1 Justin London, ‘Time (3)’, in Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (22 September 2012); Wald, Melanie, ‘Moment Musical: Die Wahrnehmbarkeit der Zeit durch Musik’, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 30/2 (2006), 207Google Scholar.

2 Sutcliffe, W. Dean, ‘Temporality in Domenico Scarlatti’, in Domenico Scarlatti Adventures: Essays to Commemorate the 250th Anniversary of His Death, ed. Sala, Massimiliano and Sutcliffe, W. Dean (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2008), 370–371Google Scholar. Examples of this sentiment are legion: see Briner, Andres, Der Wandel der Musik als Zeit-Kunst (Vienna: Universal, 1955)Google Scholar; Wiora, Walter, ‘Musik als Zeitkunst’, Die Musikforschung 10/1 (1957), 27–28Google Scholar; Rowell, Lewis, ‘The Subconscious Language of Musical Time’, Music Theory Spectrum 1 (1979), 96–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kramer, Jonathan D., ‘New Temporalities in Music’, Critical Inquiry 7/3 (1981), 539–556Google Scholar; de la Motte-Haber, Helga, ‘Historische Wandlungen musikalischer Zeitvorstellungen’, in Neue Musik: Quo vadis? 17 Perspektiven, ed. de la Motte, Diether (Mainz: Schott, 1988), 53–66Google Scholar; Klein, Richard, ‘Thesen zum Verhältnis von Musik und Zeit’, in Musik in der Zeit: Zeit in der Musik, ed. Klein, Richard, Kiem, Eckehard and Ette, Wolfram (Göttingen: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000), 62 and 66Google Scholar; and McClary, Susan, ‘Temp Work: Music and the Cultural Shaping of Time’, Musicology Australia 23 (2000), 160–161Google Scholar.

3 Adorno, Theodor W.. ‘On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music’, in Essays on Music, ed. Leppert, Richard, trans. Gillespie, Susan H. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 143–144Google Scholar. Of course, Adorno infamously privileges the teleological time characteristic of Viennese classicism virtually everywhere else in his writings – to this extent he is consistent with the Enlightenment/modernist ideology he (albeit critically) still subscribes to.

4 Brelet, Gisèle, Le temps musical: essai d'une esthétique nouvelle de la musique, 2 volumes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), volume 1, 25Google Scholar.

5 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues, chapter 16: ‘Le champ de la musique est le temps, celui de la peinture est l'espace’, in Œuvres complètes de J. J. Rousseau, ed. Musset-Pathay, Victor-Donatien, twenty-two volumes in eight parts (Paris: Dupont, 1824), Philosophie, volume 2, 483Google Scholar.

6 Augustine, , Confessions, trans. Chadwick, Henry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book 11Google Scholar. One further reason for Augustine's concentration on aurality might be to avoid problems stemming from the intimate connection with motion that has commonly beset visually based accounts of time (as in Aristotle).

7 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (written 1766), section 16, in Werke, ed. Herbert G. Göpfert and others, eight volumes (Munich: Winkler, 1970–1979), volume 6, 102–103 (although Lessing himself is concerned only to distinguish between the spatial nature of visual art and the temporal nature of poetry); Herder, Johann Gottfried, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (written 1770) (Berlin: C. F. Voß, 1772)Google Scholar, who argues significantly for the primacy of sound over sight in the historical development of language. Though probably dating from the period 1753–1761, Rousseau's work was published posthumously in 1781, after the two German treatises.

8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, ed. Shawcross, John, two volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), volume 1, 64Google Scholar. For example, Aristotle, upon whom much in preromantic aesthetics bases its values, famously opens the Metaphysics with a tribute to the eye as the primary organ of intellectual scrutiny. On this reversal of neoclassical visuality in romantic aesthetics see Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953)Google Scholar.

9 Hegel's definition of sound in the Encyclopaedia is a typical example: in his view, sound is the manifestation of an organism's inwardness, ‘subjectivity in process of liberation…. In sight, the physical self manifests itself spatially, and in hearing, temporally’ (Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopaedia, part 2), section 301 and ‘Zusatz’ to section 358, translated by A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 140 and 383). The connection between music, sound and subjective interiority in this period is well summarized by Watkins, Holly, Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 29–36 and 69–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bacht, Nikolaus, ‘Jean Paul's Listeners’, Eighteenth-Century Music 3/2 (2006), 201–212Google Scholar.

10 Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. Knox, T. M., two volumes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), volume 2, 907Google Scholar; Schopenhauer, Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Payne, E. F. J., two volumes (New York: Dover, 1969), volume 2, 28Google Scholar.

11 Lovejoy, Arthur O., The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 244: ‘One of the principal happenings in eighteenth-century thought was the temporalizing of the Chain of Being’Google Scholar. Koselleck, Reinhart, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Koselleck, , Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2003)Google Scholar.

12 Wolf Lepenies, for instance, argues that the turn of the nineteenth century marks the temporalization and end of natural history: the circular tradition of natural models gives way to the idea of history as process (Das Ende der Naturgeschichte: Wandel kutureller Selbstverständlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich and Vienna: Hanser, 1976)). For a range of scholarly accounts see Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon, 1954)Google Scholar, focusing on the decline in the modern era of earlier cyclic conceptions of time; Poulet, Georges, Studies in Human Time, trans. Coleman, Elliott (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; Gauchet, Marcel, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Burge, Oscar (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, concerning the dissipation of a cyclical, antihistorical religious time conception around 1700; Wendorff, Rudolf, Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1983), 253–337Google Scholar, with particular reference to this process of temporalization as reflected within art and culture.

13 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, ‘On the Ultimate Origination of Things’ (1697), in Die philosophischen Schriften, ed. Gerhardt, C. I., seven volumes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–1890), volume 7, 308Google Scholar.

14 See Whitrow, G. J., Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 139–151 and 177–186Google Scholar; Whitrow, , The Natural Philosophy of Time (London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1961)Google Scholar; Landes, David S., Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1983)Google Scholar; and Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).

15 Foucault, Michel also sees a decisive break in historical episteme at the beginning of the nineteenth century, whereby ‘a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time’. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), xiiiGoogle Scholar.

16 See the special issue of Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert, 30/2 (2006), dedicated to ‘Zeitkonzepte: Zur Pluralisierung des Zeitdiskurses im langen 18. Jahrhundert’, especially Stefanie Stockhorst, ‘Zur Einführung: Von der Verzeitlichungsthese zur temporalen Diversität’, 157–164.

17 See, for instance, von Fischer, Kurt, ‘Das Zeitproblem in der Musik’, in Das Zeitproblem im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Meyer, Rudolf W. (Bern: Francke, 1964), 304–305Google Scholar; Greene, David B., Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1982), 7–27Google Scholar; Monelle, Raymond, ‘The Temporal Image’, in The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 81–114Google Scholar; Wald, ‘Moment Musical’; and Berger, Karol, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 Greene, Temporal Processes in Beethoven's Music, 7–17.

19 David, Hans T. and Mendel, Arthur, eds, The New Bach Reader, revised and enlarged by Wolff, Christoph (New York: Norton, 1998), 397Google Scholar, cited by Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, 96.

20 See Seidel, Wilhelm, Über Rhythmustheorien der Neuzeit (Bern: Franke, 1975), 56–57Google Scholar.

21 Rosen, Charles, The Classical Style (London: Faber, 1971), 60–62Google Scholar. A classic example is given in Rosen's analysis of the first movement of Mozart's k466 (229–233).

22 Georgiades, Thrasybulos, Music and Language: The Rise of Western Music as Exemplified in Settings of the Mass (originally published Berlin: Springer, 1954)Google Scholar, trans. Marie Louise Göllner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 113.

23 Seidel, Wilhelm, ‘Division und Progression: Der Begriff der musikalischen Zeit im 18. Jahrhundert’, Il Saggiatore Musicale 2 (1995), 47–65Google Scholar.

24 Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, 9 and 179 (compare 14). The same essential argument is made in Fischer, ‘Das Zeitproblem in der Musik’, 305.

25 Butt, John offers a gentle refinement to Berger's dualism in Bach's Dialogue with Modernity: Perspectives on the Passions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Varwig, Bettina is slightly more sceptical in ‘Metaphors of Time and Modernity in Bach’, Journal of Musicology 29/2 (2012), 154–190Google Scholar. Also see Levin, Robert D.'s review of Berger's book, Journal of the American Musicological Society 63/3 (2010), 658–684CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Sutcliffe, W. Dean, The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and Eighteenth-Century Musical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 147Google Scholar; also see 120–121, and the same author's ‘Temporality in Domenico Scarlatti’.

27 See further Lütteken, Laurenz, Das Monologische als Denkform in der Musik zwischen 1760 und 1785 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998)Google Scholar.

28 Kapp, Reinhard, ‘Haydns persönliche Zeiterfahrung’, in Zyklus und Prozess: Joseph Haydn und die Zeit, ed. Dittrich, Marie-Agnes, Eybl, Marin and Kapp, Reinhard (Vienna: Böhlau, 2012), 67–68Google Scholar. Kapp sees the ‘new style’ heralded by Haydn in Op. 33 as closely related to this temporalized (and temporally problematized) style.

29 For example, the discontinuities and reinterpretation of phrase structure in the opening movement of Op. 33 No. 1; Haydn's playing with semantically marked closing gestures in the first movement of Op. 33 No. 5 and finale of Op. 76 No. 5; the finale of Op. 33 No. 2 (‘Joke’); and the deliberate and quite shocking lack of cadential closure in the exposition of Op. 20 No. 3. See also Bandur, Markus, ‘Plot und Rekurs: “Eine ganz neue besondere Art”? Analytische Überlegungen zum Kopfsatz von Joseph Haydns Streichquartett op. 33, Nr. 1 (Hoboken III:37)’, in Haydns Streichquartette: Eine moderne Gattung, ed. Metzger, Heinz-Klaus and Riehn, Rainer (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2002), 62–84, especially 69Google Scholar.

30 Hans-Ulrich Fuß, ‘Ein Laurence Sterne der Musik: Zur Kunst der Parenthesen im Instrumentalwerk Haydns’, in Zyklus und Prozess, 236. This reading plausibly locates a problematized attitude to musical time and multiple temporality long before Jonathan Kramer's dating of this notion to late Beethoven (‘Multiple and Non-Linear Time in Beethoven's Opus 135’, Perspectives on New Music 11/2 (1973), 122–45).

31 Most particularly, as seen in the opening movements of many of the mature piano concertos (for example, k467). The famous topical interplay of the F major Sonata k332 is a case where the sheer variety almost threatens to overwhelm the musical thread and sense of temporal continuity.

32 In Hellenic and Hebraic traditions, for instance, we read ‘As is the life of the leaves, so is that of men’ and, similarly, ‘As for man, his days are as grass’. Homer, The Iliad, book 6, lines 171–172 (translation from Kitto, H. D. F., The Greeks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), 61Google Scholar); Psalms 103.15 (King James Version). Brewer, John discusses the awareness of mortality and the vanity of worldly pursuits in eighteenth-century London society in The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997)Google Scholar, which is of particular relevance to the example of Handel discussed below.

33 Vaughan, Henry, ‘The World’ (1650), in Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Martin, L. C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 299Google Scholar.

34 The most extensive comparison of the three versions is made by Schmidt, Roland Dieter, ‘Die drei Fassungen von Händels Oratorium Il trionfo del Tempo / The Triumph of Time and Truth (hwv 46a, 46b, 71)’, Göttingen Händel-Beiträge 7 (1998), 86–118Google Scholar. Also useful are the relevant entries in Marx, Hans Joachim, Händels Oratorien, Oden und Serenaten: Ein Kompendium (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1998), 243–255Google Scholar, and Ehrmann-Herfort, Sabine, Greuel, Veronika and Höink, Domink in Händels Oratorien, Oden und Serenaten (Das Händel-Handbuch, volume 3), ed. Zywietz, Michael (Laaber: Laaber, 2010), 175–181, 182–199 and 483–491Google Scholar. Concerning the authorial status of the final version see especially Hicks, Anthony, ‘The Late Additions to Handel's Oratorios and the Role of the Younger Smith’, in Music in Eighteenth-Century England: Essays in Memory of Charles Cudworth, ed. Hogwood, Christopher and Luckett, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 153Google Scholar.

Until quite recently this piece had been neglected in Handel scholarship. Earlier critics largely dismissed it; typical are Percy Young and Winton Dean, who both found libretto and music weak (Young, , The Oratorios of Handel (London: Dobson, 1949), 36Google Scholar; Dean, , Handel's Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 17Google Scholar). Although Ruth Smith excludes this work from her survey of Handel's English oratorios (Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)), the general move towards understanding the intellectual history behind Handel's music witnessed by her book has resulted in more sympathetic recent accounts of the piece such as Jensen, James H.'s ‘The Triumph of Time and Truth: A Cosmic Framework’, in Signs and Meaning in Eighteenth-Century Art: Epistemology, Rhetoric, Painting, Poesy, Music, Dramatic Performance, and G. F. Handel (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 319–323Google Scholar, and those by Carolyn Gianturco, Mary Ann Parker and Huub van der Linden cited below. Other, briefer accounts from the intervening years include Siegmund-Schultze, Walter, ‘Der Triumph der Zeit und Wahrheit’, Festschrift zur Händel-Ehrung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik 1959 (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag fur Musik, 1959), 29–42Google Scholar; Finscher, Ludwig, ‘Il Trionfo del Tempo’, Gottinger Händeltage 1960 (Göttingen: Göttinger Händel-Festspiele, 1960), 8–16Google Scholar; Knapp, J. Merrill, ‘Handel's II trionfo del Tempo: 1707, 1737, and 1757’, American Choral Review 34/1 (1982), 39–47Google Scholar; and Pacholke, Michael, ‘Dramatische Aspekte in Händels erstem Oratorium Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (hwv 46a)’, Händel-Jahrbuch 37 (1991), 135–145Google Scholar.

35 Burrows, Donald likewise speaks of the ‘obvious and attractive symmetry’ in this work's framing of Handel's career (Handel (The Master Musicians) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 364)Google Scholar.

36 Deeper examination of the philosophical import of the text and its relation to music is provided by Magdalini Tsevreni, ‘Philosophy of Time and Music through Handel's Oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth’, paper presented at the Philosophy and Music Conference ‘Time Theories and Music’, Ionian University of Corfu, 29 April 2012 <http://conferences.ionio.gr/ccpm12/download.php?f=ccpm12_tsevreni.pdf> (5 May 2014).

37 Parker, Mary Ann, ‘Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno: A Petrarchian Vision in Baroque Style’, Music & Letters 84/3 (2003), 408CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Gianturco, Carolyn, ‘Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno: Four Case-Studies in Determining Italian Poetic-Musical Genres’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 119/1 (1994), 43–59Google Scholar.

38 The synopsis here is summarized from the libretto printed in the booklet to Handel, Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno, Les Musiciens du Louvre / Marc Minkowski, Erato ECD 75532 (1988), and from Gianturco, ‘Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, 50–51.

39 Parker, ‘Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, 406.

40 Revealingly, one reviewer of a recent recording (Hyperion CDA 67681/2) mistakes the song for a ‘renunciatory’ aria by Bellezza – an understandable assumption given the music's pathos (Roche, Elizabeth, ‘Seven Handel Oratorios’, Early Music 38/2 (2010), 316Google Scholar).

41 This feature might well contribute to the note of wistfulness or even sadness some have perceived in this song. Karina Telle, for instance, designates ‘Lascia la spina’ as expressing ‘Schmerz’ – albeit without giving any explicit justification for this reading (Tanzrhythmen in der Vokalmusik Georg Friedrich Händels (Munich and Salzburg: Katzbichler, 1977), 38).

42 The Arietta theme of Op. 111 similarly suggests a metrically displaced Sarabande. It will be noted that in both the Beethoven examples and in Bach's Goldberg Variations the sarabande theme returns at the end in something close to its original simplicity; the implications of the comparable formal design of the da capo aria in Handel's work will be taken up below.

43 There were two quite distinct types of sarabande by the early eighteenth century, the slow stately dance characteristic of France and Germany, and the quicker, lighter style more common in Italy and England that more directly reflected the dance's Spanish/South American origins. Handel's early examples are all in the Franco-German manner. Though Telle (Tanzrhythmen in der Vokalmusik Georg Friedrich Händels, 13) warns that contemporary theorists often make contradictory remarks on the sarabande's Affekt (alongside its tempo, metre and form), there is none the less a fair consensus on the general associations of the slower form. The entry on Sarabande in the New Grove Dictionary notes that ‘Grassineau's dictionary of 1740 describes the motions of the saraband as slow and serious’ and that ‘most French and German sarabandes of the mid- and late Baroque … are characterized by an intense, serious affect, though a few are tender and gracious’ (Richard Hudson and Meredith Ellis Little, ‘Sarabande’, Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (19 January 2013)). Similarly, Sarah McCleave cites Brossard's 1705 description of the sarabande as ‘grave, slow, and serious’ alongside Mattheson's later identification of the dance with ‘ambition’ and Johann Gottfried Walther's with the ‘grave and serious’ (Musikalisches Lexikon (Leipzig: Wolfgang Deer, 1732)), noting that Handel's earlier use in Almira (the source of the present aria) is characterized by ceremonial qualities of homage and pageantry (Dance in Handel's London Operas (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 108).

44 See, for instance, Hasty, Christopher, Meter as Rhythm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 130–147Google Scholar, and Grant, Roger Mathew, ‘Epistemologies of Time and Metre in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Music 6/1 (2009), 59–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It may be significant that Mattheson was a long-standing acquaintance of Handel.

45 Hasty, for instance, argues that initially in such unequal metrical types as triple time, ‘at slow tempi … duple groupings will be heard’ (Meter as Rhythm, 147).

46 The use of Schenkerian terminology here is not meant to imply the adherence to a fully fledged Schenkerian musical metaphysics, with its concomitant sense of temporality. I draw on such analytical tools simply to explain the use of melodic diminutions to decorate pitches at a hypothetical foreground level in a manner comparatively unproblematic both phenomenologically and historically; the appeal to schemata is in fact similar to the more historically oriented models recently developed by Robert Gjerdingen from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century partimenti (see his Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)).

47 ‘Perhaps Pamphilj and Handel are themselves here acknowledging the pain of the transience of beauty and pleasure’, Smith, Ruth proposes (‘Psychological Realism in Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, Händel-Jahrbuch 54 (2008), 225)Google Scholar. In the first part of the oratorio Piacere even praises music (and implicitly, the young Handel himself as its maker here) for its delightfully alluring sound. Bellezza takes up this theme, suggesting that music may perhaps perform more than mortal feats – a claim to which Disinganno and Tempo tactfully do not respond directly.

48 Petrarch, , The Triumph of Time, trans. Boyd, Hugh in The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems (London: George Bell, 1879), 397Google Scholar.

49 Plato, , Timaeus, 37d, in Complete Works, ed. Cooper, John M. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1241Google Scholar.

50 Parker, ‘Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, 406.

51 Petrarch, The Triumph of Time, 396. Parker (‘Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, 406) also notes the prominence of the mirror in Caravaggio's depiction of the conversion of Mary Magdalene from earthly pleasures to spiritual values, a point elaborated upon at greater length by der Linden, Huub van in ‘Benedetto Pamphilj as Librettist: Mary Magdalene and the Harmony of the Spheres in Handel's “Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno”’, Recercare 16 (2004), 133–161Google Scholar. It is indeed customary in Italian paintings of the cardinal virtues for Prudence to be seen holding a mirror; Petrarch would have found a nearby example in Giotto's fresco of Prudentia at the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padua. One might also compare this statement with Petrarch's famous account of experiencing an epiphany following his ascent of Mont Ventoux, where he famously turns his ‘inward eye’ upon himself in wonder at the depths of the soul – a passage often cited as fundamental to the development of a modern conception of subjective self-consciousness.

52 Parker, ‘Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, 408.

53 Hans Joachim Marx similarly sees the violin's ascent to a high e³ as aspiring to the heavenly in its pushing of registral limits (Händels Oratorien, Oden und Serenaten, 245). Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort has interpreted this closing section in related if not entirely congruent terms as possibly representing a Pythagorean or Boethian celestial music – a feature which would certainly relate to the Neoplatonic background of Pamphili's text, even if the musical basis for such a reading remains underdeveloped (‘Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (hwv 46a)’, in Händels Oratorien, Oden und Serenaten, 180).

54 The 1737 and 1757 versions use a dance from Terpsichore (the third version of Il pastor fido, hwv8c, 1734); the original melody for the 1707 aria is itself taken from a sarabande in the 1705 Almira (hwv1), the ‘Dance of the Asiatics’ from Act 3.

55 The new setting displays rhythmic attributes that suggest it might still be classifiable as a sarabande, but now a quick sarabande in the English (or Italian) style – ‘light’, ‘amorous’, ‘playful’ – rather than in the stately French or German manner of the 1707 version.

56 On a more straightforward level, of course, the new aria enables Bellezza's immediate renunciation of Piacere to be more understandable, and thus dramatically effective. Without the more complex musical expression of the 1707 ‘Lascia la spina’ setting, the hollowness of Pleasure/Piacere is easily seen through.

57 Botstein, Leon, ‘Memory and Nostalgia as Music-Historical Categories’, The Musical Quarterly 84/4 (2000), 535Google Scholar.

58 Obviously this sweeping statement is contradicted by the reading just given of ‘Tu del ciel’ in Handel's 1707 setting, which in my account is both slow and markedly time-bound.

59 Chapin, Keith, ‘Time and the Keyboard Fugue’, 19th-Century Music 34/2 (2010), 186–207Google Scholar. Robert Levin also reads the fugue as being equally linear and cyclical (review of Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow), 667.

60 Berger, Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, 9.

61 Brown, Marshall, ‘Mozart and After: The Revolution in Musical Consciousness’, Critical Inquiry 7/4 (1981), 705CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 McClary, ‘Temp Work’, 164. This argument is elaborated in McClary, , Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012)Google Scholar, chapter 9.

63 Quinones, R. J., The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 499Google Scholar. Quinones backdates the development of a modern conception of time to the Renaissance, but still sees it as primarily a phenomenon centred in northern Italy, France, England and Germany; in this reading southern Italy and Spain do not catch up until around the turn of the twentieth century. Though Quinones's broad view is plausible, Scarlatti's music, as that of his Neapolitan and Roman predecessors, clearly falls askance of it.

64 The relative lack of information about these works is apparent from the paucity of references to them in Deutsch, Otto Erich, Handel: A Documentary Biography (London: A & C Black, 1955)Google Scholar and all subsequent reference works.

65 This tension between different aesthetic conceptions of music is borne out later in the century by the discussion of Handel's music at the end of Mainwaring, John's biography (Memoirs of the Life of the Late George Frederic Handel (London: R. & J. Dodsley, 1760))Google Scholar, which clearly sides with music's power to move the emotions and the burgeoning notion of the sublime as opposed to the French neoclassical aesthetic.

66 Smith, Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought, 61. Smith elaborates on this perspective in ‘Psychological Realism in Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno’, albeit from a relatively unhistoricized perspective. Similarly, Carolyn Gianturco describes Il trionfo as a ‘typical example of the genre’ of the Roman cantati morali, works typically emphasising the brevity of life and the need to repent, often in the form of a discussion between allegorical characters (‘“Cantate Spirituali e Morali”, with a Description of the Papal Sacred Cantata Tradition for Christmas 1676–1740’, Music & Letters 73/1 (1992), 11).

67 A more nuanced and historical understanding of baroque temporality in dramatic works thus might be based in the relationship between musical Affekt and its temporal unfolding, as is one of the implications of Butt, John's recent work (see ‘Emotion in the German Lutheran Baroque and the Development of Subjective Time Consciousness’, Music Analysis 29/1–3 (2010), 19–36)Google Scholar.

68 I readily acknowledge that the term ‘epiphenomenon’ might problematically suggest there is some purely musical primary object to which it stands in contradistinction – a situation I have just denied.

69 I argue this point at length in chapter 2 (‘Music, Language, and the Aporias of Time’) of my forthcoming book ‘The Melody of Time: Music and Temporality in the Romantic Era’ (New York: Oxford University Press).

70 McClary, ‘Temp Work’, 173.

71 Even though it must be acknowledged that certain musical features may still afford quite opposed understandings (as seen above concerning the fugue).