According to Catherine Cessac, director of research at the Versailles Baroque Music Centre and the most respected French authority on the music of this period, “his Les Élémens and his astonishing overture, Le Chaos, would have sufficed to have made him a celebrity”. Rebel made his mark on the music of his time with his sonatas and the invention of the dance symphony, a new genre independent of  theatrical context.

This issue also contains an important essay on L’Incoronazione di Poppea, Monteverdi’s last opera, and the first centred on human characters. This opera has been notable for the polemical argument regarding the extent of Monteverdi’s authorship and the manner in which it is performed, with some observers viewing the storyline as immoral, an issue at the heart of Uri Golomb’s article.

The respected English musicologist and conductor Peter Holman is the author of an article about the viola da gamba. The viola da gamba or bass viol, was to some extent superseded by the violoncello at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and began a new life as a solo instrument. Holman describes how the instrument’s role in musical life changed over the course of the century, going from being representative of the seventeenth century to its association with modernity.

Interviews with two of today’s most important conductors – Nicholas McGegan and Jean-Claude Malgoire – one English, the other French, both with excellent careers and different views on baroque opera, complete issue 42, coinciding with the beginning of autumn. Undoubtedly a good moment to indulge in the pleasure of reading.