ABSTRACT
The majority of Joseph Addison's articles on music are concerned with opera. In particular, Addison dwells on the problem posed by the performance of Italian operas sung in Italian and on difficulties that may arise from a translation of Italian libretto that takes account only of the English version without attending to music with which the text is connected. In the author's opinion, composers should feel particularly summoned to this task in consideration of the fact that there are no texts in English more compelling and laden with pathos than Holy Scriptures. Addison insists on the fact that in the text of the Bible the English language would manage to appropriate to itself certain stylistic characters of the Hebrew original, from which it would draw 'innumerable elegancies and improvement'. Lord Shaftesbury's reflection on art treads a very different path from that of Addison. One of Shaftesbury's best-known writings, The Moralists, contains the basic points of his theory of the Beautiful.
