Introduction

Critical reception of topic theory over the last decades has been adversely affected by the conviction that the concept of topics has no basis in eighteenth-century music theory, aesthetics, and criticism. Furthermore, the study of musical topics has been confounded by discrepancies between representatives of topic theory, who expanded this concept beyond cross-references between styles and genres. Drawing on a wide range of eighteenth-century sources, this introduction clears away the discrepancies, clarifies the concept of topics, and relates it to Johann Georg Sulzer’s concept of characters. The relation between Ratner’s topics and Sulzer’s characters bears on the scope and semiotic status of topical signification, which is here reconsidered in light of eighteenth-century semiotics. In turn, the origins of Sulzer’s characters in the Baroque theory of affects explain the relation between musical topics and rhetoricalloci topici, discussed by Johann David Heinichen and Johann Mattheson as tools of musical invention.