ABOUT THIS BOOK

Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities.

In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined.

The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nicholas Mathew is professor of music and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Political Beethoven. With James Q. Davies, he is the series coeditor of the New Material Histories of Music series at the University of Chicago Press.

REVIEWS

“Tracing the conceptual overlap of aesthetics and economics as they developed in the eighteenth century, Mathew not only offers a startlingly original vision of Haydn and his relationship to ‘commerce,’ but also makes a major contribution to current debates about the nature and mission of music scholarship. Not just boundlessly informative, but compulsively readable and entertaining.”

— W. Dean Sutcliffe, University of Auckland

“In this dazzling and timely book, Mathew reveals not only how Haydn’s music functioned in the late-Enlightenment economic landscape, but also how musical culture helped shape modern market society. As the field of music studies today ponders the future of canons and canonical works, The Haydn Economy shows us that we are far from done with Haydn and the eighteenth century—indeed, perhaps we are only just beginning to understand how this period’s deep-seated legacies continue to reverberate today.”

— Emily I. Dolan, Brown University

“The Haydn Economy seems to signal a new era in musicology. This is a book about Haydn that is certain to draw in, rather than repel, those of us who think of colonialism and slavery before the symphony when we hear the words ‘eighteenth-century Europe.’ An intellectual tour de force.”

— Gavin Steingo, Princeton University

“Combining deft musical analysis and broad learning across disciplines, this book charts Haydn’s long career less as an evolution of style than as a series of orientations toward the newly mobilized cultural economies of Vienna and London. In Mathew’s account, Haydn achieved a major body of work that, unlike the Romantic differentiations of value that soon would follow him, managed to avoid setting aesthetic norms and market forces at odds. The Haydn Economy is a must-read for anyone interested in ‘the most abundantly mediated musician of his age’ or in the music and culture of the world in which he moved.”

— James Chandler, University of Chicago

"The Haydn Economy is, as its subtitle promises, a rich and tightly woven tapestry of musical, aesthetic, and economic concerns, filled with quirky details that are the engaging hallmarks of New Historicism."

— Alyson McLamore, Journal of the American Musicological Society

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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