logo for Harvard University Press
Haydn and the Classical Variation
Elaine R. Sisman
Harvard University Press, 1993

In this first full-scale examination of the theme-and-variations form in the Classical era, Elaine Sisman demonstrates persuasively that it was Haydn's prophetic innovationsplacing the variation in every position of a multi-movement cycle, broadening its array of theme types, and transforming its larger shapethat truly created the Classical variation. She elucidates the concept and technique of variation, traces Haydn's development and use of the form in symphonies, chamber music, and keyboard works, and then shows how Mozart and Beethoven in their individual ways built on his contributions.

Throughout, Sisman's analysis reflects both musical thinking of the Classical period and today's critical interests. She discusses ornamentation and musical figures, explores the pervasive eighteenth-century notion of music as rhetoric, and relates the style of the variation to that of the other dominant form in this period: sonata form. Her book offers a revaluation of the nature of the variation form and a new approach to the music of Haydn. Haydn and the Classical Variation is addressed to students and scholars of music, but the author's unaffected style makes it accessible to nonprofessional music lovers as well.

[more]

front cover of Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric
Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric
Edited by Tom Beghin and Sander M. Goldberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured. 

In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric's role in eighteenth-century culture.
[more]

front cover of The Haydn Economy
The Haydn Economy
Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
Nicholas Mathew
University of Chicago Press, 2022
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.
[more]

front cover of The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn
The Keyboard Sonatas of Joseph Haydn
Instruments and Performance Practice, Genres and Styles
László Somfai
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Interest in the authentic performance of early music has grown dramatically in recent years, and scholarly investigation has particularly benefited the study of keyboard music of the classical period. In this landmark publication, the most comprehensive study written on Haydn's keyboard sonatas, a leading Haydn scholar presents novel ideas, corrects misconceptions, and offers new hypotheses on long-debated issues of early music research.

Laszlo Somfai begins with a thorough study of Haydn's keyboard instruments and their development. After recommending instruments appropriate for modern use, he discusses performance practice and style, explains the peculiarities of Haydn's manuscripts in the context of eighteenth-century notation, and provides specific suggestions for playing ornaments, improvising, slurring, and dynamics. He also investigates Haydn's sonata genres within their historical context and discusses the problems of establishing a chronology of their composition. Finally, Somfai analyzes the organization and style of each musical form. The book includes an index listing the sonatas by date of first publication, and an extensive bibliography.
[more]

front cover of Making Light
Making Light
Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism
Raymond Knapp
Duke University Press, 2018
In Making Light Raymond Knapp traces the musical legacy of German Idealism as it led to the declining prestige of composers such as Haydn while influencing the development of American popular music in the nineteenth century. Knapp identifies in Haydn and in early popular American musical cultures such as minstrelsy and operetta a strain of high camp—a mode of engagement that relishes both the superficial and serious aspects of an aesthetic experience—that runs antithetical to German Idealism's musical paradigms. By considering the disservice done to Haydn by German Idealism alongside the emergence of musical camp in American popular music, Knapp outlines a common ground: a humanistically based aesthetic of shared pleasure that points to ways in which camp receptive modes might rejuvenate the original appeal of Haydn's music that has mostly eluded audiences. In so doing, Knapp remaps the historiographical modes and systems of critical evaluation that dominate musicology while troubling the divide between serious and popular music.
[more]

logo for Harvard University Press
The String Quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven
Studies of the Autograph Manuscripts
Christoph Wolff
Harvard University Press, 1980
This volume represents the proceedings of an international musicological colloquium held at Harvard in March 1979. The broad spectrum of papers and extensive scholarly debate focuses on a quintessential repertoire of musical works from the classical era. The autograph sketches, drafts, and scores of various kinds are shown to be central sources for our understanding of the genesis and history, as well as for the analysis and performance, of the compositions. Contributors are Lewis Lockwood, Laszlo Somfai, Jens Peter Larsen, James Webster, Georg Feder, Ludwig Finscher, Marius Flothuis, Alan Tyson, Christoph Wolff, Richard Kramer, Robert Winter, Sieghard Brandenburg, and Martin Staehelin, scholars working on the frontiers of current research in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven studies. An appendix provides chronological tables, a catalog of the extant autograph manuscripts, and an extensive bibliography.
[more]

front cover of The Virtual Haydn
The Virtual Haydn
Paradox of a Twenty-First-Century Keyboardist
Tom Beghin
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Haydn’s music has been performed continuously for more than two hundred years. But what do we play, and what do we listen to, when it comes to Haydn? Can we still appreciate the rich rhetorical nuances of this music, which from its earliest days was meant to be played by professionals and amateurs alike?

With The Virtual Haydn, Tom Beghin—himself a professional keyboard player—delves deeply into eighteenth-century history and musicology to help us hear a properly complex Haydn. Unusually for a scholarly work, the book is presented in the first person, as Beghin takes us on what is clearly a very personal journey into the past. When a discussion of a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, leads him into an analysis of the contemporary interest in physiognomy, Beghin applies what he learns about the role of facial expressions during his own performance of the music. Elsewhere, he analyzes gesture and gender, changes in keyboard technology, and the role of amateurs in eighteenth-century musical culture.

The resulting book is itself a fascinating, bravura performance, one that partakes of eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy while drawing on a panoply of twenty-first-century knowledge.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter