Joseph Haydn's symphonies and string quartets are staples of the concert
repertory, yet many aspects of this founding genius of the Viennese
Classical style are only beginning to be explored. From local
Kapellmeister to international icon, Haydn achieved success by
developing a musical language aimed at both the connoisseurs and
amateurs of the emerging musical public. In this volume, the first
collection of essays in English devoted to this composer, a group of
leading musicologists examines Haydn's works in relation to the
aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of his time.Haydn and His World
opens with an examination of the contexts of the composer's late
oratorios: James Webster connects the Creation with the sublime--the
eighteenth-century term for artistic experience of overwhelming
power--and Leon Botstein explores the reception of Haydn's Seasons in
terms of the changing views of programmatic music in the nineteenth
century. Essays on Haydn's instrumental music include Mary Hunter on
London chamber music as models of private and public performance,
fortepianist Tom Beghin on rhetorical aspects of the Piano Sonata in D
Major, XVI:42, Mark Evan Bonds on the real meaning behind contemporary
comparisons of symphonies to the Pindaric ode, and Elaine R. Sisman on
Haydn's Shakespeare, Haydn as Shakespeare, and "originality." Finally,
Rebecca Green draws on primary sources to place one of Haydn's Goldoni
operas at the center of the Eszterh za operatic culture of the 1770s.The
book also includes two extensive late-eighteenth-century discussions,
translated into English for the first time, of music and musicians in
Haydn's milieu, as well as a fascinating reconstruction of the contents
ofHaydn's library, which shows him fully conversant with the
intellectual and artistic trends of the era.
