Engaging Haydn
Culture, Context, and Criticism

Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation: this book explores fresh approaches to his music and the cultural forces affecting it.

Mary Hunter (Edited by), Richard Will (Edited by)

9781107686137, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 19 June 2014

362 pages, 1 b/w illus. 9 tables 93 music examples
24.4 x 17 x 1.9 cm, 0.58 kg

"Comprising essays written by a distinguished group of leading scholars, this collection is remarkable for its critical insights, its methodological rigor, and its avoidance of trendy and tendential postmodern jargon and jingoism." --Choice

Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation as one of the towering figures of Western music history. This lively collection builds upon this resurgence of interest, with chapters exploring the nature of Haydn's invention and the cultural forces that he both absorbed and helped to shape and express. The volume addresses Haydn's celebrated instrumental pieces, the epoch-making Creation and many lesser-known but superb vocal works including the Masses, the English canzonettas and Scottish songs and the operas L'isola disabitata and L'anima del filosofo. Topics range from Haydn's rondo forms to his violin fingerings, from his interpretation of the Credo to his reading of Ovid's Metamorphoses, from his involvement with national music to his influence on the emerging concept of the musical work. Haydn emerges as an engaged artist in every sense of the term, as remarkable for his critical response to the world around him as for his innovations in musical composition.

Introduction Mary Hunter and Richard Will
Part I. Cultures of Vocal Music: 1. Fantasy island: Haydn's metastasian 'Reform' opera Elaine Sisman
2. Haydn invents Scotland Richard Will
3. Haydn's English canzonettas in their local context Katalin Komlós
4. Revolution, rebirth and the sublime in Haydn's L'anima del filosofo and The Creation Caryl Clark
5. 'Achieved is the glorious work': the creation and the choral work concept Nicholas Mathew
Part II. Analytical Readings and Rereadings: 6. Imagination, continuity, and form in the first movements of Haydn's Opus 77 Quartets Lewis Lockwood
7. Does Haydn have a 'C-minor mood'? Jessica Waldoff
8. Form, rhetoric, and the reception of Haydn's Rondo Finales Michelle Fillion
9. Haydn and the Metamorphoses of Ovid Pierpaolo Polzonetti
10. Credo ut intelligam: Haydn's reading of the Credo text Tom Beghin
Part III. Performance: 11. Haydn's string quartet fingerings: communications to performer and audience Mary Hunter
12. Haydn's orchestras and his orchestration to 1779, with an excursus on the times of day symphonies Neal Zaslaw
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Opera [AVGC9], Western "classical" music [AVGC], Music reviews & criticism [AVC]