Haydn and His Contemporaries.

Proksch, Bryan

Haydn and His Contemporaries. Edited by Sterling E. Murray. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Steglein, 2011. [xiii, 225 p. ISBN 978-09819850-2-2. $30]

With a number of volumes in recent years, Steglein is fast becoming an important publisher for eighteenth-century music scholars. In the present volume, Sterling Murray gathers thirteen articles gleaned from two conferences held in the spring of 2008: the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music and the Haydn Society of North America. The collection provides both a cross section of the scholarship produced in the year leading up to the 2009 bicentennial of Haydn's death and the broader spectrum of research on the eighteenth century generally.

Ethan Haimo's thought-provoking contribution seeks to uncover the genesis of Haydn's use of remote-key movement relationships. As is well known (in no small part through Haimo's 1990 essay on the topic in Musical Quarterly), Haydn increasingly made use of distant harmonic motion in the 1780s and 1790s. Haimo now explains this unique facet of Haydn's repertoire as an outgrowth of the composer's exposure to the operas of Cimarosa in the 1770s. His argument is compelling despite the brevity of the essay; hopefully Haimo will eventually discuss the topic in more depth. Over the past decade scholars have paid increasing attention to the influence of opera on Haydn's conception of instrumental music, and Haimo's essay amply demonstrates that we cannot hope to understand the remarkable changes Haydn's style underwent in the 1770s without closely examining the operas to which he was exposed on a regular basis.

Ellis Anderson's essay on the descriptions of Haydn presented in the early biographies (Georg August Griesinger, Albert Christoph Dies, and Giuseppe Carpani) provides a glimpse into what will hopefully prove to be an interesting dissertation. He argues that these biographies present Haydn as a personable and hard-working but hopelessly "mundane" character. As a result, Anderson argues, the composer appeared to be too uncomplicated for nineteenth-century readers increasingly focused on Beethovenian-style personality flaws and dramatic struggles against all odds. It seems unfair to criticize these biographers for placing Haydn at a "historical disadvantage" (p. 20) as the author states: these Enlightenment-era authors working to write what might be called "documentary-style" biographies could hardly hope to provoke a scandal appealing to readers of a later time. While Anderson does not have an answer for which aspects of Haydn's life might have been appropriated to generate interest among the Romantics (like Mozart's "tragic" death or Beethoven's "immortal beloved" did), and while he does not account for the first-hand nature of these early biographies (again in contrast to the many anecdotal and apocryphal writings on Mozart and Beethoven), Anderson's essay nevertheless clarifies the way in which specific traits assigned to Haydn would shape the negative reception of his music over the next 100 years.

James S. MacKay's essay attempts to tackle underlying large-scale compositional issues in Haydn's Seven Last Words. The composer specifically noted the difficulty of composing seven successive slow movements without boring his audience. For analysts, the basic problem in analyzing this work has been pinpointing Haydn's solution. Given Haydn's comments as recorded in the early biographies, there can be no doubt that Haydn viewed his work as successful, even though he does not overtly state how he achieved that success. MacKay has come as close as anyone to unraveling this mystery. His argument that the tonalities of each movement are paired and mirrored around the middle movement (with a hefty dose of specific remote-key relationships) is sound, yet his attempt to further connect Haydn's chosen keys with C. D. F. Schubart's 1806 descriptions of key affects is questionable. By the same token, his observations on the eccentric phrase structures used for the opening theme of each movement are well reasoned, but, in his push to include formal idiosyncrasies and "thematic reworkings", MacKay tries to read more into the music than is necessary. In total, MacKay has uncovered the tonal and thematic schemes Haydn used in the Seven Last Words, no small addition to our understanding of the idiosyncratic work.

Half of the essays in the volume's second part ("Haydn's Contemporaries") address music in the United States. Emily Laurance's contribution on the cultivation of the French vocal romance discusses a topic of increasing importance in musicology: musical exile and the emigration of music from European nations into colonial areas. She argues that the genre was well suited to colonial America because both the people and the music celebrated simplicity, were egalitarian in mindset, and were broadly anti-establishment. Bertil van Boer examines the development of the characteristic symphony in the nascent United States. His observation that compositions became markedly more political in nature is supported by the explosion of works entitled Federal Overture (or close variants) in the 1790s. This indigenous subgenre was already on the wane by ca. 1800, but he argues that this does not detract from the significance of an overtly stated union between music and politics which could only have happened in the United States. It would be interesting to see the extent to which European characteristic symphonies (as addressed in, for instance, Richard Will's The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven [Cambridge, 2002]) interacted with these American works.

Despite a number of strong articles, the book is not without its quirks: the first part (entitled "Haydn") inexplicably opens with a solitary article on Michael Haydn followed by six on his brother Joseph. Moving the first essay in the second section ("Haydn's Contemporaries") would have made more sense. The second section seems to be mis-titled as well: it opens with an essay on Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758) and the court of Anhalt Zerbst by Barbara M. Reul. Reul has written a fine documentary history of the court complete with a number of high-quality facsimiles, but so far as I know neither Fasch nor the court documents examined are "contemporary" with Haydn in any meaningful way. In a further oddity, the editor has allowed his contributions to vary widely in substance: a five-page concert note and no small number of "as-read" ten-page conference papers are placed in juxtaposition with a number of expanded and polished "full-length" contributions exceeding twenty pages. The result is a hybrid: part a "highlights" of two related but different conferences and part a standard article collection. Murray presents all the essays on a level playing field. In spite of these oddities, the book is a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century scholarship generally and a record of the plethora of high-quality research specifically relating to Haydn produced around the 2009 festival year.

Bryan Proksch

McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana