Reviving the Classic, Inventing Memory: Haydn\u27s Reception in Fin-de-Siècle France (original) (raw)
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Reviving the Classic, Inventing Memory: Haydn's Reception in Fin-de-Siècle France
HAYDN, 2012
Haydn's French reception between 1870 and 1914 reflects a central concern of the era's music criticism: the revival of a classical aesthetic within a post-romantic context. But which, or whose classicism was intended? Examination of contemporary French periodicals reveals a tension within the élite world of the concert hall: between the socially conservative advocates of Viennese classicism-Haydn's music representing the standard-and supporters of a nationalistic, culturally progressive nouveau classicisme designed to rejuvenate a specifically French style without merely imitating eighteenth-century forms. While most scholars have located Haydn's reception in France logically on one side of this divide, sources suggest a more nuanced interpretation is needed. Concert reviews show that, while audiences enjoyed Haydn's music, many critics, habituated to Beethoven and Wagner, questioned the relevance of an "oldfashioned" style redolent of the defunct milieu of the ancien régime. Among the bourgeois concert-goers of the Third Republic, however, Haydn's music fired nostalgia for pre-revolutionary France, and triggered the projection of false memories of an aristocratic past that had never existed for their eighteenthcentury ancestors. Combined additionally with literary and visual associations, Haydn's music strengthened constructs of republican French identity and 2 historical validation for the new ruling class. Yet the tension between "classicisms" remained, as exemplified by the problematic results obtained by composers such as Debussy, d'Indy, and Dukas, who tried to integrate their respective styles with Haydn's in works commissioned by the Société Internationale de Musique for the composer's centenary in 1909.
School, Stage, Salon: Musical Cultures in Haydn’s Vienna
The Journal of Modern History, 2004
Vienna's reputation as a musical capital dates back to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it became synonymous with the names of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. True, with the exception of Schubert, none of these composers-canonized since the nineteenth century as the creators of "Vienna classicism"-could claim the Habsburg capital as their birthplace. Haydn was born in a Lower Austrian village near the Hungarian border. Mozart was a native of Salzburg, which, despite its reputation today as quintessentially Austrian, was the capital of a semiautonomous archbishopric that did not become a Habsburg territory until 1814. And Beethoven was a native of Bonn. Still, there is no denying the importance Vienna would acquire as a musical capital in the course of the eighteenth century. Haydn may not have been a Wiener by birth, but he did spend most of his career either in the city or within a day's drive, at the palace of his Esterhaizy patrons. Vienna was more or less Mozart's permanent home from 1781, when he was released from his service at the Salzburg court, to his death ten years later, and Beethoven resided in Vienna and its environs from 1792 until his death in 1827. In focusing on Haydn, the earliest representative of Viennese classicism, this essay addresses several broader issues related to the role of music in the culture of the Habsburg monarchy and to Haydn's place in that culture. In particular, my article explores three key moments in Haydn's career and development as a composer. These include, first, his boyhood years in the Lower Austrian town of Hainburg, where he acquired his earliest musical training in a modest parish school; second, the decade that followed his leaving the Choir School of St. Stephen's in Vienna (1748 or 1749-Haydn scholars are still uncertain about the precise date), when he began his career as a composer; and finally, his participation in Viennese salon life during the 1770s and 1780s. These moments-cultural snapshots, as it were-highlight important stages * I wish to thank Tom Beghin, Raymond Knapp, and Elizabeth Le Guin of the UCLA Departments of Music and Musicology for inviting me to present an earlier version of this essay in April 2001 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Their conference, "Exploring Rhetoric in Haydn's Chamber Music," was cosponsored by the UCLA Center for Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Haydn the Romantic: A Revaluation of His Place in Western Art Music
History has traditionally credited Beethoven with being the first truly Romantic composer, lauding him as being a self-made individual writing out of spiritual necessity rather than financial expediency: an artist in the modern sense of the word, rather than “merely” a craftsperson. This paper goes beyond E. T. A. Hoffmann’s assertion that Beethoven in some way “completes” the Romantic innovations of Haydn and Mozart. I assert that Haydn (whose creative period overlaps the late years of Baroque stalwarts such as Handel, Domenico Scarlatti and J. S. Bach, and continued into the early 19th century) is the true originator of many innovations historically credited to the Romantic Generation. The tonal and formal daring of Haydn’s music, especially in his experimental phases (late 1760s-early 1770s, and after ca. 1785) will be explored, using examples from his string quartets written during those years, his keyboard sonatas from the late 1760s, and his late piano trios and solo keyboard works to illustrate. These works bear witness to Haydn’s own surprisingly Romantic-sounding assertion that “art is free, and will be limited by no artisan’s fetters.” From this large, varied body of works drawn from a three-decade period, I shall posit that, far from being merely a pseudo-Romantic precursor of Beethoven, Haydn is the spiritual father of much of Beethoven’s musical thought, which subsequently resonated so deeply with many of the 19th century’s musical figures.
How the Composer ’ s Worldview Shapes Musical Meaning : Haydn ’ s Creation and the Enlightenment
2017
Haydn’s Creation, composed in 1798, is one of the most successful oratorios of all time. This is demonstrated not only by its positive reception, but by its longevity in performance even to the present day, including performances in theologically orthodox churches, universities, and seminaries. Interestingly during the eighteenth century, European society saw dramatic changes in musical style and culture, as well as religious and philosophical thought. These changes were fueled by (1) the acceptance of natural theology, a theology based entirely upon rationalism that denied tenets of revealed truth as was commonly held by proponents of the Christian Church; and (2) the shift in musical patronage from that of the aristocracy and the Church to that which was created primarily for the growing middle class. In this new structure, the influences of a middle-class, consumer-driven system of musical economics increased the desire for music as a form of expression that was accessible to all...
2009
Preface 1. God and country 2. Serving princes: images of Haydn: 1776 3. Italian opera at Eszterhaza 4. 'My misfortune is that I live in the country': images of Haydn: 1790 5. London-Vienna-London 6. Viennese composer, European composer 7. 'Gone is all my strength': images of Haydn: 1809.
Journal of Music Criticism, 2024
The analysis of a vast corpus of articles from the Parisian musical press of the interwar period offers a complementary perspective to the established historiographical versions of the debate on (neo)classicism. Less connected than one might think to the discussion of Stravinsky’s music and to politics, the theme of a return to the past and of ‘objective’ music raised aesthetic reflections on the status of modern music. The debate offers a challenging case of tension between a ‘culturally informed historiography’ based on the press and our need to classify the musical works of the past.
en Christian Speck (ed.), Boccherini Studies, Bolonia, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Vol 5, 2017
This article examines a case related to ‘musical idealism’ in Restoration Spain (1814-1833), based on the reception of music -mainly chamber music- by Luigi Boccherini (1743-1805), Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) . The main documentary source for this study is a Spanish music library which conserves a great collection of chamber pieces of these composers: the Adalid Music Library (A.M.L.), located in A Coruña on the North Atlantic coast of Spain . This library is, to our best knowledge, the only known Spanish historical music score collection that conserves chamber music pieces, printed mainly in Paris between ca. 1814 and 1827, which were received contemporaneously by their collectors without any intermediary settled in Spain. According to William Weber, the musical idealism movement was reaffirmed as a musical community who, although relatively small in number, had a considerable public resonance. Its participants defended a high culture, based on the taste for ‘classical music’ –also called ‘serious music’– as a reaction to the growing commercialization of the opera and the life of the virtuoso concert –known as ‘light music’ or ‘salon music’–. In the 1820s, musical commentators very often restricted the term ‘classical’ to quartets, symphonies and sacred music . The social class that championed musical idealism was the growing middle class, although Weber suggests that this role of social classes in the period has to be seen and analyzed from different perspectives.
French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1789–1870
The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, 2019
The period between the outbreak of revolution in 1789 and the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871 is an age filled with the rise and fall of various political groups and philosophical definitions in France, from absolutism to communism, from classicism to romanticism. Music criticism in this period in France's history is not immune from these ebbs and flows of politics and aesthetic concerns. In this chapter, I examine three critical positions that emerge in this period, whereby the music critic serves: (1) as a self-appointed protector of the listening public in defending ‘taste’; (2) as a holder and keeper of compositional rules to ensure the viability of music as a profession and to educate the public; and (3) as a torch bearer for the past and the future of music composition (i.e. criticism as history and canon formation). By taking such a perspective on French criticism in the nineteenth century, I hope not to walk down a purely chronological path nor to argue that the age belongs entirely to one or two critics, but to present a more neutral approach to the material that highlights the collectivity of the age and its ability to present co-existing musical perspectives that stand as the critical record of a people finding their voice.