Haydn Studies

The advances in Haydn scholarship would have been unthinkable to earlier generations, who honoured the composer more in word than in deed. Haydn Studies deals with many aspects of a composer who is perennially fresh, concentrating principally on matters of reception, style and aesthetics and presenting many interesting readings of the composer's work. Haydn has never played a major role in accounts of cultural history and has never achieved the emblematic status accorded to composers such as Beethoven, Debussy and Stravinsky, in spite of his radical creative agenda: this volume broadens the base of our understanding of the composer.

An introduction to the musical work and cultural world of Joseph Haydn.

This definitive study of the life and works of Joseph Haydn represents half a century of research. As a curator of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Dr. Geiringer was in charge of one of the world's leading Hayden collections. His scholarly investigations took him to various monasteries, to libraries in Eisenstadt, Prague, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., and, as a guest of the Hungarian government, to the previously almost inaccessible archives of the Princes of Esterhazy in Budapest. In the past decade, Haydn studies have progressed enormously. A thematic catalog is now available, and a substantial part of Haydn's vast creative output is accessible in critically revised editions. The new edition of Hayden: A Creatie Life in Music has been substantially rewritten to incorporate the results of recent research and to remove the tarnish that had assimilated on the picture of Haydn in the earlier years.

Sisman aims to demonstrate that it was Haydn's prophetic innovations that truly created the Classical variation. Her analysis reflects both the musical thinking of the Classical period and contemporary critical interests. The book offers a revaluation of t

This volume brings together a selection of the most stimulating and influential writing on Haydn and his music in the English language. Written by a range of established and younger scholars it probes a variety of aesthetic, biographical, compositional, performance and reception issues. A specially written introduction summarizes the significance of each essay, directs the reader to appropriate complementary material and seeks the common ground between the essays; to assist with consistent referencing the individual essays retain their original pagination. This representative compendium of Haydn research provides the opportunity to explore the intellectual diversity of recent scholarship and is an indispensable publication for students of Haydn, whether new or old, amateur or professional.

Renowned music historians Floyd and Margaret Grave present a fresh perspective on a comprehensive survey of the works. This thorough and unique analysis offers new insights into the creation of the quartets, the wealth of musical customs and conventions on which they draw, the scope of their innovations, and their significance as reflections of Haydn's artistic personality. Each set of quartets is characterized in terms of its particular mix of structural conventions and novelties, stylistic allusions, and its special points of connection with other opus groups in the series. Throughout the book, the authors draw attention to the boundless supply of compositional strategies by which Haydn appears to be continually rethinking, reevaluating, and refining the quartet's potentials. They also lucidly describe Haydn's famous penchant for wit, humor, and compositional artifice, illuminating the unexpected connections he draws between seemingly unrelated ideas, his irony, and his lightning bolts of surprise and thwarted expectation. Approaching the quartets from a variety of vantage points, the authors correct many prevailing assumptions about convention, innovation, and developing compositional technique in the music of Haydn and his contemporaries.

Haydn's Symphonies Nos. 82-7 are seminal works in Haydn's output and mark a new level of compositional attainment, launching the important cycle of mature Haydn symphonies written for an international audience. Three chapters of the book deal with the reception of Haydn's symphonies in Paris, documenting the extent to which they dominated the repertoire of important public concert series. The aesthetic basis of Haydn's reception in Paris in the 1780s is considered in discussions of the notions of 'popular' and 'learned' taste and such notions inform the commentaries on the symphonies themselves. Thus as well as discussing technical features of Symphonies Nos. 82-7, broader concerns include the relationship between orchestral splendour and eighteenth-century notions of beauty; the relationship between genius, originality and convention; irony and humour; and the updating of popular orchestral taste.