The Virtual Haydn

This is a highly original book about Haydn’s keyboard music, about 18th-century keyboard practices and culture, and about performance. Written in the first person by the author, himself a professional keyboard player, the study places the performer, both historical and contemporary, at the center of the scholarly inquiry and explores in exquisite detail the process by which a modern performer arrives at a historically-informed interpretation of Haydn’s sonatas. The veiled reference to Diderot’s Paradox of an Actor in the title explicitly situates the study within the context of 18th-century debates on performance--a crucial issue in the period, with the rapid expansion of music publishing, of concert culture, of amateur music making, especially among aristocratic women performers, and with rapid changes in the technology and the physical properties of the instruments themselves. The reference to Diderot also hints at the way in which Beghin’s text itself "performs” in the manner of many 18th-century critical texts: like them, it has a tendency to be personal and idiosyncratic. Discussing a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, the author explores the contemporary fascination with physiognomy and goes on to try out facial gestures in his own performance of the music, which he documents in photographs reproduced in the book vis-à-vis Messerschmidt’s grimacing busts of the same period. Introducing the female dedicatees and performers of sonatas written for both Vienna and London, he links rhetoric and gender showing how femininity was encoded into the music through rhetorical gestures comparable to those Haydn employed in letters to female friends and patrons. Using wit and imagination to illuminate and bridge the gulf between 18th-century and 21st-century concepts of performance, this book helps define a fresh approach to keyboard studies and performance studies today.

Haydn’s music has been performed continuously for more than two hundred years. But what do we play, and what do we listen to, when it comes to Haydn? Can we still appreciate the rich rhetorical nuances of this music, which from its earliest days was meant to be played by professionals and amateurs alike? With The Virtual Haydn, Tom Beghin—himself a professional keyboard player—delves deeply into eighteenth-century history and musicology to help us hear a properly complex Haydn. Unusually for a scholarly work, the book is presented in the first person, as Beghin takes us on what is clearly a very personal journey into the past. When a discussion of a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, leads him into an analysis of the contemporary interest in physiognomy, Beghin applies what he learns about the role of facial expressions during his own performance of the music. Elsewhere, he analyzes gesture and gender, changes in keyboard technology, and the role of amateurs in eighteenth-century musical culture. The resulting book is itself a fascinating, bravura performance, one that partakes of eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy while drawing on a panoply of twenty-first-century knowledge.

Analyzing the final three decades of Haydn’s career, this book uses the composer as a prism through which to examine urgent questions across the humanities. In this far-reaching work of music history and criticism, Nicholas Mathew reimagines the world of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, with its catastrophic upheavals and thrilling sense of potential. In the process, Mathew tackles critical questions of particular moment: how we tell the history of the European Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of late eighteenth-century culture to incipient capitalism and European colonialism; and how the modern market and modern aesthetic values were—and remain—inextricably entwined. The Haydn Economy weaves a vibrant material history of Haydn’s career, extending from the sphere of the ancient Esterházy court to his frenetic years as an entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna to his final decade as a venerable musical celebrity, during which he witnessed the transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew asserts, Haydn’s historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might retain from the cultural and political practices of European modernity—whether we can extract and preserve its moral promise from its moral failures. And it demands that we confront the deep histories of capitalism that continue to shape our beliefs about music, sound, and material culture.

Accompanying CD-ROM in pocket at the rear of book.

For well over two hundred years, Joseph Haydn has been by turns lionized and misrepresented - held up as celebrity, and disparaged as mere forerunner or point of comparison. And yet, unlike many other canonic composers, his music has remained a fixture in the repertoire from his day until ours. What do we need to know now in order to understand Haydn and his music? With over eighty entries focused on ideas and seven longer thematic essays to bring these together, this distinctive and richly illustrated encyclopedia offers a new perspective on Haydn and the many cultural contexts in which he worked and left his indelible mark during the Enlightenment and beyond. Contributions from sixty-seven scholars and performers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania, capture the vitality of Haydn studies today - its variety of perspectives and methods - and ultimately inspire further exploration of one of western music's most innovative and influential composers.