Engaging Haydn Culture, Context, and Criticism

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.

Mary Hunter is A. Leroy Greason Professor of Music at Bowdoin College. She is the author of The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna: A Poetics of Entertainment (1999) and Mozart's Operas: A Companion (2008), as well as co-editor, with James Webster, of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna (Cambridge University Press, 1997). She has written articles on eighteenth-century opera and the instrumental music of Haydn and Mozart.
Richard Will is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and is a contributor to C. P. E. Bach Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2006), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (2009) and other essay collections and journals.