The Cambridge Companion
series provides an overview of the works,
life, and context of key composers.
The series also includes books on forms
and instruments, as well as other titles
about authors, philosophers, etc.
Through a series of
scholarly essays, this book covers Haydn’s
career (Part I: Haydn in Context), his
style (Part II: Stylistic and Interpretive
Contexts), the types of music he composed
(Part III: Genres), and the way his
music was perceived (Part IV: Performance
and Reception).
With seventeen essays
by as many authors, the main issues
in Haydn scholarship are addressed.
These range from the obscure (Haydn’s
Exoticisms: "Difference" and
the Enlightenment) to the more mundane
(Recorded Performances: A Symphonic
Study). Casual fans of Haydn will find
neither biography nor musical analysis
sufficient to warrant their attention,
but those who wish to go further — especially
music students and musicologists — may
find something of value in the variety
and detail of the various essays in
this book.
The first part of the
book, Haydn in Context, presents
a vague and fragmented view of Haydn’s
career and the "context" of
his compositions, sometimes with commonplaces
that belie the scholarly nature of this
book. Discussing his "aesthetics",
James Webster makes the profound statement
that "Haydn’s musical aesthetics
by and large agreed with those current
in the second half of the eighteenth
century." Surprising indeed, that
Papa Haydn was actually a composer of
his time. Other essays in this section
examine Haydn’s relations with other
composers, or his "environments".
The second part contains
only two articles about Stylistic
and Interpretive Contexts. Haydn
and Humour is an interesting essay,
since Haydn used a fair amount of humoristic
motives in his work. This essay has
more musical examples than others in
the book, but they are essential. However,
the second essay in this section, Haydn’s
exoticisms: ‘difference’ and the Enlightenment,
is more serious, examining the "Enlightenment’s
rhetoric of universal brotherhood,"
and so on.
Part III is perhaps
the most interesting to the casual reader,
since it gives an overview of the various
forms and genres of Haydn’s oeuvre.
Yet given Haydn’s prolific output, none
of these essays goes much further than
what one reads in well-written CD booklets.
Only the essay on Haydn’s operas is
truly synthetic, and covers his entire
career briefly yet sufficiently for
readers to have a good understanding
of this part of Haydn’s works.
Finally, Part IV contains
a group of loosely related essays about
"Performance and Reception",
a big topic among musicologists when
they have nothing more to write about
the music itself. While the essay Haydn
and posterity: the long nineteenth century
is an interesting overview of the fate
of Haydn’s music after his death, some
of the other writings in this section
have lots of big words but say little.
I’ll end this discussion with the final
sentence of the book, which must mean
something, but could probably have made
some sense had it been said in a more
concise manner: "To listen to a
recording of a Haydn symphony is to
experience a collaborative artistic
representation of the musical work:
the musical performance is both practically
and conceptually displaced by technological
performance." Would that people
who write about music do so in a way
that readers can understand what they
are saying rather obfuscating through
meaningless sentences.
The authors of the
various essays all have the credentials
that allow them to discuss, with authority,
the varied aspects of Haydn’s life and
works, but this book is not meant to
entertain; readers will need to be willing
to wade through some stodgy academic
prose in the various essays. Extensive
notes and a detailed index make this
book valuable as a reference work. Musical
examples are few and far between, so
one can read this even without being
a musician. But would the average listener
want to read what this book offers?
This, dear reader, I leave to you to
determine.
Kirk McElhearn
