Engaging Haydn

de Mary Kathleen Hunter, Richard James Will

"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"-- "It is finally and mercifully a boring truism to say that Haydn's reputation no longer rests on his position as precursor to Mozart and Beethoven or as the jolly but superficial "Papa" Haydn. It is also a truism of introductions to Haydn volumes to say that the composer is finally getting both the quantity and quality of attention he richly deserves. However, since one of the qualities of a truism is truth, it is worth pointing out that this volume builds on a scholarly tradition spanning the second half of the twentieth century and showing no signs of diminishing today, which contests the still-extant and historically incomplete (at best) tendency to think of the eighteenth century as the century of Bach and Mozart rather than of Handel and Haydn"--