Haydn is enjoying renewed appreciation: this book explores fresh approaches to his music and the cultural forces affecting it.

"Joseph Haydn & die 'Neue Welt'" - dieser Titel mag zunächst irritieren, war Joseph Haydn doch nie in Amerika. Doch bei genauerer Betrachtung überrascht die Vielfalt dieses Themenkomplexes, der zwei große komplementäre Bereiche abdeckt: Zum einen die Fragen, wie Haydn und seine Zeitgenossen Amerika wahrgenommen haben, in welche Diskussionen sie eingebunden waren, welche Bilder aus der fernen Welt von der anderen Seite des Atlantiks in ihren Köpfen vorherrschten und wie sie diese künstlerisch fruchtbar machten. Zum anderen gilt es zu erforschen, wie Haydns Musik in Amerika wahrgenommen wurde und wie sie sich dort verbreitete; welche Werke von anderen Komponisten produktiv aufgegriffen wurden und welche vielleicht auf dem Weg über den großen Teich verloren gingen. Mit Beiträgen von Christine Siegert | Gernot Gruber | Waldemar Zacharasiewicz | Bertil van Boer | Thomas Tolley | Paulo M. Kühl | Kathleen J. Lamkin | Michael E. Ruhling | Bryan Proksch | Thomas Betzwieser | Balázs Mikusi | John A. Rice | Daniel Brandenburg | Josef Pratl | Pierpaolo Polzonetti | Mark Evan Bonds | Peter Király | Walter Reicher

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.

Presenting a fresh perspective on the life and work of Joseph Haydn, this biography probes the darker side of Haydn's personality, his commercial opportunism and double dealing, his penny-pinching and his troubled marriage.

In late eighteenth-century Vienna and the surrounding Habsburg territories, over 50 minor-key symphonies by at least 11 composers were written. These include some of the best-known works of the symphonic repertoire, such as Haydn's 'Farewell' Symphony and Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550. The driving energy, intense pathos and restlessness of these compositions demand close attention and participation from the listener, and pose urgent questions about meaning and interpretation. In response to these questions, The Viennese Minor-Key Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Mozart combines historical perspectives with recent developments in music analysis to shed new light on this distinctive part of the repertoire. Through an intertextual, analytical approach, author Matthew Riley treats the minor-key symphony as a subgenre of several strands, reconstructing the compositional world it occupied. His work enables signals to be understood, puts characteristic strategies in clear relief, and ultimately reveals the significance this music held for both composers and listeners of the time. Riley gives us a fresh picture of the familiar masterpieces of Haydn and Mozart, while also focusing on lesser known composers.

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.

A libretto is an indispensable part of an opera as a musical genre: with few exceptions, operas have been the subject of musicological studies, and instrumental versions of sung or unsung opera numbers may be heard, but we never listen to libretto texts being performed without the music. Thus as a literary form the libretto is a highly specific genre with its own particular attributes. This volume offers an approach to the libretto through the discussion of these attributes in many different examples. It explores what may be expected of a librettist in response to the demands of the genre’s characteristics, his trials and tribulations, his exchanges with the composer while adapting or converting a source, almost always a literary source, into the eventual libretto, and about the different musical ways of dealing with the text. In this way the volume clarifies the fundamental differences between the libretto and other literary genres.