An in-depth look at the great 18th century Austrian composer, derived and adapted from the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

This 18th century Austrian was the son of a wheelwright whose love for music led him to ignore his parents' wish for him to enter holy orders and insstead to doggedly pursue a musical career. He rose over the years of his life from a talented choirboy who sang for his neighbors to one of the most significant composers of his time. Deeply involved in the evolution of the Classical style, its subsequent growth can be seen in his own music. Under his care the symphony and the string quartet came to life. The great oratorios and masses of his late years belong to the consummation of the classical spirit in music. The New Grove Haydn takes an in-depth look at this fascinating composer.About The New Grove II Composer Biography Series:These new, fully re-written editions of some of the most popular titles in the New Grove composer biography series last published in the 1980s build on the enormous success of those books, offering fresh new insights drawn from the most recent scholarship. Focusing on some of the greatest and most influential composers of the last few centuries of the millennium, these titles are derived from the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Most excitingly, as they will be published before the dictionary, they offer sneak previews of some of the best, most up-to-date entries in this landmark, end-of-the-century edition of the most authoritative, comprehensive, and widely respected music encyclopedia in the world. In addition to the re-written editions of The New Grove Wagner, The New Grove Haydn,and The New Grove Mozart comes for the first time The New Grove Stravinsky, the first in a series of New Grove composer biographies that will cover the great masters of the 20th century, never before published as individual volumes. This series is edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. Both men live in the United Kingdom and have edited The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Second Edition.

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.

Joseph Haydn's symphonies and string quartets are staples of the concert repertory, yet many aspects of this founding genius of the Viennese Classical style are only beginning to be explored. From local Kapellmeister to international icon, Haydn achieved success by developing a musical language aimed at both the connoisseurs and amateurs of the emerging musical public. In this volume, the first collection of essays in English devoted to this composer, a group of leading musicologists examines Haydn's works in relation to the aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of his time. Haydn and His World opens with an examination of the contexts of the composer's late oratorios: James Webster connects the Creation with the sublime--the eighteenth-century term for artistic experience of overwhelming power--and Leon Botstein explores the reception of Haydn's Seasons in terms of the changing views of programmatic music in the nineteenth century. Essays on Haydn's instrumental music include Mary Hunter on London chamber music as models of private and public performance, fortepianist Tom Beghin on rhetorical aspects of the Piano Sonata in D Major, XVI:42, Mark Evan Bonds on the real meaning behind contemporary comparisons of symphonies to the Pindaric ode, and Elaine R. Sisman on Haydn's Shakespeare, Haydn as Shakespeare, and "originality." Finally, Rebecca Green draws on primary sources to place one of Haydn's Goldoni operas at the center of the Eszterháza operatic culture of the 1770s. The book also includes two extensive late-eighteenth-century discussions, translated into English for the first time, of music and musicians in Haydn's milieu, as well as a fascinating reconstruction of the contents of Haydn's library, which shows him fully conversant with the intellectual and artistic trends of the era.

"This reference classic has approximately doubled in size since its last publication 20 years ago, and the expansion involves more than the thorough revision and addition of articles about music of the past. More articles about 20th-century composers and composer-performers have been added, as well as topical articles about the gender-related, multicultural, and interdisciplinary ways that music is now being studied. Add to these changes that New Grove is also available online, making it a source that would have made its many-faceted creator Sir George Grove proud"--Outstanding reference sources, American Libraries, May 2002.