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This chapter examines the relationship between Luigi Boccherini and Joseph Haydn. It suggests that despite assertions of their subsequent enduring friendship in the obituary for Boccherini, we can be fairly sure that the two men never made direct contact. It explains that late-twentieth-century music-lovers have variously represented the Haydn-Boccherini polarity as light-dark, comic-tragic, male-female, intellect-sensibility, introverted-extraverted and it analyzes some of these comparisons. It also discusses the influence of Haydn's chamber music on the works of Boccherini.

Despite being one of the most successful songwriters of the second half of the eighteenth century, Anne Hunter did not receive as much acclaim as her contemporaries, owing mainly to the fact that many of her works were published anonymously or attributed to ‘a Lady’. Anne usually wrote words for existing tunes, but she also set verses written by others to her own music, and sometimes composed both words and music. She collaborated with Joseph Haydn in two sets of Original Canzonettas and the Creation, and with George Thomson in his Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs. Anne also wrote gloomy poems, many of which are included in Poems, published in 1802 under the name Mrs. John Hunter.

This chapter focuses on the 1760s and 1770s, especially in the Habsburg monarchy, as Gluck and Haydn began to compose comic operas on Turkish themes making use of Janissary percussion and alla turca style. Cultural interest in the Ottomans was conditioned by the presence of Ottoman envoys in Vienna in the age of Maria Theresa and, especially, by the international circumstances of the Russian-Turkish war of 1768 to 1774. Gluck’s and Haydn’s French and Italian versions of the same subject, Les Pèlerins de la Mecque and L’incontro improvviso, are discussed with reference to the comical figure of the Kalender. Haydn’s comic opera Lo speziale, performed at Esterháza in 1768, is considered in relation to operatic Turkish travesty and disguise. The news of the ongoing war between the Turks and Russians created a climate encouraging for comic operas about Turks, including works by Niccolò Jommelli and Georg Joseph Vogler.

Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony has often been described as “Haydnesque.” But neither the extent of Haydn’s influence nor Beethoven’s motivations for emulating him has been carefully explored. In early 1806, publisher Breitkopf & Härtel began issuing the “London” Symphonies in full score, allowing many connoisseurs to study the works for the first time. Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, composed that summer, bears numerous compositional affinities to these works (especially Nos. 99, 102, and 103). By turning to the “London” Symphonies for inspiration, Beethoven memorialized his former mentor while capitalizing on the Haydn mania that was sweeping theaters, concert halls, and the pages of journals like the Leipzig Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.

This chapter looks at the reception of Haydn’s Creation to show the entry of visual technologies into musical discourse, and the consequences for aesthetic judgment. Johann Triest found the oratorio like a magic lantern, a damning comparison: the magic lantern was a vulgar entertainment, and merely mechanical in operation. Carl Friedrich Zelter, by contrast, drew on the more refined shadow-play to redeem the oratorio’s visual appeal. For Zelter, likening The Creation to technological spectacles such as the shadow-play aligned the work with modern successes at controlling nature, and supported the image of Haydn as a master of tones. While Haydn’s use of tone-painting in The Creation was censured by early critics and has been a focus for modern scholars, comparisons of the work to moving-image entertainments point beyond the issue of musical imitation to other dimensions (such as patterns of alternation between voice and orchestra) that carried visual associations for turn-of-the-nineteenth-century listeners. Through its polarized reception, Haydn’s Creation helped establish the vexed relation of musical works to moving images in the nineteenth century, as novel music-image presentations like the nocturnorama drew inspiration from the oratorio, and critics voiced suspicion of anything visual-mechanical encroaching upon the musical.

Because of its inherently abstract nature, untethered to the demands of language or representation, instrumental music was the art form that more than any other was deemed capable of revealing glimpses of a creator’s “true” self. Fantasy, humor, and irony were the three qualities perceived as most readily capable of revealing that self. These happen to have been the three qualities heard more often in the music of Beethoven than of any other composer of his time: contemporaries frequently found his music obscure. In retrospect, we can see that Beethoven was moving further and further from the long-standing framework of rhetoric toward a framework of hermeneutics, which challenged audiences to understand what they were hearing by listening from the perspective of the composer.

This chapter explains why composers Johann Sebastian Bach and Franz Joseph Haydn were not included in this study of musical genius in modern times. It suggests that Bach and Haydn, in their lives and persons, cannot be made to fit the profile of either of the two dominant genius myths: the possessor or the possessed. The chapter mentions that the documents of Bach's life have little to do with the glories of art while the story of Haydn's life cannot be made to fit into either the myth of the Platonic prodigy or the Longinian superman.

In the mid-18th century, chamber music without a keyboard was a comparatively modern idea and was epitomized by the rapid growth of the string quartet. Many such works were quite simple, or composed in a concertante style for a lively first violin accompanied by the other players. Joseph Haydn is usually credited with developing equal participation by all four instruments, while matching, indeed exceeding, simpler-minded galant quartets in popularity. In this Haydn unwittingly posed a challenge to the keyboard-orientated Mozart, who seems more comfortable, in his earlier output of chamber music without keyboard, with a participating wind instrument. Mozart's string quartets divide into thirteen early works, and ten mature quartets: six dedicated to Haydn, one to Hoffmeister, and three intended for the king of Prussia.

This chapter shows how technologies for extending vision opened up new ways of listening, and specifically of interpreting muted tone and improvisatory qualities in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. It examines Haydn’s Il mondo della luna and Grétry’s Zémire et Azor to show the analogy forged between muted tone and technologically mediated, or prosthetic vision in late eighteenth-century opera. It also examines analogies drawn between magnifying instruments and keyboard fantasizing in philosophical and literary texts. On the basis of these, the chapter shows how telescopes and microscopes helped configure an alliance between muted tone, immobile listening and access to the otherwise imperceptible that became characteristic of musical romanticism.

Gall’s skull and cast collections served as his research “library.” He had a large one in Vienna, and he built a second one starting with some of his prized earlier pieces after settling in Paris in 1807, though he left a great number of pieces behind. Since the Renaissance, people had been collecting specimens from the natural world, amassing them in “cabinets of wonder” and even publishing catalogues of their pieces. In the Netherlands, Frederik Ruysch had not only collected a large number of fetuses and human body parts by the 1690s, but had incorporated some of them into artistic panoramas that even the laity craved to see. Gall fit into this collecting tradition with the skulls and casts he obtained from hospitals, asylums, and places of execution, and with those purchased, traded for, or gifted to him by friends and admirers. Nonetheless, there was also considerable grave robbing (resurrectionism) by overly zealous phrenologists in this era, worrying people and casting a dark shadow over his collecting endeavors. Parts of Gall’s Vienna collection can be seen in the Rollett Museum near Vienna, whereas his second collection and own skull are now in the Musée de l’Homme (Paris).

This chapter illustrates a transformation in audiovisual culture by comparing two orchestral crescendos: the introduction to Haydn’s Symphony No. 6 (1761), and the transition to the finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 (1808). Whereas naked-eye observation of nature and painting provided primary reference frames for “seeing” the former as a sunrise, the world-making powers of optical technologies framed otherworldly perceptions of the latter. Through an example drawn from Mozart’s Idomeneo, the chapter also introduces the study of “audiovisual culture” as a means to examine not only mixed media, or the mixed condition of media traditionally considered pure, but also processes of learning and cultivation that take place between or across the senses.

Gioachino Rossini returned home from Venice with money in his pocket and the hope of a new commission. Unfortunately, Bologna was no longer the best place to be. By 1811 Milan had taken over as continental Europe’s principal meeting place for impresarios and agents. Bologna was becoming a bit of a backwater. While he waited, Rossini rehearsed and directed an Italian-language performance of Joseph Haydn’s The Seasons sponsored by the Accademia dei Concordi. He may also have written the six-movement showpiece cantata for soprano, chorus, and orchestra, La morte di Didone (“The Death of Dido”), which he presented to Domenico Mombelli’s daughter, Ester Mombelli. If he did write it in 1811, it offers a remarkable glimpse of things to come.

Published in 1802, Poems may be considered the definitive representation of Anne Hunter's poetry. Containing a carefully selected collection of her works, it is Hunter's attempt to consolidate her work and lay claim to many of those songs she had written but had been circulating anonymously, including those written for Haydn's settings. The first three poems in the collection showcase Hunter's great sensitivity and skill in using the poetic conventions of the ode during the time. Following these are poems addressed primarily to family and friends, and then ballads and imitation folk songs that expose the harsh underside of the eighteenth-century life. Hunter saw that the ballad form was a vehicle for showing how the experiences of the common people pressed on the social circle and the hierarchies of the educated, introducing another language and wholly different kinds of poetic convention. The collection ends with over 20 songs, airs and canzonets. While many critics dismiss these poems as the product of a narrow musical culture intended for ladies singing to ladies or, at best, to a mixed audience in the homes of the elite, Hunter may have viewed these lyrics as a quintessential demonstration of the delicate social arts of collaboration and performance. All these poems indicate the amplitude of her interests and her commitment to writing poetry that always had the social circle in mind.

This chapter examines the theory of creativity and the theory of genius. It discusses the inspiration theory of creation and the inspiration theory of genius, and suggests that such theories are a way of suggesting that there is no explanation for how someone gets a bright idea. The chapter analyzes the genius shown by Joseph Haydn and Homer, and discusses the relevant views of Socrates and Plato.