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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. With this ambitious book, musicologist
Nicholas Mathew uses the remarkable career of Joseph Haydn to
consider a host of critical issues: how we tell the history of the
Enlightenment and Romanticism; the relation of
late-eighteenth-century culture to nascent 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 late career, extending from the
sphere of the ancient Esterhazy court to his frenetic years as an
entrepreneur plying between London and Vienna, to his final decade
as a venerable musical celebrity, where he witnessed the
transformation of his legacy by a new generation of students and
acolytes, Beethoven foremost among them. Ultimately, Mathew claims,
Haydn's historical trajectory compels us to ask what we might
usefully 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 economic histories that continue to shape our beliefs
about music, sound, and material culture.
Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous
composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way
to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' - a symbolic duo, who
represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast
was to shape the composition, performance, reception and
historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading
scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each
other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and
fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they
came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics
ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals
to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of
individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics
of nineteenth-century music histories.
Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered
Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it
is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In
Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and
social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his
career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the
1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of
Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to
teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define
serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned
political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate
political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre,
thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social
mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a
voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the
present day.
Beethoven and Rossini have always been more than a pair of famous
composers. Even during their lifetimes, they were well on the way
to becoming 'Beethoven and Rossini' - a symbolic duo, who
represented a contrast fundamental to Western music. This contrast
was to shape the composition, performance, reception and
historiography of music throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini puts leading
scholars of opera and instrumental music into dialogue with each
other, with the aim of unpicking the origins, consequences and
fallacies of the opposition between the two composers and what they
came to represent. In fifteen chapters, contributors explore topics
ranging from the concert lives of early nineteenth-century capitals
to the mythmaking of early cinema, and from the close analysis of
individual works by Beethoven and Rossini to the cultural politics
of nineteenth-century music histories.
Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered
Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it
is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In
Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and
social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his
career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the
1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of
Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to
teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define
serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned
political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate
political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre,
thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social
mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a
voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the
present day.
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