Synopses & Reviews
Haydnand#8217;s music has been performed continuously for more than two hundred years. But what do we play, and what do we listen to, when it comes to Haydn? Can we still appreciate the rich rhetorical nuances of this music, which from its earliest days was meant to be played by professionals and amateurs alike?
Withand#160;The Virtual Haydn, Tom Beghinand#151;himself a professional keyboard playerand#151;delves deeply into eighteenth-century history and musicology to help us hear a properly complex Haydn. Unusually for a scholarly work, the book is presented in the first person, as Beghin takes us on what is clearly a very personal journey into the past. When a discussion of a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, leads him into an analysis of the contemporary interest in physiognomy, Beghin applies what he learns about the role of facial expressions during his own performance of the music. Elsewhere, he analyzes gesture and gender, changes in keyboard technology, and the role of amateurs in eighteenth-century musical culture.
The resulting book is itself a fascinating, bravura performance, one that partakes of eighteenth-century idiosyncrasy while drawing on a panoply of twenty-first-century knowledge.
Review
"This is a book that has opened up the discussion of Haydn and rhetoric so widelyand#8212;but never too widely, thanks to considered argumentation and careful analysisand#8212;that the conversation simply must continue."
Review
"The essays are all intriguing, especially in the way they speak to each other throughout the volume. . . . Although aimed primarily at musicologists . . . the book also offers an interesting perspective on late-eighteenth-century culture that will interest other readers as well."
Review
"The distinguished contributors to thisand#160;book (and DVD)and#160;take the time-honored subject of rhetoric and music and look at it afresh, mainly through the solo and chamber music (including songs) of Joseph Haydn.and#160;Not limited to discussions of Haydn's use of rhetorical devices in composing, the volume considers, for example,and#160;the role of performer as orator, rhetorical interrelationships among groups of works, and how the decline of rhetoricaland#160;thinking and listening in the early 19th century transformed the relationship between composer and audience.and#160;There is even voiced a mildly dissenting perspective.and#160;In short, this is a lively, stimulating bookand#160;that has something to say to both scholars and performers."
Review
"This book successfully applies rhetoric not simply in its formalist modes of arrangement and style but in its more collaborative and critically difficult modes of invention and delivery. Listening to Haydn within a rhetorical framework revivifies the rhetorical tradition, within which the composer becomes an orator and music becomes discourse."
Review
and#8220;A tremendous and substantial contribution to Haydn scholarship, this book introduces, explains, and expands on a themeand#8212;rhetoric in musicand#8212;that is likely to be vaguely familiar to readers, but which has never previously been treated in such an expansive, informative, and coherent fashion.
Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric points the way forwardand#160;for new musicological research on the eighteenth century.and#8221;
Review
"In this groundbreaking collection of essays . . . the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts. [The editors] have fashioned a coherent narrative that not only reveals how the classical rhetorical tradition undergirds the composition, performance, and reception of music written between 1600 and 1800 but also stands as an excellent introduction to rhetoric per se. . . . This book has the power to change the way the music of Haydn and his contemporaries is heard and performed."
Review
and#8220;A highly original book that places the performer (historical and contemporary) at the center of scholarly inquiry; it is a virtuosic exercise in historical imagining.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;In The Virtual Haydn, virtuoso keyboardist Beghin brilliantly illuminates Haydnand#8217;s piano music from myriad angles: the period instruments for which they were designed, the women for whom the composer wrote much of this repertory, the process of animating these scores through rhetorical strategies, the minute details that make all the difference. Written in an engaging, witty style, this book serves as the discursive companion to Beghinand#8217;s monumental recordings of all Haydnand#8217;s keyboard works. Just as no one has matched those recordings, no one has written quite so effectively about performance. A must for listeners and players alike.and#8221;
Review
and#8220;Very few persons aliveand#8212;and none who specialize in Haydnand#8212;are both world-class performing artists and world-class scholars like Beghin. The Virtual Haydn will come as a revelation, even to those familiar with his revolutionary Haydn sonata recordings under the same title. Its biographical, social, and musical readings of Haydnand#8217;s music are of astonishing depth, sensitivity, and originality. They yield rich and unexpected insight into the complex relationships between a great eighteenth-century composer, his mainly female performers and dedicatees, and todayand#8217;s performers and listeners.and#8221;
Synopsis
Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric.and#160;Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured.and#160;
In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric's role in eighteenth-century culture.
Synopsis
Haydn is the last major composer whose music was regularly discussed by his contemporaries in terms derived from the classical tradition of rhetoric. Within a generation of his death, that discourse had fallen from favor, but the historical relationship between Haydn and the rhetorical tradition endured.
In this volume, a distinguished group of contributors in fields from classics to literature to musicology restores the rhetorical model to prominence and shows what can be achieved by returning to the idea of music as a rhetorical process. An accompanying DVD, specially designed for this project, presents performances and illustrations keyed to its chapters, making musicological arguments accessible to nonspecialists and advancing additional arguments of its own through the medium of performance. The volume thus reaches beyond musicology to enrich and complicate the larger debate over rhetoric's role in eighteenth-century culture.
About the Author
Tom Beghin is associate professor of music at McGill University.
Sander M. Goldberg is professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
and#160;
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
The Editors
and#160;
1. A Visit to the Salon de Parnasse
Elisabeth Le Guin
and#160;
PART I. BACKGROUNDS
2. Performing Theory: Variations on a Theme by Quintilian
Sander M. Goldberg
3. Ut Rhetorica Artes: The Rhetorical Theory of the Sister Arts
Timothy Erwinand#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;and#160;
4. School, Stage, Salon: Musical Cultures in Haydnand#8217;s Vienna
James Van Horn Melton
5. Rhetoric versus Truth: Listening to Haydn in the Age of Beethoven
Mark Evan Bonds
and#160;
PART II. FOREGROUNDS
6. and#8220;Delivery, Delivery, Delivery!and#8221; Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydnand#8217;s Keyboard Sonatas
Tom Beghin
7. The Rhetoric of Improvisation in Haydnand#8217;s Keyboard Music
James Webster
8. Clever Orator versus Bold Innovator
Land#225;szland#243; Somfai
9. The Poetry of Haydnand#8217;s Songs: Sexuality, Repetition, Whimsy
Marshall Brown
10. Haydnand#8217;s London Trios and the Rhetoric of the Grotesque
Annette Richards
11. Rhetorical Truth in Haydnand#8217;s Chamber Music: Genre, Tertiary Rhetoric, and the Opus 76 Quartets
Elaine Sisman
and#160;
Coda
The Editors
Works Cited
Contributors
Index