Carl Friedrich Zelter’s (1758–1832) legacy as a composer is seemingly only identified with the genre of lieder. However, the composer’s involvement with lieder did not begin in earnest until 1796. Before this time Zelter concentrated in differing genres, including orchestral music; his Viola Concerto is the only surviving orchestral work. Examination of this concerto reveals a different compositional ideal than that of Zelter’s later style. As Zelter’s first composition, the concerto was commissioned in 1779 and comes from a time before the young composer studied composition formally. In the work Zelter uses a more intuitive approach, revealing influences that differ from his later compositional style by including recitatives in the rondo finale. Seventeen years separate this concerto and the lieder with which Zelter’s compositional style is more readily identified. His early proclivity toward an operatic style corroborates remarks that Zelter made in his autobiography regarding his dissatisfaction with the lied and his preference for the cantata. The Viola Concerto represents a work from a composer who summarized his beliefs regarding lieder as, “I have never had an inner urge for compositions of this type.” Carl Friedrich Zelter’s later compositions have become the whole of his legacy. While they undoubtedly comprise some of his most successful works, this insular view misrepresents his compositional approach throughout the whole of his life. This paper shows that a more nuanced realization of the composer’s shifting musical ideals is necessary.
On a sheet of paper lined for music notation, Mozart sketched two ideas for the improvisatory passages of the Piano Concerto in B-flat Major, K. 595. He labeled one passage “Eingang im Rondo,” and the other, “Cadenza per il Rondo.” Why did he distinguish between the two passages, which, at a glance, seem similar in their decorative character? The proposed paper cites several examples of Eingänge, labeled as such, in Mozart’s manuscripts and references to Eingänge in letters from Mozart to his father. Clearly, Mozart did not perceive Eingänge as a type of cadenza. The paper demonstrates the conspicuous place of Eingänge not only in Mozart’s compositions, but also in the works of a cross-section of 18th-century composers (including Haydn!) and in the treatises of the foremost theorists of the day. Collectively, these sources establish a concrete definition of the Eingang and show that, like cadenzas, Eingänge may be written into the score by the composer or left to the performer to improvise; and, like cadenzas, Eingänge were written in or added to works in every genre that feature a soloist—instrumental and vocal. However, unlike cadenzas, which embellish a cadence, Eingänge embellish the beginning of a phrase that brings the return of thematic material; consequently—as the sources illustrate—Eingänge must be non-thematic and must lead into the tonic key. When composers expected performers to improvise Eingänge, they placed fermatas in the score as a signal; however, today’s performers often misinterpret such fermatas. Emphasizing the prevalence of improvised Eingänge in the 18th century, the paper explains why this embellishment is largely unknown to present-day scholars and performers and emphasizes the importance of Eingänge in manipulating phrase structure and delineating form.
Haydn’s approach to sonata form often defies norms established by music theorists. When examining his works without imposing current standards of form, however, three clear strategies of sonata-form writing emerge. To describe these strategies, three well-known terms are used: monothematic, continuous, and two-part. Few of Haydn’s works deviate from these strategies, and those that do tend to straddle the boundary between two strategies. In short, understanding Haydn’s sonata forms in terms of three possibilities clears up the “muddle” that often appears when exploring these forms. More important, the characteristics of these three strategies reveal a facet of Haydn’s style worthy of note: a fascination with middles. The middles of his phrases, formal regions, and entire movements are often extended in length and/or display loose-knit characteristics such as dissolution of hypermeter and use of mixture. Drawing on the work of Jan LaRue, William Caplin, James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, this paper briefly presents the three strategies and their characteristics. It then walks through three examples of middle-fascination taken from Haydn’s last twenty-three symphonies (starting with the Paris symphonies). It concludes with final thoughts on two topics: (1) how these facets of Haydn’s style distinguish him from his contemporaries and (2) how most theoretical constructions have unnecessarily marginalized his sonata forms.
Despite its honored position as an acclaimed major work from Haydn’s maturity, the Seven Last Words has garnered little critical attention, apart from H. C. Robbins Landon’s overview in Haydn: Chronicle and Works, a chapter from Richard Will’s The Characteristic Symphony in the Time of Haydn and Beethoven, and dissertations by Theodor Göllner and Jonathan Drury. Haydn, however, was justifiably pleased with the work, having in it solved the problem of composing eight successive adagios of sufficient variety “without fatiguing the listener.” This paper will examine two aspects of this variety in the Seven Last Words. First, we will explore Haydn’s unique tonal plan, both in the tonal succession of the individual movements, and the wide-ranging key schemes within them. The movements’ tonalities progress by a pattern of alternating steps and thirds, resulting in progressive tonality (from D minor to C minor) unique in Haydn’s instrumental music. This tonal scheme permits Haydn to pair similar movements in mirror form around the central fourth word. Secondly, we will examine Haydn’s use of sonata form in the Seven Last Words, especially the noteworthy diversity of thematic design and formal plans. Sonata II has an early and idiosyncratic example of a three-key exposition. Sonatas III and VI both begin with a cadence, which returns at the movement’s conclusion. In Sonatas IV and VI, the main theme’s final measures serve dual function as retransition, concluding the development. Certainly, though Haydn eschewed variety of tempo in the Seven Last Words, his novel tonal plan and imaginative use of sonata form adequately compensated, permitting the significant differentiation amongst movements that he sought.
Drawing heavily on new primary source evidence at the Landeshauptarchiv Sachsen-Anhalt at Dessau, this paper considers how the various Princes of Anhalt-Zerbst promoted or impeded musical life at the court, from the inception of the orchestra in 1699 to the folding of the Kapelle in the 1770s. Fascinating recommendation letters and testimonials, hilarious complaints about fellow musicians, serious requests for salary increases, sad farewell letters and narcissistic self-profiles help us to solve numerous mysteries surrounding the hiring, retaining and dismissal of musicians. In particular, it is possible to clarify the application process, audition protocols, probationary periods, and mandatory training for junior musicians at the court. A brief examination of the less than ideal work environment of instrumentalists and vocalists and the reasons why some were promoted (or not), provides the essential backdrop to the professional life of a typical eighteenth-century German court musician. Entries in court records regarding annual salaries of musicians and irregular cash gifts paid by the court of Anhalt-Zerbst also allow us to track its remarkable financial commitment to the fine arts. An important priority during the first half of the eighteenth century, support for musical activities dropped to the bottom of the court’s list when in 1758 Kapellmeister Fasch died and the city was invaded by 16000 Prussian soldiers. In 1760 the court (ruled in proxy by a Prince in exile) failed to replace deceased musicians and terminated the employment of several others. However, new music for a skeleton ensemble continued to be commissioned from acting Kapellmeister Röllig - at exorbitant prices.
This paper re-examines the commonly accepted chronology of events in the first years of Haydn’s professional life. Documents pertaining to his early activities are sparse indeed: records that might have cast light on his time at the choir school at St. Stephen’s and at the Jesuit Seminary in Vienna perished in bombing raids during the Second World War; while the minutes of the court at Großwardein make reference to the Kapelle there with respect to positions only and not to specific members in the ensemble. Very little by way of hard evidence supports our assumptions concerning Haydn’s early career. Indeed, the greater part of what we presume to know of his apprentice years derives from problematical sources. This study identifies the flaws inherent in those sources. It then sets forth evidence from the manuscripts of his earliest works themselves that suggests a curriculum vitae for the young composer that is radically different in terms of time and place to that reported in the literature heretofore.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Haydn’s position as the composer who best epitomized the current aesthetic viewpoints must have seemed unassailable. Eighteenth-century writers mainly glorified his wit, originality, and inexhaustible genius. However this status quickly eroded as a new aesthetic emphasis emerged in the first several decades of the nineteenth century in which critics, among them E. T. A. Hoffmann, favored Beethoven’s music in large part because of its perceived metaphysical qualities. Questions of how one so admired could be so quickly and efficiently devalued have long plagued those interested in Haydn’s posthumous reception. It was during this aesthetic shift that the three earliest and widely disseminated biographies of Haydn by Georg August Griesinger (1809), Albert Christoph Dies (1810), and Giuseppe Carpani (1812) appeared. The biographies have long been recognized as crucial sources of information on Haydn and for reaffirming the notion of the composer as “Papa Haydn,” but their impact on his nineteenth-century reception was much deeper. I will show that Griesinger, Dies, and Carpani create a particular picture of Haydn’s life that establishes the composer as a normal, everyday human being by focusing on topics such as his age, sense of humor, orderliness, modesty, work ethic, etc., and that they root his music securely in the aesthetic language of the late eighteenth century. As Beethoven became the chosen Romantic artist for critics, Haydn became his foil, the embodiment of the past. I will use criticism of both Haydn and Beethoven to demonstrate how completely and effectively the picture of Haydn found in the three biographies permeated early nineteenth-century criticism of his work.
Kaiser Franz II (r. 1792–1835), the emperor Haydn celebrated with his “Gott erhalte” hymn, receives relatively little attention in the musicological literature. Franz’s uncle, Joseph II, is more often thought of as eighteenth-century Vienna’s leading example of a “musical emperor.” Similarly, Haydn and his music (even after 1790) are more readily associated with the Esterházy court rather than with the Habsburgs. Recent archival studies by John Rice (2003) and Walther Brauneis (2006), however, have gone some way toward addressing this imbalance, revealing that Kaiser Franz was an avid violinist, a lover of string quartets, and possibly even an important patron in late eighteenth-century Vienna. But the existence today of Franz’s collection of string instruments, his “Quartett-Tisch,” and his enormous music collection known as the “Kaisersammlung”—which includes manuscript copies of nearly eighty Haydn string quartets—also invite a specific consideration of these surviving materials in relation to Haydn. Against this backdrop of the Kaisersammlung, for example, Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 76, No. 3, “the Emperor,” takes on new significance: the tune of “Gott erhalte” was sung for the first time in theaters throughout the empire on Franz’s birthday in February of 1797, becoming extremely popular not only through subsequent public performances but also through the numerous variation sets (by Haydn and others) capitalizing on the patriotic fervor. In this way, “Gott erhalte” blurs any rigid boundaries between public and private music in this period, instead permeating both realms. Indeed, at the center of both realms we can find Franz II: the emperor was present at public commemorations intended to boost his political popularity, but, based on the evidence presented by his music collection, he almost certainly also enjoyed the string quartet privately, as performer or as listener, as he sought diversion from the arduous task of trying to hold together his fragmented, war-torn empire.
The very first ballad opera was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), an inventive satirical play with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch and interspersed throughout with traditional tunes and popular music appropriated from English and Italian operas. The staggering success of this new dramatic and musical genre, with its brilliant satire and parodies of other favorite musical-theatrical pieces, dominated the repertories of the London playhouses for two decades. Despite brief periods of scholarly interest in the genre during the past century, however, very little is known about ballad opera performance practice. Indeed, Edmond Gagey, the author of the only book on ballad opera ever produced, never once mentions the production of the music, the orchestra or its musicians in any of his 259 pages. More recent musicological studies of English musical theater have merely glanced over the composition and size of the era’s smaller playhouse orchestras, and have essentially ignored the performance issues of ballad opera—a genre once thought too light to have carried much influence or import. My paper will examine the manuscript, printed, and iconographical evidence (much of it previously neglected) in order to illuminate how these tremendously popular musical theatre works might have been performed. This paper will not only be the first look at musical practices in ballad opera; it also will give us a more complete picture of vocal and instrumental music-making in London playhouses during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Ranieri de’ Calzabigi described operatic excesses as “beauty spots, rouge, powder, and diamonds on the face, head, and neck of an ape,” linking the realms of fashionable consumption and opera. As Calzabigi and Gluck launched a famous attack in the 1760s against the “musical gargling” and “shapeless excesses” plaguing opera, neo-classicists in France denounced the “Gothic and barbaric” trends of art and fashion in the goût moderne. While there is assuredly no direct parallel between an Italian operatic practice and an essentially French aesthetic movement, the discourses surrounding them are strikingly similar, with the condemnation of frivolous operatic ornament being echoed in the chastisement of contemporary painting, fashion, and cosmetics. The connection might be found in the 18th-century debate over luxury. Operatic music, with its shimmering coloratura, was seen to be dangerously seductive, like the glittering papillotage of rococo art and fashion. The connections between opera and luxury reach beyond the discursive world as well. Opera was a luxury item in itself, especially with its exorbitantly expensive star singers, who often wore the latest fashions onstage, functioning as a kind of traveling, vocalizing fashion plate. Documents reveal that Gluck’s reform opera may have been not only purged of operatic excess, but also simply more cost-effective. Vienna, the most famous center of operatic reform, proves a particularly fascinating landscape for investigation, with its direct confrontation between Metastasian opera seria and a francophile, rococo court. Reassessing the Viennese reform, this paper explores the cultural anxieties that linked opera and luxury in both discourse and practice.
Composing an Orpheus opera in the late eighteenth century was no innocent undertaking, as librettist and satirist Carlo Francesco Badini well knew. His libretto prompted Haydn to write some of his most sublime theatrical music, resulting in a radical opera that, prophetically, never reached the stage. Capitalizing on the literary legacy of Milton, whose Orpheus advocated the poet’s role in politics and cultural life, Badini crafted a rhetorician-philosopher whose failed enlightenment journey resonated profoundly with current political debates being waged in England during the French Revolution. The opera’s over-arching themes of death, loss of reason, horror, destruction, and chaos intersect pointedly with the discourses produced in the early 1790s by contemporary orators in parliament and the press, including Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the pamphlet war it generated. At the conclusion of the opera, a dejected Orpheus is poisoned by the Bacchantes and all are swept away in a powerful storm, recalling Virgil’s violent ending while simultaneously fueling fears about the establishment of a new political order. By imagining a cataclysmic flood that engulfs a feminized hero and a frenzied female mob at the conclusion of this aborted opera, Badini also enlisted Haydn in whipping up sentiments against an internal societal threat posed by women’s liberation, as articulated by the early feminist writer Mary Robinson in A Letter to the Women of England and The Natural Daughter (1799).
What drew Haydn to set a text by Metastasio, for the first and only time, in 1779? L’isola disabitata was a small-scale azione teatrale, set many times since Farinelli had commissioned it in Madrid in 1753. A “through-composed” work with concertante orchestra, whose accompanied recitatives are masterpieces of orchestral, motivic and affective characterization, Haydn’s L’isola disabitata fully realizes the unlikely union of a Metastasian libretto with the ideals of the Gluck/Calzabigi reform. Haydn told Artaria in 1781 that nothing like it had been heard in Paris or even Vienna. Indeed, from the outset L’isola disabitata reveals a powerful new operatic direction for Haydn, for example in the shocking transition from the G minor of the overture-as-argument to the despairing key of A-flat major and subsequent labyrinthine modulations for Costanza (linked to Ariadne in the opera’s argument). Yet the opera is still viewed as dramatically inept. This paper explores as evidence for the origin of the work: Haydn’s new contract of January 1779, which enabled him to plot a broader market for his works; his anger at the Viennese Tonkünstler-Sozietät in February 1779 for putting untenable conditions on his membership; the sentimental turn in his La vera costanza of April 1779; reports of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride from Paris in May 1779, and the resonance of his Orfeo, quoted in L’isola disabitata, that had opened the new opera house at Eszterháza in 1776; and Haydn’s increasing ire at his reputation solely as an instrumental composer. It then reevaluates aspects of the work’s underappreciated dramaturgy. That Haydn “repatriated” the work to Madrid, by way of a 1781 presentation copy to the future Spanish king, suggests a final connection, through the poet Iriarte, to the aged Metastasio.
In an article on orientalism and musical style, Derek B. Scott posits a near-exhaustive list of musical characteristics that act as Orientalist signifiers. Measures 85–88 in the development section of the first movement of Haydn’s “Fifths” quartet contain seven of them: augmented seconds, sliding or sinuous chromaticism, Phrygian mode, repetitive rhythms, a repetitive small-compass melody, parallel movement in fifths, and ostinato. It is difficult to imagine that this music could have contained more Orientalist signifiers and still make musical sense in the context of Western art music at the twilight of the eighteenth century. If Haydn’s string quartets are like four civilized persons holding a conversation, then at this point, the collocutors are speaking a foreign tongue; that foreign tongue could be Ottoman Turkish. For centuries, Turks have dwelled at the center of the European exotic imagination as denizens of the mysterious and have represented either sensual, inviting, and voluptuous (feminine manifestation) or inexplicably menacing or dangerous (masculine manifestation). In this paper, I draw from musicology, cultural and literary theory, and psychoanalysis in addition to providing my own analysis to argue that the music here is overtly Oriental, intended as a foil to the rest of the movement. These measures constitute music from elsewhere: the Western idea of the East as represented in art of eighteenth-century central Europe. I present this music as a hermeneutic window opening up to broader issues of meaning and I discuss the implications of such signification in the construction of Western identity.
As cities in the North American English colonies developed and grew during the years immediately preceding the American Revolutionary War, it was inevitable that their citizens, many of whom had immigrated from Europe, sought to recreate the musical lives that they had previously known. These included the theatre (based upon English models), private soirées in the homes of social and economic leaders, musical societies (like the Cecilia Society of Charleston, SC), and public concerts modeled upon Vauxhall in London. Initially in places such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, these were haphazard affairs, often sponsored by local musician-merchants, such as John Gualdo, who may have written the first American symphony. Often, they ran afoul of local clerics, who considered the entertainments, particularly of the theatre, frivolous, and the political exigencies created by the war. After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, however, American musical life blossomed with an influx of new musicians, such as Alexander Reinagle (1756–1809), James Hewitt (1770–1827), and the von Hagen family of Boston, who created in their new homeland a musical life of sophistication and originality. This paper explores one of the more interesting and heretofore little explored facets of post-colonial American concert life in Philadelphia. Beginning in 1784 with the arrival of Reinagle, Hewitt, Benjamin Carr, and others, extensive public concerts featuring new and innovative works for orchestra were performed by ensembles that paralleled those in major centers of Europe, such as London. The political debates of the time, Federalists versus States Rights, began to influence the new music written for these concerts and published afterwards for popular consumption in keyboard transcription. This resulted in a new symphonic genre, the Federal or Medley Overture, being created by Reinagle and others. New discoveries that allow for this missing genre to be recreated will be presented, along with the historical significance of this first manifestation of patriotism in a new country.
While the vocal romance was an extraordinarily popular genre in mid and late 18th century France, the genre influenced vocal music of other countries as well. French vocal music spread to England and early America with the displacement of aristocrats during the French Revolution and the subsequent rebellion in present-day Haiti. This paper examines the French romance in Federalist America through the musical careers of two émigrés from Saint-Domingue, Jean Baptiste Renaud de Chateaudun and Eugène Guilbert. Chateaudun and Guilbert became important figures in the musical life of Philadelphia and Charleston, their respective adopted cities. Both men sought to preserve aspects of their past privileged culture through political activism and cultural promotion. Probably not coincidentally, both men also continued to cultivate the romance in their new home. The romance reflected the 18th-century aesthetic tastes for naïve simplicity both in its poetic and musical aspects. Romance texts were often tales of medieval chivalry or pastoral verses redolent of late antiquity. Later romances of the Revolutionary era set texts inspired by sentimental novels such as Paul et Virginie and those of Jean Claris de Florian. Chateaudun and Guilbert each wrote several romances with texts from Florian that suggest a nostalgic recreation of ancien régime culture. However, in Chateaudun’s much more ambitious setting of Paul’s elegy for the drowned Virginie we find a real expression of personal turmoil, combining the description of a lost Rousseauesque natural state with the revolutionary language of the musical Sturm und Drang.
From its debut in 1770, music was a part of every monthly issue of the London Lady’s Magazine, yielding a total of some four hundred songs by 1800, a repertoire that reflected the periodical’s twin goals of education and polite entertainment. The pledge “to unite amusement with instruction” was promised by most popular magazines of the era, but the Lady’s Magazine stood at the forefront of education for women in eighteenth-century England. A single ‘Music Master’ served as musical editor during these three decades: Robert Hudson (1730–1815), who was associated with St. Paul’s Cathedral for most of his life, from choirboy to vicar choral. As master of the eight young choristers at St. Paul’s, pedagogy was an essential aspect of his professional life. Under Hudson’s influence, the Lady’s Magazine included more than 100 excerpts from Handel’s sacred and occasional oratorios, as well as songs and catches by many British composers of merit: William Boyce, Maurice Greene, Samuel Howard, Thomas Morley, Henry Purcell, and Elizabeth Turner. The Lady’s Magazine listed songs on the title page as ‘Embellishments,’ along with illustrations and needlework patterns. While this might imply that the music sheets were simply an aspect of fashion or amusement, the quantity of historical music in the magazine reflects Hudson’s didactic purpose. As the century progressed, more and more works by earlier English composers appeared, demonstrating Hudson’s pedagogical intention of using the Lady’s Magazine as a means to cultivate the heritage of British song in the magazine readers.
Franz Joseph Haydn’s encounters with performances of music by George Frideric Handel on his first London visit were clearly crucial to the genesis of his two great oratorios, Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten. Scholars have rightly pointed to the impact made by Israel in Egypt and Messiah as performed by massed forces in Westminster Abbey as part of the annual Handel Commemoration in May 1791. They have paid less attention to the music of Handel that Haydn heard at the Concerts of Ancient Music, held more-or-less weekly from February to May each year. This paper will give a brief history of the Concerts of Ancient Music from their establishment in 1776 and describe how the repertoire of the concerts had changed in the years leading up to Haydn’s arrival. It will discuss the performing forces available during Haydn’s first visit to England; analyze the repertoire presented at concerts Haydn is known to have attended as well as at others he may have attended; and relate these concerts to known Haydn anecdotes. Finally, the paper will investigate whether Haydn’s music was performed on the Concerts of Ancient Music during his second London visit, as suggested by H.C. Robbins Landon and others, or whether this assertion derives from confusion with the similarly named Academy of Antient Music, which was still presenting concerts in 1794 and 1795.
In Haydn’s opera, La fedeltà premiata (1780), there is an astonishing succession of keys for the successive numbers of the chain finale of the first act: B-flat, G, E-flat, C, A-flat and finally, B-flat. This innovatory plan is all the more surprising in that none of Haydn’s prior chain finales had used a key scheme anything remotely as daring. For his text, Haydn adapted a libretto by Giambattista Lorenzi that Domenico Cimarosa had set to music the previous year (L’infedeltà fedele). In 1982 Friedrich Lippmann wrote an article comparing Haydn’s and Cimarosa’s operas. Although he acknowledged that there were motivic similarities between the two works, Lippmann argued that the correspondences were not particularly significant. A reexamination of Cimarosa’s opera, suggests that the works are far more closely connected than Lippmann believed. Most significantly, it is clear that Haydn’s daring key plan for the finale of the first act is a copy of Cimarosa’s. Cimarosa’s finale begins in D, continues to B-flat, G, E-flat, C, and concludes in D. Moreover, there are many other important details (themes, orchestration, and keys) that suggest that Haydn was profoundly influenced by Cimarosa’s opera. The demonstration that Haydn was influenced by another composer would be significant, in and of itself, but this finding takes on added importance given Haydn’s frequent use of remote keys for slow movements in his instrumental works of the 1790s. It would appear that a central aspect of Haydn’s late style can be traced to his confrontation with the music of Cimarosa.
In the eighteenth century, students of composition learned their craft by copying and studying the work of others. As a result of this method, fledgling composers sometimes utilized a theme or pattern from the works they copied as a springboard for their own compositions, a method known as modeling. While the method itself receives frequent mention, we have precious few examples of the specific application of modeling. An exception to this is offered in the Six Overtures in Eight Parts and a Thorough Bass, op.1, by the Scots amateur composer Thomas Alexander Erskine, Sixth Earl of Kelly (1732–1781). Two of Erskine’s overtures – the first galant style orchestral works published in the British Isles – rely heavily on thematic material and ideas borrowed from earlier symphonies by Stamitz. Indeed, both of these works borrow at least one full thematic area from Symphonies in D major (Wolf D-2) and E-flat major (Wolf Eb-5a/b) by Stamitz. Moreover, Erskine seems to not only borrow themes from his mentor, but also Stamitz’s approach to composition this is clearly displayed in his treatment of the appropriated material. This paper examines the relationship between the end product of Erskine and his model drawn from the works of Stamitz with the intent of better understanding the process by which musical composition might have been taught. Focus will be placed on determining the compositional process that Erskine absorbed by examining the treatment of borrowed material, modifications to borrowed material, and how these modifications serve the function of the overall structure of the movement.
Haydn’s keyboard sonatas illustrate techniques of large-scale organization that became fundamental to the Viennese style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In this paper I focus on Haydn’s dramatic use of large-scale (hypermetrical) rhythmic organization in the set of keyboard sonatas from 1773 (H. XIV, 21–6). The conventional notion of hypermeter is inadequate for the cogent explanation of these compositional devices. We can construct a more compelling account from generalized concepts of meter and syncopation based on an expansion of David Lewin’s intervallic system of durations. Hierarchical structures of rhythmic organization and those of tonal organization interact in novel ways in Haydn’s compositional style. By comparing his keyboard sonatas to an important model, the sonatas of C. P. E. Bach, we can locate clear distinctions in the two composers’ techniques for generating and coordinating these background structures. Bach’s methods are based on the symmetrical prolongational divisions typical of the tonal sequence, with the perfect symmetry of the sequence disrupted primarily by localized misalignments of rhythmic and tonal hierarchy. In contrast, Haydn relies heavily on varied repetition, which implies asymmetrical tonal prolongational divisions while typically aligning rhythmic and tonal hierarchies more precisely. The identification of compositional techniques of large-scale organization offer insight into the historical grounding of the ubiquitous but vague ideas of “tonality” and “common practice.”
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