The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven

by Richard Will

• ISBN13: 9780521802017
• ISBN10: 0521802016
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-10-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Associated through descriptive texts with literature, politics, religion, and other subjects, 'characteristic' symphonies offer an opportunity to study instrumental music as it engages important social and political debates of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This first full-length study of the genre illuminates the relationship between symphonies and their aesthetic and social contexts by focussing on the musical representation of feeling, human physical movement, and the passage of time. The works discussed include Beethoven's Pastoral and Eroica Symphonies, Haydn's Seven Last Words of our Savior on the Cross, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf's symphonies on Ovid's Metamorphoses, and orchestral battle reenactments of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. A separate chapter details the aesthetic context within which characteristic symphonies were conceived, as well as their subsequent reception, and a series of appendixes summarises bibliographic information for over 225 relevant examples.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Note to the reader	xi
Introduction	1	(28)
Paradise lost: Dittersdorf's Four Ages of the World and the crisis of Austrian enlightened despotism	29	(54)
Preaching without words: Reform Catholicism versus divine mystery in Haydn's Seven Last Words	83	(46)
The boundaries of the art: characteristic music in contemporary criticism and aesthetics	129	(27)
Paradise regained: time, morality, and humanity in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony	156	(32)
Making memories: symphonies of war, death, and celebration	188	(54)
Appendixes	242	(62)
1 Index of characteristic symphonies	249	(45)
2 Pastoral symphonies and movements	294	(5)
3 Symphonies and movements by subject	299	(5)
Bibliography	304	(15)
Index	319