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The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
- Author: Mathew, Nicholas
The essential momentousness of Haydn’s retirement from Esterházy court life and transition to a final period marked by musical triumph, financial independence, and some degree of artistic autonomy,...
The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century
- Author: Mathew, Nicholas
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The essential momentousness of Haydn’s retirement from Esterházy court life and transition to a final period marked by musical triumph, financial independence, and some degree of artistic autonomy,...
About
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 Esterházy 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.
Contents
- Introduction
- Ringing Coins
- Haydn and the City
- Media, Motion, Connection
- Commerce, Interest, Objects, Work, Value
- 1 Commerce
- Importation of Haydn
- Warehouse Aesthetics
- Mobility and Credit
- A Resonant World
- New Addresses
- Music before the Cliche
- 2 Interest
- Taking Note(s)
- Psychic Investments
- Disinterest and Boredom
- Making Musical Interest
- The Fate of Interest
- 3 Objects
- Little Boxes
- Pursuit of Objects
- Objects, Animals, People
- Haydn's Musical Objects
- Surface Fantasies
- 4 Work
- Chapel Master, Chapel Servant
- Liberty, Work, Stress
- The Work of Comedy
- Work, Property, Works
- The Creation Concept
- The Industry Concept
- Working Concepts
- Epilogue: Value (1808)
- Of Time and Fashion
- Romantic Infrastructures
- Haydn Recalled
- Gold Is a Mighty Thing
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Awards and reviews
Notes: Journal of the Music Library Association
The essential momentousness of Haydn’s retirement from Esterházy court life and transition to a final period marked by musical triumph, financial independence, and some degree of artistic autonomy, has perhaps hindered rather than sustained investigations into the peculiar contexts in which these events unfolded. Nicholas Mathew offers a fresh and timely study of this area in The Haydn Economy, an illuminating, wide-ranging monograph on the late eighteenth-century cultural economy in which Haydn participated. The book makes not only a major contribution to studies of the composer and his achievements in their Viennese and English milieus but also a compelling case for reevaluating our understanding of the complex of craft, aesthetics, and enterprise at work in their age more widely
