Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780

Abstract

Haydn, Mozart and Viennese School, 1740-1780. By Daniel Heartz. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. [xxviii, 780 p. ISBN 0-393-03712-6. $65.00.] This book represents first installment of what is envisioned by Daniel Heartz as a trilogy of volumes dealing with modern--formerly known as classical--style of eighteenth-century music. When completed, trilogy will constitute a study monumental in its proportions and meticulous in its detail and scholarship. Judging from this initial tome, these volumes will be far removed from individual and comparatively lean books in original Norton History of Music series, which began with Gustave Reese's Music in Middle Ages in 1940 and included celebrated contributions such as Manfred Bukofzer's Mime in Baroque Era (1947) and Reese's Musk in Renaissance (1954; rev. 1959). Until now, however, one waited in vain for classical issue in that renowned series of period studies. The multivolume conception was not author's original plan. It was arrived at after Heartz discovered significance of a set of documents known as Grumpenhuber Repertories that were brought to light by Gerhard Croll in 1975. These chronicles threw concert life in Vienna after mid-century into such new and dramatic focus that, in Heartz's view, a different approach to subject was mandated. This first volume, then, is subtly informed by time and place with which it deals, as one learns already from organization of its opening chapter. Here Viennese musical institutions are laid out in a plan corresponding to categorization of music practices proposed by eighteenth-century Austrian theorists through to Johann Georg Albrechstberger: threefold division into church, theater, and chamber (concert) types. There follow chapters pertaining to court composers in years 1740 to 1765, Christoph Willibald Gluck and operatic reforms, two chapters taking up Joseph Haydn's career to 1780, his contemporaries (Florian Leopold Gassmann, Antonio Salieri, Karl Ditters, Johan Vanhal, Leopold Hofmann, Carlos d'Ordonez, Albrechtsberger, and Joseph Anton Steffan), and finally three chapters devoted to Mozart as apprentice, journeyman, and master craftsman--an approach and terminology that once more reflect an eighteenth-century institution--the Zunfte or guilds. Perhaps because it was center of such an old political system, Vienna under rule of Maria Theresa traditionally has been viewed as a bastion of musical conservatism. By following trail of his evidence, however, Heartz has opened up new vistas and arrived at fresh conclusions. He finds a more progressive side to this critical, hut little-studied and therefore little-understood transitional phase of music history. Among his thought-provoking findings in first chapters: What is most impressive about Viennese concert life is not only its many-sidedness, but also its modernity (p. 57), while Georg Christoph Wagenseil is confirmed as the trailblazer and is viewed along with Gluck as the most seminal figure in Viennese music during double reign of Maria Theresa and Francis Stephan from 1740 to 1765 (p. 115). To these innovative perspectives could be added still other details indicating Viennese musical progressiveness. Franz Asplmayr, for instance, is included among first group of court composers in chapter 2, where he is credited among other accomplishments with having made an early setting of Rousseau's Pygmalion in German translation (p. 134), but it is not made clear that his rendition (Karnertor-theater, 19 February 1772) significantly predated earliest known performance of Rousseau's melodrama in Germany (music by Anton Schweitzer, Weimar, May 1772). From outset Heartz declares that matters of style formation and dissemination will not be taken up here, but that these critical subjects will be dealt with in forthcoming companion volume tentatively entitled Galant Music and Rococo Age (preface, p. …

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