It is the winter of 2021. Like many parents around the world, I have donned the new hat of home-school administrator. My children are high-school age, so they resist oversight (as expected), but I have come to see that they do not need much (who knew?). My role is simply to find suitable remote-learning resources. Again, I am pleasantly surprised, and relieved: high-school level art history, for example, seems to be an especially engaging subject online, given the potential for abundant accurately coloured images, flexible user interfaces, and up-to-date critical content. This happy realisation hits me as I notice that the unfamiliar hat has slipped off the side of my head: I am no longer surveying the resources for the kids’ sakes, but rather I am absorbed, of my own accord, in a lesson on Fauvism.

With this contract, Nicholas Mathew opens the final chapter of his recent book The Haydn Economy, which is simply entitled: ‘Work’. ‘For most of his life’, Mathew writes, ‘Haydn was constantly busy’. In the chapter, Mathew deftly traces the common origins of the musical work concept and the economic concept of work. As Mathew builds his argument, he delves into Haydn’s varying forms of labour and work, and Haydn’s reflections on them. Mathew places special emphasis on Haydn’s career after the death of Prince Nikolaus in 1790: Haydn’s new-found ‘freedom’ brought yet more labour as he entered the London marketplace.

In 1974 Geoffrey Chew, building on work by H. C. Robbins Landon, established that Haydn quoted a melody that has come to be known as the ‘night watchman’s song’ on at least seven occasions. Most of these works date from the earlier part of the composer’s career – divertimentos and pieces with baryton, as well as Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’, of 1774. A canon from the 1790s, ‘Wunsch’, represents a late engagement with the tune, while it is also used in the minuet-finale of the Sonata in C Sharp Minor, one of a set of six sonatas published in 1780. The melody has been found in many sources dispersed over a wide area of central Europe, principally Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia, dating at the least comfortably back into the seventeenth century.

Musicologists have started to engage critically with the international reach of Haydn’s music and the claims of ‘universal language’. Miguel Ángel Marín has shown that Haydn was a significant virtual presence in Spain; Thomas Tolley has explored Carpani’s assertions that Haydn composed a ‘New World’ symphony; W. Dean Sutcliffe has documented the discovery of three autographs from Haydn’s Op. 50 in Australia; and Peter Walls considers The Creation in colonial New Zealand. Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann has stepped back to consider the style, aesthetics, and ideas behind the claims of universality; and Nicholas Mathew has discussed what it meant for Haydn and his music to go abroad as a cultural product in the composer’s era.

Towards the end of his life, and at the height of his fame, Joseph Haydn composed two oratorios based on libretti by Baron Gottfried van Swieten. The Creation (1798) has enjoyed a continual life in the concert hall and has produced one of the most unwieldy bibliographies in Haydn scholarship. However, Haydn’s The Seasons (1801) has had no such luck. Many factors have contributed to its neglect, central among them a lingering belief that The Seasons suffers from a poor libretto and lacks the musical insight and innovation of the earlier oratorio. Scholarship on The Seasons remains minimal, and is often, though not uniformly, characterised by analytical musical discussion rather than critical analyses of how the oratorio responds to cultural and artistic phenomena of the eighteenth century.

The last musicologist to see the original canon-pictures was apparently Eusebius Mandyczewski, who says: ‘At Eisenstadt [the Esterházy family’s principal residence] there are still [1891] preserved Haydn’s presentation canons – as copies – in slender wooden frames, those that he hung on the walls of his room.’ Mandyczewski, a Haydn authority, recognised that the hand in the canon-pictures was not the composer’s, strengthening a claim made in 1811 by Johann Elßler, Haydn’s servant and copyist, that he had copied their music directly from autographs. Mandyczewski’s observation that the frames were ‘slender’ suggests that Haydn adopted a style of framing favoured by collectors of prints, which the composer would have seen in London and which was much imitated in Germany in the later eighteenth century.

Joseph Haydn’s Il ritorno di Tobia (Hob. XXI:1) has had a complicated reception since its first performance on 2 April 1775 at the semi-annual concerts of Vienna’s Tonkünstler-Societät. Despite its highly praised ‘fiery’ choruses and virtuosic arias, the work was criticised for its length, difficulty, and even monotony. Haydn and others attempted to correct the work’s ‘faults’ – leading to the oratorio’s existence in multiple versions. It seems unfair, however, to critique Haydn’s Tobia oratorio in isolation, without considering local precedents and its original multifaceted context: an audience following a libretto (with stage directions) based on a well-known biblical story; an event raising funds for musicians’ families; a musical dramatisation exploiting through demanding arias the virtuosity of its vocal soloists; and performance in a nearly five-hour ‘multimedia’ concert that included other works.

Haydn’s last opera, L’anima del filosofo (The soul of the philosopher), is a highly unusual retelling of the Orpheus myth. Written for the London stage in 1791 to a libretto by Carlo Francesco Badini (c. 1730–1810), the opera was never staged then nor during the composer’s lifetime. Shut down in rehearsal and banished from performance, the opera never reached the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. As Haydn himself concluded, ‘Orfeo was, so to speak, declared contraband’ (‘Orfeo wurde, so zu sagen, als Contrebande erklärt’).

The Epilogue speculates on what Haydn might think about a study of his minuets and considers further applications of the research to other repertoires and fields.

In this chapter a method of ‘somatic enquiry’ is put forward, which demonstrates ways in which the bodily knowledge of the minuet might inform analytical approaches to this repertoire. Drawing on other contributions to the field of somatic studies by scholars such as Suzanne Ravn and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, it demonstrates ways in which the sensation of dancing informs my perception of the musical sounds, and conversely how the sounds affect my body’s kinaesthetic sensations. Taking Elisabeth Le Guin’s similar exploration of Boccherini’s body as a model, it considers challenges faced by any attempts to grapple with bodily knowledge. It builds on Christopher Hasty’s notion of projection, or ‘throwing forth’, in his theory of metre, arguing that to dance is a physical throwing forth of one’s body. The method of somatic enquiry is illustrated through detailed accounts of dancing to movements from Haydn’s Minuets Hoboken IX:11, composed in 1792 for the first annual ball of the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal. Ultimately, it argues that musical listening (even when seated) is a more active bodily experience than is typically recognised, even when one’s awareness of this activity is limited.

This chapter turns to the concert minuet, asking how somatic knowledge of the minuet dance informs engagement with and understanding of this genre. The chapter begins with writings that show eighteenth-century listeners discussing concert minuets in relation to the minuet dance step, as well as eighteenth-century music-theoretical discussions of minuet composition that put forward a view of the concert minuet as the nonconformist version of the dance minuet. Two case studies discuss minuets from Haydn’s ‘London’ Symphonies – Nos. 97 and 102 – which were written around the same period as the dance minuets discussed in the previous chapter, and were also performed in Vienna in the 1790s. These case studies show ways in which Haydn plays with expectations formed by the dance minuet: he subverts the structural norms of minuet composition, as well as manipulating one’s feeling of the dance step. The argument is made that, while traditional forms of analysis tend to seek subversion of expectations as a feature for explication, minuets and somatic enquiry invite us to see artfulness through a different lens.

This chapter explores the dance culture of Vienna in the latter half of the eighteenth century. It describes the changing legislation that opened up the city’s dance halls to a paying public, and the subsequent establishment of new dance venues across the city and its suburbs. It considers the social make-up of attendees at these venues, and ways in which social class was both entrenched and destabilised in this setting, particularly through practices such as masking. Descriptions of the minuet, the German dance and the contredanse – the three main dances performed at the public balls during this period – are given. The chapter ends with a detailed account of a public ball hosted by the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal on 25 November 1792, for which Haydn composed the music. The aim of focusing on this one event is to paint as vivid as possible a picture of the scene, such that readers can readily put themselves ‘in the shoes’ of minuet dancers in Vienna at the end of the century.

In November 1792, Beethoven arrived in Vienna to study with Haydn and ultimately to make his career. Such was the importance of dancing as a social skill that Beethoven included finding a dancing teacher on his ‘to-do’ list and upon arrival in Vienna copied out the details of a dancing teacher from the Wiener Zeitung. In the same month, Haydn returned to Vienna from his first trip to England, and his first task was to compose minuets and German dances for a ball in the city’s Redoutensaal at the end of the month. November 1792 thus sets the scene for an investigation into the dance culture of Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, and its implications for minuet composition, with a focus on minuets by Haydn. Following a description of Beethoven’s arrival and Haydn’s return, the Introduction considers existing musicological attempts to consider the minuet, and provides a summary outline of the book that follows.

This chapter explores the repertoire of minuets composed around the end of the eighteenth century specifically for dancing, considering them particularly in relation to the needs (perceived and real) of the dance. The research is based on an in-depth study of 319 minuets (and trios) composed for the annual balls of the Gesellschaft bildender Künstler at the Hofburg Redoutensaal. Certain defining features of the repertoire are identified, such as the two-bar grouping necessary for the dancers’ enactment of the minuet step. Larger-scale features are explored, such as the perceived need by music theorists (and possibly some composers) for eight-bar phrases to accommodate the choreography – even though the choreography does not actually dictate this – and the extent to which this might be considered a key structural feature of the minuet genre. The minuet choreography (established in Chapter 2) is set against the structure of a typical minuet composition, revealing that, while on the small scale there is considerable coherence between step and two-bar groupings, on the larger scale there is little correspondence between dance figure and musical phrase lengths. Compositional creativity, noble musical expression and musical anomalies are considered.

This chapter on keyboard instruments in the Classical period includes a discussion of the continued use of the harpsichord and clavichord by composers such as Mozart and Haydn, as well as throughout Europe, as documented in the writings of Charles Burney. The origins of the English and German/Austrian schools of piano making are discussed, in particular the work of Johann Christoph Zumpe and others referred to as the “Twelve Apostles,” and the Broadwood firm in London, as well as that of Johann Andreas Stein in Augsburg, and Geschwister Stein and Anton Walter in Vienna. Included are technical descriptions of the keyboard instruments used by the principal composers of the period, as well as revelations about the condition and authenticity of the piano said to have been made by Anton Walter and owned by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The inventive work of Johann Andreas Stein, in particular his so-called Vis-à-vis combination piano/harpsichord, is discussed.

In 1875 the pioneering early authority on Beethoven’s sketches, Gustav Nottebohm, claimed that had the composer completed as many symphonies as were begun in the sketchbooks, then his total output of such works would have exceeded fifty. This essay is the first to scrutinize that claim. A comprehensive study of Beethoven’s sketches from his youth to the last years of his life reveals Nottebohm’s claim to be remarkably accurate. As well as detailed study of the musical evidence the essay presents a thematic catalogue of unfinished – or barely begun – symphonies.

Critics have often described Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony as a ‘watershed’ work, not only within his career and oeuvre, but also within the histories of music, art and ideas. However, the concept of the ‘watershed’ work needs to be understood both as an aesthetic construct and as a literary device that helps to shape a narrative of triumph over adversity. Investigating this concept means disentangling the Eroica from the many stories that have been told about it since Beethoven’s death. While modern critics have made compelling claims about the Eroica’s departures from generic and stylistic norms, for instance, these claims are complicated by close engagement with the music of Beethoven’s predecessors. Carl Friedrich Michaelis’s 1805 interpretation of the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven as ‘heroic epics’ ‘Heldengedichte’ offers further evidence that the Eroica reaffirmed and reimagined ‘rather than overturned’ an existing aesthetic paradigm. The Beethoven myth has strongly shaped the way the Eroica has been understood, so that beginning in the 1830s, the symphony’s extraordinary reputation has been closely bound up with the periodisation of Beethoven’s life and works. Recent scholarship on Beethoven’s ‘middle’ or ‘heroic’ period opens up alternate ways of thinking about the Eroica’s ‘watershed’ status.

Haydn’s Seasons suffered in the critical reception of its time owing to the sublime’s proximity to the humorous or quotidian, two of the sublime’s ‘off-switches’, especially after the unproblematic sublimity of The Creation. Van Swieten’s cataloguing talents as imperial librarian are on view as librettist of both oratorios, but only The Seasons reflected his thematic choices. His poetry allowed Haydn to showcase the effects of nature’s excesses in the ‘extreme’ seasons, making the sublime ‘start’ and ‘stop’ not only in the choruses invoking God, the eruption of the storm and the sounding of the Last Judgment, but also in the quieter solos in Summer and Winter, both cavatinas, when the sun’s overwhelming presence or absence makes animate nature gasp for air. The ‘quotidian sublime’ of the sunset tapestry that closes Summer brings healing after terror. Haydn’s two Mozart quotations in The Seasons make powerful references to the life cycle as the work’s dominant metaphor, but hitherto unremarked is Haydn’s spotlight on the rising-sixth interval in Spring and Winter as Mozart uses it in The Magic Flute for moments of recognition. In thus suggesting sublime Mozart’s spirit framing the whole, Haydn’s work offers a key to Beethoven’s Cavatina in Op. 130.