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Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720-1780.

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Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style 1720-1780. By Daniel Heartz. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003. [xxiv, 1078. ISBN 0-393-05080-7. $100.] Music examples, color plates, illustrations, bibliography, index.

With his Music in European Capitals, Daniel Heartz has completed the second volume of a trilogy on the music of the eighteenth century. (The first, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780, appeared from W. W. Norton in 1995.) As he observes in his preface, this book "invited a rethinking" of musicology's traditional conception of the eighteenth century, particularly the "fixation on Bach and Handel" (p. xxi) that has prevented a full and fair consideration of the emerging galant style in the early part of the century. Heartz provides precisely that consideration, covering not only the usual suspects (e.g. Giovanni Battista Sammartini, Johann Stamitz, etc.) but also composers such as Antonio Vivaldi and Jean-Philippe Rameau, who normally figure only in accounts of the late baroque. It is a welcome rethinking, and his interpretation, along with his treatment of many musicians passed over in traditional historical narratives (e.g. Pietro Antonio Locatelli, Ignaz Holzbauer, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges) make this volume a valuable contribution to the literature on the eighteenth century.

Even without Vienna and post-1780 music, Heartz faced a formidable task in organizing the 1,078 pages of text in this volume. He opted to "concentrate on capital cities" (p. xxii) rather than on countries, a decision that allows him to give the reader a close look at the inner workings of important musical centers. His organizational scheme has a symmetry and balance quite appropriate for the book's subject. Chapters 1 and 9 contain sketches of eighteenth-century galant figures: Jean-Antoine Watteau, Farinelli, Pietro Metastasio, and Charles Burney in "Prologue: Three Rococo Idylls"; and Johann Christian Bach, Giovanni Paisiello, and Luigi Boccherini in the last, entitled "Three Apostles of the Galant Style." In between are seven chapters devoted to...