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The Cambridge Companion to Haydn.

Article Excerpt
The Cambridge Companion to Haydn. Edited by Caryl Clark. (Cambridge Companions to Music.) New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [xx, 318 p. ISBN 0-521-54107-7. $27.99.] Music examples, index, bibliography.

Caryl Clark provides an updated, "richly complex" picture of the composer and his music for the Haydn volume in the Cambridge Companions to Music series (p. xii). The book includes seventeen essays divided into four groups ("Haydn in Context," "Stylistic and Interpretive Contexts," "Genres," and "Performance and Reception"), devoted to providing new and provocative ideas on Haydn's life, music, aesthetics, image, and reception.

In the book's opening essay, Elaine Sisman investigates Haydn's interaction with the musical public and presents the composer as deeply invested in creating, crafting, and defending his public image. She reads between the lines of the early biographical and autobiographical accounts of Haydn's life to show how he portrayed himself as an unlikely success story in which hard work and musical excellence prevailed in the face of constant adversity, ranging from his low birth to problematic early employment. She continues with a number of case studies taken from Haydn's correspondence. Her reading of the "Applausus" letter of 1768 emphasizes his interest in the quality of performances given in his absence and his local self-image early in his career. Sisman also reexamines Haydn's famous attack on Leopold Hoffmann's "street songs," showing the lengths to which Haydn was willing to go to defend...

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