Customer Reviews

The New Grove Haydn (New Grove Composer Biographies)

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This is a concise, lucid, well written account of Haydn's life and career with a balanced assessment of his works and of his character. It contains a complete list of Haydn's works and a valuable bibliography for further reading and research. It is an excellent introduction to Haydn. Those wanting to learn more about Haydn's life and works will look elsewhere but will want this book for its listing of his works and its bibliography.

This is a useful and solid book for people who want accurate facts about Haydn's life and music. The lists at the end are extremely thorough and detailed. Those who are reading for pleasure will get more enjoyment out of Rosemary Hughes's book "Haydn" (out of print, but often available used), which shows a warmer sympathy for the composer and a better choice of revealing detail.

For the past several years, I have been enjoying listening to Haydn's symphonies, quartets, and oratorios and sharing my thoughts with readers here on Amazon. More recently, I have had the pleasure of hearing Jeno Jando's cycle of the Haydn piano sonatas and writing about the sonatas on this site in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Haydn's death. I received valuable guidance in learning about a composer I love and about his piano sonatas from this short study, "The New Grove Haydn" by Jens Peter Larsen.

The book is one of a series of short biographies of the great composers taken from the 1980 edition of "The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians." As is pointed out in a short Preface, the book is shaped by its initial format as part of a dictionary. It is based upon the most current, for the time, and reliable scholarship about Haydn while aiming to avoid controversy or overly technical analysis. The book is short, well-organized, clearly written, and does not require formal musical training to understand. It includes a detailed bibliography, arranged by particular subjects (such as Haydn's life, his operas, his symphonies, piano sonatas, historical reputation, what have you) together with an extensive list (90 pages) of Haydn's compositions arranged by categories.

The text itself runs about 122 pages divided into seven chapters. The first five chapters are biographical and discuss what is known about Haydn's life from his early years, through his long association with the Esterhazys, to his two trips to London late in his career, and ending with his final years in Vienna. There is a short chapter on Haydn's personality, and a lengthy concluding chapter on Haydn's artistic development and accomplishment.

The format allowed for good discussions of Haydn's music. The biographical sections of the book offer information of the characteristics of Haydn's music during each period of his life, while the section on the composer's artistic development tries to capture the thread of the genres in which Haydn worked over the course of his life. The book helped me see how and why Haydn changed as a composer over the course of a 40 year career.

There are two broad themes that are emphasized in the book. First is Haydn's relative isolation during his many years at Esterhazy from the broader musical culture of Vienna. In a famous quotation, (p. 28) Haydn himself emphasized the importance of this isolation on his development as a composer.

"I was set apart from the world, there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so I had to become original."

The second theme emphasized in the book is the character of Haydn's music "fur Kenner und Liebhaber"-- for both connoisseurs and amateurs (pp 85 - 86). Haydn wrote music of extraordinary depth and sophistication, but he also wrote music readily accessible to a broad audience with little musical expertise. Some of his works show both characteristics. But even the popular pieces show an ability to delight within the restrictions Haydn was given. As Larsen states: "it is part of his greatness that he was able to display his extraordinary musicianship and inventiveness not only in outstanding masterworks but also in more domestic pieces like the baryton trios." (p 86). I was helped in my understanding of Haydn's piano music in particular by thinking of it in terms of "fur Kenner und Liebhaber."

This is an excellent book for listeners with a basic familiarity with Haydn who want to learn more about the composer and his music.

Robin Friedman