Conference Agenda

Via the concept of topic, music scholars have illustrated that supposedly autonomous, abstract music in fact transmits social meaning through its use of conventionalized musical gestures. They have rarely, however, conducted detailed analyses of genres such as dance and church music, which were written in order to perform a concrete functional role; indeed, Monelle (2000) and Mirka (2014) theorize topic such that functional genres may furnish topics to be used elsewhere, but do not themselves signify through topics. This paradoxically reinscribes the binary of functional and autonomous music and with it the aesthetic hierarchies of the canon, with autonomous genres on top. Moreover, it skews our understanding of the mechanisms of musical communication in use in the late eighteenth century by ignoring the question of predictability and propriety of particular topics in specific functional settings.

Examining Joseph Haydn’s Nelsonmesse with an eye to its origin as a complement to the Catholic liturgy, I argue that that the current designation of imitative, contrapuntal writing as “learned style” is inadequate to characterize the technique’s use in music for the Roman Mass—a ritual with which contrapuntal imitation was closely and widely associated. This shortcoming, however, can be remedied by reintroducing Ratner’s (1980) distinction between type and style, a distinction largely ignored in subsequent topical research. I develop Ratner’s concept, provisionally defining types as invocations of a topic that carry not only semantic but also formal associations, and claim that the topic of “Learnedness” can manifest as both a style and a type, as, for example, in the fugue ending the Gloria of the Nelsonmesse or the canon beginning its Credo.

Such examples demonstrate the importance of considering topical invocations in light of liturgical contexts, for while it was common to end Glorias with fugues, it was exceptionally rare to begin Credos with canons. Topical styles, by contrast, were used more freely and cannot confirm or confound expectations in the same way. The topical type, therefore, affords a more nuanced understanding of how listeners may have related imitative gestures to the broader context of the church service which the music accompanies and punctuates.

Haydn’s last opera, L’anima del filosofo (The Soul of the Philosopher), is a highly unusual retelling of the Orpheus myth. Written for London in 1791 to a libretto by CF Badini, 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 because many of its themes – including the catastrophic storm at the end – resonated too closely with British anxieties towards events unfolding in revolutionary France. As Haydn himself concluded: “my Orfeo was declared contraband.”
The opera finally premiered in Florence in 1951 during the Cold War, with the 27-year-old Callas singing the role of Euridice. Universal Edition in Vienna prepared the performing scores and parts from musical sources photographed behind the Iron Curtain. Since they had not produced a proper edition per se, the publishing firm forbade broadcasts of performances on Radio Italia International (RAI), silencing Callas and curtailing wider dissemination of the opera. Subsequent European performances and recordings by Joan Sutherland and Cecilia Bartoli helped promote the opera, but Jürgen Flimm’s directorial vision for Bartoli’s theatrical performances with Harnoncourt and Hogwood is both mystifying and visually troubling, especially in its depiction of white superiority. Moreover, North American audiences could only access concert performances of this remarkable Orfeo (Glimmerglass, 2007; H&H Society, Boston, 2009).
This presentation by the conductor/keyboardist and dramaturge/producer who brought Haydn’s Orfeo to the stage in North America in 2023 offers many new insights. We argue that, far from being “a colossal failure” (HC Robbins Landon), Haydn’s Orfeo benefits from a better understanding of its problematic reception history, and from an intelligent staging that foregrounds details of the myth and failed liberation while also pulling out themes of warmongering, the paranormal, and environmental degradation – themes that resonate powerfully with modern-day audiences. Our joint musicological presentation also challenges Matthew Aucoin’s opinion that Haydn “is rarely willing to channel, in his music, the feral energies” demanded by “the wildness and violence at the myth’s heart” as conceived by Badini (The Impossible Art), utilizing audio-visual excerpts from our imaginative, musically effective production.

Recent years have seen an effort by scholars to acknowledge the central role played by dance in eighteenth-century Viennese musical life. As a picture emerges of considerable cross- fertilisation between ballrooms and concert halls, with eighteenth-century Viennese audiences encountering the minuet equally as a dance and as a concert movement, this has made clear that members of late-eighteenth-century Viennese concert audiences would have listened to concert minuets with bodies that knew the steps of the minuet dance. Haydn scholars Gretchen Wheelock and Danuta Mirka have both argued that this somatic understanding of the minuet heightens one’s engagement with the genre. The entire minuet genre, they hold, was defined by the danced minuet, such that ‘patterns of steps and gestures guided expectations of eighteenth-century listeners not only in danced but also in heard minuets’ (Mirka 2009, 297). Wheelock asserts that listening with the somatic knowledge of the minuet dance gives the potential for subverted expectations to cause a ‘visceral impact’ (Wheelock 1992, 89). Mirka offers some examples, claiming that ‘a missing beat in a minuet feels like stepping into a hole’, while ‘a surprisingly strong event falling on a weak beat feels like stumbling against a stone’ (Mirka 2009, 297).

In this paper, I expand on the approach advocated by Wheelock and Mirka. I demonstrate my reconstruction of a minuet choreography frequently adopted at the public balls in late-eighteenth-century Vienna (based on German-language dance treatises from the time). I then consider the minuet from Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 in relation to this choreography, showing how a listener with the knowledge of the minuet dance step would be alerted to specific compositional features. I show how a particular motivic cell interrupts the feeling of the dance step early in the movement, then becomes the main feature of the movement’s ‘B’ section, then is resolved in the ‘A’ section reprise at the end of the movement. But I then question this approach, arguing that it only really equips us to consider moments of deviation in the music, and risks presenting the dance as a mere repository of repeated actions, whose ultimate value lies in their later subversion. I introduce the minuet of Haydn’s Symphony No. 97, which is extremely regular in its construction: in the absence of any striking deviations, I consider how a somatic enquiry through the minuet dance step might inform an understanding of this movement. I contrast this mode of listening—with the feeling of the dance step—with the usual phenomenological characterisation of the act of listening (e.g. Petitmengin, Bitbol et al 2009), which presents the body as a passive, receiving agent, on which sound acts. I suggest that dance is not the only mode of listening that requires actively inserting the body into the situation, and that we are simply more conscious of the body’s role when dancing than we are during seated listening.