BAUMAN, 2004. Becoming Original Haydn and the Cult of Genius

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Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult of Genius Author(s): Thomas Bauman Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 333-357 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600908 . Accessed: 05/02/2014 23:08 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 139.82.115.34 on Wed, 5 Feb 2014 23:08:42 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Transcript of BAUMAN, 2004. Becoming Original Haydn and the Cult of Genius

Page 1: BAUMAN, 2004. Becoming Original Haydn and the Cult of Genius

Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult of GeniusAuthor(s): Thomas BaumanSource: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 333-357Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600908 .

Accessed: 05/02/2014 23:08

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The MusicalQuarterly.

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Page 2: BAUMAN, 2004. Becoming Original Haydn and the Cult of Genius

Texts and Contexts

Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult

of Genius

Thomas Bauman

During his last decade, Haydn received a series of visits at his lodgings in Vienna from Georg August Griesinger, a music-loving functionary in the Elector of Saxony's legation. Griesinger's main business with the composer was to represent the interests of the Leipzig publishing firm of Breitkopf und Hartel.1 But without Haydn's knowledge, immediately after his visits Griesinger began writing down Haydn's recollections of his life and career. By the time of Haydn's death in May 1809, Griesinger had woven these jottings into a series of "biographical notices," the first installment of which appeared that July in Breitkopf und Hirtel's house organ, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Together with the biographical account of Haydn published by the landscape painter Albert Christoph Dies in 1810, also based on an extended series of visits with the composer, Griesinger's Biographische Notizen represent one of the most important and trustworthy sources of information on Haydn's life and character.

In one much-discussed passage in Griesinger's notices, Haydn recalled how auspicious the circumstances of his employment at the court of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy had been for the cultivation of his talents. Prince Nikolaus had hired Haydn in 1761 to serve as vice chapelmaster and understudy to the aging Gregor Werner, whom Haydn duly succeeded as chapelmaster on Werner's death in 1766, about the time the court moved to the magnificent new palace Nikolaus had built at Eszterhaza. During the first fifteen of Haydn's thirty years in the service of the court, his creative duties involved him intensely with the instrumental genres on which his subsequent fame came to rest-the symphony, keyboard sonata, and string quartet. Presumably Haydn had in mind the remarkable string of compositions he had created in these genres when he capped his com- ments to Griesinger on these years with the memorable apothegm: Und so musste ich original werden. A characteristically straightforward remark, so it would seem, and one easily reconciled with both the circumstances in which he worked at Eszterhaza and the fruits of his labors. And yet even today one detects a certain amount of scholarly disagreement over how

doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdh014 87:333-357 ? The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

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this celebrated phrase should be rendered in English. Here is the para- graph in Griesinger's Notizen that it concludes, first in the original German and then in the standard English version by Vernon Gotwals:

Wenn iibrigens Haydns aussere Lage nichts weniger als glanzend war, so verschafte sie ihm dagegen zur Ausbildung seines vielseitigen Talents die beste Gelegenheit. "Mein Fiirst war mit alien meinen Arbeiten zufrieden, ich erheilt Beyfall, ich konnte als Chef eines Orchesters Versuche machen, beobachten, was den Eindruck hervorbringt, und was ihn schwacht, also verbessem, zusetzen, wegschneiden, wagen; ich war von der Welt abgesondert, Niemand in meiner Nahe konnte mich an mir selbst irre machen und qualen, und so musste ich original werden."2

Although, moreover, Haydn's outward circumstance was anything but brilliant, it nevertheless provided him the best opportunity for the devel- opment of his many-sided talent. "My Prince was content with all my works, I received approval, I could, as head of an orchestra, make experi- ments, observe what enhanced an effect, and what weakened it, thus improving, adding to, cutting away, and running risks. 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 be original."3

Daniel Heartz reproduced this translation verbatim in his study Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780, but he appended a demurral over its rendering of the paragraph's famous concluding phrase: "The last verb is 'werden,' not 'sein,' thus a more accurate translation would be 'I had to become original."'4 Elaine Sisman agreed with Heartz's point in her own rendering of the passage, published in her recent study on Haydn and Shakespeare.s James Webster had already gone much fur- ther. In his far-reaching inquiry into the compositional context of Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, he refashioned virtually every phrase in Gotwals's version, and especially the words Griesinger attributes to Haydn himself: "'My prince was satisfied with all my works; I received approval. As head of an orchestra I could try things out, observe what creates a [good] effect and what weakens it, and thus revise, make additions or cuts, take risks. I was cut off from the world; nobody in my vicinity could upset my self- confidence or annoy me; and so I had no choice but to become original.'"6

Even before considering the significance of these variant renderings, a cautionary question seems to be in order: did Haydn really say these things in the first place? Given the patently fictive nature of many conver- sations reported in eighteenth-century reminiscences,7 we would be entirely within our rights to regard the whole paragraph as a posthumous embellishment and, in consequence, turn our attention from what Haydn

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may have meant to Griesinger's own biographical aims. But for the sake of the argument that follows, we might well mitigate our suspicions, espe- cially if we take into consideration Griesinger's habit of writing down his conversations with Haydn immediately after returning home from his visits.

The issue is more than philological, for in these celebrated remarks Haydn invokes one of the seminal concepts of eighteenth-century aes- thetic thought: originality. By taking Haydn at Griesinger's word, in this essay I will revisit the meaning this concept may have had for the com- poser in light of the troubles his remarks have occasioned their recent English translators. And these troubles I will diagnose not as minor semantic complaints but as historiological symptoms of the deeply ambiv- alent nature of the eighteenth century's own rich discourse on originality.

But before turning to that wider field of study, it is worth looking at how the term "original" is situated in Griesinger's paragraph taken as a whole. At the head of Haydn's remarks stands his patron, who both gave Haydn the latitude to conduct his musical "experiments" and lent an approving ear to the results. In this role Prince Nikolaus serves as a benign counterfoil to another figure introduced by Haydn, the shadowy "nobody" mentioned in the last sentence. Who might this "nobody" have been? A person or persons, it seems, with an inclination to torment or annoy Haydn (mich... qualen), and, as Gotwals has it, "to confuse me... in my course" (mich an mir selbst irre machen). Gotwals's translation is not far from the mark as a felicitous trope on the more literal rendering, "to con- fuse me about myself." Like Webster's translation of the phrase, "to upset my self-confidence," it should be understood in the context of the overriding theme of the passage-Haydn's recollection of the supportive environ- ment in which he was able to conduct his musical experiments.

But to return to the question of Haydn's "nobody." From what we know of the public reception of his music at the time and his sensitivity to criticism, we can be reasonably certain that in summoning up the image of a distant, irritating, captious "nobody," he could scarcely have meant any- one other than the tribe of North German music critics whose aesthetic conservatism exercised itself with schoolmasterly rigor on the new musical rhetoric of Haydn and other Viennese composers. The author of an "Essay on Musical Taste" that appeared in the Hamburg journal Unterhaltungen in 1766 found Haydn "pleasant, playful, and full of invention" in most of his instrumental works, but wrinkled his nose at the composer's fondness for doubling a melody at the octave in his minuets: "One easily gets the impression of hearing two beggars, father and son, singing in octaves, and this is a poor subject for musical imitation."8 The minuet in Haydn's Divertimento a 6, Hob.II.21, offers a representative instance (Example 1). Here, in fact, the beggars seem to be out in numbers, because Haydn has

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2 Corni in El

Violino I

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336 The Musical Quarterly

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actually redoubled the effect with a quasi-canonic answer in the viola and bass, also in octaves. Two years later, the Leipzig composer, critic, and pedagogue Johann Adam Hiller once again touched on the subject of Haydn's "offensive octaves" as the first strike in what was to become an ongoing campaign against the intrusion of comic elements into musical circumstances (in this case the symphony) where more elevated thoughts were supposed to hold sway.9

The musical divide illustrated here was not simply a matter of taste. The remarks of Haydn's Hamburg critic make it clear that he still adhered to the doctrine of imitation as the basis of the fine arts. Joseph Addison had put imitation on the defensive as early as 1711 in declaring that "an imitation of the best Authors is not to be compared with a good Original."10 In 1759 Edward Young made the superiority of originality to imitation the centerpiece of his Conjectures on Original Composition, the century's most influential dissertation on the subject. While allowing that the imitation of nature had its merits, Young excoriated the servile imitation of other authors as a crippling act of self-abasement. "Know thyself... reverence thyself," he exhorted, and in so doing invested artistic production with an explicitly ethical dimension. Even today his language astonishes: "Dive deep into thy bosom; learn the depth, extent, bias, and full fort of thy mind; contract full intimacy with the stranger within thee; excite and cherish every spark of intellectual light and heat, however smothered under former negligence, or scattered through the dull, dark mass of com- mon thought; and collecting them into a body, let thy genius rise (if a genius thou hast) as the sun from chaos."l1

It is tempting to link this dithyramb on creative introspection and self-expression to Haydn: the allusion to genius as light emerging from the inchoate immediately calls to mind the most famous passage in all of Haydn's oeuvre, "The Representation of Chaos" in The Creation, and the whole introspective drift of Young's exhortation can be fitted with apparent ease to Haydn's words to Griesinger depicting his solitary path to originality at Eszterhaza. Yet this is a temptation we would do well to resist, especially if we put Young's ideas in the broader field of eighteenth-century thought devoted to the problem of originality.

At the time Young's Conjectures made its appearance, originality had already developed a distinctly bipolar nature in European thought. As an adjective, "original" was a positive attribute, used most often to talk about art and literature. As a noun, however, "an original" carried a more ambivalent charge, suggesting the bizarre and singular comportment of personalities like Rousseau or the unforgettable title characters created by Diderot in Le Neveu de Rameau and Jacques le Fataliste.12 "Genius," which Young's words explicitly link to originality, and which had preceded it as a

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counterforce to imitation, was already invested with a similar duality. Addison had allowed for the possibility of both "learned genius" and "natural genius." He also set the tone for the century by spending most of his time praising the latter, and by locating its epitome in Shakespeare.13

Young, in turn, set the tone for the succeeding century by magnifying the subordination of Addison's two categories into a polar opposition, one with a sharp ethical edge to it. Learned genius was now not merely a less exalted form of originality but rather its antithesis. Original at birth, we surrender our birthright to imitation, "that meddling ape," and in so doing "counteract nature, and thwart her design."

Young's thoughts on originality as innate, introspective, and self- expressive are routinely anthologized and celebrated as an adumbration of the Romantic Artist, especially if one includes his denigration of both Learning and Tradition. Bj0rn Tysdahl has pointed out the elemental role that Young's ideas played in shaping Wordsworth's ontogenetic ideas on genius and imitation.14 In his own day, however, Young's hyperbolic views met with a mixed reception in England. Samuel Johnson found little origi- nal about Young's thoughts on originality.15 The French were similarly cir- cumspect, but not the Germans. Whereas a French translation of the Conjectures was not brought out until 1769, they appeared in Germany within nine months of the original English edition of 1759 and were fol- lowed quickly by two further editions. Almost at once, Young's precepts rippled through German literary circles. Johann Gottfried Herder and his teacher Johann Georg Hamann were already looking with suspicion on the practice of imitating the ancients when they read Young's diatribes. His presentist conception of originality provided Herder with an especially apt weapon with which to attack Johann Joachim Winckelmann's idolatry of classical culture and to promote his own folk-based agenda of fostering "national genius."16 Johann Georg Sulzer, in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kiinste of 1771-74, shared Herder's enthusiasm and outlined three criteria for originality built directly on Young's elevation of self- expression to the sine qua non of originality: an artwork must (1) be an "authentic expression of genius"; (2) reveal Nature, not Art; and (3) give voice to what the artist has experienced and felt.17

Sulzer's celebration of unfettered originality implicitly valorized the contemporaneous expressivist extremes explored by Germany's young Stuirmer. Sulzer himself harbored little sympathy for their art, and even Herder felt compelled to repudiate them for turning "original genius" into the shibboleth of a countercultural, hyperindividualized cult of anomaly and monstrosity that threatened to destroy any hope that his cherished "national genius" might someday emerge in northern Germany. Yet a school of musical scholars has repeatedly sought to link Haydn to the

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literary Storm and Stress movement ever since 1909, when Theodore de Wyzewa proposed a crise romantique in the composer's artistic development.18 Wyzewa's notion-in itself flatly romantic-died an early and merciful death, but the habit continues of using "Storm and Stress" as a loose honorific for certain symphonic and chamber works of an impassioned, expressive cast that Haydn wrote at Eszterhaza during the high tide of the literary movement. One could consider the cultural, stylistic, and technical- formal arguments challenging this association at length.19 But what con- cerns us here is the extent to which Haydn may have shared something of the Stuirmer's allegiance to the new, Young-inspired conception of origin- ality that had invaded German-speaking lands.

Even a cursory acquaintance with that notion of originality, however, shows that Haydn stands decidedly apart on several key grounds. To begin with, his commitment to study and learning was intense and lifelong. Toward the end of his Notizen, Griesinger observed that "Haydn's aesthetic char- acter was the work of a happy natural gift and of incessant study."20 Further, Sulzer's injunction that nature come before art in works of originality finds little resonance in what Gretchen Wheelock has called Haydn's "ingenious jesting with art."21 Equally ill-fitting, and for similar reasons, is Sulzer's insistence that works of original genius involve only the noble and sublime. And most significant, the tenet of expressive immediacy that gained ascen- dancy in Germany during the 1770s stands sharply at odds with Haydn's contemporaneous preoccupation with "experiments" at Eszterhaza.

The idea that originals are born, not made, has special bearing on the famous concluding words of our quotation, so musste ich original werden. Sisman, Heartz, and Webster all point out that Gotwals's translation is defective here: the phrase speaks of becoming original, not of being original. The distinction between the two is more than stylistic. The verb "to be" throws the expression's main emphasis onto the attributive function of the predicate nominative "original," while "to become" draws our attention to a process and to the circumstances that set it in motion. Gotwals's translation, "I had to be original," while acknowledging the suasive power of the modal auxiliary miissen, still leaves room for the notion of originality as innate, suggesting as it does the activation of an essential trait that was there all along. But the more literal "I had to become original" shrinks this possibility. Now Haydn's originality takes on a tincture of the adventi- tious, of a response to circumstance by un original malgre lui.

Small surprise, then, that neither Heartz nor Webster can summon up much interest in following through on the implications of their cor- rected reading of Gotswals's translation. While both scholars offer import- ant new delineations of Haydn's compositional career involving an upward revaluation of his earlier works, neither wants to implicate the

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composer's words on originality too deeply in these delineations. Heartz warns against taking too much of the passage at face value. He points out that in the opp. 1 and 2 string quartets (written in the mid-1750s), Haydn was already original; Eszterhaza merely provided propitious circumstances that brought this side of his artistic personality more strikingly to the fore. He even questions Haydn's claim to having been "set apart from the world" while there. The ready access to Prince Nikolaus's extensive library of music would have been the envy of any up-to-date composer, and Haydn's duties as opera director at Eszterhaza absolutely demanded that he remain abreast of developments in Italian comic and serious opera.22

Webster alludes to the passage from Griesinger in the heat of a pitched battle with a long line of "evolutionist" interpretations of Haydn's compositional career. The linchpin of this tradition, he notes, is the glori- fication of the op. 33 quartets of 1781 as Haydn's moment of break- through to artistic maturity, a construction that inevitably relegates everything that came before it to the immature, the preparatory.23 Webster's recuperation of Haydn's works of the 1760s and 1770s, however, does not turn on the paragraph from Griesinger, because his strong revision of Gotwals-"I had no choice but to become original"-emphasizes originality's devalued status as a condition forced on Haydn. Instead, Webster associ- ates the works of the 1760s and 1770s with the absence of models at Eszterhaza, a reading of the state of affairs opposed by Heartz, as we just saw, and even more vigorously by Sisman: "[Haydn] was obviously exposed to and participated in the musical society he found while the [Esterhazy] court was in Vienna each winter, enabling him to hear considerable amounts of new music and interact with fellow composers and intellectuals in the salons of the day."24

Sisman offers an ingenious interpretation of her own, one that involves models but that also takes into account the late date at which Haydn is reported to have uttered his famous words on originality. She reads them as part of a two-pronged campaign waged by a veteran com- poser in defense of his artistic legacy. On one front, Haydn sought to insu- late his symphonies, now established models in their own right,25 from an onslaught of imitations by younger composers; on another, he tried to minimize the impact that teachers and models may have exerted on him during his own formative years.

But the presence or absence of models is not really at issue in the Griesinger passage. The paragraph describes not a tug of war between imi- tation and originality but rather a noteworthy set of circumstances that enabled Haydn to carry out an unprecedented program of musical experi- ments. In a biographical account contemporaneous with Griesinger's, Giuseppe Carpani cast the singularity of this program even more explicitly

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into the foreground: "Haydn perfected his science while he was com- mander in chief of an excellent orchestra at Eszterhaza. There he could carry out all the experiments he wished with a convenience no other master has ever enjoyed. I know from some of the musicians who lived with him at Eszterhaza that frequently he interrupted his work, left his cham- ber, gathered the orchestra together, tried out one passage or another on different instruments, and, having made the experiment, dismissed them, returned to his table, and continued his composition with assurance."26

How has Haydn scholarship construed the spirit of experimentation so vividly described here? Heartz and Webster both restrict it to matters of technique. Heartz acknowledges that through his experiments, Haydn "gained enormously in technical skill and fluency" during his early years at Eszterhaza, but these improvements had no real impact until the "turning point" Heartz assigns to the year 1780, when Haydn won the freedom to begin reaching out to a wider audience.27 For Webster the problem is rather a historiological one. His chief aim in so vigorously championing the artistic significance of Haydn's earlier works was to rescue them from a century of scholarly segregation in a "pre-Classical ghetto," where they had languished as the products of Haydn's aesthetic groping in the dark prior to his stylistic coming of age. Unfortunately for Webster, in their evolutionist zeal the segregationists had already suborned the label "experiments" to the task of representing the heterogeneity and tentative- ness of these "immature" works. To undo the damage, he was compelled to dismiss the label from its previous duties in the realm of style history and restrict it instead to describing matters of compositional technique. In the Griesinger passage, he argues, Haydn is not recalling a moment of sty- listic breakthrough but instead talking shop about "compositional experi- mentation within an institutional framework" with an emphasis on technical matters. To underscore the point, in his retranslation of Griesinger, Webster avoids the term "experiments" altogether by rendering Versuche machen as simply "to try things out." As a corollary he also downgrades Haydn's clos- ing reference to originality, which he enjoins us to understand simply "in the general sense of not following models or belonging to a school."28

Although his task was chiefly to deconstruct earlier opinion, Webster also offers us at least the outlines of a new reading of Haydn's famous paragraph in his refusal to interpret the composer's "becoming original" in terms of Young's ontological mystification of original genius as innate and untutored. Fortunately, following Webster's turn does not leave us without a conceptual paddle, for Young's was not the sole eighteenth-century epistemology of original genius. Alongside "natural genius," as mentioned earlier, Addison had proposed another category, "learned genius." He himself paid it little attention, and Young was hostile

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in principle to mixing learning and tradition with originality, on the grounds that the first two inevitably involve dealing with models. (Like Wilde's Lady Bracknell, Young seems to have been opposed "to anything that tampers with natural ignorance.") Others, however, found the notion of the untutored "natural genius" a troubling one. It proved especially dif- ficult to reconcile with contemporary theories of mind. In England, William Sharpe's 1755 Dissertation upon Genius, founded securely on Locke's notion of the mind as a tabula rasa entirely dependent on sensory experi- ence for its development, of necessity had to grant education a principal role in the cultivation of genius.29 And the French encyclopedist Helvetius, in his treatise De l'esprit, published a year before Young's Conjectures, argued that, because all minds are innately the same, what distinguishes the genius is precisely his disposition to learn, and to learn broadly. "Le genie n'est point un don de la Nature," he declared. "L'homme de genie n'est donc que le produit des circonstances dans lesquelles cet homme s'est trouve."30

Something even closer to the spirit of Haydn's conflation of originality and experimentation came from the Scotsman Alexander Gerard. His 1774 Essay on Genius replaced Addison's twin categories of learned and natural genius with another pair, scientific and artistic genius. Both of these depend for their exercise and cultivation on the same faculty of mind, the imagination, and on the same "infallible criterion," invention. But, unlike earlier writers, Gerard does not explicitly exalt either scientific or artistic genius above the other. As its "infallible criterion," invention is common to all forms of genius; if there is a distinction to be made between artistic and scientific genius, it is based on what each produces, not how: "Invention is the capacity of producing new beauties in works of art, and new truths in matters of science; which can be accomplished only by assembling ideas in various positions and arrangements, that we may obtain uncommon views of them."31

Conceptually, Gerard's ruminations may not have done much to reorient eighteenth-century thought on originality and genius, which even as he wrote was succumbing more and more to the organicist- expressivist idolatry preached by Young and Sulzer, soon to be the official theology of romantic aesthetic thought. Yet, in their modest way, Gerard's ideas draw our attention to a feature of originality to which this theology has remained blind-that what unifies various manifestations of genius in human affairs is not what genius produces but how it produces.

This emphasis on the process rather than the product is very much what Immanuel Kant's classic discussion of genius and originality in The Critique of Judgment is all about. Kant says next to nothing about artworks- in fact, he never uses the term, but writes instead about the "products" of genius. And these interest him not so much owing to their own formal or

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expressive qualities but rather because of such attributes as their exemplary status, their ability to enliven the cognitive faculties, their susceptibility to universal assent, and their resistance to imitation. The real center of atten- tion in his analysis is genius as agency, as a natural, innate, productive talent. Here, not in its products, is where originality lies, where the imagination and understanding are united, and where audacity of expression is to be located.32

Gerard and Kant, then, both expound views of genius and originality as attributes of a process rather than its products. Process, however, is clearly given short shrift in Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Kuinste, published the same year as Gerard's Essay on Genius. It includes entries on Originalgeist and Originalwerk, but not one on Originalitat. Unfortunately, a recent English anthology of articles from Sulzer's encyclopedia translates the keyword Originalgeist as "Originality." This is misleading, for by Geist Sulzer clearly means a person, not the abstract faculty Kant was to discuss some sixteen years later as "the animating principle of the mind."33 In fact, the lived experience of an author is fundamental to Sulzer's idea of what makes a work original, as we learn from his comments on Horace's "Ode to a Cursed Tree." In this charming ode, Horace, after entertaining us with a mock vilification of his gardener, "who planted you on my estate-O timber of misfortune!-destined to topple on the head of your innocent master!" offers a modest precept derived from this accident: "No man ever displays sufficient caution from hour to hour."34 Sulzer finds the poem defective precisely because Horace makes no serious effort to com- municate the misfortune he experienced, but concentrates instead on its artful elaboration: "Horace did not seriously intend to take the planter of the tree so severely to task as he pretends to-here there is more levity than gravity at play. With utter cheerfulness of spirit the poet undertook to pretend that the misfortune in question had occasioned such feelings in him because he wanted to show us what a good composer of odes he is."35

Sulzer's animadversions against Horace's playful ode echo those of his musical compatriots in northern Germany against Haydn's mixing of comic and serious elements in his symphonies, mentioned earlier in this essay. Gerard would have felt differently, for he could scarcely have wished for better illustrations of his notion of invention-of how the imagination assembles ideas "in various positions and arrangements" such that delectation arises not from the ideas themselves but from the "uncommon views of them" discovered to our ears. Consider a work Haydn completed the year Gerard published his treatise, the music to accompany Jean-Francois Regnard's Le Distrait, a five-act comedy that the Karl Wahr company was performing at Eszterhaza in German translation as Der Zerstreute. The score consists of six movements-an overture, four entr'actes, and a finale. When a correspondent for the Pressburger Zeitung

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praised the work as "original," he meant something more than the fact that Haydn was not recycling earlier compositions: "Connoisseurs consider it a masterpiece. One notices... the same spirit that elevates all of Haydn's work. His masterful variety excites the admiration of experts and is nothing short of delightful for the listener; he falls from the most affected pomposity directly into vulgarity, and Haydn and Regnard contend with one another in capricious absentmindedness."36

No other work of Haydn's goes to greater lengths in subverting the conservative canons of his Northern critics. It also conducts a wholesale repudiation of the central tenets of Sulzer's expressivist conception of works of original genius. A few examples will illustrate this. First, any impulse to self- expression is smothered under a tapestry of effects aimed solely at illuminating and exaggerating the traits of Regnard's characters. Even before we are intro- duced to Leandre, the play's absentminded hero, Haydn acquaints us with his defining character trait. In the exposition of the overture, where a weighty arrival in the new key is supposed to take place, the strings suddenly lose the thread of their argument and begin to dwell distractedly on a repeated-note figure. It dwindles in both dynamics and speed almost to a standstill until the band suddenly remembers what it was supposed to be doing (Example 2).37

Second, with the ludicrously distracted Leandre as his chief subject- and with a scheming mother, an overprecious daughter, a carousing miles gloriosus, and two plucky servants thrown in-Haydn had little room for even trace amounts of the sublime or elevated features that Sulzer consid- ered essential to works of original genius. Instead he carried the "masterful variety" praised by the Pressburger Zeitung to lengths unprecedented in his prior works. The compass of this variety is both vertical and horizontal, extending not only from "affected pomposity directly into vulgarity," but also from one end of Europe to the other. When the music was performed at Salzburg,38 one reviewer heard Polish, French, and even "somewhat Turkish" melodies in the second movement.39

In the finale, Haydn makes a hash of Sulzer's third rule, that Art must play second fiddle to Nature. As he had done in several other works, he quotes the popular folk tune "The Night Watchman's Song."40 This is per- haps a veiled reference to the time of day during which Leandre's most out- rageous lapse occurs: although he had resolutely tied a knot in his handkerchief to remind himself that he had gotten married earlier that day, by evening Leandre has forgotten all about it and fails to return home for his wedding night.41 In Haydn's ingenious musical depiction of this supreme act of absentmindedness, Art actually calls attention to its own robust presence as master of the games when, just a few measures into the finale, the violins realize that they have forgotten to tune up, and interrupt the proceedings in order to bring their G strings up to pitch (Example 3).

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Haydn and the Cult of Genius 345

61 J A - -

2 Oboi

2 Cori in C alto 2 Clarini in C

Timpani in C - G

Violino I

Violino II

Viola

Violoncello (Fagotto) e Basso

K. - I I PI I II Ir *I r- l I I

NJI I ~~~~~~I

~t~la~)~ ?_[L~q3~ r r-*r---rT

~----- m 1mtr r , 6~~~~~~~~~~~

67

IT I I I - I - - I - I - I - I I I I I

/Ir -J r J J"'- JJJJ

~p~~~~~p

Example 2. Haydn: Symphony no. 60, "Per la Commedia intitolata il Distratto," first movement.

I I-ll,-l- - $- _

1 L ̂ 0 - 1

I

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75

i -' ~I - I - I - I ' - I 1-

I I - I

s - I - I I I I I - I

perdendosi pp

perdendosi pp

perdendosi

:f 'rr'r' artrr rrtrrrr rrrrLr r r r r f perdendosi pp

82

ig-g'

9:If- fI^ ^ - I - IJ - I

fFi I' 1-' u\S-~ 7

f I

It -mrrrrr r r , , ' I IiHp mRrr[#' r r ' r r7r " U ' [r

| r

.r' #mzrrr r r r r-~tf' rrlfr rrrrr'

Example 2. continued

I

I

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VI. Finale

2 Oboi

2 Cori in C alto 2 Clarini in C

Timpani in C-G

Violino I

Violino II

Viola

Violoncello

[Fagotto] e Basso

Prestissimo

f

f

p:. ~ I~ ~ 11 I - 1 IJ I - I f

I [gt; u i F u Pi M _4 z

(| f rr3 3 r f

fr $ r - r r r f

I,XrW rW ry - ~~~~~~~~~~r rr -

8

(tT=^-^r ^ r^~f Fi?f ^ rrmf rW

I+F~ i - 5 cI - i a IF ! if v

:J I I - 1I I - IJ I IJ I IJ 1

- 8 - ~ - r f r f !

[3] [3]

-r? r - r -r - o . rzr ^rrn l[3 [31

Example 3. Haydn: Symphony no. 60, sixth movement.

I

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15 .JA n a l ' '-- 6 I l I l - I - I - I - I - I I- -- I

's~~ I I I I I

I~P t I I I -I I I I I- I -I I

71 i L I I - I I I I I I

)p~~~-t~F __

* Die Violinen stimmen um vonfauf g. / The violins should tune their instruments fromf to g.

Example 3. continued

at f - . . . . . . . . . . .

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Haydn and the Cult of Genius 349

Like the notorious dissonance near the end of Strauss's Salome, Haydn's tuning-up passage pushed an already richly allusive musical lan- guage to an extreme (and in both cases, one about which the composer was later to express reservations). Yet, as Leon Botstein has remarked, in the nineteenth century's reception of Haydn such illustrative passages were all but ignored. In fact, Haydn was quite generally ignored. Even in the heat of the mid-century debate over absolute and program music, neither side thought to invoke Haydn's oeuvre, either to shore up the for- malist case for absolute music (although as a craftsman, Haydn com- manded universal respect throughout the century) or to provide-especially through the flagrant tone painting in his late oratorios-canonic prece- dent for the programmic agenda of the New German School.

In order to explain Haydn's irrelevance to the core aesthetic issues of nineteenth-century musical culture, Botstein suggests that the composer had tailored his music too thoroughly to the needs of the "philosophical listening" of the eighteenth-century musical connoisseur.42 Our discussion suggests an additional reason for this irrelevance-the romantics had no interest in or sympathy for the paradigm of genius most congenial to Haydn's character and methods, that of Alexander Gerard. In his recent study of the idea of musical genius from Handel to Beethoven, Peter Kivy points out the unsuitability of Haydn's career and working methods to the hagiographics of nineteenth-century biography, which took its concept of genius straight from Kant's Critique of Judgment.43 Kant, while building on some elements of Gerard's theory, had departed sharply in several funda- mental areas, most conspicuously in rejecting Gerard's inclusion of scien- tific genius alongside artistic genius as its equal. Kant argued as follows: "Newton could make all his steps, from the first elements of geometry to his own great and profound discoveries, intuitively plain and definite as regards consequence, not only to himself but to everyone else." But a poet such as Homer would be incapable of showing "how his ideas, so rich in fancy and yet so full of thought, come together in his head, simply because he does not know and therefore cannot teach others."44 Kivy censures Kant for this "extraordinarily misguided view" and observes that Newton developed his insights into nature as intuitively as any poet. That may well be, but it does not change Kant's point. His distinction turns on the fact that, however ingeniously arrived at, Newton's discoveries remain entirely within the realm of nature and natural phenomena, and therefore have to be logically demonstrable and empirically verifiable by anyone. By con- trast, artistic genius takes nature only as its point of departure. For Kant, it alone deserves the name of genius because it transforms "the material supplied to us by nature" into "something different which surpasses nature."45

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To nineteenth-century minds, however, Haydn's art seemed all too happy to dwell in nature-to discover and disclose its properties through patient experiment-rather than to surpass it by force of personality or possession. As a result, even his greatest claim to artistic genius, The Cre- ation, fell precipitously, over the course of the century, from the universal favor it had enjoyed around 1800.46 The inability of the nineteenth century to reconcile Haydn to its views on original genius has also left its mark on the interpretative history of Haydn's famous statement to Griesinger on originality. The romantic tendency, still evident in contem- porary scholarship, has been to read the paragraph's concluding words on becoming original as its apotheosis. But this does not square either with the dim view that the nineteenth century took of Haydn as an original genius or with the logic of the paragraph itself.

What, in fact, is that logic? If we bear in mind that Griesinger's notes were based on conversations he had with the composer, then it is plausible to assume that Griesinger posed a question to which Haydn's words in this paragraph provided an answer. Unfortunately, Griesinger's account does not supply us with that question. He does, however, hint at it in the sen- tence with which he introduces Haydn's own words. The words Lage and Gelegenheit of course refer to Eszterhaza, which they characterize as not only a situation but also an opportunity. But an opportunity for what? Griesinger answers this with the keyword Ausbildung. Gotwals translated this as "development," which seems an appropriate word to describe what happened to Haydn's "many-sided talent" at Eszterhaza. But, like Gotwals's choice of "I had to be original," it subtly subscribes to Young's model of originality as innate. Had Griesinger wanted to convey the idea of "devel- opment" as the unfolding of an inborn gift, he probably would have used Entwicklung instead of Ausbildung. As an improvement, one might propose "cultivation" instead, which can be construed culturally as well as agricul- turally. But in either case, "cultivation" implies nurture as the handmaid of nature, and for this metaphoric image the more appropriate German noun would be Pflege. The most appropriate English equivalent for Griesinger's Ausbildung is "formation." The connotations of education and training carried by its root, Bildung, when placed in the field of eighteenth- century discourses on originality, mark Haydn as a musical epitome of Addison's "learned genius."

With this in mind, let us bore in on the close of the paragraph in question-not, however, just its final flourish on becoming original, but also the logical sequence that it concludes. Notice that "I was cut off from the world" is followed immediately by the comment about nobody being around to torment Haydn. Clearly the second phrase clarifies the first. Yet as we have seen, Webster and others have read this compound sentence

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Haydn and the Cult of Genius 351

as if it had ellipses in the middle; that is to say, something like this: "[A] I was cut off from the world... [ergo] [B] I had to become original." On this reading, Haydn was forced to become original because being cut off from the world meant being cut off from models and influences. A complete reading, however, would go something like this: "[A] I was cut off from the world; [by which I mean to say:] [B] there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so [C] I had to become original." But the logic here is not quite as simple as A, B, C. Why did the absence of annoying critics mean that Haydn "had to become original"? Here it is helpful to remember that in the past tense, the German modal auxiliary mufite can mean not only "I had to" but also the less compulsory "I couldn't help." This, as we mentioned earlier, emphasizes not Haydn himself but the Gelegenheit, the opportunity that Griesinger mentions in his opening sentence and which forms the overriding theme of Haydn's own words.

Biographers are wont to lament a condition included in Haydn's original contract with the Esterhazy court that forbade him to compose for anyone other than his patron. Yet it was the insulated, approving environ- ment created by this same exclusive contract that sustained and nurtured Haydn's compositional experiments and that the passage we have been studying celebrates. Despite these fostering circumstances, Haydn could still be touchy about criticism from without, especially from "the Berlin gentlemen," as his autobiographical sketch of 1776 attests.47 Had he thought of himself as an original genius of the kind exalted by Young and Sulzer, he perhaps would have welcomed rather than deplored the pedantic application of traditional compositional rules to his music, for it testified compellingly to the fact that he was taking full advantage of the Gelegenheit that Eszterhaza afforded him. For a learned genius like Haydn, however, rules still mattered, and indeed he entertained a lifelong ambivalence about compositional rules, as Sisman has amply documented.48 What Eszterhaza in the 1770s offered him was a laboratory that gave him the chance to discover just how far he could go in bending those rules.

As an illustration of this process at work, we turn once more to the string quartet and to the problem that writing in octaves occasioned Haydn's critics (Example 4). In the third bar of the second movement of his String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 71, no. 3, Haydn inserted one of his famous licenza designations, here indicating that he has knowingly written parallel octaves between the first and second violins. The octaves are not too difficult to eliminate, if you can live with a doubled third in the tonic triad following the diminished-seventh chord, so clearly Haydn wanted them there. It is quite possible to dream up explanations for his decision to allow them, the most plausible being that the E-natural in the first violin is

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II

Andante con moto J = 63

fz licenza ten.

|ilX 7 . J , JjJ W*J JJ J. I v | ten.

I b,ei fr f r f F i':

(8)

fz

? bl 1 i j 4bf .t r '-' 4,I r-~ .,.j , ? r ". L |b| Y_ ^~ J : uF J"

- $

) v bl' :7 v r r P r J~ e . ^ ?

r^^:Lr,, .~--

~~ ? r fr4', (18) I: Y _ _ _ _ e :_t_ _4_y r _ _

I1| . _:. | ,'--

n J - " - r' r' ^

I Y X = J_ J J r f 7

Example 4. Haydn: String Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 71, no. 3, second movement.

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more or less ornamental, and the real structural motion, as indicated by Haydn's own stress marks, mirrors that of the lower parts in good contrary motion by moving from F to G to F. The point, however, is not to explain or to excuse the passage, but to recognize the word licenza as a declaration of independence. With it Haydn is asserting that what his ear tells him to do takes priority over what the rules tell him not to do. He is also asserting his claim to the defining prerogative of genius as Kant had expressed it three years earlier: "Genius is the talent... which gives the rule to art."

When understood in this way, the passage sheds retrospective light on the most elusive expression in the Griesinger paragraph, mich an mir selbst irre machen, "to confuse me about myself." We know who had been sowing confusion for Haydn during the first decades of his career, but more interesting here is what he says they had been confusing him about-not about his art, but about himself. Young had already prescribed what course a born genius in Haydn's situation at Eszterhaza ought to have taken once he was freed from his niggling critics: to "dive deep into his bosom" and "contract full intimacy with the stranger within." But Haydn's own words tell us a different story. It is a story that centers not on introspection, but on opportunity. Haydn recollects a situation that in modern scientific argot might well be called "laboratory conditions": a sympathetic employer and audience, ready access to a fine orchestra, and an atmosphere undisturbed by hostile critics. What this situation made possible was not for Haydn to "find himself' but rather to gather the self- assurance to conceive and carry out a program of musical experiments that put to the test the conventional wisdom of the "normal science" of the day. In such circumstances, "becoming original" was not a matter of discovering the genius within, but of escaping the fools without.

Notes

1. Griesinger's extensive correspondence with Gottfried Christoph Hartel has been edited by Otto Biba. "Eben komme ich von Haydn... ": Georg August Griesingers Korrespondenz mit Joseph Haydns Verleger Breitkopf & Hartel 1799-1819 (Zurich: Atlantis Musikbuch-Verlag, 1987).

2. Georg August Griesinger, "Biographische Notizen iiber Joseph Haydn," Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 11 (19 July 1809): col. 662.

3. Georg August Griesinger, Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius, trans. Vernon Gotwals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 17.

4. Daniel Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 1740-1780 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1995), 400.

5. Elaine Sisman, "Haydn, Shakespeare, and the Rules of Originality," in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 3.

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6. James Webster, Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in His Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 364.

7. Witness the dubeity of the extended, self-serving conversations with Emperor Joseph II in Karl Ditters von Dittersdorfs Lebensbeschreibung, dictated many years after the fact.

8. "Abhandlung vom musikalischen Geschmacke. In einem Schreiben an einen Freund," Unterhaltungen 1 (1766): 54. Voices participating in both the Northern campaign against octave doubling and the Southern response are reproduced by Hubert Unverricht, Geschichte des Streichtrios (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), 156-58. See also Klaus Winkler, "Alter und neuer Musikstil im Streit zwischen den Berlinern und Wienern zur Zeit der Friihklassik," Die Musikforschung 33 (1980): 37-45.

9. Johann Adam Hiller, Wochentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend 3 (1768): 107. Gretchen Wheelock has provided a fine analysis of his detailed discussion of Haydn's "incompatible manners" in the review of six symphonies by Haydn that Hiller published in 1770. See her monograph, Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art: Contexts of Musical Wit and Humor (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 40-46.

10. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), no. 160 (3 September 1711), vol. 2, pp. 129-30.

11. Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. Edith J. Morley (Manchester: University Press, 1918), 24.

12. This meaning is made explicit in the entry "das Original" in Johann Christoph Adelung's Grammatisch-kritisches Worterbuch der Hochdeutschen Mundart, rev. D. W. Soltau, 4 vols. (Vienna: Anton Pichler, 1807), 3: col. 616. "Figuratively, an extraordinary genius, a person who is uniquely inventive in his art, is called an original; and hence in broader signification a strange fellow, a crank, also receives the name of an original, in this case with respect to folly or oddity." See also the entry "Originality" in Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 230-31, and "original" in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, 16 vols. and suppl., vol. 7, ed. Matthias von Lexer (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1889), cols. 1347-48.

13. "The great Danger in these latter kind of Genius's," Addison cautioned (referring to learned geniuses), "is, least they cramp their own Abilities too much by Imitation, and form themselves altogether upon Models, without giving the full Play to their own natural Parts." The Spectator, 2:129.

14. Bj0m Tysdahl, "Edward Young and Wordsworth's 'Intimations' Ode: Originality and Imitation," English Studies 77 (1996): 127-32.

15. The reception of the Conjectures in England is outlined by Matthew Wickman, "Imitating Eve Imitating Echo Imitating Originality: The Critical Reverberations of Senti- mental Genius in the Conjectures on Original Composition," English Literary History 65 (1998): 920-21, n12. In the most important recent contribution to the critical literature on Young's Conjectures, Robert L. Chibka remarks how disconcertingly unoriginal the essay is in its theme. "A rather tardy contribution to the Ancients-Moders controversy," he calls it, and goes on to point out its many internal paradoxes and contradictions: "[Young] sanc- tions independence from ancient authority by appeal to ancient authority.... He learnedly quotes to lend force to his arguments against learning... Throughout Young's work we are exhorted to resemble others in order to be unlike them, to be unlike them in order to

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resemble them, to be unique in order to be more like others who are unique." "The Stranger Within Young's Conjectures," English Literary History 53 (1986): 544, 552, 553.

16. Martin Steinke calls Herder "the principal worshipper at the shrine of the Conjec- tures." Edward Young's "Conjectures on Original Composition" in England and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations (New York: F. C. Stechert, 1917), 21.

17. In the article "Originalwerk," Sulzer assumes a frankly expressivist point of view in articu- lating these criteria: "It is easy to see how many advantages these original works must have over those that are not original: they are true expressions of genius, while these others are depictions of feigned, not genuinely experienced feelings. The former always reveal Nature to us, the latter only Art. A poet who has been moved by a subject to lyric enthusiasm and thus sings because he cannot resist the desire to express what he feels will write an original ode that is a true image of the state of his feelings. But if at another time circumstances lying outside of art occasion an ode, or if he images himself in a situation or position that he is not really in and seeks to bring out feelings that are natural to that situation, but which he doesn't really feel, and writes in this assumed attitude-then a very different work indeed will arise, one that reveals to us more of Art than of Nature. Such a work is a sham, with which one seeks to trick us merely in order to display Art." Quoted from the third, expanded edition, Algemeine Theorie der Schonen Kiinste, ed. Johann Georg Sulzer, 4 vols. (Frankfurt and Leipzig: n. p., 1798), 3:681-82.

18. Theodore de Wyzewa, "A propos du centenaire de la mort de Joseph Haydn," Revue des deux mondes 79 (1909): 935-46.

19. William E. Grim has laid out the problems of inconsistency and equivocation in the use of Sturm und Drang as a style category by music historians and theorists in his mono- graph Haydn's Sturm und Drang Symphonies: Form and Meaning, vol. 23, Studies in the History and Interpretation of Music (Lampster, Wales: Edward Mellen, 1990), 6-35. In his extensive analytic essay on Haydn's music of the later 1760s and early 1770s, R. Larry Todd provides a conspicuous example of the "evolutionist" interpretation of Haydn's stylistic development that James Webster deplores. Todd also inventories the extensive secondary literature on the subject. "Joseph Haydn and the Sturm und Drang: A Revaluation," Music Review 41 (1980): 172-96. In a short but penetrating analytic essay, Pierluigi Petrobelli has illustrated how Haydn's intense and expressive minor-mode works of the 1770s embody artistic principles that stand in direct opposition to those of the literary Sturm und Drang. "Haydn e lo Sturm und Drang," Chigiana 36 (1979): 65-71.

20. Georg August Griesinger, Biographische Notizen iiber Joseph Haydn, ed. Franz

Grasberger (Vienna: Paul Kaltschmid, 1954), 60.

21. Wheelock, Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art. Wheelock borrowed the expression from the preface to Domenico Scarlatti's Essercizi per gravicembalo (London, 1738).

22. Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 400.

23. Webster, Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, 365.

24. Sisman, "Haydn, Shakespeare, and the Rules of Originality," 4.

25. The publisher Johann Ferdinand Ritter von Schonfeld explicitly narrowed the basis for Haydn's "immortality" to his symphonic works in his Yearbook of the Music of Vienna and Prague, 1796: "While one has to say that his symphonies are unequaled and, as many imitators have found, inimitable, it is equally true that they are his greatest works and have added more to his immortality than all his other compositions." From the translation of this work by Kathrine Talbot in Sisman, Haydn and His World, 299.

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26. Giuseppe Carpani, Le Haydine, overo lettere su la vita e le opere del celebre maestro Giuseppe Haydn (Milan: Candido Buccinelli, 1812), 51-52. This extract is drawn from Carpani's Letter Three, which he dated "Baaden 20 giugno 1808," that is, more than a

year before Griesinger's serialized biographical notices began to see print at Leipzig. That

having been said, it must also be noted that scholars have frequently called into question the trustworthiness of Carpani's account.

27. Heartz, Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School, 400.

28. Webster, Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, 364.

29. Sharpe's championing of the learned over the natural genius is evident in the full title of his treatise-A Dissertation upon Genius: Or, an Attempt to shew, That the several Instances of Distinction, and Degrees of Superiority in the human Genius are not, fundamen- tally, the Result of Nature, but the Effect of Acquisition (London: C. Bathurst, 1755).

30. Claude-Adrien Helvetius, De l'esprit, 2 vols. (Paris: Duran, 1758; Amsterdam and

Leipzig: Arkstee and Merkus, 1759), 2:178, 181. Citations refer to the 1759 edition.

31. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell; Edinburgh: W. Creech, 1774), 27. In his preface Gerard explains that the book grew out of his desire to amplify the ideas on genius he had outlined in his earlier treatise, An Essay on Taste (1758). Gerard is also at pains to explain that he had substantially completed the essay on genius that same year-in other words, a year before Young's Conjectures appeared.

32. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard, First Part: Analytic of the Sublime, "Critique of the Aesthetical Judgment," ??46-50 (London: Collier Macmillan, 1951), 150-64.

33. Nancy Kovaloff Baker and Thomas Christensen, Aesthetics and the Art of Musical Composition in the German Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Christensen, who was responsible for the excerpts from Sulzer in this volume, does not

explain the purposes motivating the liberties he took in translating the article "Original- geist." Possibly the portability offered by "originality" rather than "original spirit" allowed a transfer of emphasis from the artist to the artwork, but this falsifies what Sulzer is clearly saying in his opening sentence: "Diesen Namen verdienen die Menschen, die in ihrem Denken und Handeln so viel Eigenes haben, daB sie sich von ander merklich auszeichnen; deren Charakter eine besondere Art ausmacht, in der sie die einzigen sind. Hier betra- chten wir den Originalgeist, in sofern er sich in den Werken der Kunst zeiget, denen er ein eigenes, sich von der Art aller ander Kunstler stark auszeichnendes Geprage giebt." Christensen (34): "We call originality that quality of some men who in their thoughts and deeds distinguish themselves from others through their uniqueness. Their character is of a special, singular kind. But here we will consider originality in so far as it relates to individual works of art and how it contributes to the particular features that distinguish the work from those of all other artists." My translation: "This name is merited by those men who in thought and deed are so singular that they distinguish themselves markedly from others, and whose character is of a special kind in which they are unique. Here we will consider the original spirit to the extent that he shows himself in works of art to which he gives a stamp that distinguishes itself from the manner of all other artists."

34. Horace, "Ille et nefasto te posuit die," in The Complete Odes and Satires of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander, bk. 2, ode 13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 76-77.

35. Sulzer, "Originalwerk," Allgemeine Theorie, 3:686.

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Haydn and the Cult of Genius 357

36. Report from Eszterhaza in the issue of 6 July 1774, dated 30 June. Quoted in Mari- anne Pandi and Fritz Schmidt, "Music in Haydn's and Beethoven's Time Reported by the Pressburger Zeitung," Haydn Yearbook 8 (1971): 270.

37. The passage in question (mm. 67-90) is reproduced in Wheelock, Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art, 159.

38. The Wahr Company performed in the new Ballhaus Theater in Salzburg from 16 Nov. 1775 to 20 Feb. 1776. They presented Regnard's play with Haydn's music on 18 Jan. 1776. The extensive review that appeared on 27 Jan. in the Salzburg Theaterwochenblatt has been reproduced by Rudolph Angermuller, "Haydns 'Der Zerstreute' in Salzburg (1776)," Haydn-Studien 4 (1978): 85-93.

39. This is most probably a reference to the second entr'acte, in which a courtly minuet alternates with a rustic trio based on a Bulgarian scale.

40. Geoffrey Chew has published a detailed study of Haydn's extensive use of this folk

melody in his early works. "The Night-Watchman's Song Quoted by Haydn and Its

Implications," Haydn-Studien 3 (1974): 106-24.

41. The incident in question, found in La Bruyere's original character sketch and omit- ted by Regnard, was reinstated in a Viennese prose translation, published anonymously in 1775 and attributed by Goedecke to Johann Baptist Bergopzoomer. In all likelihood, this was the version of the play performed by the Wahr Company at Eszterhaza. See Angermuller, "Haydns 'Der Zerstreute'," 85n3.

42. Leon Botstein, "The Demise of Philosophical Listening: Haydn in the Nineteenth

Century," in Haydn and His World, ed. Elaine Sisman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 275.

43. Peter Kivy, The Possessor and the Possessed: Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, and the Idea of Musical Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 10, 164-74.

44. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 151-52.

45. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 157.

46. A private letter that Berlioz wrote in 1859 does not even spare the famous depiction of the creation of light in its inventory of the oratorio's aesthetic shortcomings: "I have always felt a deep antipathy toward this work... Its lowing oxen, its buzzing insects, its

light in C which dazzles like a Carcel lamp, and then its Adam, Uriel, Gabriel, and the flute solos and all its genialities really get on my nerves-they make me want to punch somebody out. The English love a pudding surrounded with a layer of fat; I detest it. Fat is

exactly what surrounds the musical pudding of Papa Haydn. Naivete is all very fine, but too much of it we don't need! ... I wouldn't give an apple for the privilege of meeting Eve in the woods; I am sure she is stupid enough to make the good Lord ashamed of himself, and is just what her husband deserves." Letter to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, dated Paris, 8 Feb. 1859, in Hector Berlioz, Correspondance generale, ed. Pierre Citron, vol. 5 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), 654.

47. Joseph Haydn, Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Denes Bartha (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1965), 76-82.

48. Sisman, "Haydn, Shakespeare, and the Rules of Originality," 6-8.

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