Abstract
Although the celebrated Renaissance music theorist Johannes Tinctoris could confidently affirm in 1477 that “there does not exist a single piece of music not composed within the last forty years that is regarded by the learned as worthy of hearing,” the same statement — at least as it concerns art music — could not be made today.1 In the event, the excitement and anticipation that in previous eras greeted the musically new, nowadays is reserved for “authentic” performances of compositions from a curiously constructed past. Admittance into the canon of acceptability demands not only that a musical work have withstood the test of time, but also that it possess an unimpeachable pedigree. In other words, compositions bearing the labels “creator unknown” or “creator little known” are not granted space in today’s musical museums. At the outset two questions present themselves: why this radical shift and who is it that decides such matters?
Too much inquiring after the sources of things is dangerous. We should rather concentrate on phenomena as given realities.
Goethe
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Notes
Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti [1477], trans. Albert Seay (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1961), p. 14.
Nino Pirrotta, “Ars nova e stil novo,” in Rivista italiana di musicologia, 1 (1966); trans, as “Ars Nova and Stil Novo,” in Music and Culture in Italy from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 26.
The two cantatas, along with twelve others, are listed in the “doubtful and spurious” category in the work-list accompanying the article on Johann Sebastian Bach in The New Grove Bach Family (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1983), p. 189; the former is now thought to be the work of one “M. Hoffmann” while the latter has been assigned tentatively to Johann Kuhnau.
See Helmut Hucke, “Die musikalische Vorlagen zu Igor Strawinskys Pulcinella,” Helmuth Osthoff zu seinem seibzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Ursula Aarbun and Peter Cahn (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), pp. 242–50. For the little that is known of Gallo, see Charles Cudworth, “Gallo, Domenico,” The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1980), Vol. VII, p. 128.
See the work-list to Heinz Becker’s article on Brahms in The New Grove Dictionary of Music, Vol. III, p. 174.
See variously, Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century, trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 194–96, for the most balanced assessment; Alan Curtis “La Poppea Impasticciata or, Who Wrote the Music to L’Incoronazione (1643),” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (Spring 1989), 23-54, who also argues that other music in the opera may not be by Monteverdi; and Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1991), 336f. The evaluative quotation above is Curtis’s.
See further Paul Moseley, “Mozart’s Requiem: A Ree valuation of the Evidence,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 114 (1989), pp. 203–37; as well as Christoph Wolff, “The Composition and Completion of Mozart’s Requiem,” in Mozart Studies, ed. Cliff Eisen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 61-81, and Wolff, Mozarts Requiem: Geschichte, Musik, Dokumente, Partitur des Fragments (Kassel, Basel, London, and New York: Bärenreiter, 1991).
Cited in Richard Maunder, Mozart’s Requiem: On Preparing a New Edition (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 2.
Cäcilia: Eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische Welt, 3 (1825), pp. 205–29.
Richard Maunder, Mozart’s Requiem: On Preparing a New Edition, p. 6.
Thomas Bauman, “Requiem, but No Piece,” 19th-century Music, Vol. XV (1991), p. 152.
See further “Über Skizzen zu Mozarts Requiem,” Bericht Über den Internationalen Musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Kassel 1962 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1963), pp. 184–87.
Nicomachean Ethics, vi. 4, 1140a 10—16; trans. David Ross (London: Oxford University Press, 1925).
Perhaps the best general introduction to the Opus 3 question is to be found in the published round-table discussion, Haydn Studies, Proceedings of the International Haydn Conference, Washington, D.C, 1975, ed. Jans Peter Larsen, Howard Serwer, and James Webster (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981). See particularly “Problems of Authenticity-‘Opus 3’” pp. 95-106. Elsewhere, see James Webster, “External Criteria for Determining the Authenticity of Haydn’s Music,” pp. 75-78; note well Webster’s opening sentence: “The problem of authenticity has long been the most important issue in Haydn scholarship.”
Readers of this essay interested in correlating my comments with the music itself should consult, for the Opus 3 String Quartets, 83 String Quartets by Josef Haydn in 3 Volumes (London and Mainz: Edition Eulenburg, n.d.), Vol. I, Quartets No. 13—18; for Opus 33, discussed below, see Joseph Haydn: Werke, Series XII, Vol. Ill, ed. Georg Feder and Sonja Gerlach (Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 1974), pp. 105-188; for the first movement of Opus 54, No. 3, also discussed below, see Joseph Haydn String Quartets Op. 42, 50 and 54, ed. Wilhelm Altmann (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), pp. 199–207.
Carl Friedrich Pohl, Joseph Haydn (Berlin: A. Sacco, 1874), Vol. I, p. 340: “die erste Violine hat den Gesang, die zweite bebleitet in Sechzehnteln. Est ist ein ausgesprochene Serenade voll kindlicher Einfalt, Seligkeit und Unschuld, ein Rosenbusch, der uns mit neidloser Freigebigkeit mit Blüthen überschüttet und uns alles Leid der Welt vergessen lässt.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.
Haydn, Vol. I, p. 341: “vielleicht das schonste der ganzen Sammlung. Auch hier ist Haydn wieder um zwanzig und mehr Jahre voraus. Eingeschohen in eines der späterer Quartette wüurde kaum Jemand dessen frühzeitige Entstehung ahnen.”
“Haydn,” Cobbett’s Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, compiled and ed. Walter Willson Cobbett, Vol. I (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 524–25.
See, for example, Marion Scott, “Haydn’s Opus Two and Opus Three,” Publications of the [Royal] Musical Association, Vol. LXI (1934–35), pp. 1–19.
Quoted in The American Record Guide, Vol. IXX (January 1953), p. 162.
“Zur Echtheitsfrage des Haydn’schen’ Opus 3’,” The Haydn Yearbook, Vol. III (1965), p. 165. Somfai’s first article on the subject is: “A klasszikus kvartetthangzás megszületése Haydn vonósnégyeseiben [The Evolution of Classical Quartet Style in Haydn’s Quartets],” Zenetudományi tanulmányok, Vol. III (1960), pp. 295-420.
James Webster, The Bass Part in Haydn’s Early String Quartets and in Austrian Chamber Music, 1750-1780 (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1974), 244. Webster restates the evaluation in his “The Chronology of Haydn’s String Quartets,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. LXI (1975), p. 17: “We must also bid farewell to the spurious ‘Opus 3,’ very probably from the dilettantish pen of pater Romanus Hoffstetter.”
Oivind Eckhoff, “The Enigma of ‘Haydn’s Opus 3,’” Studia musicologica, Vol. IV (1978), pp. 10, 11,12, and 14 respectively.
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 14.
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 17.
Eckhoff, op. cit., pp. 21–22.
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 17.
Webster, “The Form of the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,” in Beethoven Forum (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), p. 40.
“Who Composed Haydn’s Op. 3?,” The Musical Times, Vol. LV (1964), pp. 506–7. Following Somfai’s first article wherein he expressed his uncertainty as to whether or not Haydn might in fact be the composer of Opus 3, Tyson and Landon were the first to suggest Hoffstetter as the most likely candidate.
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 35.
Eckhoff, op. cit., pp. 35–6.
Of the likely sixteen such letters, three at present are known: to Johann Caspar Lavater in Zurich, a leading figure of the literary Strum und Drang; Prince Krafft Ernst Öttingen-Wallerstein of Bavaria; and Robert Schlect, Abbot of Salmannsweiler in Gaden, Germany. See further Dénes Bartha, Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen (Kassel and New York: Bärenreiter Verlag, 1965), Nos. 39-40, pp. 106-6; also H. C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, II: Haydn at Eszterháza (Bloomington, Ind., and London: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. 115.
Ludwig Finscher, Studien zur Geschichte des Streichquartetts, I. Die Entstenhung des klassischen Streichquartetts. Vond er Vorformen zur Grundlegung durch Joseph Haydn. Sarbrücker Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, ed. Walter Wiora, Vol. III (Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1974), pp. 237–44. Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), pp. 116-7. It should be pointed out that the G-Major Quartet now known as Opus 33, No. 5, was the opening work in the original edition issued by Artaria; see further, the foreword to Joseph Haydn: Werke, Series XII, Vol. III, op. cit.
Gretchen A. Wheelock, “Engaging Strategies in Haydn’s Opus 33 Quartets,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. XXV (1991), pp. 14 and 30 respectively.
The octaves return in measures 83–87 of the same movement in the violins.
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 20. Eckhoff limits his tally of textual “curiosities” to outer movements and non-minuet movements. As he notes, p. 43, fn. 11: “In minuets, three-part and, still more, two-part writing was quite common at the time; and, as every Haydn connoisseur will know, simultaneous octave unison between the violins and between viola and cello form a characteristic feature of his particular minuet style, producing an excellent effect, and creating a satisfactory contrast to the textures of the adjacent movements.”
Eckhoff, op. cit., p. 21.
Rosen, The Classical Style, p. 142.
Whatever the answer to these questions reasonably might be, it should be noted that at least some of Haydn’s contemporaries were troubled by such supposed stylistic laxity. Thus one reads in Ernst Ludwig Gerber’s Historisch-biographisches Lexikon der Tonkünstler (Leipzig: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1790-92), Vol. I, col. 611: “Schon seine [Haydn’s] ersten Quatros, welche um das Jahr 1760 berkannt wurden, machten allgemeine Sensation. Man lachte und vergnügte sich auf der einen Seite an der ausservordentlichen Naivetät und Munterkeit, welche darinne herrschte, und in andern Gegenden schrie man über Herabwürdigung der Musik zu komischen Tändeleyen und über unerhörte Oktaven” [Haydn’s “first quartets, which became known around 1760, made a great sensation. On the one hand, the extraordinary naïveté and gaiety that prevail in them were smiled at and delighted in while on the other, the degradation of music to comic trifles and unheard-of octaves was deplored”].
Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against Its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. LXIX (1983), p. 297.
Quoted from James Parsons, “Notes on the Music,” program booklet, The Grand Opera House, Wilmington, Delaware, 14 December 1987.
For more on the development of a permanent musical canon, see Joseph Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. X (1983), pp. 107–25; reprinted in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 177-95.
Quoted from Mary Sue Morrow, Concert Life in Haydn’s Vienna: Aspects of a Developing Musical and Social Institution, Sociology of Music No. 7 (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1989), p. 141.
Morrow, op. cit., p. 143.
Ibid.
Quoted in Kerman, “Canonic Variations,” Canons, p. 180.
From Marcello’s Il teatro alla moda (1702), quoted in Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 526.
John Walter Hill, “Vivaldi as Dramatic Composer: Sources and Contributing Factors,” Opera & Vivaldi, ed. Michael Collins and Elise K. Kirk (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), pp. 327–46; the quotations are from p. 328.
“Handel’s Pasticci,” in Reinhard Strohm, Essays on Handel & Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 164. On the pasticcio in general see the excellent overview by Curtis Price, “Pasticcio,” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 1992), Vol. III, pp. 907–10.
Strohm, op. cit., p. 166.
Strohm, op. cit., p. 165.
Carl Dalhaus, Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Siegmund Levarie, Monographs in Musicology No. 1 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1983), p. 23.
Franz Liszt, An Artist’s Journey: Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, 1835-1841, trans, and ed. Charles Suttoni (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 207.
Rousseau, “Essai sur l’origine des langues,” in Oeuvres de J. J. Rousseau, nouvelle édition, avec des notes historiques et critiques, éd. M. Mussay Pathay (Paris: Werdet et Pequien fils, 1826), pp. 210 and 208–9: “On voit part là que la peinture est plus près de la nature, et que la musique tient plus à l’art humain. On sent aussi que l’une intéresse plus que l’autre, précisément parce qu’elle rapproche plus l’homme de l’homme.” p. 208: “La voix annonce un être sensible; il n’y a que des corps animés qui chantent.” P. 210: “[La musique] elle peut vous transporter au fond d’un désert; mais sitôt que des signes vocaux frappent votre oreille, ils vous annoncent un être semblable à vous.”
See, for example, Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music, Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Leon Botstein, “Between Aesthetics and History,” 19th-century Music, Vol. XIII (1989), p. 169.
From Goethe’s preface written for Opere poetiche di Alessandro Manzoni (1827), cited in Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), 830:Jene [destructive criticism] ist sehr leicht, denn man darf sich nur irgendeinen Masstab, irgendein Musterbild, so borniert sie auch seinen, in Gedanken aufstellen, sodann aber kühnlich versichern: vorliegendes Kunstwerk passe nicht dazu, tauge deswegen nichts, die Sache sei abgetan, und man dürfe, ohne weiteres, seine Forderung als unbefriedigt erklären; und so befreit man sich von aller Dankbarkeit gegen den Künstler. Die produktive Kritik ist um ein gutes Teil schwerer, sie fragt: Was hat sich der Autor vorgesetzt? ist dieser Vorsatz vernünftig und verständig? Und inwiefern ist es gelungen, ihn auszufrühren? Werden diese Fragen einsichtig und liebevoll beantwortet, so helfen wir.
Hiller, preface to George Friedrich Linke’s Kurze Musiklehre (Leipzig: J. G. I. Breitkopf, 1779), p. vii. Trans, from Mark Evans Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 70.
Scott Fruehwald, Authenticity Problems in Joseph Haydn’s Early Instrumental Works, Monographs in Musicology No. 8 (New York: Pendragon Press, 1988), p. 3.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value,” in Canons, p. 34.
Fruehwald, op. cit., p. 3, fn. 8; italics mine.
Georg August Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn [1810], in Vernon Gotwals, trans. and ed., Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 61.
Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 14–26.
Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schonen Künste, 2nd ed. (1792–94; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg O1ms, 1967–70), Vol. IV, p. 515.
Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Sechsunddreissigstes Stück (1 September 1767), in Werke, ed. Jost Perfahl, Vol. II, pp. 425–26: “wie schwach muss der Eindruck sein, den das Werk gemacht hat, wenn man in ebendem Augenblicke auf nichts begieriger ist, als die Figur des Meisters dagegenzuhalten? Das wahre Meisterstück … erfüllet uns so ganz mit sich selbst, dass wir des Urhebers darübers darüber vergessen; dass wir es nicht als das Produkt eines einzeln Wesens, sondern der allgemeinen Natur betrachten … Die Täuschung muss sehr schwach sein, man muss wenig Natur, aber desto mehr Künsttelei empfinden, wenn man so neugierig nach dem Künstler ist.”
Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 119.
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Parsons, J. (2000). When is a Work of Music Real?. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Aesthetic Discourse of the Arts. Analecta Husserliana, vol 61. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4263-2_8
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