Nicholas Mathew's book considers, as its subtitle advises, music, aesthetics, and commerce in the late eighteenth century. In that sense, it is an Enlightenment, even an early Romantic, history. E.T.A. Hoffmann, after all, considered Haydn as well as Mozart and Beethoven to be Romantics, and late works such as Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, which premiered in 1801, contain stylistic anticipations of Mendelssohn, Weber, and even Wagner's The Flying Dutchman. We tend, nonetheless, very much to consider Joseph Haydn, born in 1732 and for many years a liveried servant of the Princes Esterházy, an eighteenth-century, Enlightenment figure. Not the least of this study's virtues is materially to situate and extend transition and conflict between different yet overlapping periods in musical, cultural, and intellectual history. Still strongly influenced by Romantic notions of the artist as both priest and garret-bound bohemian, many continue to see him (or her) and commerce as “natural antagonists” (2). (Inspired by both musical ethnography and historical studies of interconnections between eighteenth-century literary and commercial activity, Mathew, however, argues something which “intellectual historians have long maintained,” that “despite their apparently antithetical relation, aesthetics and economics have a shared origin” (3). Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is back; or rather, it never went away.
This is no history of works, of style or technique (though the musical art of partimento might have benefited from a gloss for non-musicologists), nor even of ideas; it is, as the series title makes clear, a material history, close in some respects to the newish field of sound studies. A conventional, crude typology of the great “Viennese” musical classicists, even if immediately hedged, has Mozart die too early (1791) to become a successful freelance composer in the mould of the younger, trailblazing Beethoven, the older yet longer-living Haydn navigating both court and market. Mathew deconstructs these assumptions with greater historical attention and depth than most. Not only does he caution against linear transition; he shows how court and city, whether in the Habsburg monarchy or the England whose capital Haydn conquered in the 1790s, converged more than they mutually opposed. Cities were at least as controlled – in aesthetics as in politics or commerce – as the countryside. Marc Raeff's earlier “well-ordered police state” still has much to tell us: not only in the revolution and reaction of the century's close but in a continued, intensified experimentation taking in sales and philosophy, law and media, trade and technology, composition and listening, performance and provision of performing spaces, labour and capital, and, crucially, rich and complex patterns, created, tested, and modified before eyes and ears, of interaction.
Such interactions give rise to reflections strongly of our time: on new media, decolonisation, and even questions such as “how we might divide an ethically viable form” of value or of mobility from the “crassly materialist” (19) or the neoliberal, looming large. Music is not, nor has it ever been, a mere “symbol of desirable, vibrational human connectedness” (16). It, whatever “it” may be – and Mathew acknowledges that as a question both too great and too small for his study – is far more interesting than that. Source material and analysis present much to captivate any reader. From a celebratory poem in London's European Magazine on “Importation of Haydn; or, The Commerce of the Arts,” an ode to the social and mercantile advantages of freedom of movement, through Haydn's notation of street song from “a gang of rowdy fellows . . . [who] yelled so loudly that you could hear them 1000 paces away from the street,” (58) to a reading of the chorus in praise of industry from The Seasons that takes in ideas of frugality, work, and sublimity, Mathew extends understanding of soundscapes from Vauxhall to Vienna and beyond. Contemporaneous readings of the celebrated “surprise” chord in Haydn's “Surprise” Symphony provide a window into eighteenth-century music-, city-, and landscapes, and paths therefrom.
Chapter titles – “Commerce,” “Interest,” “Objects,” “Work,” and “Value” – frame the discussion in concepts of political economy, proposing additional standpoints not to replace form, style, periodisation, but to interrogate and enrich. Is it reductionist to present Haydn at Esterháza exploiting “sociotechnical principles of iteration to display collections of stock musical characters in rapid succession” (26)? Perhaps, though less if one takes it as a way in to consideration of individual instances than as a grand theory. Bidding us consider the “stock gesture” in a surprising context of mobility, credit, and print culture is compensation enough for formalist loss. It is unquestionably salutary to consider Haydn's music travelling, alongside pianos made from materials from across the colonial world, to China with Britain's first embassy, the 1793 Macartney Mission.
More fundamentally, Mathew cautions against undue emphasis on a work's first audience, be it the Esterházy court or the Hanover Square paying public. They are important, but so is “the tendency of Haydn's compositions . . . to move from address to address, to inhere as much in the mediating channels between addresses as in any point of historical termination” (47). For there is nothing vulgar about this materialism: Haydn and others in his world have agency – relative autonomy, if you will. Mathew rightly insists that music and its practices did not merely reflect social forces. Within a framework given and transformed, Haydn helped create novel ways of listening to, thinking about, and gaining access (or not) to music – as well as of writing it. We can with equal justice see Haydn's life and work as indicative of worlds to come, up to “the convergence of market and culture diagnosed by [Frederic] Jameson and assumed by [Sianne] Ngai” (9), the latter a particular influence on this study, yet also as radically different from our own.
Not entirely unlike musical performance, history helps both reconcile and extend such conflicts. We schematise, which helps us understand and theorise, yet musical lives and works do not follow schemes. Nicholas Mathew offers a valuable interrogation of case and contexts and a welcome invitation to further exploration in a short book that is readable, illuminating, and, in the best sense, provocative.
