Opera and the Enlightenment, and: Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780, and: Gluck: An Eighteenth-Century Portrait in Letters and Documents, and: Handel and His Singers: The Creation of the Royal Academy Operas, 1720-1728, and: On Mozart, and: Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (review)

No date has proved more intractable in the grand narrative of eighteenth-century music than 1750, the year of Bach’s death. Yet, while this year stubbornly remains a convenient boundary between the Baroque and Classical eras, its importance fades as music historians question the assumptions behind epochal generalizations and concern themselves instead with matters of production and consumption in local music cultures.

Daniel Heartz, who has devoted much of his illustrious career to scrutinizing patterns of influence in eighteenth-century music, speaks with particular authority and intelligence on the organization of the period known by the reductive label “Classical.” His Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740–1780, therefore, represents an immensely welcomed and valuable contribution to our understanding of the context of Haydn’s and Mozart’s achievements. A principal accomplishment of this volume is its correction of the germanocentric view that places Haydn and Mozart in a lineage stemming from Bach, Handel, and Lutheran Germany. (It is this view, of course, that values 1750 as an epoch-dividing date.) Carefully surveying the musical landscape of Austria and Bohemia during the reign of Maria Theresa, Heartz shows that the influences on Haydn, Mozart, and their Viennese contemporaries are to be found chiefly in the Catholic dominions of the Hapsburg empire, and to a lesser extent in France—but no longer in Italy and not at all in Germany. Indeed, the author pays careful attention throughout to the geography of cultural politics.

Of particular interest in this context is Heartz’s discussion of a long-neglected set of documents chronicling Viennese concert and theatrical life of the 1760s. The Répertoire de Tous les Spectacles, qui ont été donné au Theatre du la Ville [pres de la Cour] of Philipp Gumpenhuber faithfully records the activities at the two imperial theaters, the Burgtheater and the Kärntnertor, between 1758 and 1763 (picking up where the printed Répertoire of 1757 leaves off), including plays, operas, ballets, and concerts, as well as appearances by the theaters’ personnel at functions in the imperial palaces. Gumpenhuber’s handwritten journals testify (by design, Heartz suggests) to the remarkable achievements of Count Giacomo Durazzo, the fascinating and controversial “Directeur des Spectacles” who played an absolutely pivotal role in shaping Viennese cultural life. The glimpse Gumpenhuber provides reveals a diverse and vibrantly modern musical scene in which younger Austrian and Bohemian artists—not the older Italian masters of the previous generation—were prominent.

The bulk of the volume offers appreciative explorations of works by two generations of composers based in Vienna, including Ruetter, Monn, Bonno, and Wagenseil, among those active between 1740–65, and Gassmann, Salieri, Ditters, and Vanhal of those contemporary with Haydn. An entire chapter is devoted to Gluck and the topic of operatic reform in Vienna, while two and three chapters are set aside for Haydn and Mozart, respectively. Heartz traverses an exhaustingly large repertory covering all genres. Typical is his treatment of Haydn’s Symphony 35 in B-flat, a composition written at the onset of the composer’s supposed romantic crisis (which, in yet another misleading connection to...