Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 (review)

Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 is the concluding volume of Daniel Heartz’s acclaimed trilogy begun with Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740–1780 (1995) and followed by Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (2003). The initial book of this series focused more exclusively on music in Vienna and the careers of Haydn and Mozart up to 1780. The second volume took on a more cosmopolitan approach by beginning with the Italian origins of the galant style in the 1720s and 1730s and proceeded with a survey of music in Europe. As Heartz explained in the preface of the first volume and reiterates in the preface of the present book, Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven, 1781–1802 is intended to “‘wind up the careers of Haydn and Mozart, [and] describe Beethoven’s first decade in Vienna, intertwined with the tumultuous times surrounding the French Revolution’” (xv). This work thus concludes an ambitious project whose contribution to the study of eighteenth-century music is indisputable.

“By the early years of the nineteenth century, ‘Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven’ had become a watchword, a commonplace expression signifying musical excellence. From Vienna, the fame of these composers spread rapidly throughout Western civilization” (xvi). One of Heartz’s goals in Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven is to make clear why these three composers represented the consolidation of the “high classic style in music that marked the last two decades of the eighteenth century” and that culminated “in an imposing succession of undisputed masterpieces” (xv). The book is divided into seven chapters. The first three chapters cover the span of Mozart’s (1756–1791) career in Vienna from 1781 to 1791, the next three chapters focus on Haydn (1732–1809) from the 1780s until his death, and the last chapter is dedicated to Beethoven’s (1770–1827) early years in Bonn and his first decade in Vienna from 1792 to 1802. The book concludes with two anecdotal appendices on the Irish tenor Michael Kelly (1762–1826) and the Italian composer Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802).

Heartz’s book offers an interesting blend of biography and musical analyses. He discusses key pieces movement by movement and in the case of operas goes over important arias and ensembles. Heartz often takes a comparative approach, generally by implying some kind of influence, either between different genres (such as instrumental music and opera) or between composers. He particularly does so when describing Haydn’s influence on Mozart and Beethoven. Although not always necessarily convincing, it is a useful method that effectively unifies this substantial book and adds points of interest in showing how these great composers paid tributes to each other through musical quotations or dedications, for instance in Mozart’s six “Haydn” Quartets of 1785.

Despite the author’s assurance that the “tumult and instability of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s rise to power [will] serve as a vivid historical backdrop for the tale,” the book could have included a more consistent historical context of this incredibly rich era (back flap). However, the book does not lack the necessary background, but the context sometimes appears to be unrelated to the person or music about which he is writing. Heartz acknowledges that the “age in which Beethoven came to maturity was a heroic one,” so a strong historical background is especially appropriate for the chapter on Beethoven, as is a discussion of the influence of French revolutionary music on his compositions (742). For example, Heartz opens his section devoted to Mozart’s opera Le nozze di Figaro with a few words on Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–99), the author of the famed Figaro trilogy. In what could have been a brief but fascinating history of the revolutionary aspects of Beaumarchais’ play La folle journée, ou Le mariage de Figaro, Heartz simply explains that it faced “many vetoes by the censors in Paris” and was a succès de scandale (122, 124). A play initially banned by...