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Reviewed by:
  • Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony
  • W. Dean Sutcliffe
Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony. By Melanie Lowe. pp. xii + 224. (Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2007, $39.95. ISBN 0-253-34827-2.)

The 'problem' that lies behind this study is the popularity of later eighteenth-century musical [End Page 628] style, and in particular the popularity of Haydn, not just as a perceived attribute of his musical language but as an index of reception. Haydn, it seems, has still not been forgiven for his enormous popular success in his lifetime, truly a Europe-wide phenomenon but most readily encapsulated by his visits to London in the 1790s. If anyone doubts that this can still be found problematic, Richard Taruskin's coverage of the composer in his recent Oxford History of Western Music, ii: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York, 2005), offers a handy reminder of a persistent strain of critical reception. For all the incisive and often laudatory commentary, at times Taruskin revives the idea that Haydn somehow sold out to or colluded with the establishment, and that this accounts for part of his worldly success ('his sympathies and loyalties were entirely aristocratic' (p. 550), 'Haydn, who [compared with the young Beethoven] spent his life as a sort of courtier' (p. 696)). While in one sense such critical reactions reflect the long shadow that continues to be cast by Romantic music aesthetics, this is also a problem more specific to our understanding of later eighteenth-century music. The trauma for musicologists and music critics of Mozart's apparent lack of consistent public success lies behind this as well; it has scarred our whole approach to musical classicism.

Although her study never quite explicitly addresses this particular issue, and its purview is certainly not confined to Haydn (though he forms in the end its major focus), Melanie Lowe may nevertheless be understood to be writing against the values inherent in such a tradition. Replacing such values, her critical watchwords are entertainment and pleasure. We are still not on full speaking terms with such concepts in musicology; even if they are conceded, one feels that they have not prompted concerted imaginative engagement. In the face of the 'entertaining' art music of the later eighteenth century, the tendency is still to seek salvation in complexity and subversion as markers of cultural respectability. Lowe is certainly not the first to square up to this issue in recent decades, but she arguably pursues it further and more insistently. Part of her strategy is constantly to appeal to the experience of the ordinary, lay, listener of the time. In this sense the book contributes to an emerging field that concerns the history of listening, but here it thoroughly informs the basic theoretical and analytical approach. While most discussions of art music are premissed on the ideal of a musically literate and fully engaged listener, Lowe concentrates on 'those features a lay listener would have been able to hear in the "real time" of a first and likely only hearing of a given work' (p. 2) in a public genre like the symphony.

The primary means by which such listeners oriented themselves, Lowe avers, were musical topics alongside conventionalized signs of beginning, middle, and end, and chapter 2 provides a very useful taxonomy of the way these formal functions could be signalled to the listener, in concert with particular topical references. Four symphonies are chosen for the purpose-Haydn's Nos. 68 and 104 together with Mozart's 'Haffner'and 'Prague'. The traditional criteria of motif, harmony, and large-scale form play little part in Lowe's account. Not only is attending to them redolent of a different, 'absolute' aesthetic, it is unrealistic to imagine that an average listener of the time could perceive and then interpret any connections that these features suggest. Chapter 3 is boldly explicit about how a topical orientation might have worked, with its three imagined reactions to a performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 88 through the ears of 'three historically grounded but otherwise fictional late-eighteenth-century listening subjects' (p. 80). These are a Viennese count at a Tonkuünstler-Societaät concert...

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