Internationales Musikwissenschaftliches Symposium ‘Haydn & das Streichquartett’ im Rahmen des ‘Haydn Streichquartett Weekend’: Eisenstadt, 1.-5. Mai 2002; Referate und Diskussionen . Ed by Georg Feder and Walter Reicher. pp. 217. Eisenstädter Haydn-Berichte, 2. (Schneider, Tutzing, 2003, $48. ISBN 3-7952-1133-6.)
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ml/gci079
ISSN1477-4631
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoThese proceedings derive from one of a number of similarly themed Haydn conferences that have taken place in Eisenstadt (at Schloss Esterházy) in recent times. On this occasion the participants were surrounded by the music to which they devoted their attentions, all of the composer’s string quartets being played in the five days by twenty-four different ensembles in twenty-four concerts. The papers themselves cover an impressive range of approaches, although dedicated coverage of Haydn’s quartet output is almost entirely confined to its chronological outer limits. Georg Feder sets the tone by discussing some early personal encounters with the Haydn quartets. He recalls his first experience of the variations on ‘Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser’ in Op. 76 No. 3 when a student in Tübingen in 1949, a revelation after his earlier experience of the tune as he had often sung it up to 1945, in the ‘crowing’ interpretation of that time. This he compares with Haydn having called the tune his ‘prayer’ in later life; later Feder came to understand that the quartet variations represented ‘the true unfolding of the essence of this melody’ (p. 9). Yet this little morality tale might have been given a different twist from that of true intentions finally uncovered; it might also give cause for reflection on the nature of music as a ‘promiscuous signifier’. Although he makes no explicit connection between the two sections, Feder’s subsequent account of the first text-critical revision of a series of Haydn quartets (Opp. 9 and 17 in the 1963 Joseph Haydn Werke edition), after a long period of unquestioned trust in the traditional wisdom of previous musical texts, seems to be underpinned by the same narrative. Yet if Feder expresses little of the current relativism with respect to notions of an Urtext and of historical performance practice, he of all people is entitled not to do so. Deriving in great part from the composer’s enormous contemporary popularity, the source-critical problems relating to Haydn’s output have few equals.
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