Interesting Haydn: On Attention's Materials

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 655-701 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mathew
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Society ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Commercial Environment

This article examines the idea of interest and the interesting in the late eighteenth century through Haydn's London experiences of the 1790s. It argues that several of Haydn's London compositions, together with the surviving records of his English trips, bear the traces of a metropolitan mediascape and urban commercial environment in which attention and desire were newly conceivable in terms of the psychic “investments” of interest—a concept that notably oscillates between what we would nowadays consider separate economic and aesthetic meanings. Looking again at Haydn's late encounter with England's burgeoning commercial society might prompt musicologists to rethink the nature of their own scholarly interests, as well as the deeper histories of currently popular methodological paradigms that aim to resolve musicology's objects of study into networks of people and things gathered together by entangled interests and “concerns.”

Slavery and Ransom

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Smiley
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
The State ◽  
Customary Law ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Law

This chapter explores captives’ fates after their capture, all along the Ottoman land and maritime frontiers, arguing that this was largely determined by individuals’ value for ransom or sale. First this was a matter of localized customary law; then it became a matter of inter-imperial rules, the “Law of Ransom.” The chapter discusses the nature of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, emphasizing the role of elite households, and the varying prices for captives based on their individual characteristics. It shows that the Ottoman state participated in ransoming, buying, exploiting, and sometimes selling both female and male captives. The state particularly needed young men to row on its galleys, but this changed in the late eighteenth century as the fleet moved from oars to sails. The chapter then turns to ransom, showing that a captive’s ability to be ransomed, and value, depended on a variety of individualized factors.

Historical Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter looks at historical romance. Late eighteenth-century historiography began to expand its purview to unofficial spheres of social, cultural, and private life typically cultivated by informal genres such as memoirs, biographies, and novels. The ‘matter’ of history was being increasingly redefined, and this had two key effects that bear on the question of historical romance. First, the ‘reframing’ of the historical field generated a marked reciprocity among the different historical genres in the literary field, as they borrowed material and tactics from one another; second, it led to a splintering albeit not displacement of ‘general’ history, as new branches of history writing took shape, notably that of literary history as a distinct form of history. Hence romance now denoted not only the realm of ‘fancy’ but a superseded literary form of renewed interest in the rethinking of the national past.

The Practical and Symbolic Functions of Pre-Rameau Opera at the Paris Opéra before Gluck

2020 ◽  
pp. 25-50
Author(s):  
Michel Noiray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Italian Opera ◽  
Paris Opera ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Press ◽  
Late Eighteenth

This chapter explains how a uniquely long-lived canon evolved in revivals of operas by Jean-Baptiste Lully and his immediate successors—chiefly André Campra and André-Cardinal Destouches—right up to the early 1770s. The Académie Royale de Musique was unique as the only theater to resist Italian repertory, except in two brief controversial periods. A dogmatic commitment to the old style and repertory survived after Lully’s death, quite separate from the operas of Jean-Philippe Rameau. Opposition to this unique practice broke out occasionally among the public, but such opinion was not widely supported in the press. It is striking that the main critics of ancienne musique, as it was called—Rousseau, Paul Henri d’Holbach, and Friedrich Melchior von Grimm—all came from outside France. This chapter is paired with Franco Piperno’s “Italian opera and the concept of ‘canon’ in the late eighteenth century.”

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