The Haydn Economy

“Tracing the conceptual overlap of aesthetics and economics as they developed in the eighteenth century, Mathew not only offers a startlingly original vision of Haydn and his relationship to ‘commerce,’ but also makes a major contribution to current debates about the nature and mission of music scholarship. Not just boundlessly informative, but compulsively readable and entertaining.” * W. Dean Sutcliffe, University of Auckland *
“In this dazzling and timely book, Mathew reveals not only how Haydn’s music functioned in the late-Enlightenment economic landscape, but also how musical culture helped shape modern market society. As the field of music studies today ponders the future of canons and canonical works, The Haydn Economy shows us that we are far from done with Haydn and the eighteenth century—indeed, perhaps we are only just beginning to understand how this period’s deep-seated legacies continue to reverberate today.” * Emily I. Dolan, Brown University *
“The Haydn Economy seems to signal a new era in musicology. This is a book about Haydn that is certain to draw in, rather than repel, those of us who think of colonialism and slavery before the symphony when we hear the words ‘eighteenth-century Europe.’ An intellectual tour de force.” * Gavin Steingo, Princeton University *
“Combining deft musical analysis and broad learning across disciplines, this book charts Haydn’s long career less as an evolution of style than as a series of orientations toward the newly mobilized cultural economies of Vienna and London. In Mathew’s account, Haydn achieved a major body of work that, unlike the Romantic differentiations of value that soon would follow him, managed to avoid setting aesthetic norms and market forces at odds. The Haydn Economy is a must-read for anyone interested in ‘the most abundantly mediated musician of his age’ or in the music and culture of the world in which he moved.” * James Chandler, University of Chicago *
"The Haydn Economy is, as its subtitle promises, a rich and tightly woven tapestry of musical, aesthetic, and economic concerns, filled with quirky details that are the engaging hallmarks of New Historicism." -- Alyson McLamore * Journal of the American Musicological Society *
"The essential momentousness of Haydn’s retirement from Esterházy court life and transition to a final period marked by musical triumph, financial independence, and some degree of artistic autonomy, has perhaps hindered rather than sustained investigations into the peculiar contexts in which these events unfolded. Nicholas Mathew offers a fresh and timely study of this area in The Haydn Economy, an illuminating, wide-ranging monograph on the late eighteenth-century cultural economy in which Haydn participated. The book makes not only a major contribution to studies of the composer and his achievements in their Viennese and English milieus but also a compelling case for reevaluating our understanding of the complex of craft, aesthetics, and enterprise at work in their age more widely." * Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association *
"Mathew’s pathbreaking study traces the many ways aesthetics and economics developed in tandem during the second half of the eighteenth century. Unpacked in minute detail is Haydn’s deep connectivity to commerce throughout his long and prolific career, enabling Mathew to move the discipline far beyond genre-based studies or traditional understandings of the composer’s dealings with the marketplace. . . . Mathew is to be applauded for bringing musicology—and Haydn—into this dynamic new age." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *