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Tom Beghin is associate professor of music at McGill University. Sander M. Goldberg is professor of classics at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Haydn and the Performance of Rhetoric

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

List of Illustrations...............................................................................................................viiGuide to the DVD....................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.....................................................................................................................xviiAbbreviations.......................................................................................................................xixIntroduction The Editors...........................................................................................................11 A Visit to the Salon de Parnasse Elisabeth Le Guin...............................................................................142 Performing Theory: Variations on a Theme by Quintilian Sander M. Goldberg........................................................393 Ut Rhetorica Artes: The Rhetorical Theory of the Sister Arts Timothy Erwin.......................................................614 School, Stage, Salon: Musical Cultures in Haydn's Vienna James Van Horn Melton...................................................805 Rhetoric versus Truth: Listening to Haydn in the Age of Beethoven Mark Evan Bonds................................................1096 "Delivery, Delivery, Delivery!" Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn's Keyboard Sonatas Tom Beghin...........................1317 The Rhetoric of Improvisation in Haydn's Keyboard Music James Webster............................................................1728 Clever Orator versus Bold Innovator Lszl Somfai................................................................................2139 The Poetry of Haydn's Songs: Sexuality, Repetition, Whimsy Marshall Brown........................................................22910 Haydn's London Trios and the Rhetoric of the Grotesque Annette Richards.........................................................25111 Rhetorical Truth in Haydn's Chamber Music: Genre, Tertiary Rhetoric, and the Opus 76 Quartets Elaine Sisman.....................281Coda The Editors...................................................................................................................327Works Cited.........................................................................................................................333Contributors........................................................................................................................355Index of Musical Works..............................................................................................................357Index of Significant Names..........................................................................................................361Index of Rhetorical Terms...........................................................................................................365

Chapter One

At the center of the Palais Royal is a large fountain, and around it are numerous green metal chairs, which people haul to and fro in order to sit exactly where they wish. I had been at large in the City of Light for some hours and was tired, so I found a vacant chair and propped my feet against the parapet of the fountain, feeling a bit of spray on my face when the breeze changed and half blinded by sunlight reflecting off the water. I shut my eyes and let my thoughts drift. I thought of the extraordinary ferment in this city over two centuries before, a ferment in which practices musical and social-indeed, musical and political, of music and the very rights of man-were utterly inextricable: concern yourself with the one and you were of necessity embroiled in the other. I thought of the heirs to that ferment, sitting around me reading newspapers and feeding pigeons, so casually proud of their splendid and difficult heritage. I thought of pigeons and the heirs of pigeons.... Perhaps a little nap was not far off when I was abruptly pulled into wakefulness by a distinctive, slightly nasal voice at my side. It said, "Of course, there's been quite a shift."

Although I could think of no reason for this to be addressed to me, I opened my eyes. There stood a short, slight gentleman with a receding hairline, very keen eyes, and a sensitive, slightly prissy mouth. He was wearing a gray plush frock coat that had seen better days and much-mended black stockings, which combination gave him a scholarly air. Altogether he looked familiar, though I could not immediately place him. He, for his part, was looking at me expectantly, so I begged his pardon, feeling a little stupid, and asked him to repeat himself.

HIM. I said, there's been quite a shift between your day and mine.

ME. I'm sorry, but in what regard?

He smiled a little ruefully, and with that smile I recognized him. For some reason-the lateness of the afternoon, the warmth of the sunlight, the spell of the city itself-it seemed not in the least strange that I should be speaking with a man dead these two and a quarter centuries.

HIM. Well, in many of course. But at the moment I'm referring to musical life.

ME. What do you consider to have shifted so hugely? We still play music written by your contemporaries.

HIM. I think I'll answer by asking you a question. What comes to your mind when you think of performing, say, an accompanied sonata? What do you see? Set the scene for me.

ME. I see musicians on a stage, or at one end of a room; an audience.... HIM. The audience on stage as well?

ME. Certainly not. They're separate-on the theater floor or arranged at the other end of the room.

HIM. So the two groups are separate?

ME. Oh yes. And that's true in more than one way: the musicians are experts, but the audience isn't. In fact, I'll be honest, when the concert is of music from your day, most of the audience has only a vague idea of what it is they're hearing or what it means.

HIM. Why do they bother?

ME. It's perfectly possible to get pleasure from something vague-in fact many people in my day seem to prefer it so. Not to mention the business of seeing and being seen. I know audiences in your day went to concerts for that reason.

HIM. Yes, but for us the place to do that is the concert spirituel or one of the big salons like the Prince de Cond's. When we listen to music at home, or at the house of close friends, we're all together in the same room, and we, or our sons and daughters, are the performers.

ME. Pardon my asking, but doesn't that condemn you to hearing a great many clumsy performances?

HIM. The truth is, when you are that close to the making of the music you don't judge the result in at all the same way you would at the concert spirituel.

ME. All the same, I think it might be painful to hear a good sonata blundered through by my neighbors and relations.

HIM. I am not sure what you mean; how can a sonata ever be better than its performance?

ME. Well, that very question does imply quite a shift. We tend nowadays to esteem the work independently of its execution; and we judge the execution according to the ethics of production and perfection that entered European society with the Industrial Revolution. But I'm sorry: that's after your day.

HIM (with that rueful smile). Not at all. We've discussed it many a time, and a good many revolutions since.

ME. We? To whom are you referring?

HIM. If you'd care to accompany me, I believe I can introduce you directly; we meet at about this time.

Bemused, I rose and followed him across the courtyard and out of the Palais Royal. Our progress was rapid, not to say alarming: he ignored crossing signals and dodged automobiles with all the insouciance of his living countrymen.

Soon we arrived at an htel where we were admitted by a servant. Another showed us upstairs to a large, handsome room, furnished with chairs and chaises, its walls lined with bookshelves. There was a pianoforte standing open to one side, and at it sat a young woman, talking earnestly with the gentleman at her left elbow, who held a cello; nearby stood another gentleman with a violin, peering through his glasses at the music on his desk. It seemed we had interrupted a rehearsal; yet there were twelve or fifteen other people in the room as well, standing or sitting, in animated and interpenetrating groups. They made quite a mixture: men and women, young and old, in several different generations and regional styles of eighteenth-century dress. A woman of middle age excused herself from the group and came forward to greet us. Fine of feature and sober of dress, she had a quiet authority that marked her as mistress of the house.

SHE (to me). Welcome: I am Suzanne Necker. I am pleased and honored that you could be here.

ME. The honor, Madame, is mine and beyond my capacity to express. And it is, if I may say so, an unexpected pleasure.

NECKER. It is our pleasure in turn to open our conversation to our posterity. And in that capacity, too, I welcome you. (To my guide) So, Diderot, you are late, but to good effect, as you bring our final guest. We have scarcely begun.

DIDEROT. In any case we had begun on our own account; I think perhaps we anticipate today's topic? We were talking of music making.

NECKER. Yes, that has been our concern as well.... (Leading me forward to the group) Allow me to introduce you. This is the Salon de Parnasse; we meet here every Friday at this time.

A large, florid man bowed and smiled at my no doubt dazed expression.

MORELLET. Yes, so compelling were our discussions that we saw no reason to let our mortality put a stop to them. Greetings: I am the Abb Morellet.

NECKER. A member of our regular circle, as are Monsieur de Buffon; Monsieur Rousseau; and (she smiled affectionately at an elegant younger woman in the dress of a later era) my daughter Germaine, now Madame de Stal. Today we have also the honor of a number of visitors besides you. Of the party from Vienna, here is Frau Pichler, ne von Greiner; the Freiherr von Knigge; and Herr Johann Pezzl. At the pianoforte is Anglique Diderot. Herr Grimm has consented to take the violin part today, and D'Alembert the cello.

I did my inexpert best at a curtsy to each. Taking her seat, Madame Necker picked up the thread of the group's discussion as easily as if our arrival had never interrupted it.

NECKER. So you and Diderot had also been discussing music.... It seems we continually return to Fontenelle's old question: "Sonate, que me veux-tu?"

ME. Yes; we had been saying that what a sonata "asked of us" in eighteenth-century salons seems, in the ensuing centuries, to have changed quite radically. In my day, it partakes of a very different ethic.

DIDEROT. Better yet: a different rhetoric. There is a signal difference between putting everyone in the same room both spatially and socially and the professional setting created by a podium, a stage, a proscenium.

MORELLET. Would you call the latter orational?

DIDEROT. Yes, or dramatic.

MORELLET. Such art is admirable and grand, but it is that of the forum or the theater, not that of the salon.

BUFFON. Yes, in the salon we remain among the concerns of ordinary men and women. Here, we are more likely to feel indifference toward a very ingenious work; our taste will be for a simple but useful reading. What is the reason for this? In the one, the author speaks to me of myself, and in the other he speaks to me only of himself: the conversation of a friend will always please me more than that of Voltaire.

ME. If it is not orational, is there some other kind of rhetoric for this "conversation of friends"?

MORELLET. If there is, then surely the ancients will have spoken of it.

NECKER. Although how usefully I am not sure. The De oratore is ... singular. One sees there that in which Cicero considered eloquence to consist: but he had none of our ideas on this fine subject. Quite a source of reflections!

MORELLET. Quintilian, I think, is more useful. He mentions a distinction between "two kinds of oration, the one straightforward, which one calls rhetorical, and then the divided, which is called dialectic" (2.20.7). These he calls, respectively, oratio perpetua and oratio concisa.

BUFFON. But the term "dialectic" calls to mind the didactic tone that we find in the dialogues of Plato: hardly ideal conversation, I think.

DIDEROT. Yes, I think we must make further distinctions as to types of dialectic. In French, in general, one calls conversation some mutual discourse that may happen, instead of entretien, which is what one calls a mutual discourse that proceeds upon some determined object.

BUFFON. Indeed, one of the first rules for pleasing and lively conversation is not always to say considered things, but on the contrary to let oneself go with one's first thought.

MORELLET. Quintilian makes this distinction as well. He distinguishes between strict and casual or "unbound" rhetoric: "The oration in one form ... is bound and woven, and in another form unbound, as is the case in conversation and letters when these treat of nothing that might lead beyond their own nature, such as questions of philosophy, statecraft, and similar" (5.11.2 -5).

DIDEROT. There is also the matter of status. Entretien means from a superior to an inferior; one does not say of a topic that one has had a conversation on it with the king, one says one has had an entretien.

ME. If Quintilian is acknowledging conversation as a type of oration, "divided" among speakers and unbound as to theme, I will infer of the sonata that imitates it that it involves interaction, in a lively, casual style, as if invented on the spot. And, it seems, neither the conversation nor the sonata may treat of serious topics. Further, insofar as they represent the discourse of equals, neither is flattering in tone, nor presumptuous, nor formal.

NECKER. It is remarkable, I think, that we seem able to define conversation mainly in terms of what it is not. You do the same, do you not, Morellet, in your essay?

MORELLET. Yes; although I did not wish to commit the vice of presumptuousness by mentioning it. We have already named several of them here, I think.

PEZZL. Perhaps we might withdraw at least one of our prohibitions: I believe that a conversation (or a sonata) may at times treat of serious topics. What is more, it sometimes seems that the more casual the setting, the more easily seriousness may be engaged. The most important things may be argued with such ease at table at an evening gathering. While one peels the leaves off an artichoke, an entire, very serious doctrine will be demolished; over a glass of sherbet, a state secret is deciphered. Before an oyster shell is opened, judgment has been passed on three theater pieces and ten new essays: and not infrequently, better than in some famous journal.

NECKER. But perhaps, Herr Pezzl, such casual treatment of serious matters is more the Viennese custom than the Parisian?

BUFFON. I am not certain it is possible any longer to make much distinction between Paris and Vienna, or indeed between seriousness and frivolity. The spectacle of Paris at this moment is impossible to describe. Public opinion traverses all the ranks; it inspires, it hinders, it saddens, it causes despair, it takes all forms and issues from all mouths: but the scepter it holds in its hand grows in strength every day, and there is no longer time to think of wresting it away. Women speak of the constitution with the same warmth with which they once analyzed sentiment at the htel de Rambouillet.

DIDEROT. It is true: for all its casualness, good conversation may at times "treat of things that lead beyond its own nature, such as questions of philosophy, statecraft, and similar." Indeed, the government of a conversation very much resembles that of a state. One can scarcely doubt the influence of the one upon the other.

PEZZL. In any case, if this custom in Vienna came from anywhere in general, it is from your fair country! Vienna still follows Paris in matters of fashion.... New fashions rarely grow from our native soil, and when this does happen, they are never esteemed as highly as the Parisian.

PICHLER. Not only do our fashions echo the melodies of Paris. When the Revolution itself broke out in Paris, its spiritual agitations and metamorphoses made themselves felt with us in Austria.

PEZZL. In any case, I did not mean to recommend unseemly frivolity. Conversation in such good societies-whether Vienna or Paris, I have no doubt-is brought to the highest degree of refinement. One must possess a delicate organ of spirit and have enjoyed many years' concourse with it if one wishes to take one's chances with it and thereby meet with success.

DIDEROT. But as far as what principles might help us toward that success, we still have little more than a forest of prohibitions.

MORELLET (holding a book drawn from the shelves at one side of the room). In fact, there simply is no systematic "rhetoric of conversation" from antiquity. Quintilian goes so far as to tell us that there can't be one. (Reading) "From the difficulty of its performance comes then the circumstance that no system of exercises, no teacher can instill it. Therefore one takes it in through company meals and in conversations with many quick-witted people; and we make progress hereby through daily intercourse. In the calling of an orator this fine witty style is rare, and it stems not from the teachings proper to Art, but from our own sphere, where we are already confident" (6.3.14). Quintilian would seem to be in agreement with you, Pezzl: conversational eloquence is best learned at the dinner table, and not from books.

PEZZL. As if the dinner table were a kind of training ground for orators ...

ROUSSEAU. I would like to return us from the dinner table to the music desk. That sonata is written down. Indeed, it is most likely printed. The tunes, the harmonies, everything the performers "say"-all is decided in advance and notated with care. How can something so determined be a true conversation? At best, I think we must call it an entretien.

DIDEROT. Yes, that is true. Usually we call a printed conversation an entretien....

BUFFON. Although less often when the subject is not serious. One speaks of the entretiens of Cicero on the nature of the gods, but the conversation of Canaye with the Marchal d'Hocquincourt.

ME. So perhaps the question of whether we may call a sonata "conversational" turns upon its degree of seriousness. A difficult thing to determine, I suspect.

DIDEROT. Indeed-since "women speak of the constitution with the same warmth with which they once analyzed sentiment...."

NECKER. It seems to me that with our attempts at definitions and with our resorting to authorities, we are in some danger of another one of Morellet's conversational faults, that of pedantry. Perhaps we should put our ideas to the test with an actual sonata.

The musicians had taken seats among the company in order better to attend the conversation. Now they returned to the chairs around the pianoforte.

NECKER. Earlier, I believe, you were playing a sonata by Haydn.

GRIMM. Yes, we've acquainted ourselves with the first movement. Will that suit?

PEZZL. Oh, I believe it will suit very well indeed: I can see it is one of those written for Vienna.

MORELLET. Capital, capital....

With that, the musicians began to play the Trio in A-flat Major, Hob. XV:14, first movement (see DVD, ex. 1.1).

(Continues...)

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