The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century by Nicholas Mathew (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century by Nicholas Mathew Caryl Clark Nicholas Mathew, The Haydn Economy: Music, Aesthetics, and Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2022). Pp. 243; 49 b/w illus. $45.00 cloth. Focusing on the mobility of Haydn's music within an emerging European economy, Nicholas 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. Organized into four main chapters—Commerce, Interest, Objects, and Work—the book traces Haydn's chronological trajectory from the feudal Esterházy court environments of Eisenstadt, Eszterháza, and Vienna in the 1780s; to London, the center of European capitalism in the 1790s; and back to Vienna again. The book concludes with a short Epilogue—Value—that places Haydn's last public appearance at a gala performance of The Creation in March 1808 within a broader sphere of interpersonal, media, and institutional exchange. The new economic history lens Mathew employs here foregrounds developments in economics, print media, material culture, and the dynamic world of commercial exchange—one of perpetual motion of people, goods, and liquidity. For a book about the growing interdependence of capitalism and the arts, it's curious that the main source of Britain's economic wealth arising from the transatlantic slave trade is touched on only tangentially. It seems that, for Mathew, Adam Smith's arguments in The Wealth of Nations (1776) about the inefficiency of "the invisible hand" (slave labor) had yet to infiltrate economic consciousness. In a dense introduction, Mathew outlines the methodological approaches of new materialisms underpinning the warehouse of information on offer here. Where past studies have explored "when, where and how music was commodified and consumed, or became intellectual property," he emphasizes "the material forms and protocols that made these things possible" (10). These include the rise of print culture and the public concert, with its attendant ticket sales, advertising, and merchandising, and "the many forms of mediation" they encompass: "infrastructures, such as concert rooms, booksellers' warehouses, and piano builders' workshops; rules, such as ticketing and music copyright; formats, such as the piano reduction [End Page 132] or the music magazine; and music-related genres, such as the concert review or the celebrity portrait" (10). As he observes, "Haydn designed music with an awareness of the things that mediated it," helping to create a media culture that was "more than the sum of its constituent technologies and techniques" (11). Along the way, Mathew makes many fascinating observations about well-known repertory. For instance, about Symphony no. 94, nicknamed "Surprise," he observes that "Haydn made interest itself audible," giving sonic shape to the psychic reorientations of interested attention (87). Here and elsewhere, the principles of composition were absorbed into a mediascape of commercial infrastructure that enabled Haydn to mobilize and extract value from musical stock in transformative ways. Haydn's ability to "reformat his musical stock" across his long career enabled him to connect with highly populated spaces—animating culture, making things happen, and forging new associations (53). A major dividend of this book is the way it eschews traditional analyses of musical style to concentrate instead on the mobilization of musical knowledge within an ever-expanding capitalistic milieu. That said, some of the musical readings in chapter 3, which focuses on small-scale chamber pieces and popular songs associated with women's music-making, could be more nuanced. For instance, in "The Female Auctioneer," the hit song by James Hook that Haydn may have heard performed at the Vauxhall pleasure gardens in the 1790s, Mathew notes that the singer's direct address "I am come to sell if you will buy" signals an "overt combination of the erotic and the pecuniary" (95). More than a little ditty about negotiations in the marriage market—addressing both bachelors and the female prospect of becoming a wife—it's clear from the...