Haydn, Joseph Books

The Farewell Symphony

Anna Harwell Celenza, Joseph Haydn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The Farewell Symphony 5 out of 5 stars.
43 of 44 people found this review helpful.

I do collect children's books and take into consideration the illustrations as well as the story. I rate this book excellent, the story is True, based on documented evidence. A CD is also included of the complete "The Farewell Symphony'" and I replay it ad infinitum. Excellent investment in quality entertainment. The illustrations are delightful! Dorothy Hope

Editorial Review:

Includes a full-length CD recorded by the Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras.

History and music come alive!

Prince Nicholas isn't easy to work for--just ask composer Joseph Haydn. When the prince isn't demanding chamber music, operas, and ballets to entertain his guests, he wants dance music for balls and dinner music with his meals. Haydn and the other musicians are kept quite busy at the prince's summer estate in Hungary. As summer fades into autumn, however, the musicians grow increasingly homesick. When Haydn mentions the musicians' distress, the prince threatens to fire the entire orchestra! How will the talented composer convince the mighty prince that it's time to bid farewell to the summer palace?

Memorable characters, carefully researched text, and expressive illustrations tell the story behind Haydn's famous Symphony #45.

Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (Third Revised and Expanded Edition)

Karl Geiringer, Irene Geiringer

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A book to help you better appreciate this composer of the very first rank 5 out of 5 stars.
20 of 21 people found this review helpful.

Karl Geiringer was a wonderful musicologist from Austria. He lived a long life (1899-1989) and wrote many wonderful papers and books. This book on Haydn is typical of his style (his wife, Irene, gets a collaborative credit, and that is just super, since she has helped him in all his books). The book is divided in two parts: the first being a biographical narrative and the second being a biography through his musical works.

The first part is organized chronologically with the chapters focused on key events and periods in Haydn's life. The second part is organized by compositional style and maturity. Geiringer divides Haydn's compositional life into five periods: youth, transition, romantic crisis, maturity, and consummate mastery. The author makes a great case for this division. Each of these chapters takes us through the various types of compositions Haydn wrote in these periods such as piano sonatas, symphonies, string quartets, masses, and so forth.

Mozart's musical genius was fostered by his father, Leopold, who was a famous violinist. Beethoven's father and grandfather were musicians, and J.S. Bach's ancestors and progeny were musicians for generations and produced more than a few of great quality. Franz Joseph Haydn's (1732 - 1809) father was a wheelwright and his beginnings were so modest that when Beethoven was shown a picture of Haydn's birthplace he said, "Strange that so great a man should have been born in so poor a home."

While Haydn's musical ability was recognized early and he was given good musical training, he was not a prodigy like Mozart nor did he achieve greatness early. Most of Haydn's most important study was done on his own and at great personal effort. It wasn't until he earned the chief musical post with the royal Hungarian family of Esterházy that his genius matured. Haydn said, "My prince was always satisfied with my works. Not only did I have the encouragement of constant approval, but as conductor of the orchestra I could make experiments ... and be as bold as I pleased. I was cut off from the world; there was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original."

Haydn wrote a vast number of musical works in all the important forms and styles of his day. He set the example for younger composers such as Mozart and Beethoven who admired him enough to imitate him. He and Mozart were great friends whose admiration was mutual and profound. Who else in the entire earth could understand the other's work as well as they?

This year I have been fortunate to sing Haydn's "Harmoniemesse" ("Wind Band Mass"). It is one of the great treasures of the composer's vast output. He wrote 14 masses that we know of, but one is lost. This work being the last of them and the very last major work Haydn ever wrote. As Karl Geiringer noted in his biography of the composer, "... it represents a kind of farewell not only to the Mass form but to music itself. Motives and moods from earlier Masses reoccur, and Haydn displays once more his magical ability to use all elements of the contrapuntal style."

This biography will help you not only appreciate Haydn as a person and give you a greater insight into his music, it will help you realize what former generations knew better than us, that Haydn is in the very first rank of musical genius and that his music is full of revelations and delights.

Editorial Review:

This definitive study of the life and works of Joseph Haydn represents half a century of research. As curator of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Dr. Geiringer was in charge of one of the world's leading Haydn collections. His scholarly investigations took him to various monasteries, to libraries in Eisenstadt, Prague, Berlin, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C., and, as guest of the Hungarian government, to the previously almost inaccessible archives of the Princes of Esterhazy in Budapest.

The Cambridge Companion to Haydn (Cambridge Companions to Music)

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Editorial Review:

This accessible introduction to the musical work and cultural world of Joseph Haydn covers his contemporaries, working environments and aesthetics. Chapters on the reception of his music explore keyboard performance practices, Haydn's posthumous reputation, recorded performances and revivals of his operas. The book surveys his major performance genre--including symphonies, string quartets, keyboard sonatas and trios, liturgical music, oratorios, etc...

Haydn and His World

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Editorial Review:

Joseph Haydn's symphonies and string quartets are staples of the concert repertory, yet many aspects of this founding genius of the Viennese Classical style are only beginning to be explored. From local Kapellmeister to international icon, Haydn achieved success by developing a musical language aimed at both the connoisseurs and amateurs of the emerging musical public. In this volume, the first collection of essays in English devoted to this composer, a group of leading musicologists examines Haydn's works in relation to the aesthetic and cultural crosscurrents of his time.

Haydn and His World opens with an examination of the contexts of the composer's late oratorios: James Webster connects the Creation with the sublime--the eighteenth-century term for artistic experience of overwhelming power--and Leon Botstein explores the reception of Haydn's Seasons in terms of the changing views of programmatic music in the nineteenth century. Essays on Haydn's instrumental music include Mary Hunter on London chamber music as models of private and public performance, fortepianist Tom Beghin on rhetorical aspects of the Piano Sonata in D Major, XVI:42, Mark Evan Bonds on the real meaning behind contemporary comparisons of symphonies to the Pindaric ode, and Elaine R. Sisman on Haydn's Shakespeare, Haydn as Shakespeare, and "originality." Finally, Rebecca Green draws on primary sources to place one of Haydn's Goldoni operas at the center of the Eszterháza operatic culture of the 1770s.

The book also includes two extensive late-eighteenth-century discussions, translated into English for the first time, of music and musicians in Haydn's milieu, as well as a fascinating reconstruction of the contents of Haydn's library, which shows him fully conversant with the intellectual and artistic trends of the era.

Exploring Haydn: Unlocking the Masters Series, No. 6

David Hurwitz

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A book and music CD set that introduces the reader to the life and works of Haydn 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Exploring Haydn: A Listener's Guide To Music's Boldest Innovator is a book and music CD set that introduces the reader to the life and works of Haydn. An astonishingly creative genius, Hayden invented the string quartet as it is known today, earned the title of "The Father of the Symphony", and mentored the renowned Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Author David Hurwitz guides the reader through a brief tour of Haydn's life, a close discussion of Haydn's instrumental music including first movements, slow movements, minuets, scherzos, and finales, and a topical view of Haydn's art and works. Two full-length Naxos CDs, filled with more than two and a half hours of beautiful music keyed to pieces described in the text, allow the reader to experience Hayden's music firsthand. Highly recommended for lay readers, novice music scholars, and anyone seeking a greater understanding and appreciation of Haydn's monumental legacy.

Editorial Review:

No composer has ever achieved the amazing progression that Haydn has. He invented the string quartet as we know it today, became "the Father of the Symphony," and founded the greatest school in the history of music. His life was one of ceaseless experimentation and invention, of problems surmounted and challenges met. In this book, No. 6 in the Amadeus Press Unlocking the Masters series, David Hurwitz acquaints readers with Haydn's innovative melodic creativity, his revolutionary use of musical form, and important characteristics of his personal style, including his genius for writing in minor keys and creating comedy in his music. In addition to Haydn's principal instrumental works, Hurwitz explores Haydn's vocal music and instrumental masterpieces that fall outside the mainstream. Four appendixes list all of his symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, and piano trios. Two Universal Records CDs provide over two and a half hours of music keyed to pieces described in the book.

The Symphonic Repertoire, Vol. 2: The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert

A. Peter Brown

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Editorial Review:

The first volume to appear in the five-volume magnum opus of A. Peter Brown, this work sets a new standard for writing about the symphonies of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Now a single source provides up-to-date overviews of the status of research, former or present questions of attribution, discussion of stylistic traits, background material on the musical context of composition and early performances, as well as samplings from the early reception of works that we now call classics.

Echoes from Calvary: Meditations on Franz Joseph Hayden's The Seven Last Words of Christ

Young Richard

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Editorial Review:

This is a book that is certain to stir the soul with echoes, in both music and words, of the passion of Christ. That event transcends time or season; its power to uplift and inspire is endless.

In 1786 Franz Joseph Haydn wrote what he considered to be his greatest composition, The Seven Last Words of Christ. Today it continues to provide musical and spiritual nourishment for millions through a format that links its seven main movements to spoken meditations on the seven final utterances of Jesus.

The Vermeer String Quartet, in dozens of performances of this masterpiece throughout the world, has been joined by some of the foremost religious figures of our time for meditations on the seven last words. This book offers printed versions of more than 60 of them, along with seven spoken meditations as part of the complete musical performance on one of the accompanying disks. Meditations include contributions by Martin Luther King, Jr., Martin Marty, Virgil Elizondo, Raymond Brown, Peter Gomes, Andrew Greeley, Jean Bethke Elshtain and many more. There are also in-depth essays by theologian Martin Marty, historian Grover A. Zinn, ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain and the Vermeer's Richard Young. On a second disk, Young demonstrates how Haydn's composition embodies the emotion of the seven last words.

Echoes from Calvary offers many hours of spiritual reflection and devotion. It is a treasury of insights for any life, in any season.

Haydn: The Creation (Cambridge Music Handbooks)

Nicholas Temperley

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Editorial Review:

Haydn's Creation is one of the great masterpieces of the classical period. This absorbing and original account of the work provides an indispensable guide for the concert-goer, performer and student alike. The author places the work within the oratorio tradition, and contrasts the theological and literary character of the English libretto with the Viennese milieu of the first performances. The complete text is provided in both German and English versions as a useful reference point for discussion of the design of the work, the musical treatment of the words, including questions of Haydn's pictorialism, and a detailed examination of the different movement types employed. The book also contains a brief history of the reception of the work with appendices of notes on the changing performance traditions and selected extracts from critical accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Joseph Haydn: The Merry Little Peasant (Great Musicians Series)

Opal Wheeler, Sybil Deucher, Mary Greenwalt

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Excellent and Accessible Children's Biography 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is such a sweet little book for children, and adults will enjoy reading through it as well. The way Haydn's childhood and early years are portrayed is delightfully entertaining, as well as educational. If this had been a little tale invented to amuse children instead of a factual biography, it could hardly be more enchanting. Readers will find it easy to remember these interesting details of Haydn's life because they will be in sympathy with him in his escapades, disappointments, and successes. In addition to describing the life of this composer, the authors also attempt an introduction to his music. Several musical pieces are included for the reader to play on the piano to see for themselves how charming Haydn's music is. Musical terms are also explained, such as, "A sonata, you know, is music written for solo instruments with an accompaniment", or "A symphony is music written for an orchestra and is divided into several parts."

I heartily recommend this excellent book, especially for children who may be learning Haydn's music in their lessons. The authors have done an outstanding job, and I will be looking for their others.

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

Charles Rosen

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Classic writing about Classical music 5 out of 5 stars.
23 of 25 people found this review helpful.

Charles Rosen by now has attained a place among musical analysts on a par with the likes of Tovey and Grout, though his style is very different from either of these luminaries. Taking the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven as the pinnacle of the musical style that developed in the late eighteenth-century, Rosen explains how around 1775 there was a decisive shift away from the High Baroque style of Bach and Handel, and why this new music was different. After his general introduction to the style most of the book explores different genres, symphony, opera, concerto and string quartet among them, to create a lucid and multi-faceted picture of how these three great composers approached and solved common musical and formal problems. The new edition adds a preface that addresses criticisms of the original book and an additional late chapter on Beethoven.

Rosen's writing, though it can be dense and repetitive, at its best is unmatched in its ability to relate analysis to what actually is heard by a listener. To this end, an ability to read and understand the copious and detailed musical examples is essential to fully grasping his points--this book is not for the casual amateur. But to those willing to do the work, The Classical Style remains as richly rewarding after three-plus decades as when it first appeared. As another reviewer has mentioned, it is a book one returns to again and again simply for the sheer pleasure of reading it.

Editorial Review:

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven is a revised and enlarged version of Charles Rosen's landmark 1970 work on the compositions of the trio of musical geniuses who formed the Viennese Classical School and forever changed the face of music. Along with clarifications, expansions, and new insights into the composers and their music, the book has been enriched by the addition of a compact disc containing two of the Beethoven piano sonatas of which the author writes. Rosen's books are always shot through with musical examples, so you'll get a great deal more out of this one if you can read music. The Classical Style is a brilliant book, composed by a genuine artist, sometimes provocative, but never sloppy in its thinking.