Program

(Abstracts, biographies, and map appear below the program)

 

Thursday, March 5 (Boston University)

5-6 PM:  Viewing of Landon Rare Book Exhibit

Mugar Memorial Library, 771 Commonwealth Ave., 5th Flr. Reading Room

***

Friday, March 6, 9-12:00

Boston University, Howard Thurman Center

808 Commonwealth Ave. Rm. 205

9:15 -9:30

Welcome by Victor Coelho (Professor & Director, Center for Early Music Studies)

9:30-11:00 Landon, Haydn, and Mozart 

Pamela L. Poulin (Peabody Institute, John Hopkins University), Chair

Yuhan Tian (Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing) “Landon’s Salieri: Myth-Busting, Stereotype-Making, and the Narratives of Eighteenth-Century Music”

Kathryn Libin (Vassar College) “Haydn and Prince Lobkowitz: An Addendum to Landon’s Chronicle and Works”

Barbara Barry (University of London, School of Advanced Studies) “1791 Redux: Masonic Perspectives in The Magic Flute Reconsidered”

11:15-12:15 Keynote Address

Robert Winter (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UCLA)  “A Few Matters of Minor Importance” 

Break

Friday, March 6, 1:30-5:00

1:30-2:15 –  Keynote Address 

Kenneth Slowik (Smithsonian) “The Smithsonian Haydn and Beethoven Academies: A Report from the Field” (with Isaiah Chapman, viola & Chelsea Bernstein, cello)

2:30-3:30 –  Haydn Reception

Stephen Fisher (Independent Scholar), Chair

Yishai Rubin (Indiana University) “Johann Peter Salomon in Prussia, 1765-1780”

Roger Fisher (York University) “Too Bad to be True? Reassessing the Haydn-Hyde Contract”

4:00-5:00 – Lecture-Recital

Boston University College of Fine Arts, 855 Commonwealth Ave. Rm. 254 (Marshall Rm)

 Grace Eunhye Lee (Independent Scholar) “Humor as Experiment: Reconsidering Haydn’s Piano Sonatas through Robbins Landon”

5:15-7:00 PM Reception, Cornwall’s Tavern, Kenmore Square, 644 Beacon Street (conference participants & guests)
8:00 PM – Boston Baroque Concert: Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass. Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory, 30 Gainsborough St. Boston, 02115.
* * *

Saturday, March 7, 9-4:30

Berklee College of Music

1140 Boylston St. Rm. 1A

9:15-10:15 – Beethoven and Haydn

Michael Goetjen (Boston Conservatory at Berklee; MIT), Chair

Stefan Romanó (Independent Scholar) “Haydn’s Creation Challenge: A New Hypothesis about the Genesis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony”

Stephen Husarik (University of Arkansas, Fort Smith) “Humor in Eighteenth-Century Dress: The Comic Form of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge”

10:30-11:45 – Vocal Music

Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross), Chair

Michael Goetjen (Boston Conservatory at Berklee; MIT) “Cantata or Concert Aria: A Question of Genre in Haydn’s “‘Scena di Berenice’”

Carol Padgham Albrecht (University of Idaho) “Redrawing the Portrait of Theresia Saal”

1:30-2:30 – Landon and Mozart Roundtable

Laurel E. Zeiss (Baylor University), Moderator, with Paul Corneilson (Packard Humanities Institute), Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross) & Christoph Wolff (Adams University Professor, Emeritus, Harvard University)

2:45-3:45 – Topics in Music Theory 

James MacKay (Loyola University, New Orleans), Chair

Michael Slattery (Northwestern University) “‘Heil, O Sonne, Heil!’”: The Meanings of the Do-Re-Mi in Haydn’s Oratorio Sunrises”

Roman Ivanovitch (Indiana University, Bloomington) “A Matter of Trust: The Finale of Symphony No. 90 in C major and Haydn’s Recomposed Recapitulations”

4:00 – Closing Remarks 

Michael Ruhling (Rochester Institute of Technology)

***

Support for this conference was generously provided by
BU Department of Musicology & BU School of Music
BU Center for the Humanities
Alex Ludwig / Berklee College of Music 
Rochester Institute of Technology School of Performing Arts
The Haydn Society of N. America
The Mozart Society of America
Ryan Hendrickson, Chris Gately & Holly Mockovak (Mugar Memorial Library)
Organizing Committee
Victor Coelho (Boston University), James MacKay (Loyola University, New Orleans) Michael Ruhling (Rochester Institute of Technology) & Laurel Zeiss (Baylor University)
Program Committee
Ashley Greathouse (University of South Carolina), Alexander Ludwig (Berklee College of Music), Rena Roussin (Western University)
***

ABSTRACTS

Friday Morning, 6 March

  • Yuhan Tian (Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing) Landon’s Salieri: Myth-Busting, Stereotype-Making, and the Narratives of Eighteenth-Century Music

This paper reconsiders H. C. Robbins Landon’s writings on Antonio Salieri, focusing on 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, Mozart: The Golden Years, and Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Volume II. It starts from a basic observation: Landon is widely credited with dismantling the story that Salieri poisoned Mozart, yet his books also helped to fix another vivid image of Salieri–as the “arch-intriguer” at the Viennese court. How can the same author both clear away one myth and reinforce another kind of stereotype?

The paper combines close reading with straightforward source criticism and recent work on biography and life-writing. The first section examines 1791, tracing how Landon brings together medical reports, contemporary letters, and contextual explanation to argue against the poisoning story and to place Salieri back among Mozart’s professional colleagues rather than as a melodramatic enemy. The second section turns to passages in The Golden Years and Haydn II where Landon quotes nineteenth-century witnesses such as Mary Novello or characterizes Salieri as an “intriguer.” Here the focus is on tone and framing: how anecdotes and strongly colored labels are introduced, and how little they are sometimes questioned in comparison with the detailed treatment of Mozart’s final illness. A final section sets Landon’s language alongside later scholarship on Salieri and on the Mozart-Salieri relationship more broadly. This comparison shows how some of Landon’s phrases and narrative habits have been taken over in both academic and popular accounts long after the poisoning story itself ceased to be credible.

Rather than judging Landon’s work as simply successful or flawed, the paper uses his case to reflect on the practice of “corrective” biography in eighteenth-century music studies today. It asks how far musicologists can move beyond familiar plots of genius, rivalry, and intrigue, and what is at stake when we try to rehabilitate a long-maligned figure without simply giving him a new, more acceptable story.

  • Kathryn Libin (Vassar College) Haydn and Prince Lobkowitz: An Addendum to Landon’s Chronicle and Works

In the first chapter of Landon’s Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Volume IV, “Vienna and its Musical Life in 1795,” he discusses Haydn’s heightened stature among the nobility who embraced the composer after his triumphs in London. He remarks in particular that “the concerts of the old Bohemian house of Lobkowitz were, as far as Haydn and Beethoven are concerned, among the most influential and important in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Viennese musical history.” Landon was one of the early post-war musicologists to realize that there was more than one Prince Lobkowitz in Haydn’s period, and to grasp the special significance for musical culture of the younger prince, Franz Joseph (1772-1816). However, as exhaustive as Landon’s knowledge of Central European sources was, it did not extend to the vast archives of the Lobkowicz family in northern Bohemia. Not easily accessible during the period of Landon’s research for the Chronicle and Works, the Lobkowicz archives have in recent years offered up a great deal of valuable information about the role of Haydn and his music in the Lobkowitz sphere that Landon would certainly have wished to include in his magnum opus.

An imagined addendum to the Chronicle and Works might include the following items from the Lobkowicz archives: a full copy of parts for Die Schöpfung produced by Wenzel Sukowaty in January 1799, records of rehearsals in the Lobkowitz palace that spring, and performances of the oratorio that summer on Lobkowitz estates in Bohemia–all before the work’s first publication; further, Sukowaty copies for the Italian version premiered chez Lobkowitz in 1801; similar performances of Die Jahreszeiten, and an unpublished, unknown quintet arrangement of it by Lobkowitz Kapellmeister Anton Wranitzky; a translation of the Schöpfunglibretto into Czech by a Lobkowitz secretary, performed in Bohemia and published in 1805; and various gifts and other solicitous gestures to Haydn noted in Lobkowitz account records.

  • Barbara Barry (University of London, School of Advanced Studies) 1791 Redux: Masonic Perspectives in The Magic FluteReconsidered

In his discussion of The Magic Flute in 1791: Mozart’s Last Year, H. C. Robbins Landon proposes that, within the work’s diversity of styles–high and low, popular and learned, which everyone could appreciate on different levels–the decision to include Masonic symbols was motivated by fear that Masonry was in “acute danger of extinction” (p. 132). Protecting Masonic values of truth, justice and humanity, he argues, was to hide them in plain sight, in an opera.

This paper explores several perspectives behind this contention. First, the political background: in Vienna, Emperor Joseph II’s liberalizing reform, the Edict of Toleration (1781), giving rights to Protestants and repealing some restrictions on Jews, was instituted to curb the power of the Catholic Church. The Church was antagonized both by the Emperor’s threat to its religious and ideological control and by the Masonic lodges, with their values of freedom, justice and equality. Not only a threat to religious control, the Lodges were seen as spreading revolutionary ideas under the guise of Masonic rites.

Masonic background: in 1764, the vehemently Catholic Empress Maria Theresa had banned Masonry in the Austrian States, driving it underground, so early audiences of the opera would certainly have identified her with the vengeful Queen of the Night. Despite repressive measures, Vienna’s Masonic Lodges between 1780-85 were led by the Enlightenment scholar Ignaz von Born. Mozart had written his cantata “Maurerfreude” for a festival in 1785 in honor of Born, the probable model for Sarastro. While Landon notes some of the more problematic aspects of Sarastro from contemporary viewpoints, such as keeping slaves, the opera–as entertainment and coding to the audience– forefronts stylistic and tessitura opposition between Sarastro and the Queen: Sarastro’s dignified simplicity as nature, reason and humanity against the Queen’s dramatic vengefulness and bravura coloratura.

Between these defined characterizations as framing opposition, the Masonic agenda plays out with Tamino through the trials of earth and air (incarcerated underground) and together with Pamina, the trials of fire and water. But as Mozart presents it to us, the Masonic agenda is not just about esoteric symbols but about the life process, and in particular, setbacks and despair. Both Pamina and Papageno attempt suicide, circumvented by the intervention of the three boys. From this wider human perspective, the Masonic agenda is not restricted to Sarastro and the priests, nor to Tamino and Pamina. In his last illness, Mozart held a large silver watch. When his sister-in-law Sophie asked why, he said: “I am waiting for Papageno to come on.”

Friday Afternoon, 6 March

  • Yishai Rubin (Indiana University, Bloomington) Johann Peter Salomon in Prussia, 1765-1780

Joseph Haydn’s remark from 1776 about the unpopularity of his music in Berlin seems to contradict the influential role that Johann Peter Salomon, a violinist and composer best known to posterity as a champion of Haydn’s music, played in Prussia’s musical scene at the time. Between 1765 and 1780, Salomon served as the music director for Prince Heinrich of Prussia. Unfortunately, little is known about Salomon’s activities during this period of his career because nearly all his compositions from that time have been lost and only a few of his performances are documented. However, newspapers and writings published by members of Berlin’s musical circles record that Salomon composed several theatrical works for Heinrich’s court in Rheinsberg and was renowned for his mastery of the solo violin music of J. S. Bach.

More evidence of Salomon’s activities in Prussia comes from letters he sent to his native city of Bonn during those years. These include correspondence with his relatives and with Andrea Lucchesi, the Kapellmeister of the Bonn court. Salomon’s letters reveal his active interest in circulating musical works and in the activities of musicians traveling between Bonn and Prussia. Among them was his sister Anna Jacobina, a gifted contralto and student of Johann van Beethoven. Thus, the Salomon family emerges as a significant channel of musical exchange between Bonn and Berlin. Moreover, the letters—particularly in their discussion of music by Johann Kirnberger–demonstrate Salomon’s facility in moving between the learned tendencies that pervaded Berlin’s musical culture and the more approachable style that was popular elsewhere. These sources display how divergent musical tastes affected the careers of prominent musicians like Salomon and shaped broader patterns of transmission and reception in central Europe during the late eighteenth century.

  • Roger Fisher (York University) Too Bad to be True? Reassessing the Haydn-Hyde Contract

In 1796 Joseph Haydn is alleged to have signed a five-year publishing contract with the London music seller Frederick Augustus Hyde. If genuine, this agreement would be among the earliest surviving composer-publisher contracts, offering rare insight into late eighteenth-century practices. Yet close examination of the document, now in the British Library, raises serious doubts about its authenticity.

This paper re-examines the Haydn-Hyde agreement within the wider context of Haydn’s publishing activity and contemporary legal practices. Its highly formalized structure contrasts sharply with the informal receipts and loosely worded agreements typical of the music trade at the time. Economic anomalies also emerge: the inflated prices for works far exceed comparable transactions and hint at later nineteenth-century precedents. Moreover, the contract contradicts Haydn’s well-documented practice of playing multiple London publishers against one another rather than binding himself exclusively to a single seller. A close analysis of the document’s language, stamps, and seals further undermines its credibility. The misuse of seals, the presence of revenue stamps from different periods, and the adoption of archaic diction and faulty German and Latin all point to fabrication.

Taken together, this evidence suggests that the Haydn-Hyde contract is a clever but flawed nineteenth-century forgery, one crafted with knowledge of the sources for Haydn’s life but rooted in legal forms ill-suited to music publishing at the time. Exposing the document as a pastiche clarifies the historical record and contributes to broader debates about Haydn’s interactions with music publishers.

  • Grace Eunhye Lee (Independent Scholar) Humor as Experiment: Reconsidering Haydn’s Piano Sonatas through Robbins Landon (Lecture-Recital)

This lecture-recital reexamines the piano sonatas of Joseph Haydn through the lens of humor as a form of compositional experiment, drawing on the influential scholarship of H. C. Robbins Landon. Haydn’s piano sonatas have often been perceived as less structurally rigorous than those of Mozart or Beethoven, sometimes characterized as episodic, improvisatory, or formally uneven. Such assessments, however, risk overlooking the deliberate experimental impulses that animate these works.

Landon challenged periodizations that marginalized Haydn’s earlier keyboard music, arguing instead for the originality and expressive boldness of the piano sonatas, particularly those associated with the Sturm und Drang aesthetic. He emphasized Haydn’s willingness to destabilize formal expectations through sudden harmonic shifts, asymmetrical phrase structures, unexpected pauses, and playful disruptions of cadential logic. These moments, often interpreted as signs of looseness or incompleteness, function instead as calculated acts of musical wit.

This lecture-recital proposes that humor in Haydn’s piano sonatas operates not as surface charm or comic ornament, but as an experimental strategy–one that tests the limits of Classical form while actively engaging the listener’s expectations. Through selected sonatas, the performance component highlights passages in which Haydn’s humor emerges through surprise, exaggeration, and intentional misdirection, inviting listeners to laugh with, rather than at, the composer.

Situating these works within Landon’s broader historiographical framework– including his critical editions, alternative sonata organization, and contextual writings in Haydn: Chronicle and Works–this lecture-recital demonstrates how Haydn’s humorous experimentation anticipates later developments in Beethoven’s keyboard style while maintaining a distinctly Haydnesque aesthetic.

Provisional Program

  • Joseph Haydn: Piano Sonata in B minor, Hob. XVI:32 (Landon No. 47)
  • Joseph Haydn: Piano Sonata in C minor, Hob. XVI:20 (Landon No. 33)
  • Joseph Haydn: Piano Sonata in E-flat major, Hob. XVI:49 (Landon No. 59)

(Program subject to change)

Saturday Morning, 7 March

  • Stefan Romanó (Independent Scholar) Haydn’s Creation Challenge: A New Hypothesis about the Genesis of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

This essay proposes a new answer to a question that has preoccupied musicology–what spurred Beethoven into creating his Ninth Symphony? It proposes that the Ninth was primarily Beethoven’s decision to take up the challenge that Haydn’s Creation oratorio had confronted him with since his youth. The first movement of the Ninth would be, like the Introduction of Haydn’s oratorio, a musical “Genesis”–the birth of the universe out of chaos. Unlike Haydn’s relatively simple genesis by God’s Fiat Lux, Beethoven’s is a long sonata form.

The essay begins by presenting “The Creation Challenge” that Beethoven held inside himself from his youth until his full creative maturity. Haydn’s oratorio was immensely popular during Beethoven’s time, far more popular than Beethoven’s own music. It represented the golden standard of musical perfection for Beethoven himself, who strove to equal it, but repeatedly felt that he had not yet jumped over the Creation hurdle. The essay presents three such episodes in Beethoven’s life, in 1801, 1808 and even 1812, when he had under his belt enough masterpieces to make him Haydn’s equal in the history of music.

Beethoven took up the challenge in the years 1816-18, when he began designing the first movement of his Ninth, as a musical Genesis. The essay defends this particular reading of that Allegro, very different from the regular ones, focused on suffering, like those of Richard Wagner and of our contemporary Lewis Lockwood. The author emphasizes that many scholars describe the movement’s introduction in terms suggesting musical (tonal) chaos and he quotes Bernard Fournier, who sees in it “a kind of creation of the world out of nothingness.” The essay finally reads the symphony in its entirety, underlying Haydn reminiscences in the other three movements, especially in the “Ode to Joy.”

 

  • Stephen Husarik (University of Arkansas, Fort Smith) Humor in Eighteenth-Century Dress: The Comic Form of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge

This paper reinterprets Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (Op. 133) as an “algorithmic fugue” whose apparent structural disorder is not merely chaotic, but the result of a systematic sequence of expressive disruptions applied to the subject itself. Rather than relying solely on traditional fugal devices such as inversion or augmentation, Beethoven introduces a distinctive set of late-style expressa–including the application of Unterbrechung (syncopated displacement) and the segmentation of the subject into Trillettos (paired, slurred pulses)–that probe and destabilize the integrity of the theme. These deformations act like the rotational “moves” of a Rubik’s Cube: allowable, rule-governed manipulations that temporarily scramble the surface identity of the fugal material while preserving its underlying structure. Drawing on manuscript sources and sketches, the paper demonstrates how Beethoven subjects the cantus firmus to a sustained process of expressive stress-testing, exploring the limits of recognizability through rhythmic, metric, and ornamental disruption to arrive at a comedic conclusion.

The work’s comedic arc emerges not from humor per se but from the dramatic tension between the subject under deformation and the subject in its pure state. In the closing measures Beethoven performs a remarkable act of restoration: the syncopation is removed, the slurred pulse-division is transformed into tied values and reassigned to the countersubject–prominently in the soprano voice–and the main theme reappears in unbroken legato long notes. This redistribution of expressive distortions constitutes the fugue’s “solution,” revealing a final harmonic and formal clarity analogous to the reordering of a solved cube. Far from being an academic exercise, Grosse Fuge emerges as a radical reimagining of fugal tradition, one in which expressive disorder and ultimate resolution are integrated into a single algorithmic logic. Beethoven thus challenges not only the aesthetic decorum of his time but anticipates the coming transformational logic of nineteenth-century composition.

 

  • Michael Goetjen (Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Cantata or Concert Aria: A Question of Genre in Haydn’s “Scena di Berenice”

Haydn’s “Berenice, che fai?” Hob. XXIVa:10, also known as the “Scena di Berenice,” raises some important questions about genre in operatic works intended for performance outside the theater, whether in a public concert or a private venue such as an accademia or a salon. While sometimes referred to as a concert aria or scene, “Berenice” has also been called a cantata, including in its earliest reception in London after its 1795 premiere. While the two genres are closely related in their origins in the salon, the concert aria/scene later ventured out of the salon into the concert hall, coinciding with the rise of the public concert as a major performance opportunity.

In particular it is the structure of the work that presents issues, as it alternates between recitative and arioso before culminating in a more formal aria. It shares this kind of structure with similarly genre-ambiguous works including Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, Hob. XXVIb: 2, Mozart’s concert scene “Ah, lo previdi!–Ah, t’invola–Deh, non varcar,” K. 272, and Beethoven’s “Ah, perfido!” Op. 65. While Arianna is typically termed a cantata and K. 272 a concert scene, Beethoven’s Op. 65 is in fact directly modeled in its structure on “Berenice.” In this paper, I will show that while the cantata and concert aria/scene are historically related and difficult to parse out, it is the concert aria’s freer and more unusual formal structures as well as a focus on vocality and virtuosity over dramaturgy that distinguish the genres. Using Mozart and Beethoven’s works to compare, I argue that “Berenice” is thus more properly termed a concert scene, despite the slippery nomenclature of its contemporary reception. Yet, interrogating this ambiguity illuminates the growing independence of the concert aria as a separate genre from either cantata or opera in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

 

  • Carol Padgham Albrecht (University of Idaho) Redrawing the Portrait of Theresia Saal

Theresia Saal (1782-1855) was acclaimed as Eve in the first public performances of Haydn’s Die Schöpfung in March of 1799 when the role‘s creator, Christine Gerhardi, could not perform in public after her marriage to Dr. Joseph von Frank. Saal’s success propelled her to a full-time contract as principal female singer with the imperial court’s German Opera Company from 1801 until her marriage in February 1805, and led to a portrait of her as Eve (1802) by Friedrich Heinrich Füger, director of Vienna’s Akademie der bildenden Künste. In his Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Landon presents contemporary reviews and diary entries complimenting Saal’s technique and artistry in Die Schöpfung and, in 1801, Die Jahreszeiten. But his overall depiction is less flattering, suggesting that her selection as Eve was based on popularity and good looks as much as talent.

This assessment draws largely from the diary of Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, whose sweetheart (later wife) Theresia Gassmann was deeply disappointed at being passed over for the coveted role of Eve in favor of the purportedly less qualified 17-year-old Saal. The Court Theater records, however, provide a more comprehensive picture of Theresia Saal’s career and artistic impact, beginning in 1793 as Elamir (Salieri, Axur), progressing to Cherubino (Die Hochzeit des Figaro) in 1798, continuing with Pamina (Die Zauberflöte), and ultimately appearing in the latest French rescue opera heroines, particularly as Constanze (Les Deux Journées, Die Tage der Gefahr). Thus, when she left the stage in February 1805 to marry Johann Gawet, co-owner of a successful Viennese fur business, she had sustained a 12-year career, progressing from Kinderrollen to prima donna, contributing substantially to an important phase of the Court’s German Opera Company’s development as a cultural institution.

Saturday Afternoon, 7 March

  • Michael Slattery (Northwestern University) “Heil, O Sonne, Heil!”: The Meanings of the Do-Re-Mi in Haydn’s Oratorio Sunrises

Work on phrase-level schemata, introduced to music theory by Leonard Meyer (1989) and developed by Robert Gjerdingen (2007), has emphasized the syntactic dimensions of brief musical patterns. However, because schemata are enculturated cognitive structures, they are also cultural and therefore semantic. While previous work has explored schematic meaning in conjunction with topics (Byros 2014; Caplin 2014; Sánchez-Kisielewska 2016), I argue for more capacious meaning for schemata by considering them as sites for embodied metaphors (Brower 2000; Larson 2012), gestures (Cumming 2000, Hatten 2004), and deviations. Taking the Do-Re-Mi (Gjerdingen 2007) as a case study, I analyze Haydn’s construction of schematic meaning in The Creation and The Seasons, which both deploy the Do-Re-Mi for sunrise passages. The schema’s upward motion renders it as a sign for ascent and the cultural associations of ascent, including sunrise, growth, and the sublime.

I view schematic meanings in terms of cultural units, understood in cultural anthropology and semiotics as semantic entities defined through and against their positions to other units (Schneider 1968; Eco 1976; Byros 2025). This involves conceptualizing “ascent” and “sunrise” not as physical phenomena but as culturally grounded. Accordingly, I view Haydn’s sunrises in light of eighteenth-century cultural units, linking scholarship on the sublime (Webster 1997; Kramer 2009) and what Elaine Sisman has called the composer’s “solar poetics” (2013) with the Do-Re-Mi as a specific structure. For example, “Dann bricht der große Morgen an” in The Seasons adds anacruses to the Do-Re-Mi to imbue it with agential energy, signifying a vigorous gesture that accords with the triumphant eschatology of the text. Other sunrise subschemata bring out different cultural resonances. Accordingly, my analyses both reinvigorate how we hear sunrises in Haydn and demonstrate how phrase-level schemata can be linked to semantic meaning.

 

  • Roman Ivanovitch (Indiana University, Bloomington) A Matter of Trust: The Finale of Symphony No. 90 in C major and Haydn’s Recomposed Recapitulations

The finale of Haydn’s Symphony No. 90 in C major poses an extraordinary question: how do you trust a composer who cannot be believed? In one of Haydn’s most famous jokes, the movement’s recapitulation ends “too soon,” unfurling the “mission accomplished” banners about 50 measures earlier than expected by skipping to the exposition’s closing material only eight or so measures into the recapitulation, tacking on an emphatic fanfare – then following up with a “breathtakingly long GP” (Haimo). Audiences often applaud, even when the second-half repeat is taken. Clearly, despite the absurd proportions, the local signs for closure induce a Pavlovian response that overpowers any supposed sense of large-scale formal balance. But the more interesting issue is not how listeners are fooled, but what kind of listening occurs afterwards. How does Haydn get away with it? How can he persuade us to accept a recapitulation that closes after only 26 measures – and then persuade us of the plausibility, if not the necessity, of the remainder of the piece (another 70 measures)? Are we so easily fobbed off?

In this paper I use the radical finale to open a window onto the evergreen topic of Haydn’s “recomposed recapitulations.” Recent scholarship has cautioned us against reading these recapitulations as “quirky” or “inventive” deviations from established norms, suggesting rather that Haydn is simply playing by a different set of rules (for instance, a ritornello principle [Neuwirth] or an adjusted sonata principle based on the preservation of initiating thematic functions [Riley]). But in Symphony No. 90, the effect depends on the perception of an infraction: this is what makes the joke work. And in forcing the analyst to contend with the possibility that cherished large-scale formal shapes and principles do not hold the keys to sense-making, it reveals an uncomfortable truth.

Biographies of Participants

Carol Padgham Albrecht is Professor Emerita at the University of ldaho, where she taught music history and oboe for 31 years. Her research focuses on Viennese opera singers in the time of Haydn and early Beethoven, with an interest in exploring the factors that shaped individual women’s career development during this period.

Barbara Barry is the author of numerous wide-ranging studies focusing on the music of Mahler, Schubert, Beethoven, and Adorno. Most recently, she is one of the contributors to the Festschrift in honor of Lewis Lockwood’s 90th birthday, The New Beethoven: Evolution, Analysis, Interpretation ed. Jeremy Yudkin.

Paul Corneilson is managing editor for the Packard Humanities Institute whose publications include Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works and Johann Christian Bach: Operas and Dramatic Works. He served as president of MSA from 2015 to 2019.

Grace Eunhye Lee holds a DMA and MM from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and a performance diploma from SMU. She is a prizewinner of several international competitions, including the American Protégé International Music Talent Competition, the International Music Competition Premio Città di Padova, and the US Virtuoso International Competition.

Roger S. Fisher is a Barrister and Solicitor and Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. His research explores the intersections of law, culture, and the arts, with a particular focus on music copyright in the late eighteenth century. He is presently finalizing a monograph titled Improvising the Law of Copyright: Haydn and the London Music Sellers.

Michael Goetjen, a harpsichordist, organist, and musicologist, focuses on 18th-century opera and Mozart, particularly the concert aria. He teaches at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and holds a PhD in Musicology from Rutgers University.

Stephen Husarik is Professor of Humanities and Music History at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. He has delivered papers on Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge at conferences from Belgrade to Beijing and recently chaired a Beethoven session at the Minneapolis American Musicological Society meeting.

Roman lvanovitch is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Indiana University. His research appears in The Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, and Music Theory Spectrum. His 2012 article “Mozart’s Art of Retransition” won the Emerson award from the Mozart Society of America.

Kathryn L. Libin is Mary Conover Mellon Professor of Music at Vassar College. Her most recent monograph, Beethoven’s Backer – Prince Lobkowitz and Musical Culture, will appear with Cambridge UP.

Stefan Romanó is an independent Beethoven scholar and has published on the Fifth Symphony and is the author of two books: Beethoven at 250: Man and Music Under Siege (Reflection Books, 2021), and Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved. The True Story, According to the Evidence (Dorrance, 2024).

Yishai Rubin is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Indiana University Bloomington. His dissertation focuses on musical interactions between Jewish communities and their surroundings in the northern Rhinelands during the late 18th century. 

Michael Slattery is a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. His current project analyzes the Do-Re-Mi in Haydn, Beethoven, and Bruckner, positing the ascent of this schema as linked to sunrise, the divine, and the sublime. 

Kenneth Slowik is Artistic Director of the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society, a curator of musical instruments at the National Museum of American History, and Artistic Director of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute. In 2025 he received Early Music America’s Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement.

Yuhan Tian is a graduate student in the Department of Musicology at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China. Her research focuses on 18th- and 19-century opera, with particular interests in Viennese repertories, and the career and reception of Antonio Salieri.

Jessica Waldoff, Carol and Park B. Smith Professor of Music at the The College of Holy Cross, is a specialist on 18th-century music, the author of Recognition in Mozart’s Operas (OUP, 2006) a contributor to many volumes devoted to Haydn and Mozart studies, and the editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the Magic Flute.

Robert Winter  is best known for his work on Beethoven’s sketches, the history of the fortepiano, and Schubert’s music and chronology. Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and UCLA’s two highest awards for teaching and scholarship, over three decades he has pioneered in the use of new media for teaching, research, and public engagement.

Christoph Wolff is Adams University Professor, Emeritus, at Harvard University where he taught from 1976 until his retirement in 2012. His published writings and editions cover many areas of music history, notably on Bach and Mozart– including a book on Mozart’s Requiem (1994) and on Mozart at the Gateway to His Fortune: Serving the Emperor, 1788-1791 (2012).  

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