The Virtual Haydn

Book excerpt: This is a highly original book about Haydn s keyboard music, about 18th-century keyboard practices and culture, and about performance. Written in the first person by the author, himself a professional keyboard player, the study places the performer, both historical and contemporary, at the center of the scholarly inquiry and explores in exquisite detail the process by which a modern performer arrives at a historically-informed interpretation of Haydn s sonatas. The veiled reference to Diderot s "Paradox of an Actor "in the title explicitly situates the study within the context of 18th-century debates on performancea crucial issue in the period, with the rapid expansion of music publishing, of concert culture, of amateur music making, especially among aristocratic women performers, and with rapid changes in the technology and the physical properties of the instruments themselves. The reference to Diderot also hints at the way in which Beghin s text itself performs in the manner of many 18th-century critical texts: like them, it has a tendency to be personal and idiosyncratic. Discussing a group of Viennese sonatas, for example, the author explores the contemporary fascination with physiognomy and goes on to try out facial gestures in his own performance of the music, which he documents in photographs reproduced in the book vis-a-vis Messerschmidt s grimacing busts of the same period. Introducing the female dedicatees and performers of sonatas written for both Vienna and London, he links rhetoric and gender showing how femininity was encoded into the music through rhetorical gestures comparable to those Haydn employed in letters to female friends and patrons. Using wit and imagination to illuminate and bridge the gulf between 18th-century and 21st-century concepts of performance, this book helps define a fresh approach to keyboard studies and performance studies today. "