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With this work Daniel Heartz completes the trilogy of studies begun with Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740-1780 (New York: Norton, 1995) and continued in Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720-1780 (New York: Norton, 2003). Written on the same epic scale as its predecessors, it absorbs the reader in a plenitude of circumstances, connections and observations concerning its subject matter. Yet for all the book's comprehensive coverage and the formidable knowledge base that supports this, learning is worn lightly. This is a gentle epic, informal in tone.
What underpins this quality is the author's characteristic discursive mode. He prefers to avoid large claims and grand effects, instead working in a cumulative fashion to chronicle two illustrious decades in Viennese musical history. Yet the history is not as thick as it was in The Galant Style, which was based on a series of disparate geographical and cultural centres. And that study's basic term of reference (the galant as a cultural phenomenon) was constantly being invoked and examined anew. In the current case, Daniel Heartz is on much more familiar ground and is dealing with a more circumscribed repertory. This may explain why he forgoes any comparable attempts to expand on the larger significance of the music. Critical touches abound when individual cases are discussed, yet the book does not readily offer criticism on a wider canvas. Perhaps there is an assumption that the value and special attributes of this music can be taken as read. The absence of a central organizing concept (quite reasonably, the tainted 'classical' makes very few appearances) may issue from a desire to demystify this canonic repertory, to locate its 'truth' in a mass of particulars. On the other hand, this approach might still be thought to collude with a historiographical tradition in which 'absolute' and transcendent values reign supreme.
That said, the command of particulars provides a constant source of fascination, and often revelation, to the reader. Heartz clearly has an extremely retentive mind and is able to make all sorts of connections that would escape most of us, for instance tracing the career paths of some of the best singers and players of the age and noting how they...