edited by Federico Gon, Turnhout Brepols, 2021 (Speculum Musicae, 42), pp. xiv+366, ISBN 978-2-503-59488-0.
This volume focuses on one of the most crucial parts of Haydn’s career—a key era in which the experiments of the 1770s arrived at the consolidation and definition of new compositional forms and practices in the 1780s.
The ‘mature’ Haydn represents a musician marked by full creative ferment in all musical genres and reveals the profile of a composer at the peak of his career. Through new research, this book examines the views of Haydn’s compositional practice as both self-aware and as adaptations based on the public’s changing tastes.
Such was an achievement that Haydn obtained without betraying the principles of balance, solidity and expressiveness that he developed during decades of musical practice at the Esterházy court.
Federico Gon, a musicologist and composer, obtained his doctorate at the University of Padua. His monograph «Scolaro sembra dell’Haydn»: l’influenza di Haydn su Rossini (Fondazione Rossini) was published in 2014. A member of the scholarly committee of the Italian National Edition of Commedie per musica by Domenico Cimarosa, he was also a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna from 2016 to 2019. He currently teaches at the University of Udine and at the Conservatorio di Musica ‘Luca Marenzio’ in Brescia.
