Haydn, Laurence Sterne, and the Origins of Musical Irony

Bibliographic Data

ID5779533
AuthorsMark Evan Bonds (corresponding author)
Year1991
Volume44
Issue1
Pages57-91
Publication date1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Musicological Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0139 • E-ISSN: 1547-3848
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/831728
OpenAlexW1975012823
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited23

The repeated comparisons during Haydn's own lifetime between his music and the prose of the English novelist Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) point to qualities that go beyond essentially local devices generally described as "humorous" or "witty." Both Haydn and Sterne were acknowledged masters at fusing serious and comic elements in a single work, and both were strongly associated with the quality of Laune, by which the artist's disposition will inevitably be perceptible in his works. Like Sterne's prose, Haydn's music frequently calls attention to its own structural rhetoric. By openly subverting formal conventions of the day, Haydn drew attention to the craft of his art, thereby making the listener all the more aware of the very artificiality of that art, just as Sterne had consistently drawn his readers' attention toward the act of reading. The resulting subversion of aesthetic illusion led, in both instances, to a sense of ironic distance between the artist, his work, and his audience. And while techniques that fostered ironic distance had already enjoyed a long tradition in literature, they represented a new, and to many critics objectionable, aesthetic of music in the second half of the eighteenth century

Artificiality · Craft · Subversion · Musicology and Musical Analysis

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