CARYL CLARK AND SARAH DAY-O'CONNELL, EDS THE CAMBRIDGE HAYDN ENCYCLOPEDIA Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 pp. xxxviii + 486, isbn 978 1 107 12901 6

Abstract

This major book is a treasure trove, a cabinet of wonders. Yet how does one review a Haydn encyclopedia, a task tantamount to considering the immense entirety of knowledge about this composer? It is impossible, in this small space, to do it justice, or even to refer to all ninety entries written by the sixty-seven contributors. The encyclopedia is a distinctive literary genre. It enjoys neither a monograph’s authorial focus and control, nor the leisurely spaces to develop an argument afforded by an edited collection of essays. An encyclopedia is more like a labyrinth, and what it does offer is the pleasures of serendipity. Begin any entry in the Haydn Encyclopedia and, thanks to a dense network of cross-references, in small capitals, you can be whisked away to another topic entirely. Keeping your finger on the original page, you get enthralled by the new entry, forget your place, your finger slips, and up comes another rabbit hole, and away you go. Perhaps this is in tune with the desultory reading and performing practices of the late eighteenth century explored by Emily Green in a recent article (‘How to Read a Rondeau: On Pleasure, Analysis, and the Desultory in Amateur Performance Practice of the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society / (), –). Or, to switch analogies one more time, this could be compared to the distributed scholarship of digital media: this book is a Wiki-Haydn. That said, the editors, Caryl Clark and Sarah Day-O’Connell, look back to d’Alembert and Diderot’s famous example, as they explain in their helpful Preface. Given the remits of previous reference works – the Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn, edited by David Wyn Jones (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and Das Haydn-Lexikon, edited by Armin Raab, Christine Siegert and Wolfram Steinbeck (Regensburg: Laaber, ) – the editors took the decision to exclude entries on particular works, individual people and genres, focusing instead on clusters of ideas. Thus they followed d’Alembert’s injunction to create ‘an overview of learning’ rather than a lives of the saints or a chronology of battles (cited on xv). The book is organized alphabetically, and, in an inspired touch, short entries, ranging in length from two to five pages, are punctuated by seven much longer ‘conceptual essays’, like pillars in a temple, which both tie together a cluster of other entries and fly their own kites. So how does this scheme work in practice? Alas, it trips at the very first hurdle with Nancy November’s entry on AESTHETICS, which I pick out for purely alphabetical reasons. Its second sentence cross-refers you to LONDON NOTEBOOKS, an entry which doesn’t actually exist (there is an excellent entry, however, on LONDON AND ENGLAND, by Wiebke Thormählen). On the other hand, when November turns to ‘melodic invention’, which she holds to be at the root of Haydn’s aesthetic values, there is no cross-reference to Markus Neuwirth’s expert entry on MELODY. A little later, November mentions ‘lack of VOCAL training’ (). There is no entry on ‘VOCAL’, but there is on VOCAL COACHING AND REHEARSAL, by Erin Helyard. This is careless editing. Given the central importance of melody andmelodic pedagogy, why is there no entry on partimento? There are four references to partimento in the book (scattered between COMPOSTIONAL PROCESS, by Felix Diergarten, HARMONY, by Ludwig Holtmeier, PERFORMANCE, by Tom Beghin and rev i ews