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date: 23 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

To the multiple audiences for whom Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries composed—patrons, publishers, players, and an expanding universe of listeners at different levels of knowledge—symphonies were the ubiquitous markers of public musical life in the later eighteenth century, opening and sometimes closing concerts and theatrical events. To heighten their appeal and intelligibility, classical composers found topics for their symphonies in the expressive worlds of opera and theater, as well as in the realms of human activity in nature, at court, or (less often) in the church. In so doing, they heightened their listeners’ range of musical experiences and the possibility of shared interpretations. Rereading contemporaneous opinion to find surprising topical correlations, this chapter develops an understanding of symphonic topics that draws both on referential musical styles and on the textures and colors of the orchestra itself.

Keywords: topic, symphony, concert, musical life, multiple audiences, public, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven

Elaine Sisman

Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, the Cambridge Handbook Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she has published numerous essays on music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that interweave history, biography, aesthetics, and analysis. She has been awarded the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for best article by a younger scholar, serves on the boards of international Haydn and Mozart societies as well as The Musical Quarterly and The Journal of Musicology, and completed a term as president of the American Musicological Society, which elected her to Honorary Membership in 2011.

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