Haydn’s aesthetics of sensibility : interpretations of sentimental figures, topics, mode, and affect in the string quartet slow movements

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2018-06-18

Authors

Boisjoli, Eloise Anne

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Abstract

Although Haydn’s string quartet slow movements rarely resemble the intensely personal and often dysphoric empfindsamer Stil, they nevertheless engage with the eighteenth-century Culture of Sensibility. In these movements, Haydn works to “touch the heart” of his listener, an important aesthetic goal of the Culture of Sensibility, by imitating the internal sensuous experience of sentiments in all their affective fields. He also frequently imports eighteenth-century opera styles that depict sentimental heroines. Furthermore, Haydn imitates the larger premises of the sentimental mode by using a rhetoric of feeling and an affect of refined sentiment.

Haydn’s Aesthetics of Sensibility: Interpretations of Sentimental Figures, Topics, Mode, and Affect turns much needed attention to Haydn’s string quartet slow movements, the movement within a quartet most associated with touching the heart—in Op. 20 through Op. 77. This dissertation draws upon eighteenth-century treatises and sentimental novels, as well as studies of the Culture of Sensibility, to explore what it means to create and sustain a sentiment in eighteenth-century instrumental music. I begin with the eighteenth-century idea of imitation of sentiments and the idea of the Sentimental Listener (Chapter 1). I bring two topics of sensibility to the topical universe (Chapter 2), as well as several sentimental figures and devices. I further offer expressive strategies of the sentimental mode (Chapter 3) and the affect of refined sentiment (Chapter 4), suggesting updates to the theory of musical topics.

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