J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

is an almost perfect instrument for exploiting the resources of that language.’ 56 Rosen
has a very ‘strong’ conception of the nature and limitations of a given musical
language; for him the Classical style was not infinitely flexible, infinitely capacious; it
‘exacted a price for each expansion of the language.’ 57
Arguing vehemently against precisely this approach is James Webster’s book
Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ symphony and idea of Classical style: through-composition and
cyclic integration in his instrumental music. 58 The book is built around a deep and
thorough analysis of the ‘Farewell’ symphony intended to support his contention that
‘there has never been a more stunning triumph of long-range musical planning’; in
other words, he is prepared to accept it as ‘great work’ without qualification, without
Rosen’s relativising category as a ‘transitional’ work. 59 According to Webster, ‘all of
Haydn’s music, including that from his earliest years, is masterly, and completely
adequate to its purposes both generically and aesthetically’. 60
For Rosen there was a point, in the early 1780s, when Haydn’s musical style
began to cohere in a new and extraordinarily powerful way; a cohesion and power that
alone merits the designation ‘Classical’. 61 For Webster, questions of chronology are
quite distinct from questions of musical value; Haydn wrote exciting and challenging
music throughout his career. To be sure, his style certainly evolved and changed, but
there was no magical point de perfection at which it was raised to the nth power. It is
clear that Rosen’s enjoyment of Haydn’s earlier works is inhibited by what he sees as
their provisional nature. Is there, correspondingly, something that Rosen can hear in
56 Ibid., p.147.
57 Ibid., p.350.
58 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
59 Rosen had indeed criticised elements of this particular symphony when outlining the limitations he
saw in Haydn’s ‘Sturm und Drang’ style: Classical style, p.147. Nevertheless his response to
Webster (‘Music à la mode’, New York Review of Books 41/12 (1994), 55) is exceptionally generous
and irenic, qualities not always conspicuous in Webster’s writing.
60 Webster, Farewell symphony, p.10.
61 While his book Sonata forms is impressively eclectic, drawing especially upon Italian operatic
models that are still not well enough known, he confines his discussion of The Classical style almost
exclusively to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, genuinely regarding them as its only authentic
representatives.
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