New Haydn Choral Music Site

My good friend Don Oglesby  visited Birmingham over the Christmas break and told me about this new site on the Masses of Joseph Haydn.

 

It is a promotional website about a new book described this way by the authors::

In the first comprehensive study in almost three-quarters of a century of all Joseph Haydn’s Masses, two distinguished Haydn scholars bring to these masterworks the light of a treasury of recently discovered documents and new editions.

The powerful and elegant Austrian Masses of Franz Joseph Haydn are examined with thorough precision and dedication by Don V Moses and Robert W. Demaree, lifelong Haydn performers and scholars.

It has been almost seventy years since the last such study of these masterpieces, and a flood of long-hidden scores and documents uncovered over that time span (especially from the Esterházy princely archives and sources from behind the former Iron Curtain). The Masses of Joseph Haydn builds on foundations laid in the twentieth century by the research of Brand, Larsen, Landon, Feder, Schenbeck, and others.

These exciting recoveries have prompted a Haydn renaissance in Europe and America, one in which the trite, misleading image of Haydn as simple, rustic “Papa” has been replaced by a genuine one: he is now recognized as the shrewd and innovative founder of the Viennese Classical style, the mentor of Mozart, the principal influence on Beethoven, and the master of the choral/orchestral Mass setting.

The Masses of Joseph Haydn examines chronologically the history, sources, character, style, and performance choices within each of the Haydn Masses in careful detail. All this is set in a framework of Haydn’s involvement with church music over his whole life span, and, in the context of his childhood as a singer, his career as Kapellmeister to the Princes Esterházy, and his international prestige at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Check it out!