Haydn [antikvár]

PREFACE This book represents the results of more than three decades of Haydn research. As curator of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna, which owns the extensive Haydn collections assembled by C. F. Pohl and E. Mandy-czewski, I was invited to contribute a book on the composer. It was published in 1932 to commemorate the bicentenary of Haydn's birth. My Haydn research continued in the following years, and in 1946, after I had moved to the United States, a more extensive work in English appeared. Its first part traced the life and the character of the composer; the second part was devoted to an analysis of his music. The vastness of Haydn's output made it seem advisable to emphasize the main lines of his artistic development and to deal in a more extensive manner only with the works from his period of maturity. Since the publication of that book, Haydn research has progiessed by leaps and bounds as though to make up for precious time lost in the nineteenth century. The vast Esterházy collection of Haydn documents and scores owned at present by the Hungarian National Library was opened up, and I was fortunate in being able to visit it in 1959- The publication of the Collected Edition of Haydn's works made good progress, and in addition a considerable amount of previously unprinted compositions was presented in separate editions. The first volume of a thematic catalogue of Haydn's works dealing with instiumental compositions, as well as several valuable monogiaphs con-