Download Danuta Mirka (University of Southampton)

Danuta Mirka (University of Southampton)
Absent Cadences
The slow movement of Symphony No. 64 in A major, ‘Tempora mutantur’, has long since
intrigued Haydn scholars due to its absent cadences and enigmatic form. The Latin title of the
symphony is thought to be derived from the epigram by John Owen, a near-contemporary of
Shakespeare, and it was used by Elaine Sisman to support her hypothesis that the slow
movement formed part of Haydn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The enigma
can be explained through an analysis informed by concepts of eighteenth-century music
theory. The absent cadences form instances of ellipsis, the rhetorical figure described by
Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and the form plays with a familiar
formal template exposed by Heinrich Christoph Koch. This analysis leads to a different
interpretation. Rather than the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the movement stages a
fictive composer in an act of musical comedy not dissimilar to that in Symphony No. 60 Il
Distratto. The title comes not from Owen but from a Latin adage incorporated by Owen in his
epigram. This adage had been popular in Germany since the Reformation and applied by one
eighteenth-century music theorist to changes of musical conventions.