* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Download Danuta Mirka (University of Southampton)
Survey
Document related concepts
Riverside Shakespeare Company wikipedia , lookup
The Wars of the Roses (adaptation) wikipedia , lookup
Spelling of Shakespeare's name wikipedia , lookup
William Shakespeare wikipedia , lookup
Royal Shakespeare Company wikipedia , lookup
Shakespeare in the Park festivals wikipedia , lookup
History of the Shakespeare authorship question wikipedia , lookup
Ständchen, D 889 (Schubert) wikipedia , lookup
Anonymous (film) wikipedia , lookup
Ireland Shakespeare forgeries wikipedia , lookup
Colorado Shakespeare Festival wikipedia , lookup
Transcript
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.