With this work Daniel Heartz completes the trilogy of studies begun with Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School, 1740–1780 (New York: Norton, 1995) and continued in Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (New York: Norton, 2003). Written on the same epic scale as its predecessors, it absorbs the reader in a plenitude of circumstances, connections and observations concerning its subject matter. Yet for all the book's comprehensive coverage and the formidable knowledge base that supports this, learning is worn lightly. This is a gentle epic, informal in tone.
What underpins this quality is the author's characteristic discursive mode. He prefers to avoid large claims and grand effects, instead working in a cumulative fashion to chronicle two illustrious decades in Viennese musical history. Yet the history is not as thick as it was in The Galant Style, which was based on a series of disparate geographical and cultural centres. And that study's basic term of reference (the galant as a cultural phenomenon) was constantly being invoked and examined anew. In the current case, Daniel Heartz is on much more familiar ground and is dealing with a more circumscribed repertory. This may explain why he forgoes any comparable attempts to expand on the larger significance of the music. Critical touches abound when individual cases are discussed, yet the book does not readily offer criticism on a wider canvas. Perhaps there is an assumption that the value and special attributes of this music can be taken as read. The absence of a central organizing concept (quite reasonably, the tainted ‘classical’ makes very few appearances) may issue from a desire to demystify this canonic repertory, to locate its ‘truth’ in a mass of particulars. On the other hand, this approach might still be thought to collude with a historiographical tradition in which ‘absolute’ and transcendent values reign supreme.
That said, the command of particulars provides a constant source of fascination, and often revelation, to the reader. Heartz clearly has an extremely retentive mind and is able to make all sorts of connections that would escape most of us, for instance tracing the career paths of some of the best singers and players of the age and noting how they might be reunited at various times with our three composers, or discussing the roles they may have played in the transmission of pieces of music. The level of detail may sometimes be giddying, but Heartz has a knack of deploying it to humanize his subjects; one gains a vivid sense of how musicians interacted among themselves and with others as they sought to make a living in their chosen profession. This may even include competitive urges. Heartz suggests that Constanze's aria ‘Martern aller Arten’ in Die Entführung aus dem Serail – so lengthy and, above all in its immense orchestral introduction, dramaturgically problematic – took its inspiration from a big coloratura aria performed by the same singer, Caterina Cavalieri, in Ignaz Umlauf's Die Bergknappen. This is written in the same tempo, key and metre, and Mozart was clearly out to go one better (17–18). Another strong suit is the ability to put a fresh twist on documents from the time, many of these very familiar. This applies not just to matters of fact – for example, a letter by Clementi referring to the publication of Haydn's London symphonies in piano transcription, which Heartz convincingly redates from 1795 to 1798 (534–535) – but also to shades of opinion.
Relatively rarely the author pauses to offer a broader perspective, as when he deals with the dubious inference that the first production of Figaro was a relative failure: ‘One of the most pernicious myths promoted by twentieth-century musical modernism is that great composers were ever misunderstood and rebuffed by their contemporaries… . In truth, Mozart had many partisans who both understood and championed his music when it was new, in Vienna and elsewhere’ (152). Given the entrenched patterns of reception that have dogged this repertory for so long, and the authority that Heartz wields over his material, one would have welcomed more such bracing commentary. A comparable instance, thoughnow concerning style history rather than reception history, arrives when Heartz notes that ‘it is fashionable with most historians of the present day to see only the opera buffa antecedents of Haydn's achievement, and yet so much is lost by not taking into account the contributions of the seria style to forming the grand synthesis’ (532). This for once offers the sort of larger thesis that was the virtual premise of The Galant Style.
If the author has a retentive mind and is often able to make surprising and original connections within this fund of knowledge, he constantly shows that he also possesses a retentive ear. And, in similar vein, he proposes many linkages both within and between the outputs of our three canonical composers. If this is a hallowed activity, some of the suggestions are nevertheless intriguing, for example that the Storm Chorus in D minor that Haydn added for the 1784 revival of Il ritorno di Tobia may have influenced the way Mozart starts his D minor Concerto k466 (108), or that Gluck's ‘Che puro ciel’ from Orfeo ed Euridice may have been in Haydn's mind when he wrote the aria-like slow movement of his Quartet Op. 33 No. 5 (315). Heartz is often ready with circumstantial evidence to back up such suggestions – in the latter case he reminds us that Haydn had directed performances of the opera at Eszterháza just a few years before he wrote Op. 33. Other suggested resemblances may be more purely speculative, but still feel like they hit the mark: the strange harmony that Beethoven ‘muses upon’ at the start of his Sonata in E flat major Op. 31 No. 3, one that turns out to function as a 
, may have taken wing from the identical chord that we hear from bar 5 of Mozart's E flat Quartet k428 (77). Coming as it does after the contorted and harmonically ambiguous unison of the first four bars, the effect that Mozart achieves is at least as strange as in the famous Beethoven passage.
On the other hand, such discussions can suggest too credulous an ear, especially as they are often marked by an insufficient awareness – or at least acknowledgment – of formula. If this is a traditional weakness in musicological close readings, in Heartz's case his superabundant knowledge may have exacerbated the problem. He makes much, for example, of the resemblance of the opening of a piano trio in G minor (1788) by Leopold Kozeluch to materials from the second and third movements of Mozart's earlier Concerto k456. For him they must be purposive: perhaps Kozeluch heard dedicatee Theresa Paradis play k456, or both composers quote from an anterior source, or Kozeluch as a publisher of Mozart's works had got to know the concerto via that route (103). Yet the particular concatenations of triads and repeated notes in the respective passages do not seem so striking – especially when one bears in mind that minor-key music of the time tends to use a narrower range of gestures and patterns than one finds in major keys (quite the opposite of what is commonly thought). In discussing the opening of Beethoven's Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1 Heartz notes that the ‘initial move to the subdominant via its dominant was one of Haydn's favorites, used most surpassingly in his late Sonata for Therese Jansen in the same key’ (711), yet this is a schema used by all composers of the time; in his recent study Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) Robert O. Gjerdingen dubs it the ‘Quiescenza’ (see 181–195). Heartz is also alive to recurring shapes and gestures within the outputs of the individual composers, especially Mozart, and most of all when instrumental works are held to draw on the materials from the operas. Often enough these involve same- or similar-key resemblances, as in the case of passages in the Terzetto from Figaro and the first movement of the four-hand sonata k497, which are described as cousins (157). The ways in which composers deploy particular gestures in particular keys, often deriving from a mixture of shared and personal key associations, is a subject of some fascination, but the current comparison would rest on firmer ground had Heartz noted that both passages use a romanesca bass schema.
Yet Heartz's penchant for patterns also produces many gems. He seems to be the first writer to identify a Haydnesque fingerprint that involves the use of large downward leaps in a melodic line, often from upbeat to downbeat, and makes the imaginative suggestion that it reflects grotesque dance, as associated with the work of choreographer Gennaro Magri. Magri was working for the Kärtnertortheater at the very time that Haydn was writing his successful (but lost) Der neue krumme Teufel in 1759 (403). Heartz also makes many apposite references to sketches in the less expected cases of Mozart and Haydn, noting on both counts the efforts they took, often in the name of achieving a ‘natural’-sounding simplicity. In the case of the sketches for the trio in Symphony No. 86, he writes that ‘what sounds so folklike and frolicsome in Haydn's music sometimes took him a struggle to achieve, which he did in this case by refining and simplifying’ (366). Further, the sheer scale of the book means that Heartz has leisure to explore works and the critical issues they generate in considerable length and depth. A very generously proportioned account of Die Entführung sets the tone almost immediately; twenty pages devoted to The Seasons represents real de luxe treatment (the writer comments in an aside that ‘no music has elated me more in old age than The Seasons’ (644n)). Inevitably, perhaps, given the size of the operation, Heartz tends to fall back on a standard mode of discussing instrumental works in particular, where the first movement and particularly its opening material tends to receive the lion's share of the commentary and subsequent movements may be characterized in more summary fashion. And even given this generous scale there were obviously decisions to be made about coverage. The standard genres thus occupy centre stage, while occasional works may miss out. Haydn's Variations in F minor are called ‘sublime’ (397) but still do not elicit any close commentary. Mozart suffers more in this respect – not surprising, given the more scattered nature of his output. It is good to see many of the violin sonatas from the 1780s given sustained attention, but much of the solo keyboard output, including the variations and one-offs like the Rondo in A minor and the Adagio in B minor, does not figure.
In one respect such absences do serve one of the large-scale, if not quite declared, leitmotivs of the book: the unity of multi-movement instrumental works. Coherence between movements is normally sought in the traditional domain of pitch, principally with reference to thematic construction and harmonic colour, and the persuasiveness of the connections advanced by Heartz varies widely. Sometimes, as in the discussion of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 that concludes the book, one wants a distinction to be drawn between cells and motives. The incipits given in Example 7.20 on page 783 illustrate a generating shape that involves conjunct motion within the first five degrees of the D major scale. Yet pitch cells alone are unlikely to have any real generating force, to be salient in the minds of a majority of listeners, unless some sort of rhythmic identity is attached to them – in other words, unless they become motives. It is characteristic of Heartz's modus operandi that he broaches the larger issues raised by such claims for unity only on a modest scale. ‘Like Haydn, … Mozart avoided overtly obvious ways of making connections between movements. Their restraint in the matter deserves to be called classical as much as many other facets of their work. It is almost as if they wanted us to uncover for ourselves the subtle ways of tying cycles together and to take even greater pleasure in doing so’ (232). That may be largely the case, but perhaps there were more positive principles involved in such ‘restraint’ – variety as a sine qua non of a large-scale structure, on which scale thematic repetition could be regarded as a failure of discursive resource. And the author must well know that there are counterexamples in the composition of the time, with figures like Dittersdorf and especially Boccherini often keen to create explicit multi-movement cyclic forms.
Mention of such composers reminds one of a fundamental absence from the book, one encapsulated by its title: unlike the previous volume in Heartz's trilogy, and to a large extent the first volume as well, Mozart, Haydn and Early Beethoven adopts a narrow course in the music it discusses. While other composers active in the last two decades of the eighteenth century certainly play a part in the panorama, their music does not. Having done so much to flatten out the musical landscape of the eighteenth century in his previous instalment, the author now re-erects the towering peaks traditionally represented by the Viennese trio. With his encyclopedic knowledge and broad musical sympathies, Heartz would certainly be in a better position than most to integrate discussions of the music of such others, even if only those who were also active within the Viennese orbit. There may simply have been no room – with such additions, the whole account might have assumed truly unmanageable proportions.
As it stands, though, this book is formidable in itself, and takes its place within an even more monumental achievement. It can be read through as a large-scale chronicle of lives and works but will also reward browsing to see what the author makes of this or that favourite piece. If sometimes the commentary takes one aback – for example, the Andante of Haydn's last completed string quartet, Op. 77 No. 2, for many a surpassing achievement, is for Heartz a routine bit of writing (627), while he also dislikes the non-thematic virtuoso ‘noodling’ in Beethoven's keyboard works ‘when he could think of nothing better’ to do (688) – this is certainly part of the game in this sort of account. For all the restrictions of its discourse, many inherent in the genre of the large-scale survey, Haydn, Mozart and Early Beethoven is reliably astute and engaging.
