‘Haydn … is never going to wind up on the cover of any book about philosophy. And no one ever called Beethoven a “clever orator”’, notes Mark Evan Bonds in his contribution to this collection of essays on Haydn and his musical rhetoric (127–128). True, old stereotypes die hard, but if the Haydn experts featured in this book have anything to do with it, both of Bonds's assertions might be productively revisited in the near future. ‘Rhetoric’ in Haydn's music, these scholars argue, needs to be understood in terms that are interdisciplinary, intertextual and multivalent. Thus the work of Haydn as ‘clever orator’ can encompass the expression of concepts such as fantasy, suppressed desire and the grotesque. As one might expect, the eleven essays that make up this volume deal with metaphors of language and discourse as they relate to music. Yet the terms in which metaphors such as oration and conversation are understood and applied are far from simplistic.

Perhaps the most imaginative essay in the collection, though something of a primus inter pares in this respect, is Elisabeth Le Guin's opening piece, ‘A Visit to the Salon de Parnasse’. This essay en forme d'une conversation places our twenty-first-century subject in the salon of Madame Suzanne Necker, in the august company of Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Staël, together with the Viennese commentators Johann Pezzl, Caroline Pichler and the Freiherr Adolph Knigge. In these enviable circumstances, Le Guin can discuss the very notion of a ‘rhetoric of conversation’ and can consider how this might apply to a test case: Haydn's Trio in A flat major, hXV:14. While the reader might find it disconcerting to encounter familiar terms from such works as Rousseau's Essai sur l'origine des langues in the course of this conversation, the quotations are so expertly combined that one finds oneself excusing Rousseau and others in the way that one excuses intelligent friends who tend to make the same (invaluable) points each time a given issue is discussed. Indeed, this kind of literary ‘dialogue’ with the book is exactly what the editors intend to provoke. Our engagement with the written text is greatly enhanced by the addition of a DVD, with which one can, for example, listen to the Trio in A flat major, hXV:14, while ‘reading over the shoulder’ (viewing an early edition) of one or other of the players. On the DVD one can hear alternative versions of a given passage, view relevant pictures while listening and following the score, read relevant quotations and visit a related website. The volume is multivalent indeed.

Following on from Le Guin's essay the book is divided into two parts. The ‘Backgrounds’ of Part I encompass discussions of ancient performing and rhetorical theories (by Sander M. Goldberg and Timothy Erwin respectively), various musical and educational cultures with which Haydn was associated (James Van Horn Melton) and listening cultures for Haydn's and Beethoven's music c 1800 (Bonds). The ‘Foregrounds’ of Part II take us up close and – in Marshall Brown's case – personal with new interpretative approaches to Haydn's works: Tom Beghin focuses on the keyboard sonatas, László Somfai and Elaine Sisman on the string quartets, Brown on songs and James Webster and Annette Richards on a variety of (mostly) chamber works. The editors make no apology for the emphasis on a fairly small range of repertory: rather, this ‘initial focus’ is seen as a positive aspect that clarifies the issue of ‘who speaks’ and ‘who is spoken to’ in eighteenth-century musical cultures, and it facilitates applications of rhetorical theory to music in general (5–6). Thus the book provides a framework for further discussion and scholarly enquiry.

Perhaps the most provocative of the ‘Backgrounds’ is Bonds's ‘Rhetoric versus Truth: Listening to Haydn in the Age of Beethoven’. Central to his argument is a close reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann's review of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, in which Hoffmann sets up a clearly hierarchical comparison between Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Ingeniously, Bonds turns our attention from Hoffmann's colourful nouns to his verbs, noting that in the case of Beethoven the agency for the musical experience is transferred from composer to listener, who ‘opens up to us’ the realm of the monstrous and immeasurable. This is not the case with Haydn or Mozart, who merely ‘lead us into’ their music (123). I found, however, that Bonds's final analysis of the Hoffmann text falls short of discussing what could be the main point. Beethoven's music, for Hoffmann, has a different kind of rhetorical force, which is something like the Longinian sublime whereby the reader or listener is so overcome as to believe that he or she is actually composing or creating the text. Thus although some commentators of the time may have appreciated Beethoven's music as a means by which the listener could access higher realms of truth (to a greater extent than Haydn's music, for example), such a state of affairs does not preclude the understanding of this music as rhetorical. To this end, it would have seemed appropriate for Bonds to have included some discussion of the relationship between ideas of rhetoric and the sublime in the early nineteenth century. The general tendency of nineteenth-century writers to associate Haydn with rhetoric and Beethoven with philosophy also warrants further attention here. In his 1818 Lectures, for example, the English scholar William Crotch still saw fit to give some quite detailed explanations of works like Haydn's symphonies, in which he found expression of the sublime as well as the ornamental/picturesque and the beautiful.

Sisman brings together rhetoric and truth in her chapter ‘Rhetorical Truth in Haydn's Chamber Music’, arguing that intertextuality is a key to understanding a final and crucial layer of ‘tertiary rhetoric’ in Haydn's music. Sisman's essay models her opening call for scholars of rhetoric to ‘check their defensive and embattled tone at the door’ (281). Somfai, too, wants to move the reader away from more traditional applications of rhetorical theory to music. In fact, all parts of the ‘Foregrounds’ section contain fresh insights on how we might interpret Haydn as an orator in his chamber music, and the authors waste no time in making a special plea as to why we should do so. However, before we can arrive at a better understanding of Haydn's music as a form of rhetorical expression, thus fulfilling the aim of the book, greater emphasis needs to be placed on the vital role that performance plays in this process. Following on from this line of reasoning, Beghin's ‘“Delivery, Delivery, Delivery!” Crowning the Rhetorical Process of Haydn's Keyboard Sonatas’ engages in a dialogue with Goldberg's ‘Performing Theory: Variations on a Theme by Quintilian’ in Part I. Together, these two essays form the backbone of the book's ‘case for performance’. The DVD becomes a particularly vital aid here: it is most enlightening for the reader to follow the score for Beghin's performance of the Keyboard Sonata in G major hXVI:40 while observing an eighteenth-century figure moving through various poses that are well suited to the music's fluctuating affect. Perhaps this kind of visual analysis could also assist with our understanding of the rhetoric of the grotesque in Haydn's chamber music. As Richards tantalizingly observes in her article on Haydn's ‘London’ Trios, ‘visual factors are important elements in a performance, and those who reject this kind of display risk distorting the meaning of even their own compositions’ (278).

In the Introduction to this volume, the editors exclaim: ‘There are silences between chapters still waiting to be filled. Let the conversation begin!’ (13). Some particularly pregnant pauses occur between the chapter by Beghin and those by Webster and Brown. Webster discusses three types of improvisation in Haydn's music and dwells on the least familiar, which he terms ‘improvisatory rhetoric’. Examples of this kind of rhetoric occur in passages that ‘although … not actually improvised, … refer to the idea of improvising’ (207). What would Beghin say to this? For his part, Beghin goes to some lengths to show that several passages in improvisatory style can be interpreted as guides to the performer, indicating the kind of improvisation that could be applied upon repetition. Certainly, Webster discusses ‘improvisatory style as such’, referring to Eingänge (written-out cadenzas) and so forth, but are his passages that invoke the rhetoric of improvisation ever to be read as more connotative than denotative?

A related issue arises in connection with Brown's essay ‘The Poetry of Haydn's Songs: Sexuality, Repetition, Whimsy’. Here, as in many of these chapters, the central thesis is ingenious: Haydn's songs ‘employ a rhetoric of suggestion, not (or not primarily) a rhetoric of declaration or persuasion’ (238). I do take exception, though, to the final word here, since I agree with writers elsewhere in this volume that in this context it is best to understand rhetoric in broad terms, as a means to an end – the end in this case being persuasion itself. Thus as far as these songs are concerned, one would argue that their mode of rhetoric (and hence their persuasion) is all the more powerful owing to their covert nature. What seems missing in Brown's essay is a little more discussion of the ways in which a performance might change the subtle meanings of these songs. In the case of ‘Zufriedenheit’, hXXVIa:20, for instance, one might ask: ‘when is a rocket (an upward improvisatory gesture in the keyboard) not a rocket?’ If the performer varies this gesture with each strophe (as can be heard on the DVD), does the music then have the same function of discovering ‘passion where the poet has seemingly put only piety’ (243)? Furthermore, can we not understand Haydn's complex musical signs as being double-edged in terms of meaning? In ‘Trost unglücklicher Liebe’, hXXVIa:9, for instance, which Brown reads as covertly expressive of suppressed sexual desire, why not argue that the composer in fact retains the ambivalence of the reference to death? The tension between lyrics and music that Brown observes can then be understood as a productive one – the listener is led to ponder, to question. Surely this is what we would hope from a composer who, as Brown agrees, can craft a ‘philosophical argument’ (238)?

As I write, I imagine that I can hear these scholars starting to answer my questions: ‘Yes, but don't you see that …’, ‘To be sure, I didn't mean to imply that …’. Other scholars and students will no doubt want to enter the debate. This is a book that has opened up the discussion of Haydn and rhetoric so widely – but never too widely, thanks to considered argumentation and careful analysis – that the conversation simply must continue.