Federico Gon: Forced to the original: Studies on Joseph Haydn

The person and works of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) enjoy unbroken fame in concert halls and universities today, his music is present on billboards all over the world, while the historical and aesthetic significance of his work has only been researched since the middle of the last century - with a culpable delay compared to the other two stars of Viennese Classicism, Mozart and Beethoven - especially in German and Anglo-Saxon circles.But if there is one country which, alongside Austria and England, has the closest connection to Haydn, it is Italy: From his studies with Porpora to his acquaintance with Metastasio, his relationships with Italian instrumentalists (especially Luigi Tomasini, who was his concertmaster for more than thirty years) and his more intimate relationship with the singer Luigia Polzelli (with whom he most likely had an illegitimate son), not to mention the esteem in the Italian musical institutions of the time (he became a member of the Philharmonic Academy of Modena in 1780, and the King of Naples - for whom he wrote five concertos for the "organized lyre", an instrument favoured by the ruler - would have liked to have him as maestro di cappella when the decades-long relationship with the Esterházys came to an end) or the influence he exerted on new generations of opera composers (e.g. Rossini). Rossini, for example). The present volume focuses not only on the relationship between Haydn and the Belpasers, but also deals with some of the events in which the above-mentioned names appeared as protagonists, and attempts (while avoiding erudition and prolixity) to explore some aspects of Haydn's life, production, poetics and aesthetics that remain exceptionally unexplored or insufficiently clarified.