In the 1770s and 1780s his works were published (and pirated) widely across Europe. In the 1790s London welcomed him with a virtual multi-year festival of his music, and in the early 1800s his oratorios cemented his place as one of the most internationally respected composers of his time. It is, in fact, a truism that Haydn was a celebrity, his image and music recognized in London and on the Continent,Footnote 1 as recent scholarship has emphasized as part of efforts to redress the comparative indifference that the composer has suffered in the popular imagination since his late eighteenth-century heyday.Footnote 2 But in uncovering and highlighting evidence of Haydn's broad reputation, we have not fully investigated the ways in which the composer's peers both depended upon and contributed to this fame. As Mark Evan Bonds has justly asserted, Mozart used Haydn's name as ‘an asset in the marketplace’ by dedicating his ‘Op. 10’ quartets (k387, 421, 428, 458, 464, 465) to the composer.Footnote 3 In fact, more than forty composers dedicated works to Haydn (see Table 1), effectively elevating him to the status of a pseudo patron of the arts. This body of works is a historical anomaly, for no other composer in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries received nearly as many dedications, or from such an international group.Footnote 4 These offerings, then, as well as the complex of exchanges and symbolism behind them, provide new evidence regarding both the extent of Haydn's fame and the mechanisms of its creation. Much in the way that Tia DeNora has examined the context for Beethoven's reputation,Footnote 5 I consider the construction of Haydn's celebrity, relying chiefly on a class of undervalued evidence: the dedications for a group of chiefly forgotten works.
Before the late eighteenth century most dedications were directed to those who supported composers monetarily, and the title-pages of published editions boasted the names of such dedicatees in large ornate script, usually followed by lengthy metaphorical and rhetorically arcane dedicatory epistles.Footnote 6 As the patronage system began to give way in the later eighteenth century to a more capitalist economy, and composers gradually sought financial support from the growing publishing industry, the practice of dedication, interestingly, did not subside; composers and publishers honoured new sorts of individuals in this prominent position on the title-page, occasionally celebrating them with simplified epistles. Authors, friends, family and fellow composers soon found themselves recognized here, and, as a result, took on some of the same roles as the patron: by virtue of a series of operations discussed below, their names lent legitimacy to the works to which they were attached. Haydn was one such figure.
A complete catalogue of the works dedicated to Haydn is provided in Table 1, some entries of which were first introduced to the scholarly world by Horst Walter's exhaustive work on string quartets dedicated to the composer;Footnote 7 others are from Elssler's catalogue of Haydn's library, compiled in 1804–1805.Footnote 8 By contrast with many dedications to patrons, there is little evidence that Haydn knew of these dedications in advance of their public offering, with the possible exception of those from students, as discussed below.
Table 1 Works dedicated to Joseph Haydn
1 Interestingly, Tomeš's sonatas were published, in a transcription for piano and violin, as Haydn's Op. 94 by Falter in Munich in 1799.
2 This book was dedicated by Dalberg as the translator of the German edition, though the original text was written by Jones with the title On the Musical Modes of the Hindus (London, 1799).
3 The opening contains a poem by Reicha, ‘À Joseph Haydn’, and the third fugue is labelled ‘Thème de J. Haydn’.
HBV Haydn Bibliothek Verzeichnis: Elssler's Catalogue of Haydn's Library (1804–1805), as transcribed in Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, volume 5, 299–329
HW Horst Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, in Joseph Haydn: Tradition und Rezeption (Regensburg: Bosse, 1985), 17–53
LPF The London Pianoforte School 1766–1860, volume 10, ed. Nicholas Temperley (New York: Garland, 1984)
FRTC Cecil Hill, Ferdinand Ries: A Thematic Catalogue (Armidale, N. S. W.: University of New England, 1977)
AMZ Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung 6, 9 November 1803, 88
R Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester (information courtesy of Mathew Colbert)
W Worldcat/OCLC database, accessed 10 August 2009
* dedications recorded only in HBV. These works were either presentation copies (published without the dedication but presented to the dedicatee privately with a handwritten dedication in a personal copy) or were never published at all (as in the case of Albrechtsberger's canon)
** students of Haydn
bold works with epistles, discussed below and contained in Appendix
Two observations about this corpus readily present themselves: first, the preponderance of string quartets. While it may seem curious that there are no dedications representing Haydn's popular large-scale genres – the symphony and oratorio – the explanation is straightforward if one considers the practices of print culture in the late eighteenth century, when chamber music was published far more commonly than orchestral works. Particularly in Vienna, orchestral music typically circulated in manuscript, not in mass-produced engraved editions. As a consequence, if a composer wanted to dedicate a work to Haydn, it is likely that the genres available to him for publication would use smaller-scale instrumentation. The preference for the string quartet in particular speaks to the composer's reputation in this genre; his peers chose to honour and emulate him in the format that both they and their audience would most readily have associated with him.
Secondly, it is clear from Table 1 that many of these individuals had studied with Haydn to a greater or lesser extent. Some, like Pleyel and Hänsel, had extensive lessons, while others, like Barthelemon or Bertini, probably received only a small amount of instruction. Regardless of the amount of valuable time that their authors spent with the older composer, editions of the dedicated works by Pleyel, Struck, Hänsel, Neukomm and Kalkbrenner mention explicitly on their title-pages that each was an ‘élève de Haydn’. (In fact, this epigraph recalls the legend regarding Haydn's expectation for such a statement to accompany Beethoven's dedication.Footnote 9) Haydn may not have been surprised to receive offerings from these individuals, as the practice of dedicating works to teachers was well established; it was one of the oldest reasons for the composer-to-composer dedication. One earlier such example is Jean-Marie Leclair's Op. 7 set of violin concertos (1737), for his teacher André Chéron, while the title-page of Monteverdi's first book of madrigals (1587), though lacking a dedication, designates the composer as the student of Marc'Antonio Ingegneri. Some of Haydn's students, in fact, similarly honoured him by stating the pedagogical relationship on the title-page, without furnishing a dedication (see Table 2).Footnote 10
Table 2 Title-page references to studies with Haydn
1 Published similarly by Boyer (1785), Sieber (1788) and Naderman (1796)
2 Published similarly by Sieber (1788) and Naderman (1796)
As it stands, however, the fourteen students in Table 1 are far outnumbered by thirty-five non-students. The contexts for Haydn's relationships with these composers vary: Albrechtsberger is certainly the closest friend in this set, having known the composer from the 1750s until their time together in Vienna in the 1790s and early nineteenth century. Meanwhile, Benincori, Eberl, Eybler, Gyrowetz, Kreutzer, Leidesdorf, Mederitsch-Gallus, Niemetschek, Radicati, Reicha, Ries, the Rombergs, Stadler and Wölfl would have met Haydn while passing through or residing in Vienna, and Brandl and Tomasini would have known him at Eszterháza. Latrobe, famous in Haydn scholarship as the German translator of Burney's poem, became his acquaintance in London,Footnote 11 as did Hummel and Cramer. He knew a Mayer family in London, but it is not clear if this particular J. B. Mayer is of that lineage.Footnote 12 Haydn knew Dussek through Dussek's father, and Wikmanson through Silverstolpe, whose brother Gustaf Abraham had been the young Swede's teacher.Footnote 13 Barth corresponded with Haydn at the time of his dedication.Footnote 14 We cannot be completely certain whether he knew Dalberg, Zulehner (a printer in Mainz) or Kreutzer, but we do know that he heard Kreutzer's dedicated quartets.Footnote 15 Finally, there is little or no evidence to date that Haydn knew the Jadins, Kospoth or Schultesius.
Personal reasons do explain the dedications from some individuals in Table 1: Albrechtsberger's offering is indeed quite intimate, constituting an unpublished canon given on the occasion of Haydn's birthday; Eybler may have been thanking Haydn for his advocacy on the younger composer's behalf, including his recommendation of a set of Eybler's piano sonatas to the publisher Artaria in 1787.Footnote 16 Similarly, Stadler's dedicated presentation copy of his arrangement of Haydn's ‘Hin ist alle meine Kraft’ may have been sent as a sign of gratitude for the elder composer's aid in publishing the piece.Footnote 17
A TYPOLOGY OF EXCHANGE AND ITS HISTORICAL BASIS
Regardless of Haydn's personal or professional relationship with any of these composers and the possibility of private meanings behind their dedicating works to him, his name would have served a multitude of purposes when placed on the title-page for all potential consumers to see: as a sign of respect and admiration, as an acknowledgement of the composer's support for and influence over the dedicator's compositional process, or as an open claim to a personal connection with the composer.Footnote 18 In fact, all of these can overlap, forming a larger series of roles that is at once sincere and self-serving, private and public. Ultimately, however, as published on the title-page, the dedication operates in the public eye and in that respect has mainly a promotional function. More specifically, here the dedication governs a series of reciprocations of material and symbolic capital, affording Haydn and his dedicators varied opportunities to improve their reputations (see Figure 1). The top tier of Figure 1 is more easily mapped onto economic measures: pedagogy and musical works have a fairly quantifiable monetary value, while items in the medial category – gratitude, flattery and approval – are exchanged verbally between dedicator and dedicatee. Finally, symbolic capital, a Bourdieuian term that I will examine more closely below, trades in credibility and reputation. This rubric applies not only to the set of dedications to Haydn, but also to dedications historically.
The various tiers of this kind of exchange are laid bare most clearly in dedicatory epistles, which have recorded the public face of dedications since the sixteenth century. Six examples were offered to Haydn, five of which are reproduced in Appendix I. Such letters are, however, not the only evidence for dedicatory exchange. An epistle explicates the dedication, but it does not constitute the dedication itself, which is, in essence, an act. In fact, through the eighteenth century, dedicatory epistles were published with decreasing frequency, and were nearly a rarity in this era, making these open letters to Haydn the largest corpus directed to a single individual.Footnote 19 Those dedications without epistles still carry all of the meaning of their epistolary counterparts. My analysis, then, uses the epistles to Haydn to demonstrate the kinds of promotional exchanges inherent in all of the dedications listed in Table 1.
Figure 1 Exchange of capital between Haydn and his dedicators, as observed by the consumer
The practice of dedication was born of the patronage system, and has always involved exchanges beneficial to both parties. As illustrated in Figure 1, dedicator and patron earn symbolic capital by way of the material or the quantifiable. Typically, the composer offers the music, recruits the performers and takes part in the performance of the work in return for financial support and access to facilities and resources from the patron.Footnote 20 Many studies have detailed the nature of other sorts of concrete dealings between particular composers and their sponsors:Footnote 21 Tim Carter, for instance, in arguing for the importance of ‘lower-ranking individuals and institutions’ in sixteenth-century music-making, has revealed that the Corsi family in sixteenth-century Florence engaged painters for their decorative furniture and composers for their entertainment and musical enrichment, and gave them loans, meals, clothes and even doctors' expenses in addition to their artist fees.Footnote 22 As Rob Wegman has also noted, patrons offered composers court positions, lodging, payment and general hospitality either before or after the receipt of a work.Footnote 23 Furthermore, Stephen Rose has presented evidence that, particularly in seventeenth-century central Germany, composers often furnished patrons with unsolicited copies of works in the hope of securing future contracts, and sent sacred music to city councils, aiming to elicit performances at local churches.Footnote 24
Subsequently, even as patronage waned in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers continued to earn benefits from moneyed individuals and institutions. Haydn himself received various commissions throughout his life, including those from Count D'Ogny and Le Concert de la Loge Olympique in 1785 for the six ‘Paris’ Symphonies, from King Ferdinand of Naples in 1786–1788 for works involving the regent's unusual lira organizzata and from Cádiz in 1786 for the Seven Last Words. In fact, several of Haydn's exchanges with patrons involved more than money and music: the King of Prussia gave him a ring in recognition of copies of symphonies that the composer had given the monarch; in turn, Haydn dedicated to him the string quartets Op. 50 in 1787.Footnote 25 In 1784 Prince Heinrich of Prussia had received Op. 33 from the composer and in return sent a gold medal and a portrait of himself – a self-interested present, to be sure.Footnote 26 Haydn also dispatched the score of his opera L'isola disabitata to the King of Spain in 1779 and received in exchange a gold snuff-box.Footnote 27
In the context of patronage, such reciprocal exchange of tangible or quantifiable goods transforms into symbolic capital by virtue of its public nature. The process of this transformation is best explained by way of theories of gift exchange, as dedications are a kind of gift; that is, the music is the gifted object offered from composer to patron, and the dedication is the act of presentation.Footnote 28 Jacques Derrida in particular recognized that, in the popular imagination, gifts are signs of pure generosity, meaning that they must not involve reciprocation; their presentation must be altrustic and voluntary. In practice, however, Derrida notes, once we recognize the given object as a gift, then all sorts of feelings come into play, such as guilt on the part of the receiver, or altruistic feelings on the part of the giver, and these feelings constitute the beginning of a symbolic reciprocation, seemingly annulling the voluntary nature of the gift and reining it into a circular economy.Footnote 29 Pierre Bourdieu names this the ‘dual truth’ of the gift: it is imagined as unrequited but functions within a context of exchange.Footnote 30 Derrida's analysis acknowledges that gifts require reciprocation, but that it is exactly this reciprocation that invalidates them as ‘selfless’ acts, thereby turning on its head the notion that gift economy is fundamentally different in nature from consumer economy.
In the context of dedications, what we can take from Derrida is the idea that the crucial moment in the act of giving lies in its public reception; it is there that its true economy is revealed. In short, gift exchange, particularly the type relevant here, involves not two parties but three: giver, receiver and observer. When gifts are offered, they are not only received by a recipient, but also perceived by an audience. It is therefore the statement of offering itself, as a public display in front of an audience, that transforms the tangible into the symbolic and makes the dedication an instrument of promotion. Furthermore, as a result of the proliferation of publishing houses and increased ease of printing, statements of dedication wielded increasing symbolic power through the eighteenth century as mass-produced music reached larger groups of consumers.
DEDICATORY EXCHANGE IN PRACTICE
In the first tier of Figure 1, a dedicator presents works to Haydn in return for teaching, an interchange that may seem relevant only to composer-dedicatees, as fellow artists are the only individuals who can offer legitimate tutelage; however, early dedicatory epistles presaged this sort of function in passages wherein composers praised a patron's taste or virtue, thereby implying a kind of instructive influence over the creative process, as demonstrated by Wolfgang Leiner and others.Footnote 31 The historical evidence, then, for this category of exchange lies in examples such as Perissone Cambio's epistle of 1545 for a set of five-voice madrigals addressed to Godardo Ochagna, which stresses the patron's good character and generosity:
My most honorable lord, your virtue, kindness, and courtesy, having obliged me as much as anyone else who considers and experiences them, I cannot but wish ever to find a way whereby I might somehow show you some sign of the love that I bear for you, thanks to your divine qualities.Footnote 32
Marc'Antonio Ingegneri dedicated his first book of madrigals (1758) to Giocomo Gadio, similarly celebrating the patron's ‘excellent qualities’:
And so I wanted to dedicate to you these first fruits, such as they are, of my musical exercises done in your house, and owed to you, whom I wish to and should hold always in the greatest observance, as much for the special debt I owe as for the excellent qualities that make you illustrious and that make you be appreciated by all who know how precious a thing it is to find a rare virtue, doctrine and goodness joined together.Footnote 33
Immediately predating the dedications to Haydn, Pleyel offered his Op. 1 string quartets to Count Erdödy in 1783 and commended his patron's taste in a short but elaborate epistle:
Il nome, che ci metto innanzi, come di un vero conoscitore ed Amatore delle nobile musica arte, coprirà ogni difetto che vi potesse essere. Gli accolga sol tanto con benignità.Footnote 34
The name I affix to them, that of a true connoisseur and lover of the noble art of music, will hide all of the faults that they may have. May you receive them with only benign feelings.
By flattering their patrons' musical knowledge or general virtue, composers implied that they traded their works for an instrumental and affecting proximity with such favourable qualities.
Finally, Eybler (see Appendix) translates this tradition to the composer-to-composer dedication: in referring to Haydn as a ‘Mecenate’ – a word derived from Maecenas, the name of an ancient Roman patron whose name became synonymous with this sort of sponsorship – Eybler, who was never his student officially, describes the ‘rare qualities’ and ‘unique kindness’ showed him by his dedicatee.Footnote 35 Of course, those in Table 1 and Table 2 who studied with Haydn (and claimed as much on their title-pages) demonstrate the most literal exchange of material capital. Furthermore, because the act of dedication has always implied a certain kind of tutelage, one could argue that the remaining dedications in Table 1 embodied echoes of this sort of exchange as well.
The second tier in Figure 1 also has its roots in older dedicatory practices. Historically an offering reflected favourably on its participants by suggesting that the two shared more than the title-page: in dedicating a work publicly to any figure, a composer implied to the audience that he or she had some sort of history with his or her recipient. Specifically, the act of dedication asserts that the dedicatee has sponsored the artist's endeavours, an assertion that is encoded in the stylized language of an accompanying epistle.Footnote 36 Among the most flattering early examples of this practice is Claudio Merulo's statement on offering his first book of madrigals (1566) to the Duke of Parma:
If by ancient law we are held always to offer to God the first fruits of the earth, by age-old and praiseworthy custom we are also obliged to give to great princes the first offspring of our creativity that we send forth into the light. But if anyone was ever bound by this honored custom, so much more am I constrained to present to your most illustrious Excellency these, my madrigals, set to music – the first offspring that I ever produced in the public theater of the world.Footnote 37
This grand metaphor implies that the Duke, like God, has at least partially enabled the creation of the ‘fruits’ of the author's labour. As is typical with such texts, Merulo does not spell out the ways in which the Duke made his writing possible; rather, the dedication merely hints at whatever formal agreement existed between the two parties, simultaneously disguising and highlighting particulars of this agreement through flowery wordplay.
In the traditional dedication, then, the composer is promoted by the mere suggestion of a relationship with a revered patron, demonstrated in the simplified epistles of the eighteenth century by the language of approval. Early examples include Jean-Jacques-Baptiste Anet's dedication of his first book of continuo sonatas for violin (1724), in which he claims outright to have been given the approval of the Comte D'Eu:
Je suis redevable à Votre Altesse Serenissime de l'approbation qu'elle a bien voulu donner jusqu'à present à mes compositions, et du plaisir qu'elle a temoigné prendre à les entendre éxécuter.Footnote 38
I am indebted to Your Serene Highness for the approval that you have been kind enough to give to my compositions up to the present, and for the pleasure that you seemed to take in listening to them.
With the same vocabulary, Jean Barrière offered his second book of continuo sonatas for cello to one Madame Jourdain in 1733, boasting that the patron had already praised his past work:
L'approbation, dont vous avez honoré mes premiers ouvrages, m'engage aujourd'huy à vous dedier celuy ci, si je suis assez heureux, Madame, qu'il soit de vôtre goût, je me flatte, qu'il sera bientôt de celuy du public.Footnote 39
The approval with which you honoured my first works obliges me to dedicate this one to you today. Madame, I hope that it is to your taste, and I flatter myself to think that it will soon be to that of the public.
Such language is intended to demonstrate to the consumer the existence of a prior relationship between dedicator and dedicatee; the two parties, after all, must have been in some sort of contact in order for the epistle to boast that the patron had expressed approval.
If the act of dedication is traditionally used to substantiate a patron's endorsement, it carries heightened significance when applied to Haydn later in the century. Instead of suggesting that the works appealed to some sort of cultured official, the dedications in Table 1 advance the notion that the music to which they are attached suits the taste of a known composer. Further, several of the epistles accompanying these dedications make this implication literal. Mozart, for instance, claims that:
Tu stesso Amico carissimo, nell'ultimo tuo Soggiorno in questa Capitale, me ne dimostrasti la tua soddisfazione. – Questo tuo suffragio mi anima sopra tutto, perchè Io te li raccommandi, e mi fa sperare, che non ti sembreranno del tutto indegni del tuo favore.Footnote 40
During your most recent sojourn in this capital you yourself, my very dear friend, demonstrated to me your satisfaction with [these quartets]. – This approval of yours above all encourages me to commend them to you, and makes me hope that they will not seem entirely unworthy of your favour.
As James Webster and Mark Evan Bonds have both noted, the language of Mozart's epistle is overwrought;Footnote 41 this passage is no exception, stressing Haydn's ‘approval’ with two synonyms: satisfaction (soddisfazione) and favour (favore). In a similarly flattering letter, Eybler professes that ‘the work which I present here and with all my heart dedicate to you is that same one of which you with so much kindness approved’ (see first dedication in Appendix below). And his advertisement in the Wiener Zeitung of 1794 suggests that Haydn's approval was in fact the reason behind the (consent for) dedication:
[Hr. Joseph Eybler] kann zu derselben [Quartetten] den Hrn. Musik-Liebhabern nichts vortheilhafteres sagen, als daß sie dem eben so berühmten als allgemein beliebten Kapellmeister Hrn. Joseph Haydn so zu gefallen das Glück hatten, daß er die gefällige Einwilligung gab, ihm dieses Werk zueignen zu dürfen, und noch ausdrücklich zusicherte, dessen Verbreitung bestmöglichst befördern zu wollen.Footnote 42
[Herr Eybler] can say nothing more favourable to recommend these [quartets] to amateurs than that they were so fortunate as to please Herr Joseph Haydn – the Kapellmeister who is as famous as he is universally beloved – so much that he kindly gave consent to allow the work to be dedicated to him, and even expressly pledged that he wanted to promote their distribution as much as possible.
In return for this approval, dedicators offered gratitude, as apparent in a sample of dedicatory epistles. Eybler claims:
The great name you have acquired throughout Europe with your unique works will quiet those who, purely out of envy, would try to discredit this work, and will make compassionate those who would argue with you. Both of these [effects of your name] will suffice to increase endlessly my obligations to you.Footnote 43
By way of this indirect and typically ornate dedicatory language, Eybler highlights ways in which he feels indebted to Haydn. With yet more veiled language, Mozart expresses the following:Footnote 44 ‘may it therefore please you to receive them benignly and be to them a father, guide, and friend!’ (‘Piacciati dunque accoglierli benignamente; ed esser loro Padre, Guida, ed Amico!’).Footnote 45 In politics, we often hear non-apology apologies – moments in which public figures admit to wrongdoing without showing exactly the empathy necessary to make their apologies sound sincere. These statements are, similarly, non-thank-you thank-yous – gesturing towards gratitude, but never quite making it there. ‘May it please you to do x’ is not the same as ‘thank you in advance for doing x’, but it is in the same direction, politely entreating the interlocutor to perform a certain action.
These epistles also record the kind of flattery – directed towards the dedicatee – implied by the dedicatory act. Mozart refers to Haydn as ‘very’ and ‘most’ celebrated, while Eybler flatters Haydn by comparison, claiming that ‘he who will compare [this work] to yours will see clearly that I am too little for you, and you are too great for me’. Eybler also wrote an advertisement for the quartets that appeared in the Wiener Zeitung in 1794, wherein he, like Mozart, complimented Haydn's reputation, referring to him, as we have seen, as ‘the Kapellmeister who is as famous as he is universally beloved’. Bernhard Romberg's flowery and, I dare say, sweet dedication consists entirely of flattery:
In presenting this work to the famous artist whose learned works are the admiration of Europe, it is a homage that I pay to his sublime talents. If the Orpheus of the Danube deigns to smile on my exertions and accept this feeble effort, it will be the sweetest satisfaction that my heart could enjoy.
Bernhard's cousin Andreas refers to Haydn as ‘immortal’, while a review of Andreas's set of quartets, in mentioning the dedication, names Haydn as the ‘greatest, most beloved musical genius of his time’ (‘grössten, geliebsten musik Genie seiner Zeit’).Footnote 46 Similarly, in the brief dedication of his biography of Mozart, Niemetschek describes Haydn as ‘the father of the noble art of music and the favourite of the Muses’ (‘dem Vater der edlern Tonkunst, dem Lieblinge der Grazien’) (see Figure 2). Drawing on epistolary language, many simpler statements of dedication emphasize that they are offered ‘to the celebrated’ Haydn, including works by Kreutzer, Mayer, Gyrowetz and several nineteenth-century Parisian editions of Beethoven's sonatas published by Fourmage, Richault, Farrenc and Launer.
Figure 2 Dedication page of Franz Xaver Niemetschek, Leben des K. K. Kapellmeisters Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart (Prague: Herrlische Buchhandlung, 1798). Reprinted by Université de Saint-Etienne, Centre interdisciplinaire d'études et de recherches sur l'expression contemporaine. Used by permission
THE ECONOMY OF SYMBOLIC CAPITAL
In order to understand the ways in which the dedications to Haydn affected the reputations of the parties involved, we have to understand them as public social acts. As discussed above, the dedicatory act is a type of gift-giving, and as such is neither selfless nor unidirectional; gifts always involve some sort of exchange, benefiting both giver and receiver. We have so far seen the ways in which approval, gratitude and flattery circulate as part of this reciprocation, but more abstract notions like improved recognition and credibility have a role to play as well. In fact, the third tier of Figure 1 is best understood under the heading of symbolic capital, as explained by Pierre Bourdieu, a particularly appropriate resource here as the bulk of his work concerns perception and exchange on the public stage:
[The gift economy] is organized with a view to the accumulation of symbolic capital (a capital of recognition, honor, nobility, etc.) that is brought about in particular through the transmutation of economic capital achieved through the alchemy of symbolic exchanges (exchanges of gifts, words, challenges and ripostes, women, etc.).Footnote 47
Bourdieu has written extensively about various other sorts of capital, mainly cultural and social, but notes that the symbolic variety is ‘the form that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate’.Footnote 48 Later he refines this definition, referring to symbolic capital as that which goes ‘unrecognized as capital and recognized as legitimate competence’Footnote 49 and operates as ‘the power granted to those who have obtained sufficient recognition to be in a position to impose recognition’.Footnote 50 We can thus understand symbolic capital as the form that cultural and social capital take when they are ‘transubstantiated’Footnote 51 into power and a belief, among one's peers, in one's skill and authority. For Bourdieu, then, symbolic capital trades fundamentally in recognition, and his framework, wherein both sides of an exchange accumulate this capital by way of a transformation of more material ‘economic’ resources through gift-giving, is useful in drawing out and uniting that which circulates under the radar in dedicatory acts, as well as in understanding the ways in which the dedicatory exchange results in the improved reputations of both sides.
Symbolic capital thus exists mainly in the mind of the observer, and manifests itself here in the third tier of Figure 1 as recognition, credibility and appeal – or ‘legitimate competence’, in Bourdieu's terms. The full transmutation from material to symbolic in this context can occur only by virtue of the spectator of the dedicatory exchange, a fact evident in Bourdieu's thinking above, where symbolic capital itself is a measure of recognition. The relevant observers here, those who bestow this recognition, are those who encounter the score and have the opportunity to view the dedication in its printed form; these observers are consumers. Of course, there is no archetypal ‘music consumer’; many sorts of people have historically had access to many types of music. Furthermore, Elaine Sisman's work on the ‘multiple audience’ suggests that Haydn himself was aware of the various consumers of his music.Footnote 52 And so, I mean ‘music consumer’ here in the broadest sense; just as we use the term ‘audience’ to refer to individuals who encounter music aurally, I use ‘consumer’ to refer to any individual who encounters the score as a material object, regardless of class or station.
Advertisements and reviews provide the first clue that dedications were a mechanism for earning public credibility. In his announcement for Mozart's quartets, published in the Wiener Zeitung in September 1785, for instance, Artaria suggests that the act of dedication should cement the legitimacy of the already esteemed composer:
Mozarts Werke bedürfen keines Lobes, einiges anzuführen würde also gänzlich überflüßig seyn; nur kann man versichern, daß solches ein Meisterstück sey. Man kann sich dessen um so mehr versichern, da der Verfasser dieses Werk seinem Freund, Joseph Haydn, fürstl. Esterhaz. Kapellm. zueignete, der es mit allem dem Beyfalle beehrte, dessen nur ein Mann von grossen Genie würdig ist.Footnote 53
Mozart's works call for no special praise, so that it should be quite superfluous to go into details; it need only be affirmed that here is a masterpiece. This may be taken as the more certain since the author has dedicated this work to his friend Joseph Haydn, Kapellmeister to Prince Esterházy, who has honoured it with all the approval of which a man of great genius is alone worthy.
Here, it is the dedication that ‘affirms’ the ‘certainty’ that the works are a ‘masterpiece’. The same is true in an anonymous review of Andreas Romberg's quartets in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of 1802:
Wenn ein wahrhaft grosse Künstler, der einen geläuterten Geschmack mit ungewöhnlichen Kentnissen vereinigt, versichert, dass er sich bey der Verfertigung eines Kunstwerks Mühe gegeben und möglichsten Fleiss angewandt habe; wenn dieser Künstler sein Werk noch überdies dadurch vorzüglich selbst zu schätzen scheint, dass er es dem grössten, geliebsten musik Genie seiner Zeit, einem Jos. Haydn, zueignet: so darf man auch von einem solchen Werk etwas Vorzügliches mit Recht erwarten.Footnote 54
When a truly great artist who combines refined taste with an extraordinary knowledge assures [us] that, in composing a work, he has taken great pains and devoted as much effort as possible; moreover, when this artist seems to esteem his work so highly that he dedicates it to the greatest, most beloved musical genius of his time, one Joseph Haydn, then one would rightly expect something excellent from such a work.
The dedication is a guarantee of ‘excellence’ in these examples – a guarantee directed at the reading public by reviewers and publishers.
Composers sought, too, to use their offerings to Haydn to improve their own reputations in the eyes of consumers. Those who wrote epistles not only stress Haydn's reputation in order to flatter him; in doing so, these composers also flatter themselves. By dedicating a work to someone that they present as so famous and celebrated, ‘the Orpheus of the Danube’, and by claiming that this ‘genius’ approved their works, these composers are suggesting that they are worthy of being associated with such a figure. Eybler explicitly states, in a passage discussed briefly above, the ways in which he believes this association to be beneficial:
The great name you have acquired throughout Europe with your unique works will quiet those who, purely out of envy, would try to discredit this work, and will make compassionate those who would argue with you.
As dedicatee, Haydn lends credibility and appeal to Eybler's quartets. In fact, his use of Italian for a dedication to a fellow Viennese composer, as well as the register of his language, suggests that he used Mozart's letter as a model, as Bonds has argued,Footnote 55 and that he may have wished to capitalize on Mozart's reputation as much as Haydn's. Johann Brandl (1799) goes one step further, subtly aligning himself with the legacies of both composers (see letter in Appendix below):
The unforgettable Mozart's six children, as he called his quartets, have already enjoyed your valuable protection in the musical world. Permit me as well to present to you these current six [quartets] of different parentage, and to recommend them to your benevolent indulgence.
In repeating metaphors of kinship, Brandl implies that, when compared to Mozart's quartets, his own works are equally deserving of praise and sponsorship.Footnote 56
When epistles were lacking, it was the act of dedication itself that caused such recognition to accrue; in these examples, the simple record of the offering on the title-page became a way of demonstrating to one's readership that one had a significant enough connection with Haydn as to be able to dedicate a work to him. DeNora has noted, for instance, that Beethoven's tutelage with, and unmarked dedication to, Haydn benefited the status of the younger composer.Footnote 57 Published in the same year as his dedication of Op. 2 to Haydn (1796), the following report on Beethoven's activities neglects to mention his musical offering but accurately summarizes its intended effect:
A living proof of [Beethoven's] true love of art lies in the fact that he has put himself in the hands of our immortal Haydn in order to be initiated into the holy secrets of the art of music. The latter great Master, during his absence, has turned him over to our great Albrechtsberger. What cannot be expected when such a great genius places himself under the guidance of such excellent masters!Footnote 58
Haydn's tutelage becomes the proof of Beethoven's competence and promise, and the dedication, as we have seen, is one public record of that tutelage. Five years later, Andreas Romberg wrote a letter to his publisher that discusses the impact of Haydn's influence in even starker terms:
Bernhard hat drei Quartetten an Haydn dediziert, die in diesen Tagen hier [in Paris] erscheinen werden. Auch ich will drei Quartette an Haydn dedizieren, und das sollen die Eurigen sein. Fanget den Stich nur gleich an und lasset bei der ersten Violine eine Seite frei für die Dedikation, die ich Euch schon zur rechten Zeit schicken werde. Diese Dedikation wird Euch gewiß nicht unlieb sein, da sie den Abgang der Werke ohne allen Zweifel befördert. Sagt nun einmal, ob wir das Publikum nicht kennen – oder vielmehr die Welt?Footnote 59
Bernhard has dedicated three quartets that are about to be published here [in Paris] to Haydn. I too want to dedicate three quartets to Haydn, and they should be yours [to publish]. Begin right away with the engraving, and leave a page free in the first violin part for the dedication, which I shall send you in due course. This dedication will surely not be unappreciated by you, as it will doubtless promote the sale of the works. Now tell me if we don't understand our public – or rather, the world!
Romberg views the dedication as the ultimate promotional tool and as evidence that he knows the ways of the marketplace. Like Beethoven and Romberg, many composers in Table 1 dedicated works to Haydn early in their publishing careers; nearly half of these works fall within the range of their composers' Op. 1 to Op. 5. Clearly many of these composers and their publishers believed that Haydn's name would advertise their works and further their burgeoning careers in a similar vein.
But Haydn's own reputation also stood to benefit from these dedications. If there were pockets of consumers not entirely familiar with his name or his music, these dedications would demonstrate the composer's prestige to this new audience in two ways: by designating him as dedicatee, and by marking him as Kapellmeister, as many title-pages did. As mentioned above, this is the largest group of dedications to any single composer in this period, and possibly in history. Just as dedications to patrons were meant in part to illustrate the degree of the patron's wealth and stature, these dedications to Haydn, partly in their epistolary content and partly in their sheer numbers, both reflected and advanced the composer's broad reputation, his status as a respected individual in ‘a position to impose recognition’, in the words of Bourdieu. In fact, there is evidence that Haydn offered his own gratitude in exchange for one dedication in particular: when Christina Wikmanson published her father's quartets posthumously, Haydn wrote to Silverstolpe: ‘I take the liberty of enclosing 10 fl. for the kind Mademoiselle [Wikmanson], and would ask you, my dear Herr von Silverstolpe, to send it to her as a small token of my gratitude for the Quartets she dedicated to me’.Footnote 60
Haydn was also probably aware that several of the dedicatory epistles as well as other undedicated works were marked as written by ‘students of Haydn’ (Table 2). As mentioned above, there is evidence, though second-hand via Ferdinand Ries, that Haydn had wanted Beethoven to place such a motto on his Op. 2 sonatas, and that he wanted to be remembered as Pleyel's teacher.Footnote 61 If this is true, it suggests that Haydn himself was aware of the effect of public acknowledgements of his teaching.
Finally, if dedications, as gifts, afford the recipient at least partial ownership of the offered object, then Haydn is a kind of steward of the works in Table 1. And Bourdieu notes that:
of all the conversion techniques designed to create and accumulate symbolic capital, the purchase of works of art, objectified evidence of ‘personal taste’, is the one which is closest to the most irreproachable and inimitable form of accumulation.Footnote 62
Though Haydn did not purchase this set of works, he nevertheless acquired them, much like a patron, publicly proving his sense of ‘personal taste’ and causing him to acquire the attendant symbolic capital.
When a consumer encountered title-pages for some of these works, such as those by Mozart, Beethoven or Ries, the adorned large script and central location of Haydn's name, along with the brief note of his official title as ‘maitre de Chapelle’, would verify his role as a pseudo-patron, as one who had both inspired and made possible the work at hand (see Figures 3–5). Tia DeNora has shown the concrete ways in which Haydn benefited from a cadre of students, with several of them, including Paul and Anton Wranitzky and Sigismund Neukomm, acting as his aides in various ventures. DeNora also argues that, as a student, Beethoven offered Haydn not assistance but rather access to aristocratic contacts as more nearly an equal.Footnote 63 Here I have focused on the ways in which dedications buttressed what we understand to be Haydn's already developing international fame beginning in the late 1780s, demonstrating that the composer had a viable reputation among his peers, and in the end causing him to gain what Bourdieu would term ‘the capital of recognition’ among consumers. Haydn was, of course, in no way directly responsible for the accumulation of this particular kind of capital; he could not control the source or timing of the dedications that came his way. But when these many composers chose to make their offerings, the effects were significant; encoded therein were the many types of exchange illustrated in Figure 1: pedagogy for works, flattery and gratitude for approval, and finally symbolic capital for symbolic capital. Forming a neglected body of evidence, these dedications not only helped increase Haydn's fame and influence at the turn of the century, but also gave dozens of composers and their publishers the opportunity to use that reputation to their own advantage in an increasingly competitive musical marketplace.
Figure 3 Title-page of first edition of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, String Quartets ‘Op. 10’ (k387, 421, 428, 458, 464, 465) (Vienna: Artaria, 1785). Reprinted in Gertraut Haberkamp, Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, volume 2 (Tutzing: Schneider, 1986). Used by permission
Figure 4 Title-page of first edition of Ludwig van Beethoven, Sonatas Op. 2 (Vienna: Artaria, 1796). Reprinted by Tecla Editions www.tecla.com. Used by permission
Figure 5 Title-page of first edition of Ferdinand Ries, Sonatas Op. 11 (Bonn: Simrock, 1808). Berlin Staatsbibliothek, Preuβischer Kulturbesitz: DMS 0.43261. Used by permission
APPENDIX: DEDICATORY EPISTLES
The following five dedicatory epistles appeared between the years 1794 and 1809. Mozart's, published in 1785, is not included here, as it has been translated many times.Footnote 64
Joseph Eybler, String Quartets Op. 1 (1794), dedicated to Joseph Haydn (Horst Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, 37–38; translated by Stefania Neonato and the author)
Johann Brandl, String Quartets Op. 17 (1799), dedicated to Joseph Haydn (Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, 37; translated by Catherine Mayes and the author)
Bernhard Romberg, String Quartets Op. 1 (1801), dedicated to Joseph Haydn (Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, 45; translated by the author)
Andreas Romberg, String Quartets Op. 2 (1802), dedicated to Joseph Haydn (Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, 44–45; translated by the author)
Angelo Benincori, String Quartets Op. 8 (1809), dedicated to Joseph Haydn (Walter, ‘Haydn gewidmete Streichquartette’, 36; translated by the author)
