Haydn's Sunrise, Beethoven's Shadow: Audiovisual Culture and the Emergence of Musical Romanticism [Hardback]

Interest in music’s materiality has brought attention to visual dimensions of musical performance and meaning. Deirdre Loughridge argues that listening to music was never confined to hearing, and that the marriage of visual and audio cultures has roots in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Drawing on technologies like magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays deployed in operas and popular performances during 1770-1810, Loughridge demonstrates how listeners’ practices and thoughts were shaped by these contraptions and instruments, and how this applied to the composition and reception of instrumental and orchestral music as well. The current proliferation of audiovisual aesthetics and formats, including in the realm of classical music,” can thus be seen be a return of early-Romantic audiovisual culture.

The years between roughly 1760 and 1810, a period stretching from the rise of Joseph Haydn’s career to the height of Ludwig van Beethoven’s, are often viewed as a golden age for musical culture, as audiences started to revel in the pure sounds of the concert hall. But the latter half of the eighteenth century also saw proliferating optical technologies—including magnifying instruments, magic lanterns, peepshows, and shadow-plays—that offered new performance tools and fostered musical innovation.Haydn’s Sunrise, Beethoven’s Shadow is a fascinating exploration of this early romantic blending of sight and sound as encountered in popular science, street entertainments, opera, and music criticism.

Deirdre Loughridge reveals that allusions in musical writings to optical technologies reflect their spread from fairgrounds and laboratories into public consciousness and a range of discourses, including that of music. She demonstrates how concrete points of intersection—composers’ treatments of telescopes and peepshows in opera, for instance, or a shadow-play performance of a ballad—could then fuel new modes of listening that aimed to extend the senses. An illuminating look at romantic musical practices and aesthetics, this book yields surprising relations between the past and present and offers insight into our own contemporary audiovisual culture.