Hearing the symphonies and concertos of Haydn and Mozart with an ear tuned to operatic style, as their earliest listeners did, this book shows that this familiar music is built on a set of mimetic associations drawn from conventional modes of depicting character and emotion in opera buffa.
"This book is rich, beautifully written, and comprehensive. It is both an expression of Wendy Allanbrook's lifework and a position statement on the meaning, importance, and proper approach to the music of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Kudos to Mary Ann Smart and Richard Taruskin for helping this book see the light of day."
Mary Hunter, author of The Culture of Opera Buffa in Mozart's Vienna
"The Secular Commedia is a formidably informed pledge to the teeming surface of Classic music, to ethos as action, to mimesis as mainspring, and to the vernacular glories of the Western comic spirit. Ringing changes on centuries of cultural history, Allanbrook sounds the full resonant plenitude of her argument."
Scott Burnham, author of Mozart's Grace
"The Secular Commedia offers a game-changing account of later eighteenth-century instrumental music. Focusing on topics-musical gestures packed with historical and stylistic meaning-Wye Jamison Allanbrook opens up entirely new perspectives on musical variation, performance, notions of voice and embodiment, and more. Her discussion of eighteenth-century aesthetics and pedagogy, as well as their classical antecedents, is equally original and provocative. This book has the potential to shift the very foundations of scholarship on Haydn and Mozart."
Richard Will, author of The Characteristic Symphony in the Age of Haydn and Beethoven
"Consistently accessible, quick-witted and amusing . . . One must be grateful to Smart and Taruskin for asserting the virtues of scholarly community by taking up Wendy Allanbrook’s unfinished opus and delivering it to the world."
