Haydn Among the Radicals

This paper presents a new account of the reception of Joseph Haydn’s music in 1790s London.

Haydn’s visits to London have long been presented within a complacent narrative of English liberty: according to this version of events, Haydn was liberated from the Esterházy court, embraced by London’s fashionable society and rewarded with unprecedented commercial success. In contrast to this well-worn story, this paper recovers an alternative history, one that extends beyond the aristocratic denizens of the West End and into networks of political radicalism and religious dissent, focusing on figures such as the philosophical anarchist and novelist William Godwin and the playwright and committed radical Thomas Holcroft. In Political Justice (1793) Godwin notoriously banished concerts from his utopia of reason, but his diary suggests a more complex and conflicted attitude towards contemporary music culture, while Holcroft wrote a poem in praise of Haydn’s ability to convey ‘fitness, system, sense, and truth’ at a moment of counter-revolutionary terror. This paper attempts to reconstruct this scene of reception and asks what Haydn’s music meant to radical writers in 1790s London.

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