Elaine Sisman
Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University Past President of the American Musicological Society
"Under Construction: Process, Product, and the Opus-Concept"
This paper considers the opus-concept in the 18th century as more than an engaging engine of creativity and commerce. Rather, the multi-work opus enabled composers to think in two directions: toward the "collected work as achievement," exemplifying a process of labor, and toward the "multiple work as rhetorical field," reflecting and promoting a process of communication.
Moreover, because an opus was, in the words of Johann Heinrich Zedler (1740), "that which either has been constructed and finished or else is still to be constructed and yet to be finished," a multi-work opus, even more than a single work, is a kind of construction that says "assembly required." The vast majority of them contained six, or a multiple or factor of six, individual works; as Curtius put it, "Numbering, counting, enumerating are means of intellectual orientation," and twenty-four, twelve, six, and three had quite venerable meanings. Indeed, six, the first perfect number and the days of Creation culminating with man, clearly also refers to labor, to work, to the pale human echo of the divine task. J. S. Bach, having self-published his partitas one at a time starting in 1726, brought out the entire "work" in 1731 as his Opus I, having announced in advance, in fact, that he was waiting until the "work was complete." The grouping of works into sixes in Haydn's Entwurf-Katalog shows an orientation more intellectual than chronological, while the construction of op. 76 thematizes mental processes and the act of creation itself in the second half of the split opus (published as op. 75 and 76). As a habitual structure of thought and practice, the multi-work opus formed one of the means through which 18th-century musical compositions found and communicated with their audiences, thus complicating the production-reception binary and expanding the field of the production of meaning in instrumental music.
Elaine Sisman is the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, where she has taught since 1982. The author of Haydn and the Classical Variation, Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony, and editor of Haydn and His World, she specializes in music, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn’s theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart’s music, and Brahms’s slow movements. Her most recent publications, after the monograph-length article on “variations” in New Grove 2, concern biography (Haydn and his multiple audiences), chronology (Mozart’s “Haydn” quartets), history (marriage in Don Giovanni), and Enlightenment aesthetics (Haydn’s Creation) and she is at work on studies of music and melancholy and Haydn’s reform opera.
Sisman studied piano at the Juilliard pre-college division and with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University, received her doctorate in music history at Princeton University, and has taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the Alfred Einstein Award of the American Musicological Society for best article by a younger scholar. She serves on the board of directors of the Joseph Haydn-Institut in Cologne, the Akademie für Mozartforschung in Salzburg, and the American Brahms Society. She recently completed a term as president of the American Musicological Society (2005-2006).
