Introduction

Questions of canon lie behind much of the historical and musicological discussion analysed in the previous chapter; however, such questions are more consistently apparent in connection with music from Gluck onwards. In French musical life and criticism, the music of the years around 1780 marks a watershed in the early nineteenth-century perception of a musical canon: Haydn was popularly viewed as the father of modern music, whilst Gluck was the earliest operatic composer acceptable to critics (but not, until the late 1850s, the musical public) for performance on a regular basis. The term ‘canon’ was never used in the Gazette; instead, canonic status was indicated by references to ‘la musique classique’ and ‘les grands maîtres’. In France, traditions in liturgical music and the example of Lully provide exceptions to the general contemporaneity of musical experience in the eighteenth century; however, the formation of a canon centring around the Viennese classics is essentially a product of the nineteenth. This chapter charts and explains the journal's response to music comprising the traditional core of the Austro-German canon (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven) and its peripheries (including Gluck and Mendelssohn). The Gazette was unusual in its breadth of coverage regarding issues in performance and editorial practice. Most of the writing on these subjects occurred in reviews, and was therefore reactive rather than proactive; its character as a response to contemporary practice illustrates how arguments for authenticity within a continuous tradition arose as a protest against interpretive innovation.