During the 1990s the sublime became a popular trope for musicologists examining the late eighteenthcentury repertory, and several important essays arose from that preoccupation. There was Elaine Sisman's elegant application of Kant's mathematical sublime to the notorious coda of the finale of the 'Jupiter' Symphony; 1 A. Peter Brown on Haydn's 'London' symphonies, resurrecting Mr Crotch's early nineteenthcentury efforts to distinguish between the sublime, beautiful and ornamental styles; 2 James Webster on the sublime in Haydn's vocal music, following on his discussion of the symphonic sublime in the 'Farewell Symphony' book; 3 an earlier, lesser-known but valuable essay by Judith Schwartz, 'Periodicity and Passion in the First Movement of Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony', with its rewarding discussion of long excerpts from Michaelis, the first German Romantic to venture a description of the musical sublime; 4 and finally Mark Evan Bonds's 'The Symphony as Pindaric Ode', an analysis of J. A. P. Schulz's 1774 article on the symphony in Sulzer's Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste-a crucial document for those who would locate the musical sublime in this period. 5 Richard Taruskin also put his imprimatur on the late eighteenthcentury musical sublime in his discussion of the last four Mozart symphonies in his Oxford History of Western Music. The finale to Mozart's 'Jupiter' Symphony Taruskin describes, with a glancing reference to Sisman's Kantian analysis, as 'a movement that created, without recourse to representation, the same sort of awe that godly or ghostly apparitions created in opera.. .. That awe was the painful gateway to the beatific contemplation of the infinite, the romantics' chosen work'. 6 Truth be told, these efforts to back the sublime into the late eighteenth century make me a little queasy. There isn't all that much evidence for the musical sublime in this period. Quibbles I have with these essays suggest some authorial grasping at straws. These include the fact that Kant's Critique of Judgment, the source for his mathematical sublime, was not published until 1790, while the 'Jupiter' was composed in 1788. Or that
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