Haydn's Minuets and Eighteenth-Century Dance

Explores how the eighteenth-century minuet was actually danced, shedding entirely new light on Haydn's instrumental and symphonic minuet movements.

Audiences in eighteenth-century Vienna attended the city's popular public balls, where they danced the minuet. This book reconstructs this dance, enabling audiences today to understand Haydn's minuets through the kinaesthetic associations and expectations that bodily knowledge of the dance brings, revealing previously hidden features of this music.Audiences in eighteenth-century Vienna attended the city's popular public balls, where they danced the minuet. This book explores the public dance culture of Vienna in the late eighteenth century as an essential context in which to understand minuet composition from this period, focusing on the music of Haydn, and restores the array of kinaesthetic associations and expectations that eighteenth-century audiences brought to the listening experience through their knowledge of the dance. It reconstructs the choreography of the minuet as it was performed in the Viennese dance halls and examines the repertoire of minuets composed specifically for dancing, bringing new perspectives to the minuet genre. This recovered bodily knowledge allows the author to put forward an analytical method of 'somatic enquiry' and apply it to Haydn's symphonic minuets from the 1790s, revealing previously hidden features in this music that come to light when listening with an understanding of the dance.