Daniel Leonard Heartz

Daniel L. Heartz is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. Heartz combined precise scholarship with a breadth of knowledge that made him equally expert in the 16th and 18th centuries. He had a formidable grasp of social and political history and of the development of other arts, but his writing was also informed by a sensitive engagement with the music, especially in dealing with Mozart. His brief 1967 article, "Approaching a History of Eighteenth Century Music," stands as perhaps the single most influential essay in the history of musicology. It revolutionized the historiography of 18th century music by showing no link between the music of Bach and Handel at the beginning of the century and the music of Haydn and Mozart at its end. The history of the 18th century, as Heartz formulated it and as virtually all musicologists now conceptualize it, was a stylistic evolution from Italian comic opera to the late 18th century instrumental masterworks that still form the foundation of our performing repertory. Heartz fulfilled the vision set out in this article with the publication of his masterly "Norton trology": Haydn, Mozart and the Viennese School (1995), Music in European Capitals: The Gallant Style (2003), and Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven (2009). His early work on Pierre Attaingnant demonstrated the importance of the press in the renascent artistic life of Paris in the 16th century and in the development of French music. He served as Vice President of the American Musicological Society in 1974-76.