Elaine Sisman

Considered one of the foremost musicologists specializing in music of the classical era. Conducted ground-breaking work on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, interweaving music with history, biography, aesthetics, and analysis. Haydn and the Classical Variation (1993) is a landmark in Haydn research. In book on Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, writes cogently about rhetoric and the sublime in one of the best-known works of the classical repertory. Essays include the opus concept in the eighteenth century, Haydn's theater symphonies, Die Schöpfung, Mozart's string quartets, Don Giovanni, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's Metastasian opera, and the role of memory and invention in the late works of Beethoven. Current project, on "The Music of Illumination: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in the Age of Enlightenment," considers scientific knowledge, astronomical observation, time, art, and melancholy within musical conceptions of shadow and light. An extended essay from this project published in JAMS 66/1 (2013): "Haydn's Solar Poetics: The Tageszeiten Symphonies and Enlightenment Knowledge." Honors include National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and the Alfred Einstein award for the best article from the American Musicological Society. Elected to honorary membership in the American Musicological Society, (2011), which she served as President (2005-06).