A letter from the wilderness: revisiting Haydn's Esterházy environments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Well, here I sit in my wilderness – forsaken – like a poor waif – almost without any human society – melancholy – full of the memories of past glorious days – yes! past alas! – and who knows when these days shall return again? Those wonderful parties? Where the whole circle is one heart, one soul – all these beautiful musical evenings – which can only be remembered, and not described – where are all these enthusiastic moments? – all gone – and gone for a long time. So begins one of Haydn's most remarkable letters, written to Maria Anna von Genzinger in February 1790 shortly after his return to Eszterháza from the Christmas season in Vienna. In this letter we have a rare glimpse of Haydn out of livery as “Capellmeister of His Highness the Prince [Esterházy] in whose service I wish to live and die,” as Haydn had styled himself in another well-known letter, his autobiography of 1776. Eighteenth-century letters are characterized by “ontological ambiguity,” eliding public and private, natural and rhetorical in seductive ways, especially as sources for biography. Haydn's autobiographical letter of 1776 is a case in point. Though ostensibly a private letter addressed from one individual to another, the letter was in fact published in Das gelehrte Oesterreich , a Who's Who of Austria. By writing to a female interlocutor rather than Monsignor Zoller, for whom the letter was ultimately intended, Haydn invoked contemporary conventions of “cor-respondence” (especially with women) as “writing from the heart,” the most sincere and intimate form of communication. Though Haydn apologizes for offering an “artless hotch-potch,” the letter is in fact rhetorically accomplished, as Elaine Sisman has demonstrated, and should give us pause before accepting Haydn's reputation as illiterary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".