Although this exchange between the cosmopolitan Mozart and the internationally inexperienced Haydn is quite possibly the invention of Haydn’s early biographer, it says a great deal about changing attitudes toward music in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries when it was written. It reflects both an ideal – that music represented expression beyond language – as well as a reality: the international renown won by what has become known as “the Viennese classical style,” the musical language Haydn spoke. The ideal and the reality both represent culminating developments in a century that began with many different musical capitals speaking different musical languages and saw various réunions of national styles. These were very often the result of sometimes difficult German, Austrian and Italian interactions with French music, literature and culture: among them Johann Joachim Quantz’s vermischter Geschmack (mixed taste), the style galant and Italian opera “reform” based on French dramatic principles.

The question of how these changes in cultural orientation came about is a complex one, and its study has developed considerably over the years. Traditionally, scholars of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music and the arts in the West focused on repertoire of a particular place, context, or artist, but there has been a gradual realization that these approaches tend to overlook contributions made via travel and collaboration. This problem has been front and center in the historical disciplines for some time, coming to prominence in the 1980s and 90s with the concept of “cultural transfer” (transfert culturel) between one nation and another, and more recently via the notion of the histoire croisée, which recognizes more complex mutual and ongoing processes of international influence. Unlike “cultural transfer,” which implies flow from one place to another, the manyfold processes traced in an histoire croisée have no fixed nomenclature; I will refer to them as “cultural exchange.”