Symphony No. 96 in D major "Miracle": I. Adagio - Allegro
Joseph Haydn (31 March or 1 April 1732–31 May 1809) was a leading composer … Read Full Bio ↴Joseph Haydn (31 March or 1 April 1732–31 May 1809) was a leading composer of the Classical period, called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet".
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent most of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Eszterházy family on their remote estate. Being isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer at the court of Archbishop-Prince Hieronymous von Colloredo who also had in his employ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and father Leopold Mozart. Haydn had a third brother, Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor singer.
Joseph Haydn was born in 1732 in Rohrau, Austria village near the Hungarian border. His father was Matthias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother, the former Maria Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Neither parent could read music. However, Matthias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp. According to Haydn's later reminiscences, his childhood family was extremely musical, and frequently sang together and with their neighbors.
Haydn's parents were perceptive enough to notice that their son was musically talented and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain any serious musical training. It was for this reason that they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Franck, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Haydn be apprenticed to Franck in his home to train as a musician. Haydn thus went off with Franck to Hainburg (ten miles away) and never again lived with his parents. At the time he was not quite six.
Life in the Franck household was not easy for Haydn, who later remembered being frequently hungry as well as constantly humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. However, he did begin his musical training there, and soon was able to play both harpsichord and violin. The people of Hainburg were soon hearing him sing soprano parts in the church choir.
There is reason to think that Haydn's singing impressed those who heard him, because two years later (1740), he was brought to the attention of Georg von Reutter, the director of music in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was touring the provinces looking for talented choirboys. Haydn passed his audition with Reutter, and soon moved off to Vienna, where he worked for the next nine years as a chorister, the last four in the company of his younger brother Michael.
Like Franck before him, Reutter didn't always bother to make sure Haydn was properly fed. The young Haydn greatly looked forward to performances before aristocratic audiences, where the singers sometimes had the opportunity to satisfy their hunger by devouring the refreshments. Reutter also did little to further his choristers' musical education. However, St. Stephen's was at the time one of the leading, musical centers in Europe, where new music by leading composers was constantly being performed. Haydn was able to learn a great deal by osmosis simply by serving as a professional musician there.
In 1749, Haydn had matured physically to the point that he was no longer able to sing high choral parts. On a weak pretext, he was summarily dismissed from his job. He evidently spent one night homeless on a park bench, but was taken in by friends and began to pursue a career as a freelance musician. During this arduous period, which lasted ten years, Haydn worked many different jobs, including valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition". He laboured to fill the gaps in his training, and eventually wrote his first string quartets and his first opera. During this time Haydn's professional reputation gradually increased.
In 1759, or 1757 according to the New Grove Encyclopedia, Haydn received his first important position, that of Kapellmeister (music director) for Count Karl von Morzin. In this capacity, he directed the count's small orchestra, and for this ensemble wrote his first symphonies. Count Morzin soon suffered financial reverses that forced him to dismiss his musical establishment, but Haydn was quickly offered a similar job (1761) as assistant Kapellmeister to the Eszterházy family, one of the wealthiest and most important in the Austrian Empire. When the old Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, died in 1766, Haydn was elevated to full Kapellmeister.
As a liveried servant of the Eszterházys, Haydn followed them as they moved among their three main residences: the family seat in Eisenstadt, their winter palace in Vienna, and Eszterháza, a grand new palace built in rural Hungary in the 1760s. Haydn had a huge range of responsibilities, including composition, running the orchestra, playing chamber music for and with his patrons, and eventually the mounting of operatic productions. Despite the backbreaking workload, Haydn considered himself fortunate to have his job. The Eszterházy princes (first Paul Anton, then most importantly Nikolaus I) were musical connoisseurs who appreciated his work and gave him the conditions needed for his artistic development, including daily access to his own small orchestra.
In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. He and his wife, the former Maria Anna Keller, did not get along, and they produced no children. Haydn may have had one or more children with Luigia Polzelli, a singer in the Eszterházy establishment with whom he carried on a long-term love affair, and often wrote to on his travels.
During the nearly thirty years that Haydn worked in the Eszterházy household, he produced a flood of compositions, and his musical style became ever more developed. His popularity in the outside world also increased. Gradually, Haydn came to write as much for publication as for his employer, and several important works of this period, such as the Paris symphonies (1785–6) and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Christ (1786), were commissions from abroad.
Around 1781 Haydn established a friendship with Mozart, whose work he had already been influencing by example for many years. According to later testimony by Stephen Storace, the two composers occasionally played in string quartets together. Haydn was hugely impressed with Mozart's work, and in various ways tried to help the younger composer. During the years 1782 to 1785, Mozart wrote a set of string quartets thought to be inspired by Haydn's Opus 33 series. On completion he dedicated them to Haydn, a very unusual thing to do at a time when dedicatees were usually aristocrats. The extremely close 'brotherly' Mozart-Haydn connection may be an expression of Freemasonic sympathies as well: Mozart and Haydn were members of the same Masonic lodge. Mozart joined in 1784 in the middle of writing those string quartets subsequently dedicated to his Masonic brother Haydn. This lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than a deistic one.
In 1789, Haydn developed another friendship with Maria Anna von Genzinger (1750–93), the wife of Prince Nicolaus's personal physician in Vienna. Their relationship, documented in Haydn's letters, was evidently intense but platonic. The letters express Haydn's sense of loneliness and melancholy at his long isolation at Eszterháza. Genzinger's premature death in 1793 was a blow to Haydn, and his F minor variations for piano, Hob. XVII:6, which are unusual in Haydn's work for their tone of impassioned tragedy, may have been written as response to her death.
The London journeys
In 1790, Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by a thoroughly unmusical prince who dismissed the entire musical establishment and put Haydn on a pension. Thus freed of his obligations, Haydn was able to accept a lucrative offer from Johann Peter Salomon, a German impresario, to visit England and conduct new symphonies with a large orchestra.
The visit (1791-2), along with a repeat visit (1794-5), was a huge success. Audiences flocked to Haydn's concerts, and he quickly achieved wealth and fame: one review called him "incomparable." Musically, the visits to England generated some of Haydn's best-known work, including the Surprise, Military, Drumroll, and London symphonies, the Rider quartet, and the Gypsy Rondo piano trio.
The only misstep in the venture was an opera, L'anima del filosofo, which Haydn was contracted to compose, and paid a substantial sum of money for. Only one aria was sung at the time, and 11 numbers were published; the entire opera was not performed until 1950.
Final years in Vienna
Haydn actually considered becoming an English citizen and settling permanently, as composers such as Handel had before him, but decided on a different course. He returned to Vienna, had a large house built for himself, and turned to the composition of large religious works for chorus and orchestra. These include his two great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and six masses for the Eszterházy family, which by this time was once again headed by a musically-inclined prince. Haydn also composed the last nine in his long series of string quartets, including the Emperor, Sunrise, and Fifths quartets. Despite his increasing age, Haydn looked to the future, exclaiming once in a letter, "how much remains to be done in this glorious art!"
In 1802, Haydn found that an illness from which he had been suffering for some time had increased greatly in severity to the point that he became physically unable to compose. This was doubtless very difficult for him because, as he acknowledged, the flow of fresh musical ideas waiting to be worked out as compositions did not cease. Haydn was well cared for by his servants, and he received many visitors and public honours during his last years, but they cannot have been very happy years for him. During his illness, Haydn often found solace by sitting at the piano and playing Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which he had composed himself as a patriotic gesture in 1797. This melody later became used for the Austrian and German national anthems, and is the national anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Haydn died in 1809 following an attack on Vienna by the French army under Napoleon. Among his last words was his attempt to calm and reassure his servants as cannon shots fell on the neighbourhood.
Character and appearance
Haydn was known among his contemporaries for his kindly, optimistic, and congenial personality. He had a robust sense of humour, evident in his love of practical jokes and often apparent in his music. He was particularly respected by the Eszterházy court musicians whom he supervised, as he maintained a cordial working atmosphere and effectively represented the musicians' interests with their employer; see Papa Haydn.
Haydn was a devout Catholic who often turned to his rosary when he had trouble composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective. When he finished a composition, he would write "Laus deo" ("praise be to God") or some similar expression at the end of the manuscript. His favourite hobbies were hunting and fishing.
Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed throughout most of his youth. Like many in his day, he was a survivor of smallpox and his face was pitted with the scars of this disease. Haydn was quite surprised when women flocked to him during his London visits as he did not consider himself to be handsome.
About a dozen portraits of Haydn exist, although they disagree sufficiently that, other than what is noted above, we would have little idea what Haydn looked like were it not also for the existence of a lifelike wax bust and Haydn's death mask. Both are in the Haydnhaus in Vienna, a museum dedicated to the composer. All but one of the portraits show Haydn wearing the grey powdered wig fashionable for men in the 18th century, and from the one exception we learn that Haydn was bald in adulthood.
Works
Haydn is often described as the "father" of the classical symphony and string quartet. In fact, the symphony was already a well-established form before Haydn began his compositional career, with distinguished examples by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach among others, but Haydn's symphonies are the earliest to remain in "standard" repertoire. His parenthood of the string quartet, however, is beyond doubt: he essentially invented this medium singlehandedly. He also wrote many piano sonatas, piano trios, divertimentos and masses, which became the foundation for the Classical style in these compositional types. He also wrote other types of chamber music, as well as operas and concerti, although such compositions are now less known. Although other composers were prominent in the earlier Classical period, notably C.P.E. Bach in the field of the keyboard sonata (the harpsichord and clavichord were equally popular with the piano in this era) and J.C. Bach and Leopold Mozart in the symphony, Haydn was undoubtedly the strongest overall influence on musical style in this era.
The development of sonata form into a subtle and flexible mode of musical expression, which became the dominant force in Classical musical thought, owed most to Haydn and those who followed his ideas. His sense of formal inventiveness also led him to integrate the fugue into the classical style and to enrich the rondo form with more cohesive tonal logic, (see sonata rondo form). Haydn was also the principal exponent of the double variation form, that is variations on two alternating themes, which are often major and minor mode versions of each other.
The name "Franz" was not used in the composer's lifetime; scholars, along with an increasing number of music publishers and recording companies, now use the historically more accurate form of his name, rendered in English as "Joseph Haydn".
A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent most of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Eszterházy family on their remote estate. Being isolated from other composers and trends in music until the later part of his long life, he was, as he put it, "forced to become original".
Joseph Haydn was the brother of Michael Haydn, himself a highly regarded composer at the court of Archbishop-Prince Hieronymous von Colloredo who also had in his employ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and father Leopold Mozart. Haydn had a third brother, Johann Evangelist Haydn, a tenor singer.
Joseph Haydn was born in 1732 in Rohrau, Austria village near the Hungarian border. His father was Matthias Haydn, a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin to village mayor. Haydn's mother, the former Maria Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Neither parent could read music. However, Matthias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp. According to Haydn's later reminiscences, his childhood family was extremely musical, and frequently sang together and with their neighbors.
Haydn's parents were perceptive enough to notice that their son was musically talented and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain any serious musical training. It was for this reason that they accepted a proposal from their relative Johann Matthias Franck, the schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg, that Haydn be apprenticed to Franck in his home to train as a musician. Haydn thus went off with Franck to Hainburg (ten miles away) and never again lived with his parents. At the time he was not quite six.
Life in the Franck household was not easy for Haydn, who later remembered being frequently hungry as well as constantly humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. However, he did begin his musical training there, and soon was able to play both harpsichord and violin. The people of Hainburg were soon hearing him sing soprano parts in the church choir.
There is reason to think that Haydn's singing impressed those who heard him, because two years later (1740), he was brought to the attention of Georg von Reutter, the director of music in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was touring the provinces looking for talented choirboys. Haydn passed his audition with Reutter, and soon moved off to Vienna, where he worked for the next nine years as a chorister, the last four in the company of his younger brother Michael.
Like Franck before him, Reutter didn't always bother to make sure Haydn was properly fed. The young Haydn greatly looked forward to performances before aristocratic audiences, where the singers sometimes had the opportunity to satisfy their hunger by devouring the refreshments. Reutter also did little to further his choristers' musical education. However, St. Stephen's was at the time one of the leading, musical centers in Europe, where new music by leading composers was constantly being performed. Haydn was able to learn a great deal by osmosis simply by serving as a professional musician there.
In 1749, Haydn had matured physically to the point that he was no longer able to sing high choral parts. On a weak pretext, he was summarily dismissed from his job. He evidently spent one night homeless on a park bench, but was taken in by friends and began to pursue a career as a freelance musician. During this arduous period, which lasted ten years, Haydn worked many different jobs, including valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition". He laboured to fill the gaps in his training, and eventually wrote his first string quartets and his first opera. During this time Haydn's professional reputation gradually increased.
In 1759, or 1757 according to the New Grove Encyclopedia, Haydn received his first important position, that of Kapellmeister (music director) for Count Karl von Morzin. In this capacity, he directed the count's small orchestra, and for this ensemble wrote his first symphonies. Count Morzin soon suffered financial reverses that forced him to dismiss his musical establishment, but Haydn was quickly offered a similar job (1761) as assistant Kapellmeister to the Eszterházy family, one of the wealthiest and most important in the Austrian Empire. When the old Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, died in 1766, Haydn was elevated to full Kapellmeister.
As a liveried servant of the Eszterházys, Haydn followed them as they moved among their three main residences: the family seat in Eisenstadt, their winter palace in Vienna, and Eszterháza, a grand new palace built in rural Hungary in the 1760s. Haydn had a huge range of responsibilities, including composition, running the orchestra, playing chamber music for and with his patrons, and eventually the mounting of operatic productions. Despite the backbreaking workload, Haydn considered himself fortunate to have his job. The Eszterházy princes (first Paul Anton, then most importantly Nikolaus I) were musical connoisseurs who appreciated his work and gave him the conditions needed for his artistic development, including daily access to his own small orchestra.
In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. He and his wife, the former Maria Anna Keller, did not get along, and they produced no children. Haydn may have had one or more children with Luigia Polzelli, a singer in the Eszterházy establishment with whom he carried on a long-term love affair, and often wrote to on his travels.
During the nearly thirty years that Haydn worked in the Eszterházy household, he produced a flood of compositions, and his musical style became ever more developed. His popularity in the outside world also increased. Gradually, Haydn came to write as much for publication as for his employer, and several important works of this period, such as the Paris symphonies (1785–6) and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Christ (1786), were commissions from abroad.
Around 1781 Haydn established a friendship with Mozart, whose work he had already been influencing by example for many years. According to later testimony by Stephen Storace, the two composers occasionally played in string quartets together. Haydn was hugely impressed with Mozart's work, and in various ways tried to help the younger composer. During the years 1782 to 1785, Mozart wrote a set of string quartets thought to be inspired by Haydn's Opus 33 series. On completion he dedicated them to Haydn, a very unusual thing to do at a time when dedicatees were usually aristocrats. The extremely close 'brotherly' Mozart-Haydn connection may be an expression of Freemasonic sympathies as well: Mozart and Haydn were members of the same Masonic lodge. Mozart joined in 1784 in the middle of writing those string quartets subsequently dedicated to his Masonic brother Haydn. This lodge was a specifically Catholic rather than a deistic one.
In 1789, Haydn developed another friendship with Maria Anna von Genzinger (1750–93), the wife of Prince Nicolaus's personal physician in Vienna. Their relationship, documented in Haydn's letters, was evidently intense but platonic. The letters express Haydn's sense of loneliness and melancholy at his long isolation at Eszterháza. Genzinger's premature death in 1793 was a blow to Haydn, and his F minor variations for piano, Hob. XVII:6, which are unusual in Haydn's work for their tone of impassioned tragedy, may have been written as response to her death.
The London journeys
In 1790, Prince Nikolaus died and was succeeded by a thoroughly unmusical prince who dismissed the entire musical establishment and put Haydn on a pension. Thus freed of his obligations, Haydn was able to accept a lucrative offer from Johann Peter Salomon, a German impresario, to visit England and conduct new symphonies with a large orchestra.
The visit (1791-2), along with a repeat visit (1794-5), was a huge success. Audiences flocked to Haydn's concerts, and he quickly achieved wealth and fame: one review called him "incomparable." Musically, the visits to England generated some of Haydn's best-known work, including the Surprise, Military, Drumroll, and London symphonies, the Rider quartet, and the Gypsy Rondo piano trio.
The only misstep in the venture was an opera, L'anima del filosofo, which Haydn was contracted to compose, and paid a substantial sum of money for. Only one aria was sung at the time, and 11 numbers were published; the entire opera was not performed until 1950.
Final years in Vienna
Haydn actually considered becoming an English citizen and settling permanently, as composers such as Handel had before him, but decided on a different course. He returned to Vienna, had a large house built for himself, and turned to the composition of large religious works for chorus and orchestra. These include his two great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and six masses for the Eszterházy family, which by this time was once again headed by a musically-inclined prince. Haydn also composed the last nine in his long series of string quartets, including the Emperor, Sunrise, and Fifths quartets. Despite his increasing age, Haydn looked to the future, exclaiming once in a letter, "how much remains to be done in this glorious art!"
In 1802, Haydn found that an illness from which he had been suffering for some time had increased greatly in severity to the point that he became physically unable to compose. This was doubtless very difficult for him because, as he acknowledged, the flow of fresh musical ideas waiting to be worked out as compositions did not cease. Haydn was well cared for by his servants, and he received many visitors and public honours during his last years, but they cannot have been very happy years for him. During his illness, Haydn often found solace by sitting at the piano and playing Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which he had composed himself as a patriotic gesture in 1797. This melody later became used for the Austrian and German national anthems, and is the national anthem of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Haydn died in 1809 following an attack on Vienna by the French army under Napoleon. Among his last words was his attempt to calm and reassure his servants as cannon shots fell on the neighbourhood.
Character and appearance
Haydn was known among his contemporaries for his kindly, optimistic, and congenial personality. He had a robust sense of humour, evident in his love of practical jokes and often apparent in his music. He was particularly respected by the Eszterházy court musicians whom he supervised, as he maintained a cordial working atmosphere and effectively represented the musicians' interests with their employer; see Papa Haydn.
Haydn was a devout Catholic who often turned to his rosary when he had trouble composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective. When he finished a composition, he would write "Laus deo" ("praise be to God") or some similar expression at the end of the manuscript. His favourite hobbies were hunting and fishing.
Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed throughout most of his youth. Like many in his day, he was a survivor of smallpox and his face was pitted with the scars of this disease. Haydn was quite surprised when women flocked to him during his London visits as he did not consider himself to be handsome.
About a dozen portraits of Haydn exist, although they disagree sufficiently that, other than what is noted above, we would have little idea what Haydn looked like were it not also for the existence of a lifelike wax bust and Haydn's death mask. Both are in the Haydnhaus in Vienna, a museum dedicated to the composer. All but one of the portraits show Haydn wearing the grey powdered wig fashionable for men in the 18th century, and from the one exception we learn that Haydn was bald in adulthood.
Works
Haydn is often described as the "father" of the classical symphony and string quartet. In fact, the symphony was already a well-established form before Haydn began his compositional career, with distinguished examples by Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach among others, but Haydn's symphonies are the earliest to remain in "standard" repertoire. His parenthood of the string quartet, however, is beyond doubt: he essentially invented this medium singlehandedly. He also wrote many piano sonatas, piano trios, divertimentos and masses, which became the foundation for the Classical style in these compositional types. He also wrote other types of chamber music, as well as operas and concerti, although such compositions are now less known. Although other composers were prominent in the earlier Classical period, notably C.P.E. Bach in the field of the keyboard sonata (the harpsichord and clavichord were equally popular with the piano in this era) and J.C. Bach and Leopold Mozart in the symphony, Haydn was undoubtedly the strongest overall influence on musical style in this era.
The development of sonata form into a subtle and flexible mode of musical expression, which became the dominant force in Classical musical thought, owed most to Haydn and those who followed his ideas. His sense of formal inventiveness also led him to integrate the fugue into the classical style and to enrich the rondo form with more cohesive tonal logic, (see sonata rondo form). Haydn was also the principal exponent of the double variation form, that is variations on two alternating themes, which are often major and minor mode versions of each other.
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Symphony No. 96 in D major "Miracle": I. Adagio
Franz Joseph Haydn Lyrics
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The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
The lyrics are frequently found in the comments by searching or by filtering for lyric videos
Elaine Blackhurst
@Mystic Mouse
Beethoven was referring to the counterpoint lessons - a form of musical grammar - that he took from Haydn beginning soon after his arrival in Vienna in November 1792, and lasting 14 months until Haydn’s departure for his second trip to England in January 1794.
Beethoven’s complaint was referring to having to complete hundreds of dry, academic exercises from Fux’s manual Gradus ad Parnassum - many of which were not corrected - not to Haydn as a composer in general.
When Haydn left for his second trip, Albrechtsberger carried on the lessons from Fux exactly where Haydn left off - and he found him difficult too.
To quote this well known Beethoven comment out of context is simply disingenuous.
Your spelling of ‘humor’ suggests that you are writing from the US; Haydn’s universal programming figures are not determined in one country alone.
Judging from YouTube comments generally, it seems that as your comment also indicates, Haydn is less well understood in the US than in Europe particularly but also elsewhere around the world, somewhat surprising as over the past c.75 years, some of the greatest musicologists, scholars, and biographers of Haydn have come from that country - most obviously HC Robbins Landon, but many others as well since.
Mozart died in 1791, so could not ‘...build on’ the ‘London’ symphonies - an utter absurdity; the Variations in f minor; the string quartets Opus 71/74, 76, or 77, the late piano trios; the Trumpet concerto; The Creation; The Seasons; the final six Masses; et cetera, much of which went some way beyond anything by Mozart in terms of controlled tonal experimentation, building large scale musical structures from small motifs, developments in form and structure, and so forth.
In many respects, Haydn is in fact closer to Beethoven (the piano sonata Hob.XVI:52 for example).
Haydn composed many of his most important - and innovative and developmental - works (as listed above) after the death of Mozart, so I take issue with your point about Mozart building on Haydn - a clear impossibility.
Hope that helps; in summary:
I think the greatness of Beethoven is that he successfully moved music in a different direction from Mozart and Haydn;
that Haydn both pre-dates and post-dates Mozart;
and that Mozart and Haydn are less closely related than is sometimes suggested.
Elaine Blackhurst
@Mystic Mouse
Not intended to be condescending, but using the Beethoven comment out of context for example, was misleading, and therefore open to challenge.
I do not think any of the biographies of Beethoven - whether dating back from the early/mid 19th century, to the present day - have ever properly explained what it was about Haydn that so got under Beethoven’s skin, particularly from his move to Vienna in 1792, until Haydn’s retirement in about 1804 (from which period almost all the negative comments originate).
Generally speaking, you are right that Mozart and Beethoven appear more often than Haydn in concert programmes; the degree to which this is true however varies across the world.
Certainly with projects such as Haydn 2032, the publishing work going on in Germany in particular, and the performances of rarely heard operas in many places, there is certainly much going on across Europe.
I don’t actually disagree with most of your comments - particularly in relation to Beethoven - but those points I did question, like Mozart building on Haydn - which again, I felt was both partly inaccurate and therefore misleading to the casual reader - you have not answered.
I would be genuinely interested in hearing your widely shared views in those areas that prompted my initial reply.
Elaine Blackhurst
Haydn went to work for Count Morzin (not Monzi), who had a summer palace at Lukavec in Bohemia, probably in 1757; he remained there until 1761 when Morzin disbanded his orchestra.
From 1761, Haydn was then employed - or pensioned - by the Eszterhazy family for the rest of his life until 1809.
Symphony 1 as you describe, was Haydn’s first symphony, but it was composed in 1757 (not 1759).
The question of a harpsichord continuo has been much discussed; the prevailing view is that Haydn played the violin in his symphonies - certainly at Eisenstadt and Eszterhaza - but unfortunately, almost nothing is known about his time at Lukavec.
Amongst more recent conductors, the harpsichord continuo IS used by:
Goodman, Kuijken, Pinnock, Solomons.
The harpsichord continuo IS NOT used by:
Antonini, Bruggen, Harnoncourt, Hogwood, Weil.
(Dorati in his first complete cycle from the 1970’s, rather arbitrarily uses it for about the first 40 symphonies only).
It’s interesting to hear the earlier symphonies both with and without continuo; from about 1774 - ie post-sturm und drang - with works such as Symphonies 54, 55, 56, 57, and 60 which were all composed around that time, the harpsichord really begins to sound anachronistic.
The only other thing I would mention about your summary of the symphony, is that this is clearly a very modern early Classical symphony; I would suggest that any slight vestiges of the old Baroque are almost non-existent.
Elaine Blackhurst
@José Lopes
Thank you for your reply covering some interesting topics.
Regarding the dating of the first symphony, the work of the great HC Robbins Landon* - whom I met for a day in 1982 at the University of Bristol - has now been superseded by others, in particular Sonja Gerlach whose work on the dating of the symphonies is now widely accepted as the most accurate list - it can be found for example on the Haydn 2032 project website.
HCRL himself accepted Symphony 1 probably was the first, but could not date it precisely;
Haydn himself was adamant that Symphony 1 was the first, but got the date wrong - the origin of the 1759 dating;
Sonja Gerlach has - as far as it is possible to do - established that Symphony 1 was the first in 1757;
and the universally accepted date amongst scholars is now as I stated - 1757.
You will only find the 1759 date now in much older texts; the problem with the 1759 date is that it means Symphony 1 cannot be the first as there is an extant manuscript of Symphony 37 dated 1758.**
The rest of my comment -apart from the point about the harpsichord sounding anachronistic after about 1773 - was not really opinions, but a balanced summary of current scholarship.
For example I listed both sides of the continuo or not debate with a comprehensive list of conductors, if you want to know more, then another
American scholar James Webster is one of the leading authorities on this subject, and my ‘opinion’ was actually based on scholarly evidence.
Regarding the harpsichord continuo debate, in the comments on YouTube under the Haydn 2032 performance on Symphony 12 conducted by Giovanni Antonini, I have summarised the main points of the argument, and listed Webster’s reasons suggesting that Haydn did not use the continuo at Eszterhaza.
Hope that is all of some interest, and use.
* I possess all five volumes of his Haydn: Chronicle and Works - a bible for anyone interested in the composer.
** I will post separately - below - Sonja Gerlach’s dating of the earliest symphonies: the main work is unfortunately only available in German, but the lists are easy to read in any language.
Elaine Blackhurst
@José Lopes
Haydn’s first symphonies composed at Lukavec.
The work of Sonja Gerlach - building on the work of previous scholars such as Larsen and Robbins Landon - has established the following:
Symphony 1 1757
Symphony 37 1757/58
Symphony 18 1757/59
Symphony 2 1757/59
Symphony 4 1757/60
Symphony 27 1757/60
Brain Smoothie
I've heard of a story where Haydn was playing this piece and everyone was so mesmerized that they rose from their seats and dance. Then, a chandelier just fell and crashed onto the floor. Because the people liked the music so much that they managed to avoid death by leaving their seats, they began to shout "miracle!" over and over again. So Haydn literally saved everyone because he was a really good musician.
qfcbv
But in fact, scholars now think this event that gives the symphony 96 its name actually happened at the premiere of the symphony 102.
Brain Smoothie
@qfcbv That's very interesting!
Boutman
@qfcbv exactly, read about this in a book about coincidence & synchronicity (name of the book escapes me for the moment ;-) )
Luca R
This symphony truly is a “miracle”!
Timothy Thorne
Luca R this symphony is nice and inoffensive. Like classical period works in general, it's light-hearted, trivial and inconsequential. Better than Bach and baroque music, however, which tends to be thick, academic, mathematical and dull.
Real music as art begin with Beethoven. His works are pure poetry. They're potboiler novels: at once melodramatic, then temperamental. In short, he was the best composer of them all. Haydn or Mozart would have no doubt been perplexed by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Missa Solemnis.
Elaine Blackhurst
Timothy Thorne
Wow Timothy...found 11 (sic) points in your comment with which I absolutely and fundamentally disagree, and that’s just in your first paragraph!
Relating to Luca R’s point above: this is not the real ‘Miracle’ symphony; the chandelier actually fell at a performance of the rather noisier Symphony 102.
Elaine Blackhurst
Luca R See my comment above which might be of interest.
Elaine Blackhurst
Charlemagne It does matter, because if the nonsense contained in the original comment is not challenged, then it is read, repeated, believed and propagated - many of the points made are simply wrong.
CI Craft
Timothy Thorne What are you talking about? That’s absolutely false.