The Music World Needs Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn. Photograph: DEA/A Dagli Orti/De Agostini/Getty Images
Over the past year, a number of trends have emerged as American orchestras have attempted to respond to the limitations imposed by Covid-19. Chief among these is programming pieces written for smaller orchestras. Recently, there have been more performances of works by the great composers of the classical era, particularly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Joseph Haydn, since their music generally requires fewer musicians than music by later composers. This has resulted in a modest increase in Mozart performances (as he was already a popular concert staple pre-pandemic), and an enormous increase in Haydn performances, an encouraging trend, since Haydn’s music, which is innovative and demonstrates spectacular charm and compositional skill, deserves far more performances than modern orchestras ordinarily give him.
From the second half of the twentieth century until now, there has been a pronounced decline in the number of Haydn symphonies performed by American orchestras. There are several reasons for this, most of which have to do with the relatively few musicians Haydn employs, and the general opinion, hardly new but very widespread, that Haydn’s music hasn’t aged quite as well as Mozart or Beethoven’s. Many think that Haydn’s cheerful wit can’t hold the modern concertgoer’s attention like Mozart’s melodic gift and expressive chromaticism, or Beethoven’s earth-shaking emotion and moment-to-moment control.
This has been compounded by the fact that few conductors have the Midas touch when it comes to Haydn. Bernstein, Beecham, Doráti, and Szell fare well, but other conductors struggle, often by stressing one aspect of Haydn at the expense of others. Haydn, like so many great composers, condenses whole universes into his symphonies, and conductors who emphasize his folkishness at the expense of his elegance (or vice versa), his grace over his passion, his formal control over his intense weirdness, do the world a disservice. Above all, the greatest Haydn faux pas, which for whatever reason is still common, is presenting Haydn as boring and pedestrian, which obscures Haydn’s emphasis on whimsical play and deep joyfulness.
Both Mozart and Beethoven adored Haydn’s music, particularly his spectacular harmonic-structural innovations, so much so that their absorption of Haydn’s techniques has been said to have deafened contemporary ears to the originality of “Papa” Haydn’s music. Haydn virtually invented the symphony, string quartet, and piano trio as we know them, and his methods of organizing sections of a piece around different pitch centers, his contribution to what we now call “sonata form,” have far-reaching effects still felt today.
Haydn’s “artist’s story” also makes him somewhat inaccessible to us. People tend to hold a romanticized view of the archetypal “composer” as a tragic bohemian, a misunderstood genius defying society’s expectations and suffering at all costs for his or her art. A short biographical sketch of Beethoven, for example, would probably emphasize his musical innovations, his eventual deafness, his unlucky and turbulent life, and the lack of appreciation he garnered from his contemporaries. Mozart’s biographers usually discuss his status as a child prodigy, which in turn created his habit of overwork, which forced him to an early grave, poor and destitute. Films like Amadeus (1984) and Immortal Beloved (1994) have only reinforced these narratives in the public imagination. On the other hand, while Haydn faced difficulties of his own, he nevertheless lived a long life and gained wide respect while still alive, was charming and cheerful, a savvy and successful businessman, a devout Catholic whose faith was very important to him, a man who respected rather than challenged his aristocratic employers and benefactors.
Whereas the tumultuous lives of Beethoven and Mozart support the narrative of classical music as it presents itself, Haydn’s runs counter to it. Take a look at the websites, press releases, and season announcements of American orchestras, and one will find that they all tend to promote classical music as the domain of deep emotion, infinite passion, epic ambitions, utter hopelessness, and unfulfilled desire. The tragic biographies of Beethoven and Mozart fit right in with this story. Haydn’s unabashedly cheerful music does not. Consider programming tendencies for concerts. When an orchestra hires a cello soloist, it is usually to perform one of the cello concerti of great pathos, like those by Elgar, Dvořák, Schumann, or Shostakovich. Though Haydn’s two wonderful cello concerti (No. 1 in C major and No. 2 in D major) are well respected and part of the repertoire, they are not programmed nearly as often. Likewise, lovers of Beethoven’s cheerful and joke-filled eighth symphony, which is often described as “Haydnesque,” are often disappointed by how seldom it is performed, compared with his weightier third, fifth, seventh, and ninth symphonies.
Consider also the marked preference for Mozart’s minor key works, which are the musical outliers of his oeuvre. Only two of his forty-one numbered symphonies are in a minor key (Nos. 25 and 40, both in G Minor), and only two (No. 20 in D minor and No. 24 C minor) of his twenty-three piano concertos.* These four works, though beautiful and well-crafted, are overplayed, especially considering that his seven other major key symphonies of note and ten or so mature major key piano concertos are just as good. Much of Mozart’s superb (and far more representative repertoire) remains relatively untouched by major American orchestras because his minor key works encapsulate the “artist’s story” of his life, as well as the larger received narrative of classical music.
Having spent decades playing itself into this corner of “infinite pathos,” classical music is struggling to change its image. I don’t know anyone who would, after a hard week at work, sit down on a Friday evening to enjoy a movie like Schindler’s List, or watch the heartbreaking first ten minutes of Up over and over again, despite the high quality of these films. Even if Mozart’s D minor piano concerto doesn’t quite leave a viewer weeping like the end of Call Me by Your Name does, the marketing and program notes for concerts often indulge in tragedy, a potential turn-off for those who want to enjoy music in their free time. But while this sad, passionate side of classical music is essential, it nevertheless represents only a part of what classical music is or could be. If the classical music world wants to remain relevant to people’s lives today, then it must engage with the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, not just a small sliver of it.
The work of Haydn can help modern classical music correct this situation. More perhaps than any other composer, Haydn never lost his sense for the possibilities of joy and play inherent in music. Consider, for example, his 98th symphony in B-flat major, a piece that orchestras neglect despite its spectacular structural innovations, and many wonderful, and surprising, moments. For one, the opening of the first movement sounds more operatic than symphonic in character, with its dark, slow minor chords played boldly by the whole string section. But then, the music changes: it shifts from minor to major, the tempo quickens, and the winds join the strings in jubilant union. Haydn loved slow introductions like this to his brisk first movements, and this slow opening theme is in fact the main theme of the movement slowed down and put in a minor key. A wonderful example of Haydn’s capacity for “play,” the melancholic opening is the darkness before the dawning of a glorious summer day. Even more impressively, rather than introducing a second melody in the fast section (as was typical of the day), Haydn simply further varies the opening one, transforming and embellishing the opening minor motif as it bursts into life. It is easy to see why contemporaries admired Haydn as a spectacular artist, one able to hold a listener’s interest with just a single melody that, in his hands, seems to offer infinite possibilities.
Haydn took special care when it came to his slow movements, and they often act as the centerpieces of his symphonies. His slow movement for 98 is biographically significant. Symphony No. 98 was the first symphony Haydn wrote after hearing of Mozart’s untimely death, which left Haydn distraught. It quotes Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Coronation Mass, weaving themes adapted from these pieces with echoes from “God save the Queen” into a movement that sounds like a grand meditative hymn. Many critics and listeners have heard in it an elegy to the life and death of Haydn’s dear friend, whom he admired openly and without jealousy his whole life. But this is not funeral music; Haydn infuses this movement with a sort of reverent religious joy, and while the result is somewhat understated, it stands as a quietly hopeful and heartfelt monument to the life of his friend.
Usually, Haydn waits until his minuets to unleash his most bombastic jokes, but after an almost religious adagio like this one, anything rip-roaringly funny or overly raucous would be inappropriate. But while the minuet to Symphony No. 98 doesn’t exhibit Haydn at his most unbridled, it nevertheless demonstrates beautifully Haydn’s ability to fuse folkish with courtly music, a skill other composers, especially Beethoven, greatly admired him for. The stately pomp of the minuet dissolves into a trio of almost rustic intimacy before returning to the pomp of the minuet to end the movement.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 98 boasts the longest finale of any of his symphonies. Of special note is his use of the solo violin as the movement progresses, especially paired with a somewhat jarring key-change at the beginning of the development section. In another unforgettable moment, Haydn adds a brief but sparkling keyboard solo, which he himself performed at the premiere, to the delight and surprise of the audience. At the premiere, the audience adored the symphony’s finale so much that the orchestra felt compelled to encore the movement in its entirety.
This symphony offers just one example of the emotional and experiential range that Haydn’s music is capable of. It is astounding to consider that Haydn not only wrote over a hundred other symphonies like this—each with its own unforgettable moments and innovations—but also huge, earth-shaking oratorios, humble sonatas for solo keyboard, and almost everything in between. Yet, despite all this, American orchestras have neglected this symphony and almost everything else Haydn composed. It took a pandemic to force orchestras to reconsider him as a figure worth performing. After a year filled with such intense turmoil, boredom, and sadness, does the world really need another thousand performances of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony, or do we need a figure who captures the joys of friendship and religious hope, who can surprise us with laughter and condense whole worlds of joy, play, humor, and delight into every work he ever wrote?
*Mozart’s piano concertos are numbered 1-27. Nos. 1-4 are arrangements for piano and orchestra based on sonatas by other composers. His next three concertos, also arrangements, are unnumbered. Together, that means Mozart wrote twenty-three original piano concertos and seven arrangements.
Jacob Martin is a freelance oboist and English hornist in the Cincinnati area. He regularly plays with orchestras in Columbus, Dayton, Evansville, Owensboro, and Anderson.