Elaine R. Sisman

Haydn and His World

Preface and AcknowledgmentsHaydn, Shakespeare, and the Rules of Originality3The Creation, Haydns Late Vocal Music, and the Musical Sublime57Haydns London Piano Trios and His Salomon String Quartets: Private vs. Public?103The Symphony as Pindaric Ode131Representing the Aristocracy: The Operatic Haydn and Le pescatrici154Haydn as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of His Keyboard Sonata in D Major, Hob.XVI:42201The Demise of Philosophical Listening: Haydn in the Nineteenth Century255A Yearbook of Music in Vienna and Prague 1796ISpecial Friends, Protectors, and Connoisseurs in ViennaIIVirtuosos and Amateurs in ViennaIIIAmateur Concerts289Remarks on the Development of the Art of Music in Germany in the Eighteenth Century (1801)321Joseph Haydns Library: An Attempt at a Literary-Historical Reconstruction395Index463List of Contributors473

Haydn's Theater Symphonies

Although spoken plays in eighteenth-century Germany and Austria frequently included arias, the presence of instrumental music as overtures, entr9actes, and finales is less well documented. Few instrumental pieces appear to have been composed especially for particular plays before 1780. Haydn wrote one of the most celebrated of these pieces-music to Regnard9s play Le distrait, performed in German as Der Zerstreute-and then arranged it as a symphony (no. 60, 1774). Theater journals of the 1770s listed Haydn as music director to theatrical troupes in residence at Eszterhaza, notably that of Karl Wahr, known for performing serious plays and Shakespeare9s tragedies; indeed, references in the same journals suggest that Haydn had even written music to Hamlet for Wahr. Yet no such music nor any other theater music by Haydn has been recovered. This study explores the hypothesis that Haydn9s symphonies served as theater music and examines theories of theater symphonies, the flourishing of Hamlet on the Austrian stage in the 1770s, and the relevance of titles of Haydn9s symphonies of the later 1760s and 1770s. The author proposes that much of Haydn9s symphonic music of the period widely described as exemplifying the musical Sturm und Drang was either originally destined for the stage, or composed with a view to possible later use as overtures and entr9actes, and that important dramatic and rhetorical features of his style can be better understood in this light than in traditional ways.

Haydn's career and the idea of the multiple audience

For whom did Haydn write? This simple question, easily enough answered by such obvious recipients as his patrons or the public or particular performers, masks a series of more complex questions about Haydns career as well as about his muse. How did he balance his own desires with those of his patrons and public? How did he respond to the abilities of the performers, whether soloists, orchestral musicians, or students, for whom he composed? How did he seek to communicate with different audiences, and were his communicative strategies and modes of persuasion always successful? While these questions might be asked of any composer, especially those in the later eighteenth century who had to adapt to an evolving menu of career opportunities, they have special pertinence for Haydn, whose career and works reveal, as well as revel in, the idea of the multiple audience that emerged in this period. This essay will explore the ways in which the shape of Haydns career, his sometimes inexplicably defensive tone in letters and memoirs, and his musical self-assessments stem from this new source of inspiration. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Haydn, unlike C. P. E. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, left no record of disparaging remarks about the public.

“The spirit of Mozart from Haydn's hands”: Beethoven's musical inheritance

Open any textbook in music history or music appreciation and the problem of Beethovens relation to music historiography becomes immediately apparent: is he Classical or Romantic or both or neither? Is he part of the Canonical Three of the Viennese Classical Style – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – or is he a chapter unto himself, as the One destined to inherit and transform, even liberate, the achievements of the Classical Duo? As Charles Rosen astutely pointed out, “it would appear as if our modern conception of the great triumvirate had been planned in advance by history”: Count Waldsteins entry in Beethovens album, written in 1792 as the young composer left Bonn for Vienna, famously assured him that “You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” This attractive phrase refers to the sense of lineage both conceptual and practical that places Beethoven in a musical culture already fully fledged in its genres and expressive possibilities. Mozarts premature death and the position of Haydn as Beethovens teacher in Vienna left Beethoven perfectly placed to come into his inheritance. This chapter will examine some of the dominant elements in European music in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, and explore some of his methods of appropriating and personalizing the expressive language of Haydn and Mozart. Oppositions By 1790, observers of the musical scene could classify the genres and structures of music according to shared assumptions about their place in musical life and the level of sophistication of their audience. About Vienna we read of a broad division of the musical public into the more and less knowledgeable: audience members, including patrons, comprised “connoisseurs” and “amateurs,” while performers might be classed as “virtuosi” or “dilettanti” according to their skill. Music was performed in a range of venues from the grand and costly public theaters associated with courts (for example,Vienna’s Burgtheater) to the salons of the aristocracy and wealthier middle classes, from open-air gardens and coffee- [45] houses to private homes.

Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony: Gesture and expectation: Allegro vivace

The first movement of the “Jupiter” has been variously described, in three books of the 1980s, as full of the “spirit of comic opera,” as embodying a mixing of styles in “semiseria” fashion, and as being at once “monumental” and “saturated with the rhetoric that characterizes high comedy.” One key to understanding the multiplicity of expressive stances in this movement is the striking and persuasive idea of topics that has emerged from research into the period by Leonard Ratner and Wye J. Allanbrook: they argue that particular features of the music – rhythms, melodies, textures – represented familiar topoi , or topics, and that in this way Classical music was intelligible to its audience. These topics included dance types, with their characteristic meters and gestures (for example, minuets, sarabandes), rhythms (sometimes connected with dance, as in the march, or in unrelated categories, like alla zoppa ), and references to other styles and genres (recitative, aria, French overture, hunt, fanfare, pastoral, among many others). Thus, the Classical composer may be seen as drawing on a common fund of musical types or “commonplaces,” the source of ideas and arguments that constitutes invention (inventio) , the first of the five parts of Classical rhetoric. Composers and audiences invested these commonplaces with meaning. On the face of it, this is an attractive way to “decode” the language of the late eighteenth century. The principal problems concern the identification and limits of topics within a piece: what is a topic and what is not? Is every tremolo passage in a minor key a “reference” to Sturm und Drang or every imitative passage “learned style?”

Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony: Structure and expression: Andante cantabile

The Andante cantabile of the “Jupiter” is a kind of distillation of its companions in the symphonies of 1788 and in the “Prague,” since it is considerably shorter yet no less powerful. Indeed, whereas the outer movements of these works are remarkably distinct from each other in musical personality, the slow movements all disrupt their lyrical flow with disturbing transitional passages of powerful emotional expressiveness. We simply do not see this in earlier symphony Andantes by Mozart. But we have seen it in some of the piano concertos of Mozarts glory years in Vienna, 1784–6, and the suggestion may be advanced that those concertos deepened his later symphonic slow movements just as they transformed his orchestration. I will refer to the works by their numbers here so as not to create confusion in keys (for example, the slow movement of the G minor is in ♭, major, the key of a different symphony). “Expressive episodes” In Mozarts last four symphonies, the Andantes initially induce a reverie in the beautiful sound-world of their principal themes, only to shatter it with varying degrees of force in a suddenly forte transitional passage. All but No. 40 turn to minor at that point, and all within a few bars move toward (or farther around) the flat side of the circle of fifths, which gives emphasis and poignancy to the stirring rhythms, syncopations, offbeat accents, and other signals of heightened affect.

Mozart: The ‘Jupiter’ Symphony: Phrase rhythm: Menuetto, Allegretto

At a time when composers did not challenge the two-reprise structure and inevitable double bars of the minuet and trio, the stereotyped metric and rhythmic characteristics of these movements became an inviting target for originality and wit. Haydn at the end of his life may have wished for someone to write “a really new Minuet,” but no exhaustion of possibilities is evident in either his or Mozarts symphonies. Two significant features of the Menuetto and Trio movement will form the principal subject of this chapter: the intricate relationship between phrase rhythm, dynamics, and orchestration that characterizes the Menuetto, and the often-remarked final cadence that begins the Trio. In 1976, Leonard B. Meyer devoted nearly seventy pages to an explication of the Trio of Mozarts G-minor Symphony, K. 550. The length of the study vindicated his premise, that his earlier assertion that “complexity was at least a necessary condition for value” in music was “if not entirely mistaken, at least somewhat confused,” because “what is crucial is relational richness, and such richness (or complexity) is in no way incompatible with simplicity of musical vocabulary and grammar.” Indeed, he suggests that the listener is able to appreciate the complexities of the Trio “precisely because these arise out of uncomplicated, unassuming tonal means” (emphasis added). In this chapter, the tension between simplicity and complexity will form the background of the discussion. Menuetto The beginning of the Menuetto is unstable. In a thin texture played only by the violins for two bars, the piece lacks a tonic pitch until bar 2, a bass register until bar 3, and most strikingly, a strong downbeat or sense of meter.