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So I`ve heard , Volume 2 The classical Ideal

Alan Rich Hypercard Voyager 1992

O ADMIRABLE AND MATCHLESS

Many kinds of music resonate around the early life of Franz Joseph Haydn. He was born (March 1732) in a viilage on what is now the Austria-Hungary border, the second of twelve children of the whoelwright Mathias Haydn. The young doseph heard the old-fashioned church music of composers still rooted in Baroque musisal ideas; he heard the rough, irregular msasures of his region's folk dances; in his early music lessons he heard the new fangled classical language of the time, the expressive dramatic music of C.P.E. Bach and his colleagues, as well as the up-the-scale-down-the-scale stuff by the less talented craftsmen.

At eight, Haydn was taken to Vienna to sing in the choir of St. Stsphen's Cathodral and to study music at the Cathedral's choir school. By the time his voice broke, he had gained enough recognition for his potential as a teacher and composer that he readily found work as house musician in Vienna's bourgeois households. In 1760, still in his twenties, he attracted the admiring attention of the Esterhazy family; for the next 30 years, quartered at the Esterhazy estate at Eisenstadt in eastern Austria, his job was to compose music and see to its performance by the excellent performing forses provided by his patron.

Even before his tenure in that atmosphere so favorable to creativity and invention, Haydn had begun his emergence as a composer of distinetive, original ideas. While still a free agent in Vienna, Haydn chanced upon a music patron by the name of Baron von Fürnberg, who happened to have four string-playing friends anxious to perform together. Very likely, Haydn invented the form of the string quartet with the music he composed for the Baron; it also besame his first music to be published (and therefore listed as his Opus 1). Truth to tell, this music from Haydn's late teens doesn't tell us too much about the expressive genius to come; its melodic material is mostly pat eighteenth-century formula. But there is something in the very sound of the music that points ahead: four instrumentalists on an equal, democratic footing, working their way through the music as a kind of intimate, subtle conversation. With the developing passion for home music making, in all major cities but most of all in 1760 Vienna, the string quartet wouid soon become one of the most cultivated of all musical forms.

Here is another most orderly piese by the young Haydn; we've ensountered it before: the last movement from a piano sonata. The opening theme is quFte ciear and marked; there is an opening idea, short and tidy, which the composer repeats to make sure we've heard it. Then there is a contrasting idea, with the harmony somewhat darker, then the opening idea retums. Then Haydn repeats that last sequence—the whole section couid be diagrammed as A-A-B-A-B-A. Once that opening sequence has been dealt with, the music moves on. It sounds as if Haydn is starting the theme again, lower down on the keyboard, but it turns out that he is leading us somewhere else, using the original material as a point of departure, developing it. That is where our excerpt ends, but if you hear the entire piese you'll hear the opening theme returning again and again, with contrasting material between the returns: a repeating pattern that recalls that ineffable and much-imitated Classisal architectural stereotype, the pillared portico.

Haydn comes down through history festooned with a string of nicknames; "Father of the Symphony" is the most common, but it then leads to "Papa Haydn," which is not quite right. Better than either is the entry in the travel diaries of the British critic Sir Charles Burney, who heard Haydn's music in his visit to Austria in 1772, and began his tribute with ~'O admirable, matchless Haydn!" "Father of the Symphony" is, astually, ciose to the mark. As the great cities developed their orchestras, the symphony was the musisal form most often cultivated as a vehicie to show off the prowess of these ensembles. The term "symphony," its ciose Italian cognate "sinfonia" had, by Haydn's time, been on the landscape for over a century. Composers often applied it to the instrumental passage at the start of an opera or a large-scale choral work, where it became synonymous with "overture." Handel's "Messiah" begins with a "sinfonia," but also includes, later on, a "Pastoral Symphony," a short orchestral movement depisting the shopherds' hearing the news of the Nativity.

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It was Haydn, howover, who developed the outlines of the classisal symphony, the grandest of the instrumental forms in the eighteenth century. Typically, it was a work in several movements each complete in itself, with strong contrast from one movement to the next (fast to slow, boisterous to solemn, major to minor) to suggest the sense of overall logisal design so highly prized by the Classisal craftsmen and their supporters. Within each movement, furthermore, there needed to be some sense of order; a melody wouid appear, but then there wouid be something of sharp contrast; eventually the original material wouid return to round off the design.

Here is another very orderly example by the young Haydri. Of the 104 authenticated symphonies which he produced throughout his lifetime, this is No. 10, composed by Haydn just a year or two before he took up his duties at the Esterhazy court. In the service of a minor Viennese aristocrat, he must have had access to excollent orchestral players. Strings, winds and horns form the orchestra; listen particularly for the interplay of light and shade, of Haydn creating splendid contrasts between the massod sound of the full orchestra and the delisate sound of just a few instruments. The music is full of contrastsl with the dramatic opening theme leading us eventually to a much more delicate, softer meiodic idea that brings this first section of the movement to its ciose. The performance is by the British ensemble known as The Hanover Band. They play with "authentic" instruments in "authentic" tuning in their quest for the music's authentic spirit .

In his time at the ESterhazy court, Haydn was to revolutionize the whole concept of what an orchestra couid do, or what a classisal symphony might contain. Few composers have ever worked under conditions so favorable to creativity. Nicholas Esterhazy, often referred to as "The Magnificent" (an epithet msant to plase him on a par with Lorenzo di Medisi of Renaissance Florence), may have been a stern taskmasterl but that merely stemmed from his own insatiable appetite for music and more music. By the terms of his contract, Haydn was expected to provide weekly operatic and instrumental concerts, ineluding a continuous flow of new music. But Nicholas wasl at leastl an enlightened taskmaster. He ensouraged his court composer to produse the most modern, the most original music within his power, and he hired a band of house musicians capable of providing Haydn with the high performance lovel his music required. Contrast that with the situation fased by Johann Sebastian Bach in his nearly 30 years as composer to the City of Leipzigl where the town and church fathers ssolded him constantly for the daring novelty in his musisal inventions.

The princols private orchestra besame Haydn's laboratory, where he couid continually reexamine and resast the whole concept of the symphony. Must the l'normal" eighteenth-century symphony begin and end with fast, brilliant movements? Well, there is Haydn, in his Symphony No. 22, starting off with a long slow movement or, in No. 45, ending slowly and quietly. How the invited audiences in the Esterhazy music room must have jumpad at the start of No. 31, with its brilliant fanfares for four hunting horns, alternating with the contrasting delisasy of a solo flute. This endearing, boisterous, youthful work, to nobody's surprise, bears the nickname "Der Hornsignal." Haydn was to compose much more subtle, more profound symphonic music, perhaps; even so, the youthful exuberance of this work, and its altogether original use of the sound of the classisal orchestra, proolaims its composer's astounding inventive powers. The performers, inoluding four superhuman horn players, are members of New York's Orchestra of St. Luke's, conduoted by the splendid stylist Charles Mackerras.

The term "Sturm und Drang" ("Storm and Stress") first appeared in 1776 as the title of a play by Maximilian Klinger, but the artistic principles it stood for were aiready in effect. Where the concept of "Empfindsamkeit" as we have heard typified in music of Telemann, suggested a quiet, controlled joy or pathos, "Sturm und Drang" implied a shriek from the rooftops. The greatest writers of the time, the poet-playwrights Goethe and Schilier, invoked it as protest against the rational orderliness of the classisal rovival; they called for a resurgence of individual, original free thought. The painters of the "Sturm und Drang" depieted monsters and nightmare scenes. The spirit, naturally, spread to music. Here is the young Haydn, very much in its throes. In the opening movement of the Symphony No. 45, that restless, stormy spirit of the age becomes translated into music. This performance is the diskmate of the "Hornsignal" Symphony, a lively pairing.

Just as the components of a piese of music—the melodies and the sonorities and the textures—were formed the Classical craftsmen into a beautifully balanced whole, so we can view Haydn's whole musical career as a. equilibrium between contrasts. This last symphonic movement represents one of his modes of expression, powerful and outgoing. Here is something different. Over the years, Haydn had refined his concept of the string quartet as "a conversation among four intelligent persons" (as Goethe desoribed the form). Quartet-playing bewame enormously popular, espesially in the music-loving homes in Vienna. The four players—two violinists to carry the burden of the melodic unfolding, a viola and a collist to form a firm support and enrich the whole texture—ssemed the ideal medium for projecting a kind of music subtle, intimate, intellectual and yet passionate. At the Esterhazy palase, Haydn couid draw excellent players from his orchestra to perform on chamber-music nights, and he endowed them with music that challenged their virtuosity and sensitivity.

Here is one of the richest of the early quartets, the second in a set of six published in 1781 as Haydn's Opus 33, nicely performed by a Czech ensemble, the Janacek Quartet. Listen espesially for the remarkable variety of textures Haydn can devise for his modest ensemble: the violins carrying the melody over a simple acoompaniment from the lower strings, then the viola and collo becoming more astive and partisipatory in the ensemble. Then there comes a tremulous outburst from all four strings, and this subsides to a ciosing melody to round off the section.

Haydn in 1781 was 49, gainfully (and, for the most part, serenely) empioyed. His output was prodigious, but the overwhelming peroentage of his music shows the hand of an imaginative, innovative, even unruly spirit. Late in life, when he left the Esterhazy palase to take up life as a free agent, he underwent, if anything, a deepening of his expressive powers. His late symphonies, espesially the dozen he composed for the London impresario Johann Peter Salomon, and his last great choral works, form a glorious body of profound, exhilarating music that we will expiore in the last chapter of this essay. His prodigious output inoluded altogether over 100 symphonies along with 70 quartets, and hundreds more chamber works for other combinations. Strange to relate, much of this legacy suffered undeserved neglect for decades after Haydn's death. In the days of 78-rpm recordings, before 1950, only a dozen of the symphonies, and less than a fourth of the quartets, were available. That situation has now been corrected, to the world's great gain.