Judge Dennis Davis
Haydn: Father of the Symphony: If No Haydn, No Beethoven?

Judge Dennis Davis - Haydn: Father of the Symphony: If No Haydn, No Beethoven

- So tonight I’m going to be giving a lecture on Franz Joseph Haydn, which itself poses numerous challenges. It does so for reasons I’ll come to in a moment because it’s extraordinary output that Haydn generated over his lifetime. It also has challenges because in many ways, as we were just talking about before we started this lecture, Haydn is a critically important composer in that great tradition of classical music. And some while ago, when I did one of my Mahler lectures, I indicated that when Mahler composed his ninth symphony at the turn of the 20th century, he kind of looked back and thought that he was the last person, the last standard bearer of the great tradition that had gone from Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, etal to him, and that he was the last person standing in this regard. And so therefore, in a way he may well be right, that of course deserves treatment on another occasion. But there can be little doubt that Franz Joseph Haydn is a crucial figure if we going to evaluate music as such. When Beethoven left Bonn in 1792, he had with him an album in which his patron, Waldstein, had written quote, “You are going to Vienna in fulfilment of your long frustrated wishes. You’ll receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.” Because of course with Beethoven, it was with Mozart by the way that Beethoven had wished to study, and he’d travelled to Vienna some years earlier and impressed Mozart with his playing, but Mozart had now died. And the 21 year old Beethoven turned to Haydn, who had really encouraged him during a visit to Bonn.

And so when Waldstein said, “You received the spirit of Mozart in the hands of Haydn”, that kind of linkage between Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven cannot be overemphasised. And then there are dates where that art apart from anything else. Haydn’s dates 1732 to 1809. Mozart, as you’ve learned from Patrick’s wonderful lectures on Mozart, 1756 to 1791, Beethoven 1770 to 1827. And so in a way, Haydn kind of straddles to a large degree, certainly the career of Mozart, and to some significant extent say for the last 18 years, the career of Beethoven as well. And as I indicated to you, the output is absolutely prodigious. Not for nothing of course, and we’ll get back to that, was he called “the father of the symphony” as well as “the father of the string quartet.‘ But his influence went far beyond them, 'cause he not only composed 104 symphonies, 104 symphonies, over 20 concertos, 60 piano sonatas and 83 string quartets. And that’s apart from two extraordinary oratorios, which one of which I will talk about later. The creation and then the seasons, and of course the various masses that he also composed. So how do you in one lecture actually try to capture the music of someone with such a prodigious output? The answer is you don’t. And all I can do for you is to give you some suggestive recordings of the variety of his output and why he’s so important. But before we get onto the four recordings that I have chosen for us tonight, let us just talk a little bit about the biography of Joseph Haydn. As I say, born in 1732 near the Hungarian border in Austria, a place called Rohrau. His early career, he excelled at the harpsichord, the violin, and the singer.

And it was his singing voice that won him a job as a choir boy in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where he studied under Johann Georg Reutter and of course, when puberty affected him, what then happened was he lost his place in the choir and sought other forms of freelance work. To cut his long story relatively short, the way in which he worked as a freelancer was of course not particularly consistent and it raises the sort of precarious sources of income. And so he began seeking work with wealthy aristocrats who could afford a music director, a Kapellmeister if you want. And he found one in Count Morzin, who employed him as a Kapellmeister and had a small orchestra at his home, which was located in what is present day Czech Republic. But when Count Morzin encountered financial difficulties, Haydn moved on to the crucial move in his entire career, which was to the Esterhazy family, which would employ him for most of his professional life. And he worked out of various estates for the Esterhazy family. I should add that around 1765 when he was just 33 years old, prince Nicolas Esterhazy, he learned the baryton, which is a form of viola. And apparently Haydn wrote something like 200 works for this instrument to please his patron. But by 1779 he managed to renegotiate a contract with the Esterhazy family. And this allowed him to get his symphonies published, particularly the famous Paris symphonies, the six of them in 1785 to 1786. And of course later on a whole range of 12 symphonies, which became known as the London Symphonies because he was particularly popular in London. In 1790, as I’ve indicated earlier, he met the young Ludwig Van Beethoven in Bonn.

There was some teaching of Beethoven by Haydn. Although according to the books I’ve read, Haydn wasn’t the greatest of all teachers, but nonetheless, and then of course he remained in the Esterhazy family, spent most of his final years in Vienna. And it was during this period that he composed these two renowned oratories, "The Creation” in 1798, of which we’re going to talk briefly a little later, and “The Seasons” in 1801. He then, the last work he composed was the sixth mass for the Esterhazys. And also bear in mind that he also composed “Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser”, the national anthem of modern day Germany. So much for the background. What about the kind of music that Haydn composed over this very long and distinguished career? Let me make a few preliminary remarks about the character of the music. There’s no doubt, as I indicated, that he was called often “The father of the symphony” and “the father of the spring quartet”, he did not invent either of these forms, but there’s no doubt that it was his compositions would shape that into a format that will be used for centuries in both the case of the quartet and the symphony. And if you look at the symphony, it was Haydn who established the modern sonata form of the symphony, which I’ve spoken previously in discussing, particularly in Beethoven. That is the idea of a movement which encapsulated an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. And it was he who essentially imposed that kind of structure on the symphonic work. Secondly, I suppose you would argue that most of these symphonies, most of his music was upbeat in the major key. He spent most of his career working for the nobility, as I’ve indicated. And they wanted to have upbeat music and most of it was jaunty lighthearted melodies, which essentially pleased them to a large degree. Not all, some of his music was actually even at that time, extremely creative.

Let me give you one example, the famous “Farewell Symphony,” the 45th Symphony. What had happened here, which is a, and some of you may have heard it played, it’s very lovely to hear it, watch it actually, because this was a symphony, the 45th, where Esterhazy had persisted in holding the musicians at his summer palace for a very long time, for longer than usually was the case in summer. And they were getting rather disgruntled. And Haydn then persuaded Esterhazy to end the summer stay eventually at this remote summer palace. And in order to do so, he composed the symphony in 1772, the 45th. And as the adoggio begins to play, musicians one by one snuffed out their candle and left the orchestra. So by the end of the movement, only two musicians remained. Now I could have played this for you and shown you, but because of time I thought it’d be better for me to concentrate my efforts on some of the more interesting, or let’s say the music which essentially supports my argument about him being the bridge. So the first of the pieces that I want to play is the “Symphony 100”. It’s part of the London symphonies and the “100” of course is known as being the military symphony. It was written for Haydn’s triumphant return to London. It’s filled with what was then surprising new sounds, a Turkish exoticism of the triangle, the crash cymbal. The bass drum.

Audiences at the time might have expected to hear these effects in the opera house, but not in a symphony. So from the bugle call to drum rolls, the military symphony is filled with sounds of the battlefield. The context of this, of course England at that point was involved in the French Revolutionary wars. But it may well have been that Haydn has more influenced by the sounds of the Austria Turkish war, which occurred between 1778 and 1791, and roundabout the time that he composed this in 1794. After its premier, a writer for the Morning Chronicle wrote, “It is the advancing to battle and the march of men, the sounding of the charge, the thundering of the onset, the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may well be called the hellish roar of war increased to the climax of horrid sublimity.” So it’s a kind of military symphony to a large degree. It starts, in many instances it’s still relatively cheerful. So if you look at the second movement, which we’re going to talk about, in which there’s a lot of military activity, it’s also relatively cheerful. So here we are and let’s us have a listen to the second movement of the military symphony, which I think reflects to some considerable extent what I was trying to say to you. So Lauren, if we can get onto that. Hello Lauren. You can stop that now, Lauren. Okay, thank you. I think you got the picture we could carry on with that. But I wanted to move contrast that to the “Symphony 103.” This is the penultimate symphony that Haydn wrote. And it’s called “The Drum Roll Symphony” because of the timpani roll in the first bar. The truth about it is that it is really interesting because if you contrast the hundredth, which essentially is really typical kind of Haydn, to the hundred and third here is where I think we start to get closer to the influence that was exerted on people like Beethoven.

So I’m going to start off by just playing for you, 'cause it’s quite interesting, the dichotomy. It starts with a mysterious melody that follows with the bassoon and the low strings. And you can’t really quite determine the metre at first, the hints as well of the famous “Dies Irae” tune. And then this suggestion is reinforced by kind of eerie chromatism, which then ensues, in other words, using the chromatic scale, which became very popular with both Mahler and Beethoven. But then it sort of flips to the kind of Haydn that we know, the cheerful Haydn, the Haydn that you’ve just heard in the military symphony. It kind of recalls to some extent a point that Patrick was making about some of the dichotomies in Mozart’s music. And you can feel a similar parallel here. So I’m going to play for you the first, I think probably three and a half minutes of the first movement of the drum roll. And then I want to talk a little bit about the last movement, just to give you a feel of it. What is interesting about that, by the way, the photograph of course is the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Austrian conductor conducting the Philharmony Orchestra. And I mean he really is a brilliant conductor of these kinds of pieces, I should add. And what is interesting, as I indicated to you earlier, is that you’ve got this mysterious melody, as I indicate to you in the bassoon and low strings.

Then all of a sudden there’s almost this kind of naive quality merges out of a totally different, as it were, real dichotomy almost as if sort of Haydn can’t bear to continue the introspection and has to get back to the sort of the levity of his patrons. We now come to the last movement, which again is interesting. It seems to start with a simple horn call, but we then discover that it has a countersubject, comes the theme of this movement. And if you listen carefully to the treatment, particularly feugal treatment throughout, long-held notes above and below the figure of the winds, there is quite clearly some resemblance to that which emerged in its full glory under the symphonic guidance of Beethoven. And there is unquestionably for me a bridge there, but let’s listen at least to the first couple of minutes of the last movement and as it opens up with the horn call. Thanks Lauren. Would I be entirely out of place to agree with what many musicologists suggested, that you can almost hear some of the fake motifs of the Beethoven five there, that there is something there, but the knocking theme, which we learned later and which we did examine when I lectured on on Beethoven before. I now want to turn, 'cause he did so much, to the great oratorio, which is “The Creation.” And let me give you some background to this and then we’re going to just listen to two little bits. In 1791, there was a Handel festival in Westminster Abbey and Haydn attended and he was overwhelmed by the monumental nature of the choruses in Handel’s Messiah and Israel and Egypt, amazed by the fact that there were a thousand players and singers involved. In an early biography, which would be written by Giuseppe Carpani, Haydn confessed quote, “He were struck as if he been put back to the beginning of his studies and had known nothing up to that moment.”

He meditated on every note and drew from these most learned scores, the essence of true musical grandeur.“ And he then wanted himself to write something of a similar kind. Just before he left England for the last time in 1795, the impressario and violinist Johann Peter Salomon handed him an anonymous English libretto on the subject of creation, which had been intended for Haydn almost a half a century earlier, sorry, for Handel. Haydn saw the musical potential in the creation, the main source was of course the book of Genesis and Milton’s "Paradise Lost.” And it was on that basis when he was back in Vienna that he sat down to compose this remarkable piece of music, which was finished towards perhaps the end of 1796. And of course, it’s structured very, very kind of simply in a way, the first two parts, the six days of creation, are announced in a recitative way by one of the three arc angels, Raphael, Uriel, and Gabriel. After each act of creation, the arc angels then develop upon the wonders in accompanying recitative arias. And each day after the first, which ends with the chorus held in the new created world, there’s a jubilant hymn of praise by the heavenly hosts. And then part three is the first morning in Eden, Adam and Eve’s praise of all creation and their mutual love.

It’s a vast canvas. It carries on for almost two hours and obviously I can’t, we could have a whole lecture on the salan 'cause it’s really fascinating in its own way. The first part of it, which is what I wanted to play, the first few moments are really interesting because you’ll notice almost the instability of the music as Haydn six as it were, to reproduce in musical form notion of creation, ex nihilo. In some ways, I’ve often thought that the first few bars of the Beethoven nine also reflect this, but that’s for another day. But here we have, and I wanted to play for you a famous recording by Leonard Bernstein which he did with the Bavarian Symphony Orchestra in the Ottobeuren Abbey in Bavaria, an abbey which had been there from the eighth century, but the building in which this particular concert was held was completed in 766. And apparently they have regular Saturday concerts and it’s a magnificent building, as you’ll see. And we will just listen to the first couple of minutes. It’s a documentary, so you can get the whole thing on YouTube if you want, but just bear with me for the first three minutes of “The Creation” and then we’ll return to the end thereof thereafter. So after almost two hours in which you’ve got a soprano as Gabriel, tenor as Uriel, a bass as Raphael, and a soprano as Eve and a baritone as Adam, we come to the end of this extraordinary piece of music. And it ends, I’m not Patrick, I’m not good enough to have the text produced, but let me read it to you, the chorus at the end. “Let every voice sing unto the Lord. Thank him for all his works. To the glory of his name. Let song with song compete. The glory of the Lord shall endure forever. Amen amen.” So this is the last chorus after almost two hours of music. I wasn’t able to get the Bernstein recording, I couldn’t kind of edit it properly, but this is, I think a Norwegian orchestra in the last three minutes. It really is excellent, and I wonder when you and I listen to that, you can well understand why many in the musical world regard this as the greatest of all the true oratorios in German.

But of course it’s not only German, even though it’s spoken German, but it does have, as I indicated, a recourse to the English oratorial tradition, which was established by Haydn, really a magnificent piece of work. And we could spend a lot of time analysing it. But I wanted to give you some sense that Haydn was more than the kind of jaunty music that I just played by way of the first of my clips. I want to end with one of my favourite Haydn pieces. Again, I’m particularly cognizant of the fact that the 19th century musicologist, E. T. A. Hoffmann once wrote that “Listening to Haydn was like taking a walk in the country.” But I think that here he was able to compose one of the two great trumpet concert and the other one by Hummel. And it really is interesting because in the 18th century, the trumpet was a coiled tube of brass, about eight foot long, about twice as long as a standard modern instrument, starting with a mouthpiece at one end and flaring bell at the other, none of the valve machinery in the middle that characterises a modern instrument. And it was then once the modern instrument in the latter part the 18th century was developed so that it was a truly chromatic instrument, that Haydn was, as it were, persuaded by his friend Anton Weidinger, the trumpeter of the Imperial Court Orchestra in Vienna who commissioned this concerto. And indeed the later one or the other one by Hummel. It really is an extraordinary trumpet concerto. It’s played often by the orchestra and trumpeter.

I have chosen for you an interesting recording by one of my great musical heroes, Wynton Marsalis, who was the great jazz musician. He here is playing the Haydn Trumpet concerto. We just listened to the first little bit of the first movement and the glorious part, the end of the second movement, of the last movement, sorry. To finish off our evening on Haydn.

• [Announcer] Hear now John Williams and soloist Wynton Marsalis for the Haydn trumpet concerto.

• Right Lauren, we can move to the last clip from there. Lauren, we can stop this clip. Hi Lauren. Ah, thanks. Before we get to the last clip, just to make the point, you listen to this magnificent rendition by Marsalis, what a musician he is, oh, you’ll notice that whilst it starts in a manner in which what would be called the old natural trumpet would’ve been able to play, once you start running up the scale from the written middle C and you’ve got all those chromatic notes that could not possibly have been accomplished on anything other than the modern trumpet. And so bearing in mind that it was an instrument which was only developed in the late 18th century, it’s a really remarkable composition and we will now hear parts of the final movement, which just reinforces the point I’m making in relation to the remarkable composing ability of Haydn to compose this trumpet concerto. Thanks Lauren. I want to just say this before I end my lecture, to say that I could have done a lecture on a whole range of other compositions of Haydn. And if those of you who feel cheated, I don’t blame you particularly over 76, the string quartets one to six, they’re absolutely fantastic and are well worth listening to very carefully as so are some of the masses.

So is “The Seasons”, which is the other oratorio to which I’ve mentioned and I cannot, but escape talking about his piano concerti, sorry, the cello concerti particularly interesting enough, concerto number one, which was discovered in Prague in 1961 and has now become one of these most popular orchestral works played very often, they are magnificent pieces and I could have as well chosen to play them as well. But I made a choice because of this absolute extraordinary volume to give you some sense of both the way his symphonies influenced those who came after him, the way in my view in which “The Creation” is an incredibly sophisticated work which undoubtedly would’ve influenced many who use the voice and the symphonic instrument at the same time. And then the remarkable trumpet concerto where if you think about it, dealing with a brand new instrument and composing in this way, just fabulous. So thank you very much for listening, and I hope everybody is well and safe and manages to escape Omicron. Wendy, that’s about it for me.

• [Wendy] Dennis, do you have time to take questions?

Q&A and Comments:

• Oh, sorry, I’m happy to, there are not many. I was just looking now Lauren, most of them I think are comments and I agree with almost all of them.

There is one about “I love Marsalis and I hope you do a jazz session”, and I agree with you, and Howard talks about the two Haydn cello concertos, interesting that his most instrumental concerti are not for piano and violin, but the for the less popular concert instruments such as the trumpet and the cello. I couldn’t agree more with that.

Is there anything else that I’ve got to deal with? Yeah, I agree with you about the velocity and of course, you know, yes, he was carried to a Beethoven concert and died shortly thereafter. And there’s a wonderful BBC documentary which talks about “The Eroica” and Haydn coming in in the middle of it and saying music will change forever as a result of that.

But anyway, that’s my bit and thanks very, very much for listening and thanks Lauren again, so much for helping me. Goodnight to everybody.