Joseph Haydn passed away two centuries ago this year, and with the ending of the year we may expect the stream of CD sets, concerts, and books to return back to their normal trickle. The next Haydn folderol year will be 2032, the tricentennial of his birth. I may live to see it.
I am known by my students, friends, and colleagues to be a bonafide, card-carrying, police-registered Haydn nut. I am stunned by his technical craftsmanship, awed by his prodigiousness, and inspired by his unfailing freshness. As I advance through middle age and sense the closeness of senior-citizen status, I am reassured by his having written some of his best stuff when he was at my current age or older, invigorated by the thought that he had a creative second wind when approaching his seventieth birthday—the equivalent of eighty nowadays.
My admiration for Haydn’s work has come about gradually, by dint of experience and only with a modicum of musical maturity. He did not register on my childhood radar, save a bit of the “surprise” symphony from an elementary-school music class. My teens came and went without him taking part; in those days, even Mozart was a hard sell for me. I was a Russian-romantics and early-moderns kind of guy in my teens, very hot on Borodin, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, and Bartók, but lukewarm at best on Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, and Mozart, and stone cold on just about everybody else.
My first piano teacher at Peabody, Elizabeth Katzenellenbogen, gave me the precious gift of a secure foundation in piano playing. She took me back to the basics and made sure that I knew precisely how to negotiate the instrument. No hand position was left to chance, no motion of the wrist, elbows, or arms. During my first year she also ensured that I planned out my music-making with the same meticulous care; every phrase mark, dynamic, degree of legato or staccato, pedaling, and the like, had to be worked out, thought through, and written down. To that end, she put me on a very steady diet of unimpeachably high-quality composers, including a half-dozen or so early Haydn sonatas.
I cheerfully confess to being deaf to Haydn’s charms at the time. I only knew that if I didn’t lift my wrist just so where marked in my score, that if I didn’t play this note staccato as marked, that if I rushed or played too loud or all the notes of a chord didn’t sound properly or whatever, I would be fitted with the Katzenellenbogen Cone of Shame—and I did not like the Cone of Shame. So I lifted my wrist, played staccato, did my best to play at the appropriate volume, voiced my chords, and hoped for the best.
I didn’t grok Haydn any more than I appreciated Mrs. Katzenellenbogen, but time passed and I grew up a little bit. It didn’t take all that long before I realized just how much I owed that steel-haired woman and her rigorous methodologies, but Haydn-love took longer to arise.
My ‘eureka’ moment came when I was well past the age of thirty. A composer friend of mine had been exploring Haydn’s great oratorio “The Creation” and brought over a recording & score to share his enthusiasm with me. I felt a bit skeptical, but at the same time I was curious about “The Creation”—at the time I knew it only by name.
We took a break at the end of Part I, after the golden majesty of “The Heavens Are Telling”. I am told that I sat on the couch, thumbing back through the score, mumbling my God what superb writing, the control, the quality, the invention, just look at that transition and get a load of that fugue and my God what superb writing what a glorious piece this is sheesh what a fine composer.
Only connect, as Forster would say. I connected. From that moment there was nothing for it save I should drench myself in Haydn. The symphonies were the obvious next step and before too long I had the “London” and “Paris” sets down cold. Into the earlier symphonies—those daring explorations he made during the late 1760s and early 1770s—and the string quartets—and the piano trios—and the full-court-press astonishment of the late Masses. I just kept on going; I knew he was a prolific composer but I had no idea of the actual power of his creativity.
Around that time I began programming Haydn’s piano sonatas regularly and made the discovery—hardly unique to me—that performing a Haydn piano sonata requires everything a musician has to give, and then some. It isn’t just the transparency of the texture, either. The fact is that every phrase must be thought through, every dynamic and tempo considered carefully, every nuance and gesture examined and questioned. And then in performance you must forget all of that, and just let the music flow. Of course the same is true for all music and all performances, but in Haydn the challenge seems concentrated. In a recent piano recital I programmed a premiere, some Rachmaninoff, and some Debussy, but it was the Haydn Sonata No. 59 in E-flat Major that I knew was the most challenging on the program, and the work that got the lion’s share of my attention.
So I keep on exploring, enjoying, having a great old time with this endlessly engaging writer. One could spend a lifetime studying the string quartets alone, not to mention the symphonies, piano trios, choral works, and piano sonatas. His craftsmanship, strong from the beginning, reached a level by the 1780s at which he became incapable of writing anything even remotely second-rate. He was a master of form without equal, a constant tinkerer never content to repeat himself or fall into a rut. He was a prime mover in the development of sonata form, and as such could treat that critically-important technique with a rare freedom. Haydn’s sonata forms are often shockingly radical, at least if we apply the strictures developed by nineteenth-century theorists who had used mostly Mozart and Beethoven as their models.
Haydn’s harmony is another area worth exploring; just as with form, his music offers some short, sharp shocks to the student who approaches it expecting a simple tonic-and-dominant affair. He was fond of melding major and minor keys together—i.e., treating “D” as both minor and major and using the chords from both interchangeably. His mastery of Phrygian relationships rivals Bach’s; his ability to manipulate key centers within large-scale structures is paralleled only by Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms. Many of Beethoven’s signature harmonic practices, in fact, originated with Haydn, including such classic Beethoven shockers as the C# in the opening phrase of the Eroica or those signature quixotic key changes.
Haydn’s vocal writing is a topic yet to be explored by musicologists or performers. The later Masses and the two great oratorios are well-known enough, but other vocal works—including a fine body of lieder—yet await their due. Although Haydn’s operas will never stand on an equal footing with Mozart’s (none can), they are filled with first-class writing and offer a treasure trove just waiting to be discovered.
More than anything else what we need now is an inexpensive complete Haydn edition. The 19th century, so indefatigable about giving us complete Mozarts, Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Schumanns, Schuberts, Brahms, et al., did not see fit to extend the courtesy to Haydn. As a result, we have no recourse to inexpensive Dover reprints or access to Haydn via that wonderful new resource, the Internet Music Score Library Project and its endless public-domain treasures. Donald Francis Tovey once referred to him as “Haydn the Inaccessible” and while he has become accessible, at least within the confines of a library, he remains, alas “Haydn the Expensive.”
But recordings abound of the big major works, and the minor ones as well. If you’re just determined to hear all 120+ baryton trios, they’re out there, as are the buckets of wind serenades, suites, occasional chamber pieces, vocal works, and the like. Brilliant Classics has made a good start with their Haydn Edition, but unlike their Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach sets, the Haydn isn’t complete—they just couldn’t get him into a single box set, no matter how hard they tried.
But that’s Haydn for you: always surprising, always something new around the corner. We’re nowhere near finished with Papa Joe—in fact, the journey is just beginning.