Music: COMPOSERS: Rebel in Uniform

Rebel in Uniform

To most concertgoers a generation ago, Joseph Haydn was the composer of only twelve symphonies (inexplicably numbered 93-104), a few string quartets and the Austrian national anthem. According to the music-appreciation crowd, he was a genial papa figure who enjoyed a joke at the audience’s expense and turned out a great deal of tinkly, tinseled music to light up the ballrooms of the Austrian nobility.

Nowadays, Papa is lighting up a good many more places. In what must be considered a permanent renewal of interest in 18th century music, Haydn is being hailed as one of history’s leading musical revolutionaries. Listeners are discovering, most of them for the first time, the vibrant iconoclasm of a composer who began life by assimilating the even-patterned regularity of the style of his times and spent the rest of his career thumbing his nose at it.

Throw Away the Script. His career lasted over half a century; by 1803, at 71, he was too weak to compose, but lingered on six more years to counsel such later hotbloods as the young Beethoven and Weber. For most of his life he was court composer to Prince Nicholas Esterházy, who obliged him to wear livery and dine at the servants’ table, but who gave him every encouragement to tinker with accepted musical conventions and, when necessary, to kick them over. Haydn’s musical life, in fact, stands as a direct contradiction to the old movie script that requires genius to feed on adversity.

At Esterház (in eastern Austria), Haydn created operas, symphonies and chamber works whose freshness remains remarkably vivid. The Prince gave him a crack orchestra, and Haydn taught it a dramatic musical vocabulary unknown before his time. When it pleased him, he would begin a symphony (Nos. 22, 49) with a long slow movement instead of the expected brilliant allegro. Some of his effects were comic: in the finale of Symphony No. 60, the violins are asked to mistune their lowest string from G down to F, then pause in mock horror and raucously retune. At the end of Symphony No. 80, the orchestra comes in on the offbeat so consistently that wrong begins to sound like right; then, with a wrenching jolt, the return to right sounds all wrong.

But Haydn was more than a musical wag. Sharing the spirit of the Sturm und Drang poets of the time (among them Schiller and Lessing), he made his instruments weep and rant as well. The supple, rhapsodic lyricism of the slow movement of Symphony No. 44 is far removed from the aloof, balanced expressiveness sought by most composers of his time; the demonic orchestral outbursts and sudden silences in the first movement of No. 80 point ahead to the struggle-locked manner of the later Beethoven. To initiate the finale of the Sinfonia Concertante, four solo instruments conduct a nonverbal argument among themselves, a passionate foreshadowing of the violent orchestral disputation in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

New Old Sound. To bring Haydn to life in just proportion, a great deal of sandblasting, as well as digging, has had to be done. According to American Haydn Scholar H. C. Robbins Landon, the standard published score of Symphony No. 96, for example, contains more than 10,000 errors, mostly either from miscopying the original manuscript or from the desire of 19th century editors to beef up the orchestration to fit their own ideals. Landon has devoted his life to rectifying such abominations by publishing newly edited scores and by burrowing in European libraries and monasteries for lost works.

RCA Victor has issued a six-disk album of Symphonies Nos. 82-92, conducted by Landon Disciple Denis Vaughan and using Landon’s cleaned-up editions. Columbia is currently engaged in recording all 104 of the symphonies, also in authentic versions, and several other companies (including the low-priced Nonesuch label) are also busily filling in the Haydn gaps. And only last week, Composer-Conductor Pierre Boulez led the Cleveland Orchestra in a crisp performance of the Sinfonia Concertante in B Flat—a score virtually unknown 20 years ago. Today, an alert collector can lay hands on 88 of the symphonies, all 83 of the string quartets, and a varied assortment of operas, Masses and piano pieces that reveal for the first time the full inventive measure of music’s swinging Papa.