Music: People Should Care

The 13-year-old schoolboy wanted to know why no score was available for Haydn’s Symphony No. 58. His teacher told him that “forty years ago a German publisher [Breitkopf & Härtel] started out to collect all of Haydn’s works, but bogged down. It was too expensive and nobody cared.” The 13-year-old thereupon resolved that Haydn’s work should be collected and that people should be made to care. That was in 1939. By last week, at a heavyset 24, Boston’s H. C. Robbins Landon was well on the way to both objectives.

Landon helped form the “Haydn Society of the United States” when he was just out of college in 1946. The society managed to get some special programs of Haydn’s music performed on a Boston radio station, but not much more. In 1949, Landon formed the “Haydn Society Inc.,” and really started to roll.

Bonanza. In Vienna, with $4,000 inherited from an uncle, Landon arranged for the recording of four rarely heard Haydn symphonies by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, led by young U.S. Conductor Jonathan Sternberg. Then he hit a bonanza; he persuaded a friend to invest $13,000 in the Haydn Society, assuring him it would “pyramid faster than Florida real estate.” With his bonanza money, he hired a photographer and a musicologist, sent them up & down Austria, Germany and Hungary collecting and microfilming Haydn manuscripts. He also recorded the Nelson Mass, which sold 5,000 copies, put the society on the map.

Altogether, Landon has recorded 25 Haydn symphonies, six Masses, Haydn’s most famed oratorio, The Creation, and some chamber works, with Mozart’s neglected opera Idomeneo thrown in for good measure. With profits from record sales, the society has published the first of 63 volumes of Haydn’s collected works. Landon (and seven other stockholders) can now survey a corporation which will gross $150,000 this year, numbers some of the world’s outstanding Haydn authorities (including Denmark’s Jens Peter Larsen, Boston’s Karl Geiringer) on its advisory board. Nonetheless, the society’s 19 staff members in Boston, New York and Vienna still limit their salaries to a $60-a-week top. Says Landon: “Every cent net goes back into the ‘Complete Works.’ ‘

“A Killer.” Last week Robbins Landon completed a Haydn Society coup he was sure would become a major musical event: the recording of Haydn’s last opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, a four-act work that has never been staged.

Haydn Society musicologists turned detective to put the score together. Haydn composed the opera in London in 1791 when he was 59, on a commission from the Prince of Wales (afterwards George IV). On the day of the premiere, King George III, who was sponsoring a rival theater and tiffing with the Prince, closed up the Orfeo theater with troops. Haydn pocketed his £300, forgot the opera for the time being. Landon found one score in Berlin’s State Library, another in the Esterhazy archives of Budapest’s State Library, but both were incomplete. At one point, the frustrated musicologists had begun composing a recitative to fill in a gap when the missing part suddently turned up in a misnumbered manuscript.

Unlike Gluck’s Orfeo, Haydn’s opera has an unhappy ending: Orfeo’s beautiful singing is not enough to bring his Eurydice back from the dead; Orfeo himself is poisoned by the Bacchae. Enthusiastic Robbins Landon, who recorded Orfeo with singers, chorus and orchestra (cut to a Haydn-prescribed 40 pieces) of the Vienna State Opera, was ready to predict that “it will hold its own alongside [Mozart’s] Don Giovanni. We don’t believe in resuscitating something from the dead unless it’s really a killer. And this is.”