Music: Take Away 50

Before he died at 77, Franz Joseph Haydn composed more than 500 works, including at least 104 symphonies. Last week the Haydn Society, which has been busying itself preparing a catalogue of Haydn compositions and recording many of them, reported some tentative findings: some 50 works generally attributed to Haydn are not his at all—and further, many a Haydn score has been tampered with by “improving” editors.

After two years of Haydn-go-seek, H. C. Robbins Landon, one of the society’s founders, writes in the Saturday Review of Literature: “It is (unfortunately) more profitable today to issue a symphony on records under Haydn’s name than under the correct title of [say] Johann Rasper Ferdinand Gluggl, and it was just as profitable for an 18th Century publisher to follow this same course.”

Other Haydn Society conclusions which “will come as a considerable surprise to the music world”:

¶Haydn’s Toy Symphony is the work of J. G. Leopold Mozart (Wolfgang’s father).

¶Brahms’s famous Variations on a Theme by Haydn should perhaps be retitled to credit Haydn Student Ignaz Joseph Pleyel. Student Pleyel may have written the theme which Brahms used for his variations; it wasn’t Haydn.

¶The drum-roll effect in Haydn’s Symphony No. 103 (“The Drum Roll”) was not Haydn’s idea, but the work of a later innovator, identity unknown.

Happily, reports Landon, the society has cleared up at least one bothersome question in its hero’s favor: it was really Haydn—and not, “as certain German circles tried to prove,” Anton Kraft—who wrote Haydn’s fifth Cello Concerto.