Haydn Seek

1749 - 1750 - More music

Missa brevis in F major (Hob 22:1)

The other earliest work, along with the previously discussed Missa 'Rorate coeli desuper', is this little Mass in F major. Unlike the Mass in G, though, this one was apparently popular from the very beginning, and parts were distributed widely throughout German-speaking Catholic countries. Haydn, himself, apparently forgot about it soon after entering it into the Entwurf Katalog, and didn’t rediscover it for himself until nearly 40 years later when he was going through the stacks of personal papers accumulated during his lifetime and ran across the autograph!

In mid 1750, Haydn joined in a longstanding Viennese tradition of a pilgrimage to a shrine to Mary at Mariazell. It is highly likely that he was in company of a group from St Stephens, since according to both Griesinger and Dies he introduced himself to the Choirmaster as ‘Haydn from the Capellhaus…’. Apparently he sang with the choir there and made a good impression, since he was asked to stay on for a week. One of the compositions that he showed and which was probably played was this Mass in F. It is a very agreeable work that could be performed by most church ensembles of the time, having parts for a 4 part choir and the typical instrumental group of 2 violins, basso (cello etc) and organ. The one thing that sets it apart in this regard is that there are also parts for 2 soloists, both sopranos. It is very generally believed that Haydn composed this work the year previous for his brother, Michael, as first soprano and himself as second.

Fifty years later, when Haydn rediscovered it, one would like to suppose what made him prepare it for publication. Was it nostalgia for the wonderful times he spent as a chorister with his brother in the magnificent church? Or the recognition of the actual piece that seemed to have many of the characteristics that would make him famous? In any case, he did add winds, more strings and voices, and essentially attempt to bring it up-to-date. But the original, somewhat naïve 11 minute mass is great just as it is. There are a few recordings of the original version, the Hickox set noted above has it, and so does this one with the Academy of Ancient Music led by Simon Preston.

 

But I like this recording by the Rebel Baroque Orchestra / Burdick because it is wonderfully done, and also because it contains the only recording that I’ve found of the 1805 orchestrated version. A great chance to compare the two and draw your own conclusions.

Next time, I would like to talk a bit about a topic of great interest to me, one which goes along very nicely with Haydn, but is not specifically about him. Yet.

Thanks for reading!

Beginning at the Beginning

 

Wiener Neustädter Altar at St Stephens Cathedral from 1447

The earliest music

Throughout this series I am going to do my best to present the music in small chunks. It has been my experience, in the years that I have spent communing with classical music enthusiasts, the reason many tend to avoid or (more accurately) gloss over the prolific composers of the Baroque and Classical eras is because the size of the body of music is truly intimidating. And this is not helped by writers who tend towards lumping decades of music together, as they must do within the confines of a book, no matter how large. The problem with this is, all sense of chronology and context are lost. In my own case, and also in yours, I hope, chronology and context are The Holy Grail!

If you are looking at the earliest music, you will need to begin where the roots are. After spending his life from 7 to 17 years old as a chorister in St. Stephens Cathedral, it must come as no surprise when Haydn starts out with sacred music. The earliest surviving piece of music is one or another mass, either the Missa brevis in F major (Hob. 22:1) or the Missa 'Rorate coeli desuper' in G major (Hob. 22:3). It is highly probable both of these were composed while Haydn was still at St. Stephens. They are both noted in Haydn’s catalog of his works, which he began to keep circa 1765-6. They led different lives though. The Missa 'Rorate coeli desuper', a mass composed for the 4th week of Advent (part of an Austrian tradition) was lost for many years, laying in Gottweig Abbey unperformed since 1786, the last of 15 documented performances there. H.C. Robbins Landon found it and its parts in 1957. The mass itself, as a ‘rorate’ mass, would have been sung without a Credo if performed on the 4th Saturday of Advent, or, if on the 4th Sunday, then with a Credo but without a Gloria. So both are provided, but in practice both wouldn’t be sung together. In addition, it is a missa brevis, by which is meant that parts of the text of the Gloria and Credo had the different lines sung simultaneously by the four soloists. It is hard to imagine the words making any sort of sense this way, but probably the listeners knew the text so well that it worked just fine. There are literally thousands of these masses from 18th century Austria. When it was first discovered, many scholars thought perhaps it was too good to be by Haydn in 1749, but current scholarship consensus, after years of fretting over it, is that Haydn composed the 2 violin parts and the vocal melodies, all of which are less polished and rather filled with student errors, over the perfect figured bass that was probably composed by his teacher, Rütter. Scoring was four voices (S – A – T – B), and a standard church trio of two violins, along with a basso section that could be a variety of instruments including any or all of cello, violone (or double bass), bassoon, and an organ of course.

I will make suggestions (I hesitate to call them recommendations) from time to time to show you where you can listen to this music. I might as well say here and now that when it comes to Haydn, I only listen to period instrument recordings, hopefully performed in a manner which is congruent with what scholarship has discovered about performing practices from the 18th century. This is not to say that modern instrument performers are not adept and scholarly, but this is precisely why I don’t make recommendations. I simply prefer the sound of period instruments, even when many would say they don't sound as good. 

Of all of the groups that have essayed “complete” Haydn mass recordings, only one has recorded this Missa 'Rorate coeli desuper', and that is Collegium Musicum 90 directed by the late Richard Hickox. It is an entirely pleasant little mass, totaling only 7:03  (well, brevis does mean ‘brief’ after all!). I can only speculate that the early controversy over authorship affected the recordability of this work, a situation that really should change. It is the likely first surviving work of one of the greatest masters, after all.

Next time we will look at more of the really small amount of surviving music.

Thanks for reading!

1749 - 1750

1749 is not a year chosen at random to begin exploring Haydn's life and music. Getting booted from St Stephens was a major turning point. No matter which anecdote you choose to subscribe to (I tend to think that Maria Theresa actually did comment to Reutter that Haydn croaked like a crow), his life as a St. Stephens choir boy was over some time in autumn of that year. Despite the fact that the end was variously described as harsh and heedless, there is no evidence that this is so. As we shall see, he probably never went far off, and had a regular job singing when reinforcements were needed. In addition, his brother, Michael, would continue on in the choir until the early part of 1752; all the more reason for him to stay close by, and for his ‘termination’ to have been on good terms. That said though, when it was time to go, Reutter appears to have been all business about it. By November, he was looking for a roof over his head.

It is not known for sure exactly what Haydn did after his dismissal, but it is virtually certain that he went home to Rohrau, at least for a short time. That gave his mother the perfect opportunity to badger him about becoming a priest, her long time dream career for him. That he was able to resist and return to a clouded future in Vienna is certain, and of itself, a testament to his dedication to the idea of being a career musician.

When you look at the various events in Haydn’s life, it is difficult not to notice that his knack for being in the right place at the right time to take best advantage of circumstances always served him well. Being out on the streets in Vienna would appear, at first blush, to be a rather inauspicious beginning for a man destined to be the greatest composer of his time. But already, connections made early on were serving him well. He met up with a fellow chorister, this one from the Church of St Michael named Spangler. Young Spangler and his wife were scarcely better off than was Haydn, with the exception that they had a garret apartment to live in, to which they invited him to sleep on the floor. This problem being solved for the short term, he was then able to go out and earn his daily bread by being a freelance musician. This entailed singing and playing violin and organ in various churches, playing at dances (of which there were many), and mainly going serenading in the evening. This was a long-standing Viennese tradition where the walking musicians would go to appointed places, and for a fee, they would play music for various celebrations or to satisfy the personal interests of the person who hired them. As an additional bonus, Haydn most likely wrote much of the music they played, which provided an outstanding opportunity to practice composition, and also to make his name known among fellow musicians and present and future clients.

In his autobiographical letter of 1776, Haydn wrote of his freelance 1750’s: “When my voice finally broke, for eight whole years I was forced to eke out a wretched existence by teaching young people.” And in fact, he did just that, giving lessons in singing and keyboard playing nearly from the beginning. However, my opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the ‘wretched’ aspect is perhaps a bit overstressed. If pressed, he could have very well said that it was an adventure such as a young man should have some of. He emerged not only intact from it, but also mentally stronger and prepared for success when it arrived. Probably it didn’t look like it in 1750, though….

Next: the earliest surviving music

1749 and before...

 

'View of Vienna from Belvedere' 
1758 by Canaletto

When Haydn was turned loose from his adolescent home at St. Stephens, it was into a city with a great mix of beauty and ugliness, much like any other city, then or now. My goal in this story is to show you and learn with you too, how, through his hard work and innate genius, Haydn moved from one pole to the other in that beautiful and interesting world of the Habsburgs. 

 Here is something we will have to get used to early on; there is almost no documentary information on Haydn's life and musical activity before his employ by the Esterházy court in 1761. The so-called 'primary sources' are few and far between. This is one though; in 1776 he was asked to write a brief autobiographical sketch for a sort of Austrian Who’s Who called Das gelehrte Oesterreich,  probably because of the fame he gained in Vienna as a result of his oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia. This took the form of a rather long letter addressed to a Mrs. Leonore Lechner who had been enlisted to solicit him for it. One will have to believe take this much at face value; if Haydn wrote it himself it was probably pretty much accurate (although he starts off in the first sentence saying that he was born in 1733 rather than ’32…). I don’t intend to recreate it here. You might have a read of it though sometime, and you might also note, as I did, that when he briefly lists the compositions that he has to his credit at that time, every one of them is a vocal/choral work, his operas, oratorios and sacred works. This is no accident, it shows that he, like everyone else at that time, viewed his instrumental works as insignificant trifles.

The only other primary source (which is to say, from people who knew and interviewed Haydn) are the brief biographies by Georg August Griesinger, Albert Christoph Dies and Giuseppe Carpani, along with parish registers, documents from musical archives, a few dated autographs and such. I will be relying on Griesinger and Dies quite a lot later on because they are the most accurate in their writing.

Haydn was born into a family of primarily south German stock. His immediate ancestors were tradespeople. His father, Mathias (1699–1763), was a master wheelwright and also  the magistrate of the ‘market village’ of Rohrau, a possession of Count Karl Anton Harrach (1692–1758). Haydn's mother, Anna Maria Koller (1707–54), had, before her marriage in 1728, been a cook at the Harrach castle.

Mathias Haydn was ‘a great lover of music by nature’, who ‘played the harp without reading a note of music’; his mother sang along. In fact, all three of their surviving male children became professional musicians, two of them famous composers, the third, Johann (1743–1805), was a tenor in a church choir and later at the Esterházy court. Dies says of Haydn's father that ‘all the children had to join in his concerts, to learn the songs, and to develop their singing voice’.

It was clear from early times that Haydn had talent. He tells Griesinger that ‘As a boy of five I sang all [my father's] simple easy pieces correctly’ and he still remembered these melodies in old age. ‘Almighty God … granted me so much facility, especially in music, that when I was only six I boldly sang masses down from the choir loft, and could also get around on the harpsichord and violin.’ In 1737 or 1738 (that is, when he was 5 or 6), a local friend and teacher named Johann Mathias Franck  was so impressed by Haydn's voice and musical accuracy that he suggested that he come to live with him, ‘so that there I could learn the rudiments of music along with other juvenile necessities’. It being clear that his abilities could not be developed in Rohrau, his parents agreed, whether in the hope that he might amount to something as a musician or the belief that musical and educational accomplishments might be useful in what they (especially his mother) imagined as his true calling, that of a priest.

He told Griesinger later that he received instruction in reading and writing, in the catechism, in singing, and on almost all the string and wind instruments, and even on the timpani: ‘I will be grateful to this man (Franck) even in the grave’, Haydn often said, ‘that he taught me so much, even though in the process I received more beatings than food’.

In 1739 or 1740 (‘in my 7th year’ writes Griesinger, but Dies says; in his eighth year) Haydn was recruited to serve as choirboy at St. Stephens in Vienna: ‘Kapellmeister Rütter (Georg Reutter II (The Younger))  on a trip through Hainburg, heard my thin but pleasant voice from a distance, and at once accepted me into the Capell Haus’ (choir school). At the choir school, ‘I was taught the art of singing, the harpsichord and the violin by very good masters’. Really though, there was apparently little formal training in theory or composition, although the singing included solfeggio and the harpsichord instruction probably entailed figured bass.

Haydn's instruction included lessons from Mattheson's Der vollkommene Kapellmeister (1739) and Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). It seems much more likely that Haydn would have studied Fux in the early 1750's when he was teaching himself some more advanced theory, but n any case, his copy of Gradus is heavily annotated (in Latin); he made it the basis of his own teaching of composition, as did Mozart.The primary thing to take away from this time in Haydn's life is that he was fully participating at this early age at the highest level of art music in existence at the time. That this occurred from the age of 8 to 17, the highly impressionable early years when most learning and taste-forming takes place resulted in the man who would later become the premier composer in Europe in his time.

Inevitably though, his voice broke. Griesinger states that Reutter had earlier suggested that Haydn might become a castrato, but his father refused permission and even made the trip from Rohrau to insure that there should be no mistake. Soon afterwards Joseph was dismissed from the choir school. He wrote that he remained there ‘until into my 18th year’ (i.e. April 1749 to March 1750). Carl Pohl, who had access to many documents now lost, writes: ‘We find Haydn on the street; it was a damp November evening in 1749’. The date is consistent with Haydn's statement that he suddenly found himself 'out in the streets of the city…'.

Next time we will see how Haydn lands on his feet. Only the first of many times.

Thanks for reading!