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!