Haydn Seek

1762 part 1 – Just when you think you know somebody!

Entering 1762, after spending the bulk of the previous year in Vienna settling in with the new boss and the boys in the band, Haydn must have been feeling pretty pleased with his efforts to date. He was, after all, the de facto head of the hottest band in town, employed by a man whose wealth, on a good day, exceeded even the Empress’s.  And who was very pleased with his musical compositions; witness the fact that he had the contract out already with a view to passing along a raise. So what could go wrong? Glad you asked!

Nicholas I Esterházy

In one of those temporal coincidences which seem to populate Haydn’s life, on March 18, the last day of the first full year of employment, Prince Paul Anton died. OK, didn't see that coming! One can imagine the bit of a lurch in the stomach of all the newly hired musicians at the news. Paul’s younger brother, Nicholas, was set to take over the reins of power. But for the hired help, he was an unknown quantity. Would he keep everyone on or would they be walking down the road with their fiddles over their shoulders? This may all seem rhetorical to us today, who already know the answer to the question, but I don’t imagine rhetoric was at the front of their minds on March 19!

Just as the thirty-day period of mourning passed, there was yet another death in the family, Maria Octavia, mother of Paul and Nicholas and erstwhile housemate of Haydn in the Michaelerhaus. I wonder if she lived long enough to see Haydn and realize that the nice boy from upstairs who played music all night was now the Vice-Kapellmeister to her son.  Probably never gave it a passing thought, but interesting idea anyway.

On 17 May, Nicholas finally had his installation ceremony as Lord Prince of the Herrschaft Eisenstadt. There are several roles that Haydn could have played here, some early Sacred motets and cantatas that he composed for unknown reasons that could have involved this doubtless huge festival. Even his early (undated) Te Deum would have fit perfectly into the situation.There is no documentation of it though.

Nicholas, as it turns out (but you knew) well deserved his epithet “The Magnificent”. His talent for spending money was only equaled by his talent for making it! At his death in 1790 the estate was worth several times more than when he took it over. But the income increased despite the expenditures. One of his first actions taken in 1762 was to hire a touring dramatic company that could perform opera. And one of Haydn’s first tasks was to compose some arias for them to sing. La Marchesa Nespola is a comedy. It consisted of nine arias, of which five remain intact, along with parts of two others. It would appear to be actually musical numbers for a spoken word play, along the lines of a Singspiel. The play was likely in German, but the arias are in Italian and wonderfully well set. So idiomatically, in fact, that the new Prince was totally surprised and already began having thoughts which would come to fruition in a few short years. By way of reward and reassurance, on June 25, 1762, Esterházy made his very first official decree regarding the musicians; Vice-Kapellmeister Haydn was to receive an annual salary increase of 200 florins!  For those who are counting, that is a 50% pay raise! And so this earliest surviving musical drama of Haydn's was a great career move, but sadly it is the only operatic work by him which has not been recorded so we can't hear it. A tragic turn of events for lovers of early opera and early Haydn.

Next time I want to take a look at the remainder of the year before we approach the music in more detail. There is no doubt in my mind that as much as Prince Paul had Haydn earmarked for rapid advancement, it was only with the 1762 ascension of Nicholas the Magnificent that the partnership for the ages truly was formed. From this point forward, the rapidity with which events overtake events is the stuff of legends!

Thanks for reading!

1761 – The Music – Part 3 – Some interesting odds and ends

Hob 16_13 Sonata #15 in E for Keyboard
Hob 16_14 Sonata #16 in D for Keyboard
Hob 24b_01 Aria for Soprano "Costretta a piangere"

To take a last look at 1761, there is always the mystery of the keyboard sonatas to contemplate. We have two which are attributed to this year by David Wyn-Jones, and they are essentially the last on the list of early sonatas we talked about oh-so-long ago in trying to come to grips with chronology. If the analysis which the early chronology was based on; i.e. - if the works can be divided into two types, teaching tools and performance pieces, and if the ranking by advancing complexity of musical language can also be trusted, then these two are the most complex of the performance group, thus the culmination of the early sonatas. Lots of if’s there, seems to me. Not that I can reasonably propose an alternative for the purpose, and when this happens I choose the simple expedient of listening to them! This seems to work well for me.

Rather than an in-depth analysis of these (which has been done by experts if you are interested), I am more interested in trying to determine what might have been the impetus for their genesis. If indeed the evidence for dating these to 1761 is right on the money, what was Haydn doing writing keyboard sonatas at such a momentous time in his life?

The year 1761 can be broken down into two distinct parts; before and after March 19. Since ‘after’ is the larger temporal chunk, and we know he had a job then, the natural assumption is to go with these works having been composed for the Esterházy family. But making this assumption leads us to an apparent dead end since there was no particular reason to write sonatas for them. And these aren’t student sonatas either, unless we are talking about an advanced student. So, I think we need to look back a bit more towards the early part of the year, when Haydn was either still employed by Morzin or ‘between gigs’. Listening to them now, yet again, I can say that they really rock right along, and that they require more than a beginner’s technique on the harpsichord. I don’t think my speculation that Haydn wrote them for performance, either by himself or some unnamed other, in and around the city in the winter of 1760-61 is too far out of line. These last two of Haydn’s ‘divertimento/sonatas’ also show how far he has come in the 10 quick years that he has been composing for keyboard.

The final work we will look at for 1761 is once again shrouded in mystery. It is the Aria for Soprano "Costretta a piangere". It is marked for a character named 'Dorina', from an unknown opera almost certainly composed by Haydn and nearly as certainly lost in all other aspects! Even the writers who are secure enough to speculate in print have refrained from speculating much about which opera it might be and what occasioned its composition. Nonetheless, it is a lovely little work which shows again the benefit which accrued to Haydn of having worked for Porpora a few years earlier. This is a work which can be had on record, and worth a listen if you can get it. Next time we will move on to 1762, yet another year of turmoil, but followed by one of the longest periods of peace and security enjoyed by any composer.

Thanks for reading!

1761 – The Music – Part 2 – It’s good to be the Prince

Hob 02_08 Divertimento in D         2 Flutes, 2 Horns, 2 Violins & Basso
Hob 02_14 Divertimento a quattro in C    2 Clarinets & 2 Horns
Hob 02_17 Divertimento a nove in C        2 Clarinets, 2 Horns, 2 Violins, 2 Violas & Basso
Hob 02_24 Divertimento fragment in Eb  Flute, 2 Cors Anglaise, Bassoon, 2 Horns, 2 Violins & Basso
Hob 07a_04 Concerto in G for Violin & Strings

So, you are having some friends over for dinner. Of course you will make a good impression, as you always do with your clothes from Paris, Italian Masters on the wall, gourmet chefs in the kitchen. And tonight, your newly employed vice-Kapellmeister, one of the leading exponents of new music in Vienna, will be directing your personal orchestra in a few compositions of his own device during dinner. Everyone should be blown away, which of course, they are. It’s good to be da Prince!

Of course, I am making an assumption here that these works were used as Table Music (Tafelmusik), but it is not in any way outlandish to imagine they were.  It was exceedingly common among the upper classes throughout Europe to have music with dinner. Haydn’s divertimenti may or may not have been used for this purpose in earlier times, it is difficult to say. But there is no reason to think the Morzin family didn’t employ music in this manner also.

So what points of interest do we see in this year’s crop of divertimentos? There are at least a few standout items. Clarinets appear for the first time. Who played them?  In the extended fragment of Hob 24, we discover two English horns replacing the two oboes normally employed. This is an extremely Viennese affectation, and also one which Haydn was very fond of. We also see flutes making a long awaited appearance, so clearly we are past the Morzin years of flute starvation!

Hob 17 is a wonderful example of divertimento style. Of course, as with all of these works, upon close examination one is left wondering how each can differ so much from ‘the norm as wel as from each other. To start out, this one begins with a Marcia: Adagio the only example in Haydn’s divertimento output which does so until the first notturno for the King of Naples in 1788. The long tradition of divertimentos beginning with a march is a Salzburg one, not Viennese. And then, of course, there are the famous clarinets in C. No one in the Esterházy band is listed as a clarinetist, let alone any two people! And what instruments were used? There is no record in inventory of a clarinet or repairs to one being billed and archived. One possible solution arises in the visit by Polish Count Oginsky, where the omnipresent Zinzendorf (now at Wallnerstrasse on Oct. 6, 1761) tells us “after dinner we were entertained by clarinet music of his own composition by the Count Oginsky”. It is not hard to envision Haydn composing a work for him (and a member of his retinue) to play along with the band, a routine occurrence in those days when amateurs were pretty damned good! Which may also explain the origin of Hob 14, a lovely divertimento/quartet for 2 clarinets and 2 horns of the same time period. This would have been a very suitable gift from Prince Paul to his friend. In any case, the music is an especially good listen.

I included Hob 7a:4, a concerto in G for violin & strings, mainly because it is a difficult work to place. There is very little doubt that, despite being Hob. #4, it is Haydn’s first violin concerto. In many ways it resembles the organ concerti of the 1750’s, verging on the Baroque tradition at times. Also, it doesn’t have the virtuoso requirements of the later concertos that he wrote specifically for Tomasini (fatto per il Luigi). Not a lot is known about the origin of this work, sadly. But when one observes the famous groupings of Tafelmusik, Telemann’s, for example, it is hard not to notice a nice sprinkling of concertos among the sonatas and suites. I think this is ample justification, just for my small purposes here, to include this work in with the divertimentos. I hope, also, there is no implication the piece is less than a pleasure to listen to, since that would be untrue.  Unless you are one of those folks who counts the tuttis and the solis, in which case I’m not addressing you anyway! 

Finally, next time, we have a couple of slighter, but no less nicely finished works to look at. I hope you have the wherewithal and the interest to listen to some of this music. As with any music, put it into the context of its time. It is natural, for example, to find Beethoven’s violin concerto to be a little more daring than the Haydn G major, but as a basis for comparison, maybe not so much.

Thanks for reading!

 

The Esterházy Palace on the Wallnerstrasse in Vienna

1761 – The Music – Part 1; Perfect miniatures

The six Scherzandi

Hob 02_33 Scherzando #1 in F  
Hob 02_34 Scherzando #2 in C 
Hob 02_35 Scherzando #3 in D
Hob 02_36 Scherzando #4 in G
Hob 02_37 Scherzando #5 in E
Hob 02_38 Scherzando #6 in A  all for Flute, 2 Oboes, 2 Horns, 2 Violins & Basso*
* The Basso almost certainly consisted of a bassoon, likely aided by a violone and cembalo

A natural progression for anyone discussing Haydn’s music for this year would be to start out with the famous ‘Times of Day” symphonies, and indeed I have already got them out front, although in their historical aspect only. But in my own estimation, the unsung gems of the year are the set of six Scherzandi. Probably there would be a more appropriate name for these works, but I don’t know what else they might be called, except Haydn’s own passing reference to them as ‘sinfoniettas’.

For many years these works were consigned to the Morzin period until some sharp knife realized that Morzin had no flutist in his employ and these would have been the only Morzin works with obbligato flute! In addition, two existing copies were written by the same Esterházy copyist who wrote the original manuscript of Symphony #7. They are contained within Hoboken’s classification as divertimentos for multiple instruments, but in reality they are nothing other than miniature symphonies. Each has four movements, binary with both halves repeated, and it seems very intentional that all six have precisely the same tempo scheme; Allegro, Menuet & Trio, Adagio and Finale: Presto. Haydn worked very diligently to make all six work musically within this identical structure. Added to the fact of the key structure, F - C - D - G - E - A, and one can easily infer we are looking at Haydn’s very first attempt to compose a cycle of works. Nothing before this, like the artificial groupings of Opp. 1 & 2, are leaning in this direction. If there were such a thing as ‘symphonic bagatelles’, these would be the archetype!

Manfred Huss, in the liner notes to his superb recording of the set, documents the extreme concision of the musical material, the shortest movements are 24 bars long, while the longest is only 71! This is far from the norm at the time, one would be hard pressed to discover a parallel. And yet for all that, no single feature of ‘sonata style’ is missing. In addition, he is not the first commentator to compare these works with those of Webern. If you will accept that, it is interesting that both ends of the Viennese dominance of music are framed by miniatures!

It is possible there are other recordings of these works. I have seen another disk but been unable to find a copy for sale. However, the Huss recordings certainly do a splendid job for displaying them at their best. Originally recorded on Koch/Schwann, when that company ‘went away’ this was among the library which was purchased and thankfully released by BIS. As far as I know, it is the only Koch/Schwann disk of Huss which was still regularly available, so you could find it standing alone. However, the six-disk BIS release, Music for Prince Esterházy and the King of Naples, is so indispensible you might want to start thinking about it in any case.

We have still only scratched the surface of 1761, so we will be back for more next time.

Thanks for reading!

 

1761 – Part 3 – Vienna and Eisenstadt: Living in the Big House

One of the essential elements of a nice, well-rounded biographical sketch is to actually have some biographical information. We all probably have a feel for the works which Haydn composed in these years. And we will be looking at those shortly. And we also can see the bigger picture of where he was going and how the story is going to end. A retrospective point-of-view is nice for being able to be right about such things. But despite the new presence of an overwhelming amount of data, we are still stuck with supposition to base our story on. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Haydn’s first year with the Esterházy’s, Prince Paul Anton and his wife Maria Anna, was probably spent doing exactly what it says in his contract that he was supposed to do. By June he had hired the remaining musicians needed to upgrade the band. Since he had been spending a lot of time in Vienna with the Morzin’s,  it is highly likely that he knew most of the musicians who were working in Vienna at the time, and even more likely that he brought the cream of the crop from the Morzin outfit right along with him. As we talked about earlier, the quality of the wind writing for Morzin necessitated some superior musicians, and since Bohemia was the epicenter of horn playing, for example, it is an easy deduction which places the (now unemployed) Morzin hornists in the Esterházy band.

There were also any number of chores that are typical for a new-hire; getting uniforms fitted and made for hmself and the new band members. The earliest ones were a most attractive blue with silver trim. In a not surprising token of the Prince's esteem, Haydn's uniforms were made of much higher quality cloth and tailoring. Look sharp, feel sharp!

This is said to be the earliest extant painting of Haydn. If it is indeed Haydn, and it IS by Grundmann, he was a cabinet painter and scenery painter for the Esterházy opera.

One of the musicians Haydn would not have to go out and hire, and who would end up serving with him for the rest of their lives, was the brilliant violinist, Luigi Tomasini. He was nine years younger than Haydn, and in one of those odd twists of fate, he was hired as a manservant/musician by Paul Anton when the latter was performing ambassadorial duties in (proto-)Italy. It was probably not intended for him to become more than just another violinist in the band, but a combination of talent and training, both in Italy and by spending a study period in Salzburg under Leopold Mozart, led him much further.  He was a far better violinist than was Haydn, and he became concertmaster fairly quickly, a position he would hold for the rest of the century.

Among other bits and pieces of odd gossip that we pick up from onlookers, such as the French busybody, Count Carl Zinzendorf,  who would figure in the stories of every musician in Vienna in the final third of the 18^th century, we find that Prince Paul was already ill at the time that Haydn was hired. This, coupled with the fact that there was major construction going on at Eisenstadt (a new venue for opera and stage performance, among other things), led to spending most of Year 1 at Wallnerstrasse, the family palace in Vienna. The net result was Haydn had considerable traveling back and forth to the country. Thirty miles with today’s transportation is as nothing. In 1761 it must have been burdensome! Still, work needed to be done at both places and so it was.

One thing that didn’t get put off by anything though was the opening of the musical floodgates in Haydn’s mind. One can see immediately that the quantity of works didn’t change very much, but the nature of them did. For the next three or four years, orchestral music would predominate by a large margin. Symphonies, divertimentos (Tafelmusik perhaps?) concertos; these replaced string trios and string quartets and keyboard trios as well in the standard selection flowing out of his pen. Next time we will take a look at the music of 1761, especially some unique little pieces that have no parallel either in Haydn or anyone else that I can find!

Thanks for reading!

1761 – The 14 Commandments – A different age!

As we saw, Haydn finally had to sit down on May 1, 1761 and sign his new contract. It is a rather short document, actually, and loaded in favor of the employer. Despite what we think today (was he crazy?!?) it was not really that much different than going to work for an employer in modern times. It spells out who was in charge, what Haydn’s duties were, how much he would be paid to perform them, what he couldn’t do, and ultimately what he could expect down the road. It isn’t the actual duties and such that seem to bother people today, rather, it is the overall imperious tone used throughout. If you sit and examine your own relationship with your employer, I think you will discover that it would be nice to have a document spelling it all out like this.

I am not going to type out the entire contract, archaic language and all. Since I think of it as ‘The Fourteen Commandments’, I will just hit on the substance of each one in one or two sentences or less. You will miss the flavor of the Princely haughtiness this way, but maybe that will help to keep you more focused.

I     There is an old Kapellmeister named Werner in Eisenstadt who has the infirmities of age. He will be in charge of the chorus and choral singing. Every other thing having to do with music will be the responsibility of Haydn.

II     Haydn will be a House Officer and behave as such. He will treat the people in his charge with kindness and leniency. They will all wear their musician uniforms (which the Prince provides) when playing, including Haydn.

III     He will refrain from drinking and acting a fool in front of his subordinates so they won’t lose respect for him. He will act like a gentleman/courtier.

IV     He will compose whatever music the Prince asks for, and not give or sell copies to anyone.

V     He shall appear every day in the Prince’s antechamber and inquire whether a musical performance is required. He will be on time, and will make sure the musicians are all on time too.

VI     If, against all hopes, disagreements between the musicians shall break out, Haydn will do his best to resolve them and only submit them to higher authority if all else fails.

VII     He shall be in charge of all the music and instruments and make sure they are not destroyed through neglect.

VIII     He will give singing lessons to the women singers so they don’t forget what they learned in their expensive lessons in the city (yes, he put it that way!). Haydn will also practice diligently on every instrument that he can play.

IX     A copy of this document will be given to everyone who reports to him so they will know what’s what. (I believe this means the document up to this point)

X     It is unnecessary to put down on paper all of the duties since the Prince hopes that he will be so diligent that he will do his best at everything, now and in the future.

XI     He will receive an annual salary of 400 florins. (That is a pretty good chunk of money, and just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what he actually got (firewood, livestock, vegetables &c))

XII     When at the estate, he will eat at the officers’ table or else get a per diem of half a florin.

XIII     This contract is good for three years. At the end of that time, if Haydn wishes to leave he may do so having given 6 months notice.

XIV     The Prince wishes to retain Haydn for the entire period. If Haydn gives full satisfaction then he may look forward to becoming Ober Kapellmeister. However, if he wishes to do so, the Prince may dismiss him at any time.

I have read any number of comments about this contract, the consensus of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries being that it was equivalent to having sold himself into slavery! This was actually one of the main points which the 19th century music establishment held against him and his music; he was a toadying lackey of the aristocracy. In more recent times, though, some balance seems to have come into the heads of historians and it is now being viewed in a more enlightened way. For someone in Haydn’s position, this was a godsend that would guarantee his security for the rest of his life.

Maybe translating the literal text and shortening it up into simple, modern English makes it a bit more straightforward to digest. You don’t need ‘Nobly born, Dread Lord…’ sort of verbiage in the way, just the nut itself.

So, are you an 18th century person or proud to be free but hungry? When one looks at the opportunities available at the time, the options are few. Burning a demo DVD and getting it on MTV seems to be out of the equation for now. Teaming up with young Mozart and going on the road with a ‘Father & Son’ act has already been done. So yes, the options are limited. But let us not look at this as a desperate final solution, it truly was the chance of a lifetime, and the making of a musical establishment which would influence the art for the next 200 years!

Thanks for reading!