1781 – The Music part 1 - Attribution & Reception

Hob I:	Key	NC	HRL	Name	Instruments
73	D	77	77	La chasse	Flute, 2 Oboes, 2 Bassoons, 2 Horns (in D & G), (2 Trumpets in D & Timpani) & Strings
Hob#	Key	Genre		No.	Instruments / Notes
7d:4	D	Concerto		2	Horn & String Orchestra – Composer unknown

This is a fine year for variety, even if we say the present concerto belongs to an earlier time. One of Haydn's most popular symphonies, a new set of string quartets and a set of twelve songs with keyboard give a broad view of a composer heading out on his own. Hard to believe he is forty-nine years old already! So let's, as always, begin with the orchestra.

Hob. I:73 – Symphony La chasse (The Hunt)

I	Introduction: Adagio	D major 3/4	Allegro	D major 4/4
II	Andante	G major	2/4
III	Menuetto: Allegretto - Trio	D major	3/4
IV	La Chasse: Presto	D major	6/8

It is interesting to see bits of Haydn's late style rooting and growing in the soil of the early 1780's. Here, for example, we see the slow introduction, now not only being fully integrated into the first movement, but also being used for something special. While I will always passionately avoid digging into theoretical aspects of music, which are frankly beyond me anyway, I can say quite simply the introduction here will establish we are in D major, and yet it will throw in a few notes which cause uncertainty, even to those who don't know why this might be. And then when the Allegro starts, a few critical tones are raised up a half step which only further increases the tension being created. This is classic late period Haydn, and it is also classic 'all-period' Beethoven. In short, we are now hearing a modern symphony unwinding before us.

Modern, but also very much in its time, since two of the movements are from other places, and two are brand new. No, honestly, we aren't going to see Hob 1a:4 again, I promise! In the first movement, we find Haydn developing from his little germ cell, in this case a little motive of three eighth-notes followed by a downbeat. Sounds simple, what can one do with that? Well, if you are a genius, you can turn it into an entire movement which varies in its harmonies instead of its melodies or even rhythmically. In fact, I'm damned if I can hear a melody in there anywhere, and yet, I don't miss it. You won't be whistling this tune on your way home from the concert!

If I knew, knew that I
were even a little dear to you,
and that you felt for me a hundredth part
of what I feel for you!

            Gegenliebe – Gottfried August Bürger

Jumping time just a bit, I will tip you off; in 1784, Haydn publishes a second set of 12 Lieder for Voice & Keyboard, following upon the first set, published this year. But he actually intended to publish all twenty-four of them together, and in fact had completed much of the second set before being detoured by the exigencies of business. And one of the songs in the second twelve, one of the traditional favorites, is called Gegenliebe (Mutual [or Requited] Love) Hob 26a:16. And it is this melody which forms the basis of the second movement Andante. Which came first, the chicken or the egg, the song or the symphonic movement, is really not the issue, although it has been studied to little avail. The lyric of the song is a cross between melancholy and hopeful, and the orchestral version of the music expresses that dichotomy by turning it into a rondo, in which the statement of the song is in a major key and can seem like the positive side of the poet, while the episodes of the rondo are in the minor and seem to stand for the more introverted aspects. See, even a staunch classicist like myself can think like a Romantic under the right circumstances! The minuet and trio, while charming in their own way, possess none of the extraordinary features we have almost come to expect from Haydn, beyond a very important establishment of the key of D for the first time, so we will merely enjoy them and move to the Finale. Quick, someone go wake up the trumpeters and timpanist!

Now we come to the part which Haydn appears to have constructed this lovely framework in order to feature, the celebrated overture (as they said in those days) to La Fedeltà Premiata; no longer an overture here, but a rousing Finale instead. Haydn retained the trumpets in D and the timpani from the original opera, and along with the urging of the brilliant horns, the game is afoot! For all the excitement generated by the leading horns, though, musically this is a very straightforward movement, always solidly in D major, the earlier chromatics and instabilities long resolved and no longer nagging at the back of our minds. And this itself offers the explanation for the structure. I think Peter Brown settles it nicely when he says this symphony is a truly integrated cyclic form, beginning with tonal instability and hints always of possibly being in G major instead of D. Haydn resolves the G major issues by making G the key of the second movement Andante, and then he goes on to make the minuet and Finale both solidly and undeniably in D, so that there is no feeling of incompleteness when this symphony becomes just the second and final symphony of Haydn's which ends in a quiet whisper. Perhaps the death of the stag metaphorically matching the musicians blowing out their candles as a gesture of Farewell…

Haydn, certainly Haydn…
Hob 7d:4 (?) – MH53 (?)

Concerto in D for Horn & String Orchestra

I	Allegro moderato
II	Adagio
III	Allegro

Year/Date of Composition     1781?
First Publication         1954

You can often tell the age of a musicology text about Haydn. If it talks about 'reception' of Haydn's works by his contemporaries or subsequent cultural generations, then it is almost certainly from after 1980. But if it talks about 'authentication', then it is equally surely from before 1980. Try it and see. So, does this mean all the authentication issues have been resolved by our predecessors? Equally, and more philosophically, are authentication and reception somehow different? Let's use the present work as an example.

Everyone loves a horn concerto. Haydn's #1 (Hob 7d:3) and Mozart's four, along with Antonio Rosetti's great oeuvre are all justly popular, and even any other one which comes down the road, like Michael Haydn's Concertino (MH134) of 1768. And yet, when it comes to this particular work, I was quite surprised to discover that recordings are rather thin on the ground, especially period instrument versions, which is always a tipoff that something is up. And of course, some basic research quickly showed what I had feared; we don't know who wrote it! If one reads today's literature, like Anna Leverenz' doctoral thesis from 2011 about the Debated Authenticity of FJ Haydn's Concertos for Horn or 2004's The Haydn Tradition by Dwight Blazin, or most recently, Robert Wrigley's Joseph Haydn (?): Attribution and Reception, all three of which can be found and downloaded online, then other than a stirring up of the facts under discussion 30-50 years ago, they read more like a discussion of the techniques of earlier researchers than like research itself. And to be fair, it could well be because the answer will never be found and thus continuing the search is a waste of time. Even so, is it fair to let this concerto languish? What can be extrapolated from the evidence presented, what conclusions can be arrived at?

In the briefest possible nutshell, let me recap what we know. In or around 1781, the music publisher Breitkopf of Leipzig published the incipit of a concerto in their catalog, and attributed it to "Hayden". Traditionally, since Joseph was the elder and better known of the Haydn brothers, "Hayden" referred to him by default. The manuscript, however, came from a well-known cache of manuscripts known as the Exner Collection, which is now known to be notoriously unreliable as to attribution of works. Some people took this attribution at face value, some did not. The reasons for accepting or not ranged from concern over the source to the always tenuous 'stylistic' ones. An example of this is the minor key Adagio second movement. Just because the minor mode is never used in another Haydn concerto second movement, doesn't mean he didn't use it this time. On the other hand, maybe it does mean precisely that, and thus excludes J. Haydn as a potential composer. It is the inability to draw conclusions from stylistic observations which makes them far less valuable than we would hope. If one were an insurance actuary, this argument would eat your bread of life, I'm sure: one can't predict future events by past ones, thus rendering statistical prediction less valuable also. Precisely the same scenario.

The currently most reliable (read: latest and greatest) catalog of Michael Haydn's works, Sherman & Thomas, lists this work as MH53, but doesn't really discuss it much beyond that. It is a thematic catalog, not a musicology text.

Anthony von Hoboken listed it as VIId:4 (VIId = horn concertos). If he thought otherwise, he would have called it VIId:Dx where Dx = the next in number of horn concertos in D major attributed to J. Haydn.

This Michael Haydn is the Concertino MH134

In an earlier essay, I discussed the probability of Haydn writing Concerto #1 for Joseph Leutgeb, and the series of events which led to us having one copy of it saved for posterity. As always in such cases, there is more to the story which time didn't permit me to relate then. Leutgeb's main source of income in the early 1760's was playing concerts as a horn virtuoso in Vienna. Between November 27, 1761 and January 28, 1763, he played no fewer than fourteen different horn concertos at academies (i.e. - concerts) at the Burgtheater. On July 2, 1762, he played a concerto by Michael Haydn. Michael was newly arrived back in Vienna after an extended period of employment for the Bishop of Grosswardein, Hungary. Long story short: that concerto, which is believed lost, has been given the MH # of 53, in the event it should be rediscovered. It has been postulated that our current concerto is indeed that one.

One of the most reliable, thorough and accurate musicologists I know of has his own blog, mainly discussing Mozart. But peripherally, Michael Lorenz also discusses Haydn issues, in this case through the common denominator of Leutgeb. Here are a couple of brief extracts from this very interesting article:

Leitgeb (Leutgeb) seems to have owned a whole collection of autograph scores of which Haydn's concerto (Hob 7d:3) was "nummer 6". When Leitgeb was hard pressed for cash during the last decade of his life, with the Austrian monarchy approaching the 1811 state bankruptcy, he (or his widow) was obviously forced to sell the valuable autograph to Archduke Rudolph, from whom it came to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.

And this:

It seems likely that Leitgeb also owned the autograph scores of other concertos he performed at the Burgtheater. The horn concerto he performed in Paris in 1770 which was claimed to be his own composition might well have been Michael Haydn's lost work. After all, similar to Joseph Haydn's wife seven years earlier, Michael Haydn's wife also was the godmother of one of Leitgeb's children: Maria Magdalena Victoria Leitgeb, born on 23 December 1769 in Salzburg….

So current status quo: Maybe it is Michael Haydn.

What isn't postulated in all this discussion is the probability of this work actually being Horn Concerto #1 by Joseph Haydn. We know Haydn was loose on the streets of Vienna between the time he left Count Morzin's employ and began working for the Esterházy's in 1761. We also know he wrote many concertos during the period from 1755 to 1762. There is no doubt this work is not from 1781, it is stylistically from the very late 1750's or early 1760's. So, since everyone is tossing 'could-be's' around, I will add this one. Based on the quality of the horn writing and similarity of it to the horn writing in his Morzin divertimenti and symphonies, and the overall similarity of the work to other contemporary concerti by Haydn, along with the original attribution to "Hayden" which has never been discredited, I believe it is Joseph Haydn's actual first horn concerto, from the 1760 time frame.

Ultimately, reception and authenticity are inextricably linked. One only needs to look at the history of another discredited set of works, the Opus 3 quartets, which went from being sublime to being dung when it was demonstrated they were by Roman Hofstetter instead of Haydn, to see this is so. With this in mind, I will close this overlong essay with a quote from the liner notes of the recording by Thomas Fey and the Heidelberger Sinfoniker, where Eckhardt van den Hoogen says of this work:

Two concertos for one horn, and one concerto for two horns [by FJH] from this same period have vanished completely from the radar. The rediscovery of these three works would be at least as valuable a task as the identification of the author who was responsible for this concerto, which is neither 'dubious' nor 'inauthentic'.

Have a listen and see what you think! Next time we will talk about Haydn's first string quartets in a decade. Are they really the official beginning of the Classical Era?

Thanks for reading!