Thanks to the Haydn Society of Great Britain for permission to republish this essay here.
One thing which seems to dominate all the arts in eighteenth century Germanic lands, to the point of being a hallmark of sorts, is the notion that if art is to be considered worthy, it must follow The Rules. This is true of dramatic theatre, music and literature of every sort. It was well into the latter half of the century before artists rebelled to such a degree as to change the course of art history. Two kindred spirits, separated by nearly a hundred and fifty years, did their part in helping to bring this revolution about. They were Shakespeare and Haydn.
Even though it is not generally known, or frequently brought to mind due to what his future success was based upon, Haydn's earliest professional music jobs were writing and accompanying theatrical works. In as early as 1752, his biographer, Griesinger, tells us that the twenty-year-old musician and would-be composer found himself in the apartment of the famous actor, Johann Joseph Felix Kurz ( = Bernardon = Hanswurst). Kurz had heard Haydn and friends out in the street playing serenades composed by Haydn and been intrigued by their quality. He decided to put Haydn to the test to make sure he was, indeed, the composer.
'…You sit down at the Flügel (said Kurz) and accompany the pantomime I will act out for you with some suitable music. "Imagine now Bernardon has fallen into the water and is trying to save himself by swimming". Then he calls his servant, throws himself flat on the stomach across a chair, makes the servant pull the chair to and fro around the room, and kicks his arms and legs like a swimmer, while Haydn expresses in six-eight time the play of waves and swimming. Suddenly Bernardon springs up, embraces Haydn and practically smothers him with kisses. "Haydn, you're the man for me! You must write me an opera!" So began Der krumme Teufel (The Lame Devil). Haydn received twenty-five ducats for it and counted himself rich indeed…'
Der krumme Teufel in its second incarnation, which, unlike the first, passed the censor, was a hit, and even though the play still exists, the music has sadly disappeared. There are also very strong indications that this wasn't the only music which Haydn wrote for Kurz, and they continued their business relationship right through the 1750s, even during his time with the Morzin family.
We also discover from various sources, none more reliable than Haydn himself, that his housemate at the Michaelerhaus, Metastasio, had arranged another job for him, circa 1754. The Italian opera composer and friend of Metastasio, Nicola Porpora, was giving voice lessons and needed a keyboardist to accompany his students while they practised. Again, we have Griesinger to thank for knowing this. Haydn later remembered Porpora thus:
'There was no lack of Asino, Coglione, Birbante [ass, cullion, rascal], and pokes in the ribs, but I put up with it all, for I profited greatly from Porpora in singing, in composition, and in the Italian language'. He also said that he had learned from the maestro 'the true fundamentals of composition'.
The earliest existing opera from the Esterházy years is Acide (1762), but Haydn also worked on a drama with music, an Italianate version of a singspiel, called La marchesa nespola. There are but a few fragments, and at least one fine aria entitled Navicella da venro agitate. This is all which seemingly remains of a set of four works written circa 1762-'63. Predictably, the surprising quality of these early works impressed Prince Nicholas I to the point that he made some decisions which would govern the remainder of Haydn's long stay with the Princely family. Haydn wrote three more operas during the 1760s, Italian comedies all, and most interestingly, he also began to write overtures and entr'actes for Nicholas' new diversion, a dramatic troupe.
All Haydn enthusiasts are well aware of Prince Nicholas I Esterházy's love for opera. An accurate job description for Haydn during the heart of his career was 'opera impresario'. What is less known, though, is that Nicholas' love for dramatic plays equalled or exceeded that for opera, at least before 1780. And one thing we can be sure of with Nicholas; if he likes or wants something, it will be the best! Having tried out various companies of players since opening Eszterháza Palace, in 1772 Nicholas engaged the man who was possibly the finest actor in central Europe at the time, Carl Wahr, and his troupe of players. Wahr was a pre-eminent serious actor, but he hadn't always been. In an amazing coincidence (or is it? there is no evidence otherwise, yet…), he had learned his acting craft from Joseph Felix Kurz! Had Kurz, either overtly or covertly arranged this meeting?
Haydn always faced criticism, although rarely from his Austrian contemporaries, with the notable exception of the super-conservative aristocracy, including the Habsburgs. There is a clear difference in what an audience of the time wanted and expected from music in the eighteenth century. Surprisingly, the actual reception of music hadn't yet been decided upon. Such questions as 'who are we trying to satisfy?' and 'what will satisfy them?' hadn't been fully answered in the minds of composers, critics or listeners. So in 1776, Charles Burney could write:
'music is an innocent luxury, unnecessary to our existence, but a great improvement and gratification of the sense of hearing' and 'music, like other arts, pretends to no higher purpose than amusement'.
But in the same year, Sir John Hawkins takes on the task of...
'reprobating the vulgar notion that [music's] ultimate end is merely to excite mirth', and 'impos[ing] on Taste some rational controls and sober discussion'.
And also in this same year, in his 1776 autobiographical note for Das gelehrte Oesterreich (Scholarly Austria), a sort of Who's Who, Haydn mentions the criticisms levelled at him by the North Germans:
'In the chamber music style, I have been fortunate enough to please almost all nations except the Berliners; ... I only wonder that the Berlin gentlemen, who are otherwise so reasonable, preserve no medium in their criticism of my music.'
The criticisms were quite harsh and specific. In 1768, J. A. Hiller wrote that Haydn's music was...
'a curious mixture of the noble and the common, the serious and the comic, which so often occurs in one and the same movement'.
And in 1771, J. C. Stockhausen wrote:
'the problem is getting out of hand… you only have to be half a connoisseur to notice the emptiness, the strange mixture of comic and serious, trifling and moving, that rules everywhere'.
Haydn also, of course, broke many 'rules' of composition, but it was these rules of Affekt, which most greatly vexed his critics.
Meanwhile, after going through a fallow period during the seventeenth century, Shakespeare's status was seeing a rebirth by the middle of the eighteenth. Even though the order of the day still ran to adaptations, Shakespeare was gaining prominence, not only in England, but in parts of Europe as well. Finally, by 1765, Samuel Johnson produced an eight-volume set of recognizable Shakespearean works which contained meaningful annotations explaining some of Will's more cryptic passages. Progress wasn't speedy though; it was 1790 before Edward Malone produced a solid ten-volume octavo edition which also included the first good attempt at a chronology of the works.
In Germany, things were certainly no better. There, 'Shakespeare' was merely a good English-sounding name, suited to append to any adapted text. Like most of the rest of Europe, save Britain, the Germanic realms were dominated by the French-influenced theatrical concept of the 'Classical Unities'. The Unities required a play to have one line of action to follow, with minimal subplots. The action in a play should occur over a period of no more than 24 hours, and a play should exist in a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place. This neo-Classical idea, taken from Aristotle's Poetics, ruled drama nearly up to the nineteenth century. Added to this was the 'German Sensibility' concept, which dictated it was in poor taste to have too many deaths within a play, or to fail to emphasize the moral aspect, or to have an unhappy ending. In practice, this left no choice but to adapt the plays to fit accordingly. Anything which didn't match these ideals was simply excised and/or replaced by something which did. One thing which seems never to have occurred to these critics though, was that the concept of The Unities didn't exist in Shakespeare's time, nor would German Affekt have made even a slight difference to him. But we can see how the 'rules for drama' and the 'rules for music' were being cut from the same cloth.
Those whom we saw above hectoring Haydn were equally keen to skewer Shakespeare. Among the most prominent German critics to reject Shakespeare on the grounds of his abandonment of these 'rules of drama' was J. C. Gottsched. In a famous series of essays, Shakespeare was used as a virtual model for everything which was wrong with drama. It was not until 1759 that G. E. Lessing, part of the budding new literary movement which would eventually come to encompass Sturm und Drang in the 1770s, demolished Gottsched's ideas in a series of essays which were quite influential, especially on Goethe and other young playwrights coming on the scene. One of Lessing's main themes was that Shakespeare 'needs the grand, terrible and melancholic passions of the English', something which was clearly at odds with 'German Sensibility'.
The Wahr company's employment with the Prince began as an April to October contract, gradually getting longer over the succeeding years. But in the 'off-season' they played the winter in the nearby major city of Pressburg (also called Pozsony then, but Bratislava now). So even though the Esterházy Archives are surprisingly silent about the troupe's repertoire, we have the Pressburger Zeitung and the Theatre-Kalendar of Gotha to give us background on the players and their works. Thus we discover that by 1773, Hamlet and Macbeth had already been performed. And in the 1774-1775 seasons, King Lear and Othello can be added to the list, the very first German language presentations of these two plays. A few non-Shakespearean works of interest for us include Le Distrait ( Il distratto OR The Distracted (Absent-Minded) Man) by Regnard and Die Feuersbrunst (The Burning House) by Grossmann, both of which, we know, entered Haydn's repertoire within the next two or three years. The reviews and articles also list the players and what types of parts they played, so we can discover leading lady, Sophie Körner, as the first German-speaking 'Desdemona'. The final entry in the 1775 list of players in the Theatre-Kalendar is the one which catches our eye above all:
Musical Director: Herr Haydn, conductor to Prince Esterházy.
It goes without saying, Nicholas wanted his costumes, scenery and dramatic music to be every bit as high in quality as his actors and their material. So even before Wahr's time, the Prince obligated himself contractually to provide those things. For this reason, the potential impact of Haydn being called 'Music Director' has been perhaps understated in the Haydn literature. Mostly, it isn't even mentioned, or at best it is given a passing reference. However, in the 1775 Gotha Theatre-Kalendar we see:
'Haydn had supplied the troupe with appropriate music for the entr'actes of nearly every noteworthy play'.
Note the past tense here, it certainly seems like a done deal. In the 6 July 1774 issue of the Pressburger Zeitung, datelined 'Eszterháza', we are treated to a rave review of Regnard's Le distrait (Il Distratto), the music of which became, famously, Symphony No. 60, it closes somewhat tantalisingly:
'We still look forward to hearing [the] original music to Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' by this adept composer…'
Even if one cannot discern from this what stage the music was to completion, there is no doubt expressed that it would (or did) happen. One can certainly not discount the seriousness which Haydn, and everyone associated with the drama project, took Haydn's title as 'Music Director'.
Two facts about Haydn, the composer, stand out from this period: the more famous, of course, is that this was the heart of his so-called Sturm und Drang period. The second is less well-known but perhaps more interesting. As Haydn told Antonin Reicha in 1805:
'around his fortieth birthday (1772) he concluded a 'Complete Course in Composition', during which he had restudied and re-evaluated everything he did as a composer'.
It can be readily postulated that the series of quartets beginning with Opus 9 and culminating with Opus 20, and the entire series of 'Sturm und Drang' symphonies were the immediate fruit of this 'complete course in composition', which may have begun as early as 1768. But isn't there another significant event happening in Haydn's life at this same moment? Yes, he is the Music Director of a troupe which is specializing in Shakespeare and 'serious drama'. Without detailing the entire range of musical devices which Haydn used, which would be a book in itself, we can note here that the audible effect of 'Sturm und Drang' on music is drama! And the immediate requirement for overtures and entr'actes to be effective is drama!
Current thinking seems to be heading towards a continuation of the modern rejection of Saint-Foix's Sturm und Drang theory, and even Landon's revisionist theory of the 'Austrian Musical Crisis', and to look at the music he composed at this time as Haydn's own invention and the development of a new style for himself, notably his Theatrical Style.
There are many factors which point towards this conclusion, several of which I have shown here: Haydn's background in theatrical music, which extended in a continuous line from his first employment right through to this time. His unquestioned ability as a tone painter, contouring his music to the needs of the drama. Witness the symphony No. 60, Il distratto, which fits the play like a glove, and is known to be dramatic music. And his relationship with Wahr (they were said to be close friends), which even included a shared teacher/mentor, who also knew Lessing's work, once calling him 'my favourite poet.
Haydn would have respected Lessing's famous opinions too. When Wahr's Company began performing Shakespeare's plays circa 1773, it was most likely to have been in the adaptations by Franz von Heufeld, Viennese bureaucrat and sometime playwright. Being the superior actor that he was, Wahr is thought to have supplemented these rather thin efforts with some excerpts from Weiland's more accurate translations. By all accounts, they were a sensation, despite being pared down to a tamer version of Shakespeare's originals. Hamlet, for one, couldn't be given often enough. If these were Haydn's first exposure to Shakespeare, which is highly probable, then at least he got a feeling for a kindred spirit, a fellow rule-breaker.
If Saint-Foix were writing today instead of in 1909, trying to explain the not-so-sudden rise of dramatic rhetoric in Haydn's music, he would be in a far better situation than he was then, due to the great deal of knowledge which has been gained in the last 100 years. Relieved of the dual burden of trying to explain how the Sturm und Drang of the early 70s developed and where the 'sudden' burst of superb theatrical music of the late 1770s came from, one can happily look at the entire package as a continuum matching the time when Shakespeare came to visit Eszterháza!
Michael McCaffrey is a member of the Haydn Society resident in Texas. USA. He has blended his love of history with his passion for music into a chronographical Haydn blog at www.fjhaydn.com
Author's note -
In 2016, The Haydn Society of Great Britain asked me to write an article which would join Haydn and Shakespeare in one package. There were a few possibilities, for example, Haydn was known (and not only in London) as 'The Shakespeare of Music'. I was also tempted to approach my very favorite canzonetta, She Never Told Her Love. But the one which appealed to me most strongly was the idea that the so-called Sturm und Drang period in Haydn's compositions was really Haydn's response to the finest artist and rule-breaker he had ever run across; namely, Shakespeare. I proposed this to the Society and they generously gave me the go-ahead to explore this idea. Since they have now given me permission to publish this essay, I present it here, despite the fact that 1797 is nowhere to be found.Mike McCaffrey
Thanks for reading!
Bibliography
-
Horányi, Mátyas – The Magnificence of Eszterháza – Barrie & Rockcliff, 1962
-
Griesinger, G.A. – Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn – in Haydn - Two Contemporary Portraits trans. Gotwals, Vernon – University of Wisconsin Press, 1963
-
Wheelock, Gretchen – Haydn's Ingenious Jesting with Art – Schirmer Books, 1992
-
Paulin, Roger – Shakespeare and Germany – in Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century – Edited by Ritchie and Sabor – Cambridge University Press, 2012
-
Sisman, Elaine – Haydn, Shakespeare and the Rules of Originality – in Haydn and His World – Edited by Sisman – Princeton University Press, 1997
-
Sisman, Elaine - Haydn's Theater Symphonies - Journal of the American Musicological Society 43, no. 2 (1990): 292-352.
-
Robbins Landon, H.C. – Haydn, Chronicle and Works, Vol I "Haydn, the Early Years" – Indiana University Press, 1980
-
Robbins Landon, H.C. – Haydn, Chronicle and Works, Vol II "Haydn at Eszterháza" – Indiana University Press, 1978
-
Bonds, Mark Evan – Haydn's 'Cours complet de la composition' – in Haydn Studies – Edited by W. Dean Sutcliffe – Cambridge University Press, 1998
-
Chantler, Abigail. "The "Sturm Und Drang" Style Revisited." International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 34.1 (2003): 17-31.