First page (there is no title page) of Op 77 #1 - 'di me, giuseppe Haydn '799'
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Hob 3#
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Opus #
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Key
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New Grove Number
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Instrument(s)
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Notes
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81
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77 #1
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G
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66
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2 Violins, Viola & Cello
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Lobkowitz Quartets
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82
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77 #2
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F
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67
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…There is no sufficient reason to believe that Beethoven much resented Haydn's methods of correcting his counterpoint exercises; no clear grounds for believing that the letters to the Elector involved deception on Beethoven's part regarding his 1793 compositions or had anything to do with Beethoven's not going to London; no great importance to be attached to any misunderstandings about Op. 1, no. 3 or public protestations of pupillage; no reason whatever to suppose that Haydn disliked Op. 1, no. 3, or indeed any of Beethoven's music of the 1790s, unless for reasons that reflect on Beethoven's limitations rather than his own; or that he was envious of Beethoven. Against all this must also be placed the clear evidence of productive professional association and positive feelings on both sides.
James Webster – The Falling-out Between Haydn & Beethoven
People love intrigue. Especially historical intrigue concerning people they feel they know, and whose artistic output they certainly love. And so we get Mozart v. Salieri, or Brahms v. Tchaikovsky, and for our own interest, Haydn v. Beethoven. What does this have to do with Opus 77 and 1799? Let's have a look…
1799/1800 was one of those year groupings in which reality seemed to have exceeded the expectations placed upon it by people eager for the old century to end and the new era to begin. The fin de siècle hoo-ha which accompanied the end of the 18th century was nearly as pervasive as that at the end of the 19th, which itself gave rise to the realization that the much-needed cultural renewal of society was sparked by seemingly unrelated occurrences, such as the artificial construct of a calendar resetting. The events of the late 18th century, from the American and French Revolutions to the onset of the Napoleonic Wars which were currently tearing apart Old Europe, had their effect upon concurrent drama, art and music, among so many other things. So we see testimony like this about life at the time:
Without exaggeration, there is nothing more to be said about these symphonies (a new release of Mozart, KV 162, 183, 199, & 202) except that they - although not without good value and content — are really just quite ordinary orchestral symphonies, without any conspicuous traits of originality or novelty, and without any special diligence to the Art, . . They are on the whole rather flat.
AMZ – May, 1799 (anonymous reviewer)
And if this was the currently evolved opinion of the Mighty Mozart, what then of his contemporaries? Truth is, they disappeared even more completely and sooner. Here is one which any avid Classicist would know:
My things [NB – personal possessions] disappear one after the other, to the tune of one-third or even less than one-third, I suppose, of their intrinsic value; and when they are all gone, what then? For the last five years l have tasked my mental powers, which, Heaven be thanked! are still tolerably good, in the production of many new works, such as operas, symphonies, and a great number of pianoforte compositions. All these things were announced more than three months ago in the Neue Musikalische Leipziger Zeitung, but, good heavens! not a soul has bought one single piece as yet; and though I really give good money's worth, alas! I cannot find a maintenance in that way
The Autobiography of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf pg. 310
For those few of you who don't know Karl Ditters, he was one of Haydn's lifelong closest friends. They met in the early 1750's in Vienna, when Haydn was a struggling young composer and Ditters was already a successful virtuoso violinist. They maintained contact throughout their lives, Ditters was a friend of Emperor Joseph II, and a major force in the Imperial Court music operation, both as a composer and violinist. Haydn was doing well too. I use Ditters in this context not only because of his poignant capturing of a situation which engulfed a great number of composers at the time, but also because he died this year, in October. And in an ironic touch of just-in-time-ism, he completed his autobiography just two days before his death. And this, even though his most famous opera, Doktor und Apotheker, was playing all over Europe at the time (for which, of course, he got bupkis). So the question to ask here is this: had Ditters and (many/most) other composers simply lost their ability to write good music? Or had music itself changed so much that it became an adapt or perish situation for them? Perhaps a bit of both?
As we saw last time, Haydn had his plate filled to overflowing in the early part of 1799. Not only with everything associated with The Creation, but also his obligation to Prince Esterházy, his blossoming business relationship with Breitkopf & Härtel and other publishers and music buyers, and his ever-expanding circle of friends and acquaintances, each of whom wanted a piece of the man's time. But it's time here for a reminder, on the 31st, less than two weeks after the public première of The Creation in Vienna on March 19, Haydn's sixty-seventh birthday came along. And while in the 21st century, 67 may very well be the 'new 50', in Haydn's time it was venerable old age.
[To Christoph Gottlob Breitkopf, Leipzig - in German]
[Letter enclosed a full score of The Creation & a letter from Griesinger]
Vienna, 12th June 1799.
Dearest Friend,
I am really very much ashamed to have to offend a man who has written so often and honoured me with so many marks of esteem (which I do not deserve), by answering him at this late date; it is not negligence on my part but the vast amount of business which is responsible, and the older I get, the more business I have to transact daily. I only regret that on account of my growing age and (unfortunately) the decrease of my mental powers, I am able to dispatch but the smallest part of it. Every day the world pays me compliments on the fire of my recent works, but no one will believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them: there are some days in which my enfeebled memory and the unstrung state of my nerves crush me to the earth to such an extent that I fall prey to the worst sort of depression, and thus am quite incapable of finding even a single idea for many days thereafter; until at last Providence revives me, and I can again sit down at the pianoforte and begin to scratch away again. Enough of this!
[snip – discussion of Breitkopf's 'Complete Mozart' and his proposal to do the same for Haydn's works - more later]
Your obliging and obedient servant,
Joseph Haydn [m.p] ria.
Joseph Franz Maximilian 7th Prince Lobkowitz
by August Friedrich Ölenhainz
To get back to the question I posed above, the underlying current of this letter seems to lean towards Haydn fearing the answer for him was the first: he would lose his ability to write because his mind and/or body was worn out. There is no better basis for deciding the issue than the Op. 77 quartets, commissioned by Prince Lobkowitz, which Haydn was working on even as he wrote the above letter to Breitkopf. As an interesting example of parallelism, Lobkowitz, at approximately the same time, also commissioned a set of six from Beethoven, which would become his Op. 18. The result is talked about even today.
Against the background of the story of Op. 77 and Op. 18, it is important to remember that 1799 saw the actual public release of Haydn's Op. 76, since their term of suppression under Prince Erdödy was complete.
[To Artaria & Co., Vienna. in German]
Messieurs!
I am most grateful to you for the copies of the Quartets you sent me, which are a great credit to me and—because of the legible engraving and the neat title page—to you.
Herr Count Joseph Erdödy wrote me many kind things, and thanked me for having made them available to the world at last. I hope that His Excellency will have received his copy by now. In a little while I will send the 5th Quartet in D major, and then the last in E flat.
Meanwhile I remain, with respects to the whole firm,
Your most obedient servant,
Joseph Haydn [m.p.] ria.
Eisenstadt, 12th July 1799
There was quite a lot more conversation about all this because of Haydn's side deal with Frederick Hyde which required all works to be printed in England first in order for Haydn to receive a £75 bonus, but suffice for the moment to say there was a modest anticipation for these quartets to arrive, since they had been little more than a rumor before now. Eventually though, the publishers and the public were all satisfied and Op. 76 began its journey to immortality. Below we see an excerpt from a letter of Dr. Charles Burney, Haydn's good friend in England, which is the earliest written reaction I was able to find. I really don't think Burney was simply flattering Haydn because they were friends, I think he was actually quite gobsmacked by what he heard.
[To Haydn from Charles Burney. in English]
Chelsea College, August 19, 1799.
My dear and much-honoured Friend,
[snip – discussion for later about subscriptions to The Creation]
[NB – Op. 76 #1, 2 & 3 were registered at Stationer's Hall (published) on 13 June 1799]
I had the great pleasure of hearing your new quartetti {opera 76) well performed before I went out of town, and never received more pleasure from instrumental music: they are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well already, but of one of highly-cultivated talents, who had expended none of his fire before.
[snip – discussion of Haydn's National Anthem and Burney's adaptation of it to English]
Dear Sir
your enthusiastic admirer and
affectionate Servant
Charles Burney.
Closer to home, the first review published in the AMZ (which I can't find in translation) speaks of the "beauty and originality" of the first three. Fair to say, they were well-received, and this only continued to expand as time passed.
It is the timing of this release which is germane to this discussion. Recall, Haydn actually wrote them 2+ years earlier, and at a time when he was also preoccupied with much other work, such as Gott erhalte den Kaiser, some of the Partsongs, and the biggest part of The Creation. Maybe this little venture into instrumental music was more a moment of relaxation for him? But by 1799, we are looking at a different Haydn. As we saw above, this was a man upon whom had been visited the fame of a creative lifetime, concentrated into one decade. And the pace of his collapse under the pressure of it was slowly accelerating. Even though it is from well out in the future, this quote from Griesinger gives you some idea where this was all going:
"I never would have believed," [Haydn] said on September 3, 1807, "that a man could collapse so completely as I feel I have now. My memory is gone, I sometimes still have good ideas at the clavier, but I could weep at my inability even to repeat and write them down."
It is not the sort of collapse one envisions when the word is mentioned, Haydn's output in 1799 was as brilliant as it ever was. He was so far out on the cutting edge that he was writing music of the future instead of the past, the thing which was causing the downfall of his contemporaries. His debility may have been peaking by 1807, but clearly it was beginning by 1799.
Meanwhile, young Beethoven had finally managed to coax a set of quartets from his muse. They were commissioned in autumn of 1798; the first three were ready in autumn 1799, the final three a year later. It is interesting to read modern commentary on these works. They are variously described as derivative and relatively primitive. Which, of course, is nothing more than the snobbery of people who know the future. But as far as Beethoven's contemporaries go, the musical style-setters in modern Vienna, we have only to look at this extract from Countess Josephine von Deym, a prominent habitué of Vienna's salons, to see what the opinion was in those circles:
[Josephine von Deym, letter to her sister;
10 December 1800]
…Yesterday we had the music to honor the Duchess… then Beethoven, that real angel, let us hear his new Quartets, which have not been engraved yet, and are the greatest of their kind. The famous Kraft played the cello, Schuppanzigh the first violin. You can imagine what a treat it was for us! The Duchess was enchanted and everything went famously.
Nothing about derivative there, or copying Haydn or Mozart. And these are people who would have known; books, music and art is what they did!
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| So many fine realizations of Op. 77! |
However, there is one commentary which actually accomplishes two different aims: it puts the Beethoven works in a context which I agree with, but on the other hand, it draws a conclusion which I totally don't agree with. Landon, in Chronicle & Works vol. 4 (page 505), makes an argument that Haydn went no further than two quartets in Op. 77 because, having heard Beethoven's Op. 18 played at the Palace Lobkowitz, he was intimidated into being unable to go further with string quartets! His argument for this is based upon an earlier argument which is itself reliant on nothing more than coincidence and surmise. The first one goes; after Haydn heard Mozart's operas and keyboard concertos he wrote no more himself (except Orpheus & Eurydice for London) because he was intimidated by Mozart's talent. And he never wrote any string quintets, which were a Mozart (and Boccherini) specialty.
If anyone should know what sorts of strictures were applied to Haydn by his employment, it would be Landon. Yet he seems to entirely ignore the fact that until 1790, Haydn wrote what he was told to write, or what would fit with the musicians he had available or lastly, what was commissioned from him by cash customers. Other than his very earliest concertos, which he wrote for the church he was working at, he never wrote any concerto just for amusement. He wrote them for specific musicians, like Tomasini or Leutgeb or Kraft, or possibly for a prominent player who was passing through Eszterháza. This is the reason why those works which DID survive did so merely by chance, since there was usually just one or two copies. Operas in particular were especially constrained. Haydn only wrote an opera when told by The Boss to do so. And Mozart's operas didn't show up at Eszterháza until 1790, when Le nozze di Figaro was in line to be performed if the Prince hadn't died too soon. But Haydn didn't hesitate an instant to write Orpheus & Eurydice, a work which Landon excluded because it didn't fit his argument. And Mozart was still alive, and as far as Haydn knew, healthy, when this opera was composed. I think it is bad form to base one argument upon an earlier one which is itself total speculation. Hard to imagine Landon doing so, but there it is.
To top it all off, there is absolutely nothing about Op. 77 for Haydn to feel inferior about. The two completed works are brilliant in every way. The first quartet, in G, reveals none of the physical or mental health problems of which Haydn complained. Instead, it speaks only to his musical strength, his always ready wit, and the thorough command of his art, which is equal to anything he wrote previously. The second, in F, is nearly unprecedented in it's harmonic and rhythmic structures. Daniel Heartz, in Haydn, Mozart and Early Beethoven, claims that it appears as though this specific work really gave Haydn some trouble:
…Although Op. 77 No. 2 finishes with a strong finale, some of the more puzzling aspects in the other movements, as well as their sequence of keys — odd even for very late Haydn — cannot but raise suspicions that the work gave its creator uncommon trouble. This might have had something to do with its lack of a direct successor. More likely, Haydn left off composing quartets mainly because he was so pressured by other compositional tasks, besides all the business he was conducting. By summer 1799 he was working on another mass ordered by the Prince to honor his wife's name day. Also, much of the work on the new oratorio (NB – The Seasons) with Swieten occurred in 1799. It is not surprising then that these labors began taking their toll on his health.
Daniel Heartz - Haydn, Mozart and Early Beethoven
With all due apologies to Landon, using Occam's Razor, as well as applying a sympathetic and open-minded reading of Haydn's life and times, leads me to believe that Heartz' conclusion, though less dramatic than Landon's, is far closer to the truth. By the time, in 1801-02, when Haydn was able to return to Op 77, his debility had overtaken him and he simply could not compose any longer
24th visit - 17 August 1806
I concealed the degree to which I felt sorry for him and sought to bring up pleasant topics of conversation. What can amuse a Haydn more than music? I was lucky enough to disperse the clouds on his countenance a little, and at the question, "How long is it since you have touched your pianoforte?" he sat down to it, began slowly to improvise, struck some wrong notes, then looked at me, corrected the false notes, and struck some new ones in the correcting.
"Ach!" he said after a minute (the playing lasted no longer), "You hear for yourself, it is no good anymore! Eight years ago it was different, but The Seasons has brought this evil on me. I never should have written it! I overworked myself at it!"
Biographical Accounts of Joseph Haydn – A.C. Dies
The relationship was clearly there in his mind, but I would posit, perhaps it wasn't actually the composing of The Seasons, but the fact it is what he was working on when he, as we say today, simply ran out of gas. Not creatively, but physically. The next few years brought frustration to Haydn's efforts to complete this commission. He was convinced he would be able to do it if only given the time which finishing all his other projects finally afforded. But it was not to be. For those who wonder whether the two movements of Opus 103 are, in fact, Op. 77 #3, I will spoil any surprise now. While we will discuss this work in its proper sequence, the short answer is yes, beyond doubt. But on 11 September 1802, Artaria published Opus 77 as a set of two quartets. Perhaps they would be Haydn's final farewell to instrumental music? If that turns out to be the case, they were an amazing capstone on that brilliant phase of his career!
Next time, a Mass that brings out the old Haydn!
Thanks for reading!
Resources –
Landon, H.C.R. – Joseph Haydn – Chronicle & Works Vol. 4 – The Years of "The Creation" 1796-1800
– Univ. of Indiana Press 1977
The Collected Correspondence & London Notebooks of Joseph Haydn - Barrie & Rockliff (1959)
Grave, Floyd & Margaret – The String Quartets of Joseph Haydn – Oxford University Press New York (2006)
Jones, David Wyn - Beethoven and the Viennese Legacy in The Cambridge Companion to the String Quartet -
Cambridge University Press New York 2003
Heartz, Daniel – Mozart, Haydn & Early Beethoven – 1781 – 1802 – Norton (2009)
Gotwals, Vernon (trans.) - JOSEPH HAYDN - Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius – Univ. of Wisconsin Press (1963)