Zakira’s Roses

Notes on Joseph Haydn, the basis of a presentation I gave this summer to my LS 819 class.

Introduction
Franz Joseph Haydn is known as Papa or Father Haydn – during his lifetime those musicians he conducted called him Papa and today he is widely considered the Father of the Symphony.   One of his by – lines is “Founding genius of the Viennese Classical Style”.  He was a friend to Mozart and a teacher of Beethoven.  He composed over 750 works and arranged over 330 songs.

2009 will be the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death, and has been designated Year of Haydn – I haven’t been able to discern by whom  but it appears to be the progeny of a  marriage of Austrian Tourism and Music Fans.

The two classic quotations from Joseph Haydn that I’ve come across on my travels through his work are:

“My Language is understood throughout the world” ; and “I was forced to become origjnal”

Haydn’s Life
A quick timeline of Haydn’s life
He was born  on March 31, 1732  in a “market village”,  Rohrau, Austria near the Austro-Hungarian border.  He had a nurturing and loving artisanal and musical family  of total 12 children) supported by a wheelwright father. By the age of 6, little Haydn had shown musical aptitude especially in his voice. His parents sent him to Hamburg  in 1738 to be trained as a chorister.  In 1740, he went to Vienna to sing in the St. Stephen’s cathedral choir, where he learned Keyboard, strings, and music theory as well. It’s hard to know if this musical nurturance was adequate compensation for the subsistence diet the boys in the choir were kept on, but it would serve him well in his future.

The life in the Boys Choir was characterized by long hours, poor care, and beatings, and after his voice broke the precocious 17 year old Haydn was released from the Choir. He left the choir in 1749 and struck out to find his fortune. He reportedly worked 16 hour days teaching, learning and composing.

Around 10 years later,  Haydn was hired as Vice Kappellmeister by the Prince of Esterhazy.  He would spend the better part of his life in the service of this royal family which not only loved music but was willing to put significant funds towards it.

The royal home is in provincial town Eisenstadt.  Haydn bought a lovely little home there.  However, the summer home is where the real action happened.

The Esterhazy prince had decided to build a “second Versailles” for his summer home. This required the draining of a marsh to build, but once established this was called by Goethe a “fairyland”. Here is an Image of Esterhaza.  The Esterhazy court, including musicians and our now-kappelmeister Haydn, were expected to spend the summer up to ten months of the year in Esterhaza, providing entertainment of all kinds – especially musical! He spent winter in Vienna.

Life under Contract
Joseph Haydn worked for 30 years in the employ of two generations of Esterhazy princes, under increasingly less-restrictive conflict-of-interest clauses. It was a good job. He had unlimited musical resources, time, and most importantly, an enthusiastic employer with a taste for novelty.

Fourth clause of his 1761 contract – under obligation to compose music as the prince commanded, never to allow copy or communication of said music to any other person but to keep use only for His Highness, not to compose without permission of his Highness .

In 1779 his new contract did not include such a clause and enabled him to compose for other counts, for King Ferdinand IV of Naples, and for Francesco and Carlo Artartia of Vienna, also with a London firm of William Forster.

1778 – Artaria publishing company branches out into publishing music – first music publishing company in hamburg. Haydn worked out a contract with Artaria and also extended to make private and bigger deals deal in multiple nations and with multiple music lovers.

According to Grove, Haydn was adept at marketing himself and his “methods of exploiting multiple markets became a model for the next two generations of composers He taught it to Beethoven and it was still used by Mendelssohn and Chopin.

Love

He made a poor choice in marriage, wedding a woman with whom he had a minimum of chemistry. They never had children and ultimately their marriage was in name only. He also had a mistress, Italian mezzo-soprano Luigia Polzelli.

At the end of his thirty years, he was virtually released from service with an excellent pension and a worldwide reputation. Having long since tired of the provincial life, Haydn moved immediately to Vienna and within the year had received the deal of a lifetime. Salomon came to his door and gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse.
He was initiated as a Freemason on 12 Februrary 1785

On May 12, 1809 Napoleon invaded Vienna,
On May 31, 1809,. Haydn Died in Vienna.

Haydn was a Man of the Enlightenment – Self-made, self-educated, rages to riches

Personality & character

He was a contented, happy, good natured man

Haydn’s intellectual life

Haydn acquired more than half his library in the 1780s and 1790s, at the end of his Esterhaza years and in his London Years. It was fashionable at the time to own your own library. Privately owned libraries was a specifically social phenomenon among middle classes towards the end of the 18th century.

He got deeply involved in German poetry in the 1780s, likely looking for texts to put to music. He also frequented the Salon of Imperial Councillor Greiner (a freemason-oriented salon). The freemason’s involvement with literary advancement had an impact on the Austrian literary scene.

Haydn purchased books such as reference books, and received books as gifts. It is clear that he enjoyed reading as a pleasure activity when not writing music.

He owned foreign language dictionairies – English – german- French –italian, self-help books “orations at a moment’s notice” and “on dealing with people”.
He also owned books on popular philosophy such as moses Mendelssohn, adam smith’s Moral Sentiments, Shaftesbury and Burke.

He was a wide reader – the contents of his personal library reveal him to have been up to date on the major works of his time.  He owned Edmund Burke’s  Philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. – Haydn’s intellectual interests and his later work rested on a “solid base of philosophical and aesthetic culture”  (Sisman, 447).  He had a large number of popular scientific works in a variety of disciplines. 447: An autodidact’s regular schedule of reading… a pattern based on a way of living guided by enlightened, diet-conscious habits.

Maria Horwarthner notes that all the books relevant to Sturm und Drang, the Weimar classicism of Goethe and Schiller, and the romantic music, are missing from his library. He remained firmly in the literature of the rococo, literary conservatism. Horwarthner notes that this literary conservatism persisted through Werther-fever and Sturm und Drang.  She notes the apparently backward-looking trend of literary life in Austria was oriented towards permanence over progress, and this combined with the conservative  late-rococo enthusiasts in Haydn’s Vienna circle of friends. “The rational clarity and resulting awakening of the soul lent rococo poetry (also its language) a lucidity and accessibility that Haydn could make his own – despite his well-known lack of formal schooling”.  Enlightenment poetry had linguistic transparency and simplicity that fell within Haydn’s capacity for understanding and provided stimulation to his intellect and creativity. Contemporary developments and transitions in German literature remained foreign to Haydn, and he admitted that he could not come to terms with the latest poets and their way of expressing themselves.

Music

The Esterhazy musical ensemble at first was very small: 13 to 15 players (of whom many performed on more than one instrument): strings (approximately 6 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello, 1 bass), 2 oboes, 2 horns and a bassoon (plus a flute in certain works or movements). manned largely by virtuosos. The difficulty of some passages in Haydn’s symphonies and concertos reflects the skills of the musicians as well as of the composer. Haydn led from the violin; no keyboard continuo was employed except in the theatre.  By its height in the 1780s, it had around 23 members.

There was something dangerous and exciting in his music, something scandalous even.

Music was criticized hostilely for “caprice” – for a sense of humour suggested to be trivial. “No one will contradict that the only dominating attitude or (since we are dealing with music) the only dominating emotion in Haydn is eccentric, bizarre; and projected without control…But just name me one single, solitary product of Haydn, in which caprice is not at the bottom of it all! You won’t find any!”  – C.L. Junker, in a pamplhlet entitled Zwantzig Componisten, eine Skizze of 1776, reprinted Lepzig 1792 (Quoted in Haydn String Quartets on page 25). Despite his at the time very stable employment, Haydn was always interested in maintaining and defending his reputation.

Haydn’s creative process started with flights of fancy at the keyboard, developing a melody and then working out the musical substance at the keyboard and in shorthand drafts, and then finally writing out the full score. He used cross-referencing to reorganize music from one draft to another, and drew from such sources as folk song, hymn and plainchant, and folk dance.  His background as a singer was always present, and he was of the opinion that a good melody could be tested through song. If it sung well, it could be the basis for a good piece of music.

From 1761-1766 – Primarily instrumental. experimentation phase with a wide variety of musical genres, opera, church, chamber music.

At Esterhaza (1766-1775) “Sturm und Drang” (strong passionate expression) – used a lot of minor keys and sxpressed his boundless energy – string quartets, symphonies, operas, church music. Pieces are passionate and more daring. For example the Sun Quartet 1769 – Prince Nicolaus engaged a theatrical troupe each summer that put on shakespear’s tragedies, French comedy, etc  for which Haydn would have been required to write incidental music for.

After 1785 – work is varied, instrumental – London Visits – the influence of Handel led to vocal music from 1795-1809 (Emperor’s hymn , oratorios – creation and seasons)

On Another note – he was hired in 1804 by George Thomson to compose arrangements for 400 scottish and welsh songs.  Thomson made adjustments to the arrangements and only in 2001 have Haydn’s original compositions been recovered and are being produced by in six volumes by the Hydn Trio Eisenstadt and two Scottish singers Lorna Anderson and Jamie MacDougall. .http://www.haydntrioeisenstadt.at/schotten/schottenindexcdprojekt_cd.htm

Musical Relationships

Mozart composed 6 quartets dedicated to Haydn – who famously remarked to Leopold Mozart that Wolfgang A. was the greatest composer Haydn knew.

Mozart and Haydn took every opportunity available to play together in each other’s string quartets or quintets.

In Conclusion
Haydn was born baroque and straddled the classical to romantic era. In both business and music he made consistent and significant progress. His music broke boundaries with elegance and wit, and his influence on the history of music cannot be understated.

Bibliography

Horwarthner, Maria. “Joseph Haydn’s Library” Sisman, Elaine, Ed.; Haydn and His World
Greenberg, Robert. Great Masters: Haydn and His Music Audio CD series.

Sutcliffe, W. Dean  Haydn: String Quartets, Op. 50

Sisman, Elaine “Haydn’s Career and the idea of the multiple audience.” Clark, Caryl Leslie, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Haydn

Webster, James. “Style, Aesthetics, Compositional Method” in Oxford Music Online.

Wittgenstein and Haydn on Understanding Music
http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=397

Schroeder, David “Melodic Source Material and Haydn’s Creative Process” The Musical Quarterly, Volume 68, No. 4 (Oct, 1982) pp 496-515