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Contents:
DDD Recorded: North Transept of the Priory Church of Our Lady and St Cuthbert,Worksop –17-20 September 2002, by kind permission of the Vicar, the Reverend Father Andrew Wagstaff SSC A distinguished musician once paused during a lecture and said “You know … the great composers are much underrated!” As so often in humour, this joking remark concealed a profound truth. Haydn’s music has in the past often been undervalued. When compared to Mozart and Beethoven, he has been seen as a lesser figure although it is difficult to understand why this might be. In his own lifetime, he was acknowledged to be a great master and his creative genius, while different from that of his two greatest contemporaries, was in so many ways equal to theirs. Haydn was a great innovator and an essential and influential figure in the development of symphonic forms during the latter part of the 18th century. Despite this, many of his finest works remain virtually unknown today. There are many neglected masterpieces amongst his operas, symphonies, trios and quartets. Between 1765 and 1795 he wrote some of the most original and finest solo keyboard music we have from that period, but only a handful of these works are heard in today’s concert halls. Yet the keyboard was the foundation of his art, and many of his keyboard works encapsulate his musical genius. A key to understanding this situation may perhaps be found in the instruments for which Haydn wrote, and our access to performances on them today. From the Renaissance, keyboard instruments were important in all German-speaking countries. For private music making and for study, the clavichord was supreme. We know that from his earliest years, Haydn was inseparable from his clavichord, and composed at the instrument. Although he claimed that he was not a first-rate keyboard performer, this was probably excessive modesty on his part. In reality he was a gifted player, perhaps only lacking the flair and pleasure in self-display that all concert performers must possess. His understanding of the clavichord’s musical potential was so great that it can be said to have unlocked his musical imagination. Through it he developed new styles and textures in keyboard music, and used it during the evolution of the most important musical form of his time. This keyboard music does not transfer entirely successfully to the thicker, heavier textures of the modern piano even in the most sensitive hands. It can often sound slight or miniaturized even if played with due attention to style. The music’s scale, vitality, strength and quicksilver imagination is revealed fully only on the instruments of Haydn’s own time, and particularly on the clavichord. Haydn once complained that young composers seldom develop their ideas fully: “they string together one little bit after another, and they break off before they have barely begun, but nothing remains in the heart when one has heard it”. His own skill in the creative development of simple musical motifs is astonishing. He drew on a great tradition of ‘continuous development’ of ideas in earlier German music. This ability combined with his sense of musical rhetoric enabled him to build musical structures of powerful, architectural scale, and with a deep, emotional content In 1765, Haydn wrote a Capriccio based on a popular Austrian folk tune that was used at about the same time by the boy Mozart in his Gallimathias Musicum. Haydn’s choice of a banal tune for a complex work may have been deliberate. There is a later parallel in Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations in which a theme originally dismissed with contempt was used to build one of the composer’s most profoundly imaginative keyboard works. Haydn’s Capriccio in many ways breaks new ground in keyboard writing, introducing many keyboard devices, figurations and textures for the first time. It is the first of Haydn’s mature keyboard works, and one of many distinguished sets of variations written throughout his career. The Capriccio is a set of twelve variations, each of varying length and in a sequence of varied major and minor keys. In a call to attention for the audience, a fragment of the theme is announced, followed by its full statement in the first variation. Then, as in a rhetorical address, eight variations follow in different keys like a series of points to be tested or argued, with their accompanying counter arguments. With the tenth variation, in an echo of classical sonata form, Haydn returns to the home key in a reaffirmation of the original ‘proposition’. The twelfth variation concluding the set is a brilliant coda. In writing keyboard sonatas, Haydn adopted styles then popular in Vienna, and was strongly influenced by the three movement sonata design of his famous older contemporary, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach. In Haydn’s F major Sonata (Hob.XVI:29 begun about 1774) we see all the elements of the first movement form created by Bach, managed with wit and ingenuity. In it, the asymmetry of phrase length is at once unconventional yet typical of a contemporary rococo aesthetic, giving the music a playful tension. A first subject group in the home key is like a rhetorical proposition. It is followed by a transition to the dominant key and a statement of new musical material as a musical counter-argument. The first half of the movement concludes with a brief codetta. The development or ‘free fantasy’ section that follows, plays with the first proposition and counter argument until a recapitulation of the first subject group (the proposition) in the home key is reached. A modified transition leads to a restatement of the second subject group, now also in the home key. In this way the counter-argument has been reconciled with the original proposition. As a musical rhetorician, Haydn has demonstrated the truth and strength of his original proposition. For the central, slow movements of his sonatas we hear Haydn as an operatic composer. He writes a lyrical aria or dramatic scena for the keyboard. This lyricism is expressed in long, decorated, singing lines that make perfect use of the capabilities of contemporary instruments. This singing manner of performance does not necessarily mean the production of an unbroken, seamlessly sustained legato line of the 19th century bel canto tradition. Instead it should be taken to mean an inflected, articulated line, of the kind a singer with perfect diction can sustain, and so communicate the musical (and literary) content of the work. This approach casts the singer in the role of a rhetorician. The clavichord’s immediate response to the touch of a gifted player makes it the ideal ‘rhetorical’ keyboard instrument, like a fine singer, capable of swaying the emotions and convincing an audience of the power of a rhetorical exposition. Haydn, as a master of musical rhetoric, is perhaps one of the greatest composers of clavichord music of the 18th century. The last work on this disc is the set of Variations in F minor, Hob.XVII:6, also modestly called by Haydn ‘un piccolo divertimento’. This self-deprecating title cannot disguise the fact that this is one of Haydn’s greatest compositions in any genre. Consisting of a single movement, it is a series of alternating variations based on two themes, a form particularly identified with Haydn. The plaintive first theme with its persistent dotted rhythm is in the minor key; the second more lyrical theme is in the major key. Each successive variation pair is based on figurations of ornamental scales, trills, syncopations and so on. The seventh pair of variations is, however, unique, beginning with a full restatement of the opening of the work before its transformation into an elaborate cadenza-like coda of great emotional intensity. Its extreme chromaticism is matched to the dotted rhythm of the first theme that now takes on a dark and sinister insistence until the work fades to inaudibility with the sounding together of the highest and lowest notes of the keyboard in the faintest pianissimo. Haydn wrote the variations in 1793 for Barbara von Ployer. This distinguished and sensitive pianist was a pupil of Mozart’s; two of his concertos were written especially for her. Haydn was in London in 1791 when he heard of Mozart’s appallingly premature death. In the months before his departure for London, Haydn and Mozart had met almost daily and plans had been made for them to appear together in a concert series. His death was a great shock to Haydn who continued to mourn the loss of his friend, and the loss to music, until the end of his own life. In writing a work of such emotional intensity and introspection for Barbara von Ployer, Haydn was perhaps making a direct, personal comment on Mozart’s death. The F minor Variations may be regarded as an anguished tombeau or memorial for the younger composer. The work truly “remains in the heart when one has heard it” Derek Adlam, Welbeck, 2003 Page revised 25.09.03 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
