VOL.3 __SOLO E PENSOSO

JOSEPH HAYDN: Overture to «L'isola disabitata» Hob.XXVIII:9 (1779)

Largo – Vivace assai – Allegretto – Vivace [assai]

by Christian Moritz-Bauer
 

First performed for the name day of Nicholas I Esterházy de Galantha, on 6 December 1779 (or on the eve of the celebrations arranged for it), only three weeks after the destruction by fire the Eszterháza theatre, the azione teatrale entitled L’isola disabitata – devised by no less than Pietro Metastasio after motifs from Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – has a special status. With only one stage set – the action takes place on a lonely West Indian island, lapped by the ocean waves, where thirteen years previously two sisters had been compelled to seek refuge from a storm and have since been stranded – the work could be performed without the usual elaborate décor. To compensate, it had no less than seven arias, both touching and stirring, and in the end a quartet sung by the two friends Gernando and Enrico, now returned after having been abducted by pirates, with Costanza and Silvia. And all the recitatives are performed accompagnato, that is with orchestral accompaniment, a particularly dramatic form also used, for example, by Christoph Willibald Gluck in Orfeo ed Euridice. The overture, in G minor, which is consistent with the idiom of ‘Sturm und Drang’ in our composer’s symphonic work, began to take on a certain life of its own even in the early 1780s:

[…] concerning the symphony of my present very new opera, which has not yet been fashioned, I can oblige no sooner than after the first production, but if in the meanwhile you would like two others from of my operas, which no one, not a single soul, possesses, you can have each for 5 ducats, and I promise you that I will make them up to half a dozen.¹

It should only be mentioned in passing that this advanced praise, written to the Vienna art and music suppliers Artaria & Comp. in August 1782, refers to the still unfinished instrumental prelude to Orlando paladino. At any rate, only a few weeks later, Haydn – famously shrewd in business matters – was able to post the ‘requested 5 pieces, neatly and correctly written and well composed symphonies’, whose ‘publication, because the brevity of the pieces makes the engraving very inexpensive, will make a considerable profit’.² Ultimately they were reborn (following a not always harmonious further correspondence with the company’s proprietors, Carlos and Francesco Artaria) as SEI SINFONIE A GRAND ORCHESTRE Opera XXXV: the orchestral preludes to the Esterháza operas L’incontro improvviso, Lo Speziale, La vera costanza and L’infedeltà delusa, followed by the oratorical Il ritorno di Tobia and headed by L’isola disabitata as Sinfonia I.
The overture to L’isola disabitata, which is divided into four sections, is without doubt one of the most interesting of its kind: while other works are either in the traditional three movements of the Italian overture, or their single-movement form – as with Il mondo della luna – tempted the composer to reuse them as the first movement of a concert symphony, this one is a veritable anticipation of the subsequent dramatic action, a kind of tone painting of the inner fortitude, despite her torments of despair, of the main protagonist.
Haydn was especially fond of his ‘uninhabited island’: ‘If you would hear my little opera l’Isola disabitata and my most recently composed opera la fedeltà premiata: then I assure you that suchlike works have not yet been heard in Paris and just as little in Vienna,’³ he wrote in May 1781. Although he was unable to give the opera a second season – too much was the challenging role of Costanza tailored to the exceptional abilities of the Italian soprano Barbara Ripamonti – at least its overture could be enjoyed throughout Europe, distributed in the following years of the 18th century in various copies and reprints, among them an arrangement of the allegretto for voice, piano and other instruments as desired, with specially written English lyrics: ‘Gentle Sleep, mine eyelids close.’

_{¹ Haydn to the publisher Artaria, Vienna, 16 August 1782, translated from Joseph Haydn. Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Dénes Bartha, Kassel et al. 1965, p. 118.
² Haydn to the publisher Artaria, Vienna, 29 September 1782, translated from ibid., p. 119.
³ Haydn to the publisher Artaria, Vienna, translated from ibid. p. 97.}

VOL. 3 _SOLO E PENSOSO

Giovanni Antonini, Francesca Aspromonte, Il Giardino Armonico

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SYMPHONY 42 IN D MAJOR, HOB. I:42 (1771)

Moderato e maestoso / Andantino e cantabile / Menuet. Allegretto – Trio / Finale. Scherzando e presto

by Christian Moritz-Bauer
 

While mention has already been made in reference to the overture to L’isola disabitata of the idiom of ‘Sturm und Drang’, in the sense of an exaggeratedly emotional form of musical expression which came into fashion around 1770, it is easily overlooked that Haydn’s compositional thinking at this time also contains a number of other peculiarities whose continuance was to be comparatively more sustained. Musicologists speak among other things of a ‘popular style’, or make the observation that Haydn’s symphonic works – on the one hand because of the involvement with music-theatre prescribed by his employer, on the other through fruitful contacts to contemporary spoken drama – became increasingly ‘theatrical’. The first movement of the Symphony in D major, Hob. I:42, composed in 1771, with its litany of dramatic set phrases, pounding chords, singing violin melodies, unison passages of ascending scales and descending broken triads, culminating in a crescendo for the whole orchestra, has even been portrayed as ‘satirising an Italian opera sinfonia’.¹ It does in fact seem to be ‘a little too much’, and the number of bars alone (up to 448 in performances at the given tempo observing all the repeats) make it one of Haydn’s longest instrumental movements – a fact that demands a small evaluation. The main thematic idea is not only followed by a second subject but also, shortly before the end of the first section (exposition), by a third quite jaunty one, complete with a dynamically contrasting transition. The second section (development) is impressive in its deceptive main cadence and equally misleading secondary one – two ‘phoney’ reprises – while the third part (the actual ‘reprise’) comes to a standstill and prematurely fades away in a surprising and dreamlike full stop.

Haydn’s contemporary, the important music theorist Heinrich Christoph Koch, identifies ‘Five different melodic parts, which additionally use no other means of melodic extension than repetition up to the first cadence’,² in the symphony’s thoughtful, at times inspired andantino second movement. One such passage, in which the first violin was originally supposed to execute a short sighing solo, was marked by Haydn himself with the famous words, ‘This went before too learned ears’. In the middle section of this A-major movement, which Koch memorialised in his composition manual Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, the harmonic events are determined by minor keys, and it increasingly appears as if the composer himself were desperately seeking a way out of the gloom in F sharp, until even the last glimmer of hope is extinguished. Then – affirmed by soothing wind tones – the sudden return of the quiescent opening theme hurries to his aid. The allegretto minuet, with its circling quaver triplets, is also filled with floating lightness, while the trio, left to the strings alone, sounds like an acoustic excursion to the delightful ornithological world of nearby Lake Neusiedler. The subsequent scherzando finale has always been held in higher regard. According to Sonja Gerlach it is Haydn’s first ‘variation rondo’, that is a ‘firmly established five-part rondo, with the […] distinction that the refrains are varied’.³ It is of course particularly thrilling – as so often in rondo movements – in the intervening couplets, in which we primarily have to do with sprightly interludes featuring two oboes, two horns and two bassoons, secondarily with a contrasting journey through sombre minor keys, whose erratic outbursts might recall The Youth Who Wanted to Learn What Fear Is.

_{¹ A. Peter Brown, The Symphonic Repertoire Vol. II – The First Golden Age of the Viennese Symphony: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Bloomington 2002, p. 130.
² Translated from Heinrich Christoph Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, part 3, Leipzig 1793, p. 382.
³ Translated from Sonja Gerlach, ‘Joseph Haydns Sinfonien bis 1774. Studien zur Chronologie’, in Haydn-Studien 7/1–2 (1996), p. 192.}

VOL. 3 _SOLO E PENSOSO

Giovanni Antonini, Francesca Aspromonte, Il Giardino Armonico

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JOSEPH HAYDN: ARIA «SOLO E PENSOSO» HOB. XIVb:20 (1798)

by Christian Moritz-Bauer
 

With this aria, whose first verse has provided the maxim for the third part of the Haydn2032 projects, we have the honour of attending a performance of Joseph Haydn’s last secular composition for solo voice with orchestral accompaniment. Written in 1798, it is a setting of sonnet XXXV from Petrarch’s Il Canzioniere (ca. 1337), the selection of which was considered ‘extremely unusual for the late 18th century’¹ by the editors of Haydn’s complete works. But in Europe’s extreme east – meaning the Russian Empire – the turn of the 18th to the 19th century was a time of intense interest by the educated population in this particular Italian poet, one of the most important personalities in Western cultural history because of his writing in the vernacular, the translation of whose works into Russian expressed a desire to advance the empire’s own national language.² At any rate it does not seem to be a matter of chance that in the year of the completed Creation, Haydn – who in the early 1780s had into personal contact with the then heirs to the Russian throne, and in 1804 was to delight the late tsar’s German widow, Maria Feodorovna, by sending her his (one- to many-part) Songs with Piano-Forte Accompaniment – was confronted by a Russian grand duke, later to become Tsar Alexander I, or his younger brother Constantine, with the suggestion of setting to music this Petrarch sonnet – although naturally in the Italian original – which had recently been translated by Mikhail Kaizerov. This can at least be gathered from the caption on the title page of the autograph: ‘Aria. del Haydnmpria / le parole del gran Prencipe di Russia.’

Haydn’s setting has repeatedly been accused of sacrificing the metrical structure of the undramatic sonnet to the principles of opera.³ Worse still, that his music runs the danger of making a serious aesthetic mistake in interpreting the inner dialogue with Amor, as a personified image of Petrarch’s unrequited love of Laura, not as steady discourse but in the sense of a light-bringing way out for the voluntarily exiled narrator, now fallen prey to melancholy. (Haydn’s own mood, described in a letter from the loneliness of the Pannonian winter of 1790 to his bosom friend Maria Anna von Gennzinger in Vienna, cannot be ignored: ‘Now – I sit in my solitude – abandoned – like a poor orphan – with almost no human company – unhappy – full of memories of precious past days …’⁴)
The farewell to the Italian aria bade by ‘Solo e pensoso’ exhibits some features of Haydn’s late orchestral movements: it requires two clarinets instead of the usual pair of oboes, and in its opening adagio ritornello creates an almost religious atmosphere, which is additionally concentrated at the start of the allegretto section. Motivic relationships to the Agnus dei of the Nelson Mass, or anticipations of the Credo and Et resurrexit from the Harmoniemesse, underline this impression. The religious image is broken into by the odd harmonic structure of the work, which proceeds from B-flat major via F major to the submediant D-flat major, where it persists until the beginning of the tercet verse on the harsh roads trod by the lonely self burning with desire. The return to the tonic allows space for a few modest yet all the more touching fioriture in the vocal-instrumental melodic parts. Although the composer’s personal feelings had meanwhile returned to a state of inner peace and freedom, the self-portrait of a poet in picturesque rural scenes must have appeared entirely apposite to him. And appropriately enough the first performances of the aria took place in the time of inner contemplation, namely at two pre-Christmas concerts given by the Vienna Tonkünstler-Societät on 22 and 23 December 1798. The solo was taken by a certain Antoinie Flamm, who as an alto must have been somewhat taxed by a part extending to b♭''.⁵

_{¹ Translated from Joseph Haydn Werke, series XXVI, vol. 2, Arien, Szenen und Ensembles mit Orchester, 2nd edition, ed. Julia Gehring, Christine Siegert and Robert v. Zahn, Munich 2013, p. XIX.
² See Tatiana Yakushkina, ‘Was there petrarchism in Russia?’, in Forum Italicum 47 (1), pp. 15–37.
³ See Andrea Chegai, ‘Divergenze tra forma poetica ed effetto estetico: “Solo e pensoso” musicato da Haydn’, in Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi VII Centenario della nascita di Francesco Petrarca Arezzo, 18–20 March 2004, ed. Andrea Chegai and Cecilia Luzzi, Lucca, pp. 425-433.
⁴ Haydn to Maria Anna von Gennzinger, 9 February 1790, translated from Joseph Haydn. Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Dénes Bartha, Kassel et al. 1965, p. 228.
⁵ See H.C. Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, vol. 4, Haydn: The Years of 'The Creation' 1796–1800, London 1977, p. 334.}

VOL. 3 _SOLO E PENSOSO

Giovanni Antonini, Francesca Aspromonte, Il Giardino Armonico

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SYMPHONY NO.4 D MAJOR HOB. I:4 (1757-1760)

Presto / Andante / Finale. Tempo di Menuet

by Christian Moritz-Bauer
 

The Symphony in D major, Hob. 1:4, is one of the compositions ascribed to Joseph Haydn’s time as kapellmeister to Count Karl Joseph Franz von Morzin at Dolní Lukavice (Unter-Lukawitz, south of Pilsen), West Bohemia, which must have lasted from 1757 to shortly before Haydn’s appointment at Eisenstadt in early 1761. It was previously dated to 1762, in connection with a (probably lost) copy, but the Haydn scholar Sonja Gerlach, as a result of her chronological investigations, was able to place it directly after the four so-called ‘firstlings’ – meaning the Symphonies no. 1, 37, 18 and 2.¹ (The traditional numbering goes back to an index published in 1908 by Eusebius Mandyczewki for the collected edition of Haydn’s symphonies begun by Breitkopf and Härtel. Its sequencing is in many cases inadequate, but it succeeded in distinguishing all original compositions from attributions.)

The main source of the works not surviving in the composer’s handwriting is a collection of orchestral parts from the Fürnberg Collection in Keszthely, Hungary. The name refers to Karl Joseph Edler von Fürnberg, whose family seat was once Weinzierl Palace in Wieselbug, Lower Austria. The baron not only recommended the young composer Haydn to his friend Morzin but in the following years acquired a series of musical manuscripts of particular importance in the documentation of Haydn’s early symphonic works.

Haydn’s first symphonies, usually in only three movements, often have a finale in 3/8, which in the case of Hob. 1:4 would be played in minuet tempo, but above all ‘lean textures, impeccable formal logic [...] and a surprisingly contrapuntal approach to part-writing concealed beneath a facade of gallant gestures’. These gallant gestures² – paired with a dance-like ‘drive’ and incisive horn calls – pervade the opening presto. Noteworthy too are the contrasting secondary themes in the dominant minor, and very much so – according to James Webster³ – ‘the impressive twofold modulating crescendo sequence and the long, suspenseful transition’.

The following andante, with a restlessly suspended basic rhythm over which a ‘lonely’ first violin cantilena rises, its muted sound-world creating an atmosphere sometimes described as ‘ghostly’, carries us off into an almost disconcertingly different world, perhaps already familiar to us from the solitary scenario of the L’isola disabitata overture and Haydn’s setting of the Petrarch sonnet ‘Solo e pensoso’. While the middle movement certainly leaves a lasting impression, a faint trace of melancholy threads its way through the amusing finale, breaking out unmistakeably at one point, when ‘the dynamics recede from forte to piano and pianissimo, the sudden change from D major to D minor, the faltering melodies of the violins and finally the appearance of the two horns with a sustained octave’ contribute to the ‘intensification of the pedal point’. (Walter Lessing refers here to the evenly beating quaver movement of the low string at the beginning of the second section.)⁴

_{¹ Sonja Gerlach, ‘Joseph Haydns Sinfonien bis 1774. Studien zur Chronologie’, in Haydn-Studien 7/1–2 (1996), p. 70ff.
² Neal Zaslaw, review ‘Joseph Haydn, The Morzin Symphonies 1758–1760, […] L’Estro Armonico, directed by Derek Solomons’, in Early Music, January 1983, p. 125.
³ James Webster, Joseph Haydn. Sinfonien für Graf Morzin, ca. 1757-60, in: Haydn Symphonies c. 1757-60 […] The Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood, volume 1, London 1993, S. 49f.
⁴ Translated from Walter Lessing, Die Sinfonien von Joseph Haydn, vol. I, Baden-Baden 1987, p. 16.}

VOL. 3 _SOLO E PENSOSO

Giovanni Antonini, Francesca Aspromonte, Il Giardino Armonico

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SYMPHONY NO.64 A MAJOR HOB. I:64 (1773)

Allegro con spirito / Largo / Menuet. Allegretto – Trio / Finale. Presto

by Christian Moritz-Bauer
 

The Symphony in A major, Hob.I:64, has always provoked discussion about the origin and meaning of its epithet ‘Tempora mutantur’. The usually retrospective naming of Haydn’s works is an issue – not only in relation to the symphonies but also to the string quartets and wherever the composer left a complex and varied oeuvre to his surroundings or posterity.
The quality of an epithet was ‘officially’ evaluated – without thinking of the often positive ‘side effects’ – according to the criteria of authenticity and authorisation, that is according to the question of whether it came from the composer himself or his immediate environment, or was acknowledged as applicable by one or the other. In the case of Hob. 1:64 at least – the relatively high sequence number within the symphonies does not quite correspond to the presumed composition of the work in autumn 1773 – there is still disagreement about the acceptance of the title, based on a famous Latin saying (Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis: quomodo? Fit semper tempore peior homo / Times change, and we change with them: how so? Mankind gets worse with time’) and found on the portfolio of a copy of orchestral parts dated to 1775 and obviously of Esterházy provenance.¹
This would be unequivocal, were it not for the fact that the (later?) portfolio consists of a different kind of paper and the caption on it is in a different handwriting from that of the manuscripts it contains. My own recent inspection of these copies (now the main source for Hob. 1:64, due to the loss of the autograph) at least led to the conclusion that the epithet – brought up for renewed discussion by H. C. Robbins Landon, by the way – was certainly applied at some time to this work and not – as the author of the article ‘Tempora mutantur’ in the Haydn-Lexikon presumes² – to a Sinfonia in G [...] del Sig. Carlo Ditters. referred to upside down on the inside cover. Furthermore, the consistent and characteristic signing of portfolio and parts indicates a (temporary) origin, or even combination of both elements, from or in the Vienna copyist workshop of Johann Traeg, which was so important for distribution of Haydn’s symphonies throughout Europe.

The slow movement of the Symphony in A major has particularly attracted the attention of connoisseurs, musicians, musicologists and concert-goers – although the reactions of Haydn’s contemporaries were probably stronger than those of today – as the largo permanently contravenes the basic laws of musical grammar and plays with its listeners’ expectations. In short, this concerns the so-called cadences, the ends of musical phrases, which are of decisive importance in the recognition of tonality and musical structure, and how Haydn simply causes them to disappear and then reappear after a delay.
The American scholar Elaine Sisman – convinced she had rediscovered in Hob. 1:64 parts of a lost accompaniment to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, commissioned from Haydn for a production by Karl Wahr’s troupe in Pressburg in 1774 – sees an inner connection between the Latin saying and the cunning compositional procedure, although she justifies this in reference to what Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister declares to be a key dictum of the Prince of Denmark: ‘The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite. That ever I was born to set it right!’³
Sisman’s notion was recently taken up in a study by Danuta Mirka of ‘absent cadences’, and explained by the rhetorical devices of ‘ellipsis’ as ‘aposiopesis’, drawn from 18th-century music theory.⁴ But ultimately her deliberations do not provide a convincing answer to the question of the connection between the largo of Hob, 1:64 and the adage ‘tempora mutantur’. Perhaps – until deeper knowledge is attained – we should simply proceed from Haydn’s music and what it induces in its listeners. Dean Sutcliffe, for example, proposes an ‘affective reading that concerns nostalgia and melancholy’⁵ for the play of interrupted cadences and incomplete phrases, which would bring us back – not quite imperceptibly – to the idea of the sonnet ‘Solo e pensoso’. A few stirring passages, which bring forth the composer’s ‘theatrical’ vocabulary, can be found here too, as in the dramatic modulation to D minor when the horns first join the muted strings, ‘an abrupt crescendo from pianissimo to fortissimo and an equally abrupt sinking back into quiet, gloomy persistence.’⁶ The final, eerily beautiful return to the gloom is accompanied by a surprising tone colour: a pedal point of contrabasses and second horn on a low D, while the first horn replaces the violins as the melodic lead.
But the obscure musical logic of the Symphony in A major brings about yet more idiosyncrasies. In the spirited allegro we encounter dynamic brusqueness, syncopated rhythms and unusual harmonic sequences, which contain yet more ‘ellipsis’ for those with knowledge of classical musical composition. The presto, in contrast, at first appears to be in sonata form, although the ritornello form of the rondo increasingly emerges. Not to mention the frequently occurring dramatic ‘Sturm und Drang’-like outbursts … And finally there is a fortissimo flourish – but only, as is right and proper, at the very end.

_{¹ See for example Joseph Haydn Werke, series I, vol. 5a, Sinfonien um 1770–1774, ed. Andreas Friesenhagen and Ulrich Wilker, Munich 2013, pp. VII & 250.
² Horst Walter, ‘Tempora mutantur’, in Das Haydn-Lexikon, ed. Armin Raab, Christine Siegert and Wolfram Steinbeck, Laaber 2010, p. 780.
³ Elaine R. Sisman, ‘Haydn's Theater Symphonies’, in Journal of the American Musicological Society, 43 (1990), p. 320ff.
⁴ Danuta Mirka, ‘Absent Cadences’, in Eighteenth Century Music, vol. 9, no. 2, September 2012, pp. 213–235.
⁵ W. Dean Sutcliffe, ‘Expressive Ambivalence in Haydn’s Symphonic Slow Movements of the 1770s’, in The Journal of Musicology, vol. 27, no. 1 (2010), p. 110f.
⁶ Walter Lessing, Die Sinfonien von Joseph Haydn, vol. II, Baden-Baden 1988, p. 88.}
 

VOL. 3 _SOLO E PENSOSO

Giovanni Antonini, Francesca Aspromonte, Il Giardino Armonico

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