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Joseph Haydn, Op 76 No 5 in D Major Transcript Joseph Haydn, Op 76 No 5 in D major Transcript Date: Thursday, 18 March 2010 - 12:00AM Location: Museum of London Haydn: Quartet Op. 76 No. 5 Professor Roger Parker 18/3/2010 Today's lecture is about Haydn's Op. 76 No. 5, and with it we come to the last of our three Haydn string quartets, all of them from the Op. 76 collection. In the last lecture, on Op. 76 No. 2, I mentioned something about how Haydn had fared in the two centuries since he wrote these marvellous quartets: how writers and listeners had, during those two centuries, tried to come to terms with him and his music; and also how that coming-to-terms changed with the changing times. For the nineteenth century, that great age of biography, the efforts were hampered by difficulties over what we might (anachronistically) call Haydn's "personality", an area that proved hard to grasp for Romantic sensibilities. While it was easy to paint seductive pictures of bewigged Mozart as the eternal child-genius, and of bad-hair-day Beethoven as titanic and sublime, Haydn seemed, in this period at least, close to being a Man Without Qualities. It was already well known, after all, that for most of his life he had been little more than a loyal servant in an aristocratic household (that of the fabulously wealthy Esterhazy family). When public fame came in the 1790s of Paris and London, he was elderly by the standards of the day...almost a relic from another age. And so the figure emerged of "Papa" Haydn: not a stern patriarch, but something much more homely: the composer of repertoire choral works and a few symphonies and quartets; the man who made the eternal Mozart and the sublime Beethoven possible, but who in the process seemed to fade into the shadows. As we saw in the last lecture, the twentieth century did much to change this picture, and in many ways caused a fundamental rehabilitation of Haydn. The very lack of romanticized excess expended upon him by the now-despised nineteenth century made it easy to fashion him as a slightly austere musicians' musician: above all a master manipulator of abstract forms, a genius of the sonata principle. He was thus elevated by successive waves of the modernist avant garde, and in the process his symphonies and quartets (now emerging in great profusion) were praised and exhaustively analysed for the intricacy of their motivic and harmonic workings. Instead of old "Papa" Haydn, then, we were given Haydn the progressive, the modernist-icon, the precursor of the twentieth-century's celebration of "pure" musical endeavour. Stravinsky, ever méchant and ever provocative, was a typical composer-champion (Mozart, he said, could be dull in comparison); armies of white-coated musical analysts followed in this path. But amid all this celebration, the Haydn "personality" (again that anachronistic word) again seemed to escape. While popular culture in the early twentieth century took to the Romantic images of Beethoven with huge enthusiasm, and while the later mythologisation of "Amadeus" is something no-one could ignore, Haydn stubbornly remained there on the page, with his wig and pen, somehow still resistant. There is, admittedly, a book called Haydn the Merry Little Peasant; but no-one (thank goodness) made it into a movie. So: with all this reception history now behind us, and with new biographical information still emerging from the archives, what can we, today, know of Haydn, the "real" Haydn? What's more, how can such knowledge help us understand his music? As I've already said, the very idea of "personality" in our modern sense is anachronistic for a person born, as Haydn was, in 1732. But the composer did have a long life, and it was one in which our notion of "personality" or "identity" was indeed forming. There is also the fact that Haydn had the good fortune to become famous in his own lifetime, thus causing a fair amount of evidence to be preserved about his behaviour and attitudes. Let's delve into this archive for a moment, in particular the period around the mid 1790s when Haydn wrote his Op. 76 quartets. Let's see what it might reveal. The bare facts of the period are easily related. As mentioned in an earlier lecture, Haydn's decades of gentle servitude in the employ of the Esterhazy family came to an abrupt end in 1790; his patron Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy died and the Prince's son and heir promptly dissolved the musical establishment to which Haydn had devoted so much of his life and creative energies. The faithful composer was given a pension and set adrift. By that time, however, Haydn had-mostly by means of publications of his music, which had spread far and wide-become the most famous living composer in Europe. Freedom from gentle servitude meant he could cash in to this fame, and he did so in no uncertain terms, with lucrative tours to Paris and, twice, to London. In 1795 he returned to Vienna and mostly devoted himself to grand choral works, as befitted his now elevated public station. But he also, and perhaps significantly, made time to write this set of six quartets, and two further quartets for another projected collection: while he seemed content not to write any further symphonies (perhaps the 100-odd he had penned werre enough!), the medium of the string quartet continued to challenge his musical imagination. To undergo the momentous change from fixed employee to "freelance" musician (something Mozart had famously achieved a decade earlier when he left Salzburg to make his way in Vienna) might seem an obvious test of "character". How did Haydn react? Here's a letter of his, discussing the matter with a devoted female friend: This little bit of freedom, how sweet it tastes! I had a good prince, but at times I was forced to be dependent on base souls. I have often sighed for release; now I have it in some measure- even though I am burdened with more work, the knowledge that I am not bound to service makes ample amends for all my toil. And yet, dear though this freedom is to me, I long to be in [the new] Prince Esterhazy's service on my return, if only for the sake of my poor family. This extraordinary wavering-between celebration of freedom and uncertainty about what it might bring economically-was to become a familiar story in the nineteenth century. Composers and other artists frequently hymned their newfound independence, the fact that they were beholden to nobody and could follow their passion where it took them. But many learned that being beholden to nobody meant being without the safety net of fixed employment. As it happened, Haydn had no need to be nervous: his fame protected him, indeed rewarded him in a completely new manner. But we can tell in his tone, with its concern for his "poor family", that he was well aware that freedom might also mean freedom to starve. The ragged artist in the garret, that emerging cliché of the Romantic sensibility, was a potent symbol of the downside of nineteenth-century emancipation. Was Haydn's caution perhaps symptomatic of something we can also see in his musical personality, something that there he turned to creative effect? A possible illustration of such an equation might be the third movement of our quartet today, its Minuet and Trio. During Haydn's long life, he had written literally hundreds and hundreds of these minuet movements, all with more-or-less the same basic shape and rhythmic cut, even down to the bar-lengths of the various themes and the overall key schemes. The fact that he could return to this comparatively restricted form so often, and even did so late in life, when other genres were opening before him, says something important about his love of order and predictability. But of course there is also the fact that what we might see as constraints were for Haydn also opportunities. Listening to the present Minuet, you can witness how Haydn manages yet again to find originality in the formula. In this case, listen to how an innocent-sounding rhythmic tag at the end of the opening theme of the Minuet (q/q/c) becomes the main topic of the second half of the minuet, stretched out across the quartet's entire range; or how sinister and disquieting the Trio sounds in contrast, with its obsessively rumbling cello and sigh figure in the upper strings. By such means, an unassuming outer form becomes packed with meaning. By such means, 'servitude' can become freedom. Let's now try another, more difficult route to musical meaning. I mentioned female companions a moment ago, and this aspect of the composer's life risks putting a severe dent in the "Papa Haydn" portrait. He was married fairly early on, in 1760, to the daughter of a wig maker: Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller. It's possible that Haydn married Maria on the rebound from her sister, as Mozart seems to have done; but we can't be sure. The marriage was (by Haydn's account, which is all we have; Maria left very few traces) far from happy. The composer's explanation, as reported by his biographer Griesinger, was strange, reminding us of the distance between eighteenth-century ideas of marriage and our own. His analysis was that Maria could not have children, and that this circumstance made him "less indifferent to the charms of other women".
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