Review Essay Haydn Recordings in the Bicentennial Year
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Review Essay Haydn Recordings in the Bicentennial Year SYLVIA BERRY N ANTICIPATION OF THE 200TH anniversary of the death of Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), a number of early keyboard specialists embarked upon Icomplete recordings of Haydn’s keyboard works, all but one of which was released before the Haydn Year 2009. These recordings include not only the complete solo keyboard works, but also the complete keyboard trios — a wonderful and often neglected facet of Haydn’s keyboard output. In a real marriage of performance and scholarship, every keyboard work Haydn wrote (including some contemporary arrangements of works by Haydn in other genres) has now been committed to disc on a stunning variety of instruments. Thus, in 2009, we can finally hear Haydn’s keyboard music performed on a veritable constellation of clavichords, harpsichords, and fortepianos, reflecting the wealth of keyboard instruments available to Haydn during his life-long career as a composer of keyboard music. Previous to this recent crop of recordings, there were very few interpretations on disc of Haydn’s works on the harpsichord, and only a small number of recordings by a handful of fortepianists of a variety of programs, very few of which included the early works. Expanding on the fortepiano interpretations of the standard programs by Malcolm Bilson and Paul Badura-Skoda, we now have four complete sets of Haydn’s keyboard sonatas, two complete sets of the miscellaneous or non-sonata works (henceforth called Klavierstücke), a number of readings of assorted Klavierstücke, and a complete set of the keyboard trios. Taken together, these sets employ twenty-one instruments, of which a number are antiques. This enormous body of work delights enthusiasts of Haydn’s keyboard music by finally offering recordings to accompany the groundbreaking research of Haydn scholars A. Peter Brown, Georg Feder, Christa Landon, H.C. Robbins Landon, László Somfai, and James Webster, who have long championed this repertoire. In this essay I will focus on the recordings of three keyboardists: Bart van Oort, Christine Schornsheim, and Tom Beghin.1 While Schornsheim 1 Dutch pianist and fortepianist Ronald Brautigam made complete recordings of the keyboard sonatas and Klavierstücke on the fortepiano for the BIS label (BIS-CD-1731/33) in the late 1990s and early 2000s that were re-released for the Haydn Year as a 15-CD box set (EAN 13 3 and Beghin have blazed the wider trails in terms of the number and different a new Fortepiano.”3 While we cannot be certain that Haydn is referring here kinds of instruments used, van Oort has made an impressive contribution in to the purchase of his first fortepiano, we do know that the “new” instrument terms of the wide scope of repertoire recorded. he bought in 1788 was built by Wenzel Schanz. We also know that Haydn’s later works written during his London sojourns were inspired by the pianos The Question of Instruments of John Broadwood, which differed greatly from their Viennse counterparts in many respects, most notably in compass (FF — c4 versus FF — f3 or g3 ) Perhaps the most compelling question addressed by this collection of recordings and in their damping mechanism, which was less precise and featured a lot is the complicated one of which instruments are the appropriate ones for the of “after-ring.” performance of Haydn’s keyboard music. This is a particularly ambiguous Most scholars also agree that the early works written during the 1760s matter in the case of Haydn, whose sonatas and Klavierstücke were written (and perhaps 1750s) up until 1772, were conceived for the harpsichord. across a roughly forty-year period during which many changes in aesthetics Recent organological research by Richard Maunder and Alfons Huber has and instrument-building took place. shed welcome light on the Viennese harpsichords Haydn knew during that Most scholars agree that the “Auenbrugger” sonatas of 1780 (Hob. XVI: 35- time, particularly those with the so-called Viennese short octave (Wiener Bass- 39, 20) mark a turning point in which Haydn shifted from the harpsichord to oktave). 4 A small number of works from this period, most notably the Capriccio the fortepiano. Published by Artaria in Vienna as “Sonate per il Clavicembalo on the folk tune “Acht Sauschneider müssen sein,” Hob. XVII:1 (1765) have o Forte Piano,” this is the first set to include two instruments as options on chords in the bass spanning a tenth that are only realizable on instruments the title page, and they are the first sonatas with highly nuanced dynamic with this particular short or “broken” octave configuration. (When this work indications as well, ranging from pp to ff, sometimes following each other in was first published in 1788 by Artaria, perhaps without Haydn’s consent, these quick succession.2 While publishers continued to include both harpsichord passages were reconfigured to fit on a fully chromatic keyboard.) However, and fortepiano on their title pages well into the eighteenth and early nineteenth even the topic of harpsichords can be thorny. Viennese harpsichords of this centuries, largely in an attempt not to exclude those who had not yet bought period closely resembled Italian harpsichords in that they were single manual a fortepiano of some kind, practically everything about the “Auenbrugger” instruments with only two 8' registers, with no easy way to change registration sonatas points to the necessity of a touch-sensitive instrument for their full while playing. But Haydn may have had access to French double-manual realization. Haydn’s “Bossler” sonatas (Hob. XVI: 40-42) of 1784 were the harpsichords as well, which differ significantly in their usual disposition of two first works published specifically for the fortepiano (“pour le Pianoforte,” 8' registers and a 4' register, with easily accessible handstops at the front of the by Bossler in 1784), but we do not have circumstantial evidence of Haydn case. A. Peter Brown has conjectured that Haydn’s employer Prince Nikolaus owning a piano until 1788. In that year he wrote to Artaria that “In order to Esterházy would almost certainly have had such an instrument at the court, compose your three Clavier sonatas particularly well, I was compelled to buy not only because the Viennese aristocracy had a penchant for French culture, but also because Prince Nikolaus consciously set out to create the Eszterháza 7318591731337). This set will not be considered for this article, but it must be mentioned since, in terms of repertoire covered, it is as complete as any of the other sets. Brautigam used a Walter replica (c. 1795) by Paul McNulty (1992) throughout. 3 Joseph Haydn, Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen, ed. Dénes Bartha (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965), 195-96. Quoted in Sandra P. Rosenblum, Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music: 2 Although dating the works before 1766 is difficult since Haydn did not begin cataloging his Their Principles and Applications (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 20. “Clavier works until then, it seems that the Sonata in B-flat Hob. XVI: 18, usually dated as “before 1766” sonatas” here refers to the keyboard trios Hob. XV: 11-13. See László Somfai, The Keyboard is actually the first sonata to contain dynamics. Though the dynamics only range from p to f, Sonatas of Joseph Haydn: Instruments and Performance Practice, Genres, and Styles, trans. Charlotte the sonata also includes other striking new elements, such as, in the first movement: a fioratura Greenspan and the author (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 20. passage in m. 7; a preponderance of short slurs (cf. mm. 17 — 21); a sinewy chromaticism not seen in many of the early sonatas (cf. m. 21 — 29); and in the second movement, a number of 4 See Richard Maunder, Keyboard Instruments in Eighteenth-Century Vienna (Oxford: Oxford detailed articulation marks: double thirds (mm. 15, 17, 84, 85) in the right hand; and broken University Press, 1998), 34-47. See also Alfons Huber (ed.), Das Österreichische Cembalo: 600 octaves (mm. 40, 65-66, 104) in the right hand. Jahre Cembalobau in Osterreich (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2001). 13 4 K EYBOARD PERSPECTIVES II REVIEW ESSAY 13 5 palace in the image of Versailles.5 first movement of the Sonata in C minor (Hob. XVI:20) which contains many This leaves in contention two sets of sonatas, the so-called “Esterházy” dynamic indications (and was eventually included as the last sonata in the Sonatas and the “Anno 776” Sonatas, both of which date from the 1770s — “Auenbrugger” set), and she asks whether Haydn may have already had access the decade during which the fortepiano gradually came to ascendancy while to a fortepiano when drafting this work. the harpsichord and clavichord remained popular. The “Esterházy” set (Hob. Indeed, many aspects of the “Esterházy” sonatas point to a new keyboard XVI: 21-26), dedicated to Haydn’s employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, and idiom, most notably a heightened refinement of articulation marks, and a published by Kurzböck in Vienna in 1774 as “Sei Sonate per Cembalo,” was more pianistic texture, the latter most obviously on display in the set’s many Haydn’s first authorized publication in any genre. The second group (Hob. lyrical slow movements. Five out of the six sonatas have expressive slow second XVI: 27-32) appears in Haydn’s catalog under the title “6 Sonaten von Anno movements in place of the Menuet and Trio movements that abound in the 776” but was never formally published, first appearing in an edition by sonatas from the 1760’s. The Adagio of the first work in the group, the Sonata in Hummel issued without Haydn’s consent in 1776.6 László Somfai claims that C major, Hob. XVI: 21, bears a strong kinship to the Adagio of the Sonata in C the sonatas in both sets are unequivocally harpsichord works, while Sandra major, Hob.