How London remade Haydn
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
The 12 symphonies that Haydn composed on visits to London in 1791-92 and 1794-95 belong to a world that was already gone. Mozart, who died soon after Haydn left Vienna for the first time, led his symphonies into darker, dangerous tonal territory. Beethoven, whom Haydn taught on his return, was ready to leapfrog into a new century of revolutionary ferment. The Haydn London symphonies belong mostly to a decadent age of domestic amusements on noble country estates.
In some ways, though, Haydn was transformed by London…
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
Oh boy…
The content here has gone into Haydn.
His large scale works are boring and not very good.
“The Haydn London symphonies belong mostly to a decadent age of domestic amusements on noble country estates.” What a blatantly typical English arrogance you display.
First of all, the 12 London symphonies by Haydn are immortal masterpieces, and show the solid developement of the Classical symhony as we know it.
Were there any composers between Purcell and Elgar, if you exclude the Irishman Balfe and Arthur Sullivan? Mind the Gap, cos me thinks England has a big big debt to Händel and Haydn.
And remember: without the “amusements” of the Nobility, or the Church, we would not have had any arts, cos nobody would have commissioned any.
I don’t know about those decadent weekends at country estates. Are you sure you aren’t confusing Prince Eszterhazy with Ivor Novello?
We should be indebted to Johann Peter Salomon 1745-1815, violinist, composer and impressario. It was thanks to him that Haydn came to England in the first place.
I would recommend listening to Salomon’s violin romance in D major. Several recordings on you tube. My favourite is the one by Simon Standage. A beautiful piece.
Haydn composed his “London” symphonies under conditions utterly unlike Mozart’s for his final symphonies so the comparison seems misplaced. What is remarkable about Haydn’s set is that each was composed for a discriminating, ticket-buying audience — meaning each and every concert gave that audience the option of being elsewhere — and symphony after symphony was a success. The closest Mozart came to that sort of triumph was with his remarkable series of piano concertos and even that ended rather sadly for him. But that is where the comparison should be directed.
The double triumph is that Haydn’s “Paris” symphonies faced similar circumstances — market forces were at work, and he prevailed in symphony after symphony. This is a very different challenge than keeping your regular employer relatively satisfied with your work, a challenge Haydn also met (but then again so did his brother Michael with his symphonies and his employer — Michael to my knowledge never attempted a level of commercial success comparable to his brother’s).
It is hard to think of a composer who composed such a long string of immediate symphonic successes and in a fairly tight time frame.
There is a shadow factor that violinists like to discuss. The same Paris audiences that flocked to hear Haydn’s newest symphonies were also rapturous in their reception of Giovanni Battista Viotti’s latest violin concertos. And when Haydn began visiting London, Viotti did the same and enjoyed essentially the same successes with the very same audiences — literally the same audiences, in Salomon’s concerts. Yet only a relative handful of Viotti’s concertos are still played, and those often in student concerts with piano accompaniments, not full orchestra. There is some undiscovered gold in the Viotti concertos.