MuseData: Franz Joseph Haydn

Fran Josef Haydn was one of the best-loved composers of the eighteenth century. His string quartets, symphonies, concertos, masses, keyboard, and chamber music all became models of their genres. Haydn encapsulated the eighteenth-century ideal of well articulated organization, balance of resources with enough rotation to avoid blandness, and a critical ear. The music was famously good-natured and found an easy reception.

Yet Haydn himself never received the praise for his operas he would have wished. Many were written for performance in Eisenstadt, where his employer's wife was an Italian noblewoman with a significant interest in the genre. Ironically, Haydn's operas are more approachable today than they were in his time. Some, on texts by Carlo Goldoni, are comic. Many contain a pleasant balance between vocal and instrumental pieces, for Haydn was even-handed in his approach to all kinds of music.

Facsimiles

String quartet prints of Haydn's Time

No complete edition of all of Haydn's works was organized until a few decades ago. In the absence of a comprehensive critical edition, Haydn's music has been circulated in a great bevy of short runs from his time to our own. CCARH had the good fortune to acquire bits and pieces of several string-quartet editions from Haydn's lifetime. We make them available below.

The identification of works in these scans requires consultation of the finding chart linked here. [xx] The lack of a comprehensive edition parallels the absence of a comprehensive catalog of Haydn's music, although this need was substantially met in time by the catalog of Anthony van Hoboken.

Musicians who leaf through the Haydn quartet scans rapidly develop insights in the condition of music circulation in Haydn's time. It is immediately noticeable that during the intervening two centuries many conventions of notation, particularly regardings turns and grace notes, have changed. A much larger proportion of melodic notes were conveyed through small notes than would be the case today. The technically astute will find, if they investigate the encoded score data, these editions do not serve modern editors at well. Beat-regularization squeezes many of those same small notes out of the file, which regulates musical flow by bar structure, and extensive annotation is needed to convey the composer's intentions.

Digitized sources

A recent online exhibit of Haydn resources at Stanford University provides a useful overview of the varied genres in which the composer worked. Some of the fragmentation in Haydn's oeuvre owed to the vicissitudes of patronage. Only recently a composer might have been supported throughout his life by a duke or prince. Haydn's fortunes were mixed. A great deal of his music is associated with the Esterhazy family, who had one court in Eisenstadt (on the Austrian side of today's border) and another, grander one some miles east of the today's Hungarian border. Like most Austro-Hungarian and Bohemia nobles of the time, they also had a town house in Vienna.

Encoded editions (CCARH)

Unlike other major composers of his generation, Haydn was not honored with a catalogue or a complete edition of works in the nineteenth century. The reasons for this are many and varied. Haydn's chamber music was printed in short editions by scattered publishers, each with a different system for numbering both works and editions. The Hoboken catalogue does its job well but it often difficult to link up with random editions. (See further remarks under String Quartets.) A comprehensive edition is not nearing completion.

Opus No.	Title	Key	Instrumentation	PDF Score	Notes
No. 93	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 94	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 95	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 96	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 97	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 98	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 99	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 100	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 101	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 102	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 103	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
No. 104	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example
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