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.

Haydn quartet finding tool

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The identification of works in these scans requires consultation of the finding chart linked above. 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. (George Barth's 1991 article on Mozart performance gives some sense of this situation.) 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.

Chamber music: 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 with Hungary) and another, grander one, some miles east of the border. Like most Austro-Hungarian, Bohemian, and Moravian nobles of the time, the Esterhazy princes also had a town house in Vienna. Chamber music found a place both in habitual locales and in Vienna.

String quartets

Haydn contributed generously to the chamber music repertory. He is most strongly associated today with the string quartet, a genre in which he coached followers including Mozart and Beethoven. The quartet genre was not so distinct then from closely associated string works, such as the divertimento and the sinfonia concertante, as it later became.

CCARH conducted experiments in encoding from early editions in the 1990s. The Haydn quartet repertory offered a particularly thorny array of available materials with no coordination between them. We offer facsimiles of the editions and some encodes files without any warranty. The notational style of early editions is often ill-suited to encoding. The variability between publishers was considerable. Current users would want to re-edit the data before using it. Yet for those studying the difficulties of the task, we have posted these materials without any restrictions on their use.

Catalog numeration systems

Three systems of numeration for Haydn quartets are in common use. One enumerates single works, one enumerates collections of works by “opus number,” and one (“Hoboken”) assigns an arbitrary number to single works for bibliographical reference. This listing is ordered by the first, with cross-references to the other two. In efforts to encode the early prints, we encountered basic problems of reference: Which exact work was under discussion? This led is to create a table to coordinate all the materials. It is instructive in clarifying the scope of the problem. <Add table>

A Hoboken catalog designation contains a Roman numeral prefix (III=the string quartet category) and an Arabic numeral indicating the approximate order in which the work was composed (or assumed to be composed), e.g. III:10. (Some numbered works are now known to be spurious and should be excluded from analytical applications.)

Early and recent editions of Haydn string quartets

Most Haydn quartets in the MuseData database come from early nineteenth-century editions, especially those by Trautwein, Pleyel, and Bremmer. Most Haydn quartets were published in small groups of works, so one print number may pertain to several works.

Quartet numbers which are commonly used in modern performing editions and recordings reflect the arbitrary assignment of opus numbers as used by more recent publishers. Each publisher had his own self-referential system of identifying new titles. As many of six or several instances of a fictitious String Quartet Op. 1 could prove to be musically independent works.

When quartets were published in sets, the order of works within the set was determined by the publisher. It did not necessarily duplicate the order used by another publisher. The order in which the works were arranged varied from one collection to the next. Not all works were called “string quartets” on their first appearance. Widely circulated editions of the past half-century employ their own naming and numbering systems.

Symphonic 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.)

The London Symphonies

By 1790, Haydn had spent three decades in the employ of the Esterhazy princes. The death of Prince Nicholas led inadvertently the dismissal of the court orchestra. A new offer of patronage from the German impresario J. P. Salomon enabled Haydn to hear his music played by an orchestra of substantial size in London. Haydn's music was already well known and frequently heard there. An added benefit to Haydn was the local publishers were eager to bring out the latest works and to license further editions on the Continent. He ultimately prepared to two sets of six symphonies, one set performed in 1791-92 and the other in 1794-95. Apart from their great success in London, many of these works have remained favorites every since.

Our selection of encoded symphonies emphasizes the later works that show off his talents to best advantage. Users will find that each one is different from the others but fully transparent.

Symphony No. (Date)	Hoboken No.	Genre / Instruments	Key	Nickname	Score
No. 93 (1791)	I:093	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	D Major		Full score
No. 94 (1791)	I:094	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	G Major	"The Surprise"	Full score
No. 95 (1791)	I:095	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	C Minor		Full score
No. 96 (1791)	I:096	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	D Major	"The Miracle"	Full score
No. 97 (1792)	I:097	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	C Major		Full score
No. 98 (1792)	I:098	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	B♭ Major		Full score
No. 99 (1793)	I:099	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Cl/B♭, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	E♭ Major		Full score
No. 100 (1793-94)	I:100	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	G Major	"The Military"	Full score
No. 101 (1793-94)	I:101	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Cl/A, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	D Major	"The Clock"	Full score
No. 102 (1794)	I:102	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	B♭ Major		Full score
No. 103 (1795)	I:103	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Cl/B♭ 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	E♭ Major	"The Drumroll"	Full score
No. 104 (1795)	I:104	Symphony / 2Fl, 2Ob, 2Cl/A, 2Bn; 2Hrn/D, 2Tr/D, Tmp; 2V, Va, Vc, Cb	D Major	"London"	Full score

Bibliography

• George Barth, "Mozart performance in the nineteenth-century," Early Music, 19/4 (Nov. 1991), 538-552.