Haydn’s cello concerto in C
The take-over of Hungary and Czechoslovakia by their respective Communist governments a few years after the end of World War II had one curious side-effect: it proved to be the greatest event that ever occurred in the world of Haydn scholarship. In Hungary, the vast Esterhazy Archives, previously closed to all except the very occasional and fortunate scholar (the great Danish Haydn expert, Jens Peter Larsen, was one of the few to enter its portals in the 1930s), was opened to the public. Until this time, most of Haydn’s music in the Esterhazy Archives had not only remained unpublished but many of the unique manuscripts had never even been photographed: for example, the concertos for ‘lira organizzata’ (a type of hurdy-gurdy), some operas as well as so-called ‘insertion’ arias, written for inclusion in other composers’ operas. And apart from the famous Esterhazy Archives, a perhaps more remarkable find was a complete archive formerly belonging to the Festetics family and housed (as it is again today) at Kescthely Castle on Lake Balaton, south-west of Budapest, and containing the only authentic manuscripts of most of Haydn’s early symphonies, quartets, divertimenti for strings with horns, and two string trios.
Bohemia, one of the provinces of [the former] Czechoslovakia, was the home of the many castles belonging to the Austrian nobility and as the Communist government began systematically to confiscate the holdings of these castles, the musical collections, often very substantial, were simply heaved on to trucks and carried to Prague, there to be dumped in the cellars of the National Museum’s Music Department. I was one of the first Western scholars to be allowed to examine the Museum’s vast uncatalogued holdings when, in 1959, Christopher Raeburn and I spent several weeks in Prague, he working on Mozart documents and I examining manuscripts. Within a fortnight, a large number of hitherto lost Haydn works turned up.
But the most sensational discovery from the Prague Archives came in 1962, when O. Pulkert, then a librarian of the Museum discovered a set of eighteenth-century manuscript parts of a lost ‘Concerto per il violoncello’ in C (as Haydn entered it in his ‘Entwurf-Katalog’, a chronological thematic catalogue which the composer began about 1765 and kept, with interruptions, for many years). Because of the thematic entry in the ‘Entwurf-Katalog’, the newly-discovered Concerto in C major (VIIb:1) could be at once identified and authenticated. The twentieth-century premiere of the work took place in connection with the Prague Spring Festival on 19 May 1962, when the soloist was Milos Sadlo and the Czechoslovak Radio Symphony Orchestra was conducted by (Sir) Charles Mackerras, both of whom also made the first recording. The new work was an instant success both with public and soloists, and is now one of the most popular cello concertos in the repertoire.
The first movement, with its dotted patterns, syncopations and courtly atmosphere, is in Haydn’s great C major style of the 1760s — the work was probably composed in about 1765 for Haydn’s brilliant cellist in the Esterhazy band of that time, Joseph Weigl. The virtuoso demands of the great solo sections in Haydn symphonies of this time are all somewhat similar and show Weigl to have possessed a matchless technique and, judging from the slow movement in a symphony especially written for him in 1763 (No.13/II), a beautiful tone in adagios. The slow movement of the C major Concerto is indeed very similar in mood and compositional technique to that of Symphony No.13. The Finale is a tour-de-force of epic proportions, with passages lying very high indeed and difficult for even the most accomplished soloists of today. Formally, this last movement is brilliantly laid out, the culmination of all Haydn’s concerto finales of this period and a worthy successor to the great Vivaldian ritornello form. It is sobering to think that this noble work might have been lost to us forever, had not this single set of parts survived the Second World War and its aftermath.
Extracts taken from an article by H.C. Robbins Landon
courtesy of Decca Music Group Ltd.