104 reasons why I like Haydn

by Bernard Levin

The following article was published in The Times on October 13, 1972. It was inspired by the half way mark in Decca’s release of all Haydn’s symphonies by the Philharmonia Hungarica, conducted by Antal Dorati. Decca this month [February 1998], releases the 8th volume of The Academy of Ancient Music’s complete set of the same symphonies, directed by Christopher Hogwood. Being a delightful article, we thought it would be nice to bring it out of The Times archives.

Feast at the installation of Antal Esterhazy as Lord Lieutenant of the County on 3rd August 1791. It was during Haydn’s time as Kapellmeister at Eszterhaza that he wrote the symphonies about to be released by Decca with The Academy of Ancient Music.

Name the celebrated composer who wrote this about himself: ‘My greatest ambition consists only in being justly considered by all the world an honest man — which is what I am.’ Well, you can’t imagine Beethoven saying that; he would not have cared if all the world had thought him a rogue. You cannot imagine Mozart saying it either; life simply would not have presented itself to him in those terms. Nor Bach, who would have considered it an almost blasphemous form of solipsism; not Verdi, who had larger amibitions, nor Rossini, who was far too sophisticated to tempt fortune with such a remark, nor any of the romantics, who were more interested in their emotions, nor Richard Strauss, who could not have said it with a straight face. As for Wagner, he would not have had the slightest idea what it meant.

It must be, and is Haydn. And I write about him today for no better reason, and for no worse reason, than that the vast project, undertaken by Decca, of recording all his 104 symphonies with the same orchestra (the Philharmonia Hungarica) and conductor (Antal Dorati), is now just over halfway through; I have just carried home the sixth album and the collection now wants only the first 35 of his symphonies and the final 12. And if you think that that is insufficent reason for writing about Haydn, you may go and boil your head, and if you do not agree that Haydn is a great and lovely genius, a Titan fit to march in step with Beethoven and Mozart themselves, then your head will be none the worse for a boiling.

Mind you, if you do think that, you will be in company which if not good is at any rate plentiful. The trouble is that Haydn has too often been thought to be in the same trade as Beethoven and Mozart; after all, they were alive together for 21 years, they show an unbroken musical succession, they were all at least partly adopted Viennese, and they all spoke the same language; the consequence is that their names are as indissolubly linked as those of Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Haydn was in fact in a different part of the forest from the other two, but because he was not driven by Beethoven’s daemon or Mozart’s grim destiny is thought of as a kind of country-bumpkin cousin of theirs — ‘Papa’ Haydn — who would have written as well as they if only he had known how to, and strove to do so even though he did not. But the man who wrote the La Passione symphony (his 49th) need fear no charge that he is Beethoven-and-water, and the man who wrote the Clock (his 101st) is not Mozart-and-soda, either. The extraordinary thing is that, though Mozart wrote 41 symphonies to Haydn’s 104, and their symphonies are formally similar in many ways (which is not surprising, in view of the fact that Mozart’s 36 years fitted almost exactly into the middle of Haydn’s 77), it is almost impossible to mistake, even on first hearing, a work of one for a work of the other; Haydn was as completely sui generis as Mozart, and his style, too, was unique.

Joseph Haydn, portrait by Ludwig Guttenbrunn, with kind permission from the Haydn Festival, Eisenstadt, Austria

And then, what a style! The fecundity of his symphonic imagination is staggering; the comparison that comes to mind is with the songs of Schubert. And, however astonishing is the way in which we can instantly tell a Haydn symphony from one by Mozart, what is even more astonishing is the way in which we can instantly tell one symphony by Haydn from another. Apart from ten or so, I could not put the right numbers to them (my compliments to Mr Joseph Cooper, and if he takes this as an invitation to spring Haydn symphonies on me in the next series of Face the Music and to laugh like anything when I call the ninety-second the eigthy-eighth and vice versa, I beg to inform him that I will put him into his silent piano and nail it shut), but if you played me any dozen today, and any dozen tomorrow, I believe I could tell you without hesitation whether any of them had been in both days’ lists. For though they are all cut from the same roll of cloth, each one is fashioned anew, and each has a life and a character all its own.

Haydn was also, it is clear, one of the most endearing men who ever lived; I find infinitely appealing, for instance, the fact that he would not have dreamed of sitting down to compose without first donning his best clothes and wig (compare that with the dreadful description given by one of Beethoven’s last visitors, who found him in a frenzy of composition amid unutterable squalor, down to an unemptied chamber pot on the table). Born a peasant, Haydn retained all the peasant virtues and acquired none of the peasant vices; his religious faith was as uncomplicated as it was unquestioned, and every one of his manuscripts is headed ‘In Nomine Domini’ and concludes ‘Laus Deo’ (Beethoven, faced with a composition by a devout pupil who had put ‘Finished, with God’s help’ at the bottom, crossed it out and wrote ‘Man, help thyself’). It was typical of Haydn that his own favourite of all his compositions was the ‘Emperor’s Hymn’ (Gott erhalte Franz den kaiser) and it is not his fault that the world knows the tune rather better as Deutschland uber Alles.

AAM on the steps of the Eszterhaza Palace

I am grateful to Decca; already, amid the collection, I have come across Haydn symphonies I had never heard before, and there will be many more of these as the very unfamiliar early ones appear. (O, for someone to publish an edition of Jane Austen with a dozen novels one has never read!) I shall listen, enrapt, to them all, and if you write to tell me that you don’t wish to know that, I will throw your letters unanswered into the wastepaper basket and probably set your house on fire, too.