It is well known that over the years the evaluation of Haydn underwent a number of changes. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, no one would have hesitated to call him the greatest of all composers. According to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1802, “The inexhaustible spirit of his masterpieces is admired from Lisbon to St. Petersburg and Moscow, as well as behind the ocean and at the Polar Sea.” In the London press he was even called “the Shakespeare of music.” This international fame was triggered by the six string quartets Op. 33, owing to the recent proliferation of newspapers and musical publishing houses. As soon as his works ceased to be the property of Count Esterházy, Haydn offered them to a multitude of publishers at once, even inviting subscriptions to handwritten copies. Ten years earlier, the incredible novelty of the string quartets Op. 20 had created a stir among musicians: Mozart and Beethoven copied them out, and later Brahms ended up being the happy owner of the autograph. Has there been another composer who bestowed us with a musical cosmos comparable to Haydn’s quartets? Schubert’s lieder may qualify. In the nineteenth century, a counter-reaction occurred. Schumann, Liszt, Wagner and their spokesmen Adolf Bernhard Marx and Franz Brendel (no relation) voiced criticisms, while Mendelssohn, Weber, and Brahms seemed to have remained faithful admirers. Opinion-makers such as Eduard Hanslick and Theodor Adorno saw in Haydn mainly the precursor of greater masters. A different kind of sympathy and insight came from musical thinkers such as Heinrich Schenker and the composer, pianist, and brilliant writer Donald Francis Tovey, who dared to express the view that “in the history of music, no chapter is more important than that filled by the life-work of Joseph Haydn.” Haydn scholars such as H. C. Robbins Landon, Jens Peter Larsen, Anthony van Hoboken (who created the standard catalogue of Haydn’s compositions), James Webster, and Georg Feder — to mention only a few — then discovered missing works, eliminated inauthentic ones, and helped to correct mistakes. By 1935, not even one tenth of Haydn’s works had been printed. We cannot be grateful enough to the publisher Henle, whose complete Haydn edition is now available. In comparison to most of the other great composers, it is anything but easy to acquire an overview of Haydn’s work. Let us try to assess his life’s achievement. His compositions include sixty-seven string quartets, a hundred and four symphonies, fifty-five piano sonatas, forty-five piano trios, fourteen masses, three oratorios, one Stabat Mater, and one Te Deum — not forgetting his seventy-three operas and other music for the stage. We should also mention the approximately two hundred baryton trios that he composed for the pleasure of Esterházy, whose hobby was playing the baryton, a now-defunct string instrument with some added strings to be plucked. There were also approximately four hundred canzonettas and settings of Scottish and English folk songs, and more than forty canons. Haydn liked to sit down at the piano after dinner and sing some of his canzonettas for the pleasure of the English nobility. (As a boy he had been trained as a singer, and he remained particularly fond of cantabile even as an instrumental composer.) In addition, Haydn mounted twelve hundred opera performances for his employers the Esterházys, and was responsible for running their marionette theater. Conducting some of the performances of his oratorio The Creation, he seems to have used a baton, which did not become standard practice until a few decades later. Let us also not forget his numerous piano, voice, and composition students who, in his later years, he taught in the early morning before breakfast. Unlike Mozart or Beethoven, Haydn’s constitution seems to have been unshakeable, enabling him to live productively into old age. Only after the composition of his oratorio The Seasons did his vitality decline. In this weakened state, he carried visiting cards pronouncing “I am old and frail,” and enjoyed playing his “Kaiserlied” three times a day on the clavichord, happy if one of the performances turned out to be particularly emotional. With all these activities, Haydn was no quill-driver. Please note the spectacular increase of achievement in his late symphonies and quartets. Haydn himself resisted being labelled a hasty composer. How all this can be reconciled in a single human life is hard to comprehend. The Esterházys belonged to the wealthiest of noble families. To spend a large part of his life in their service was, for Haydn, a stroke of luck. No one has expressed this more clearly than Haydn himself: “My sovereign was pleased with all my work, I was able to earn his approval, I could, as the director of an orchestra, experiment, observe what makes an impression and what would diminish it. I could improve, add, subtract, dare; I was separated from the world. No one in my vicinity was able to lead me astray or distress me. Thus, I had to become original.” This last sentence gave rise to controversy: is it possible to become original, or is a genius, in Kant’s sense, born an original, endowed with an ability that surpasses what can be acquired? To the last question I would cautiously reply in the affirmative — after all, Haydn himself seemed to have been sufficiently aware of it. Today we see in Haydn not only the foundation of later music but also a phenomenon of originality and inexhaustible vigor. The fact that during his lifetime vocal music ceased to dominate while instrumental composition gradually gained the foreground was in no small measure due to Haydn’s activity. It was Haydn who led the string quartet from its rudimentary beginnings into the most concentrated, treasured, and “democratic” way of music-making, the democratic element becoming even more pronounced when a growing public gathered in larger halls to listen to Haydn’s “overtures,” as the symphonies were called in England. In the more recent Haydn literature, the image of Haydn has become many-faceted, with some old notions still cropping
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