It’s a conclusion that puts an optimistic gloss on the discrepancy between Haydn’s genius and his music’s relative lack of popularity, a discrepancy that troubles several of the contributors to these two books. They attribute it chiefly to the condescending images of Haydn that originated in the 19th century and persisted through most of the 20th. As these misrepresentations – “Papa” Haydn, the “merry peasant”, etc – are swept away, the Haydn that re-emerges from this academic make-over is more complex, a knowing yet elusive figure, whose music, once thought bland and impersonal, has acquired new subtleties of feeling and rhetoric.

The consensus now is that Haydn’s star is rising again, a notion confirmed perhaps by the appearance of The Cambridge Companion to Haydn, part of a series aimed at the non-specialist reader, and the reappearance, this time in paperback, of the more scholarly Haydn Studies, originally published in 1998. With hindsight it’s clear that Holloway’s essay, as the most accessible and entertaining piece in either volume, would have been better suited to the Companion; but, that anomaly aside, each of these collections is well-tailored to its target constituency.

The Companion allots an essay to each of the major genres in Haydn’s oeuvre. Given the volume and scope of his output, the writers meet this challenge with admirable concision. Even so, the allocation of space is questionable, with vocal genres favoured at the expense of the orchestral and chamber musics. While the emphasis on less familiar works, such as the operas and the songs, is understandable, the results do not always match the intention. For example, Caryl Clark provides thumbnail sketches of nearly all the operas, but her long chapter reads like a dutiful roll call rather than the passionate yet discriminating advocacy that is surely needed. Conversely, David Schroeder is handed the impossible task of covering all 106 symphonies (and the concertos!) in one brief chapter.

He sets out basic principles in engaging fashion, but then has to rush through the chronology, omitting several notable symphonies and giving many more only a cursory mention. That said, these essays are generally insightful; none more so than Mary Hunter’s elucidation of the many varieties of wit and “conversation” to be found in the string quartets.

The seven ‘genre’ essays are complemented by ten others setting Haydn and his music in various social, philosophical and stylistic contexts and address questions of performance practice and reception. There are useful pieces by James Webster on Haydn’s aesthetics and Rebecca Green on life at Esterháza, but the outstanding contributions here are Tom Beghin’s imaginative account of playing the keyboard sonatas and Matthew Head’s survey of “exoticisms” in Haydn’s music, which he argues could serve numerous ends, from satirising cultural convention to propagating Enlightenment ideals such as tolerance and brotherhood.

While the Companion can be highly recommended as an introduction to Haydn’s music, Haydn Studies caters for the more dedicated enthusiast. The essays here tend to be very specific, focusing on particular aspects of particular works (e.g. W. Dean Sutcliffe’s examination of “textual facts and textural principles” in the piano trios), or very speculative (e.g. Daniel Chua’s recourse to 18th-century chemical metaphor to redefine Haydn as a proto-Romantic), or both, as when Michael Spitzer adapts Eugene Narmour’s theories concerning cognition and musical meaning to track Haydn’s apparent change of style between 1772-73. It’s not all so esoteric: in particular, Mark Evan Bond’s discussion of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang-period explorations of form and technique and James Webster’s re-evaluation of his subsequent “entertainment” symphonies both make for engrossing reading.

And then there’s Robin Holloway’s brilliant sortie into the multiple facets of Haydn’s musical personality: life-affirming, quizzical, self-conscious, serene, intellectual, cheerful, a consummate artist, musically “the purest of all composers” – and yet, through all this Haydn seeking, ungraspable to the last. GRAHAM LOCK

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO HAYDN
Edited by Caryl Clark
Cambridge University Press, 2005
340 pp.
[ISBN 0521541077]
£ 17.99 (Paperback)
 
HAYDN STUDIES
Edited by W. Dean Sutcliffe
Cambridge University Press, 2006
358 pp.
[ISBN 0521028353]
£ 21.99 (Paperback)