PhilPaine.com

Since I found a set of scores for Haydn’s first fifty sym­phonies (pub­lished in Ger­many, and appar­ent­ly with­drawn from the Mannes Col­lege of Music in New York City some­time in the 1960s), it behooves me to lis­ten to them with score in hand. I’m not sure why the first two are not num­bered, but labeled “A” and “B”, but I pre­sume it’s because their attri­bu­tion is doubt­ful. “B” cer­tain­ly sounds like Haydn. “A” is plod­ding and mechan­i­cal, and could have been com­posed by any­body. The role of the com­pos­er in the first half of the 18th cen­tu­ry was rather like that of a rave dj. He was expect­ed to “spin” what­ev­er was at hand, and much mate­r­i­al was recy­cled from his own (or oth­ers’) out­put. Nobody kept track of who com­posed what, except as an after-thought. Com­posers where con­stant­ly fired and rehired by patrons, and hop­ping from one prince­ly court to anoth­er cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties for pur­loin­ing works, or rehash­ing one’s own. When nec­es­sary, baroque music could be man­u­fac­tured in min­utes, by assem­bling cook­ie-cut­ter pat­terns. Some baroque com­posers, like Giuseppe Torel­li, seem to have “com­posed” more music than could be played end-to-end over their life­times. Some­one used to the mod­ern idea of a “sym­pho­ny” would bare­ly rec­og­nize these pieces as such. Lat­er on, Haydn him­self, and the young Mozart, would cre­ate the com­plex form of that name, by expand­ing the orches­tra­tion and cre­at­ing struc­tur­al uni­ty beyond the mere lump­ing togeth­er of vague­ly sim­i­lar pieces. The sym­phonies of this peri­od were what we would call “suites” today. But that doesn’t mean that they couldn’t be intel­li­gent and entertaining.