Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 76 in E-flat
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN was born at Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in
Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed the Symphony No. 76 around 1782, apparently for a planned
visit in 1783 to England that did not take place. This week’s performances are the first by the Boston
Symphony Orchestra of Haydn’s Symphony No. 76.
THE SYMPHONY NO. 76 calls for an orchestra of one flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns,
and strings.
Haydn’s total of 106 symphonies is one of those bodies of work, comparable to Bach’s more than 200
extant cantatas, that contain rich veins that can scarcely be mined; the repertoire has to strain to
contain them. Certainly, as with any composer, Haydn’s symphonies include workaday music, but
even at his slightest he is full of surprises, eccentricities, experiments, and wit, always under his
incomparable control of form and expression.
All of this is on display in his Symphony No. 76 in E-flat, from around 1782; it is at once
entertaining, substantial, and subtly quirky. The quirks were more obvious in his day than ours. Wrote
a critic of the time, commending his Symphony No. 73: this is another product of a “great master,
who seems to be inexhaustible in ideas.” He warned the mostly amateur performers of the time,
however, that these pieces need to be rehearsed (many symphony performances were sight-read in
those days) because “there are in this, as in all his symphonies, difficulties and unexpected
progressions.” He expects, in any case, that “Heydn [sic] will crown this great epoch of the
symphony with more such wonderful pieces, and thereby reduce all bad writers of symphonies to
silence, or to improving their superficial products.”
That Haydn was dubbed “father of the symphony” does not mean that he invented the genre, but
rather that he slowly elevated it from the status of a slight bit of entertainment to, by the late “London
symphonies,” a work on the verge of Beethovenian—which is to say, the king of instrumental genres.
That Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies and Beethoven nine is a gauge of how seriously each
composer took the genre. For Haydn during much of his career, a symphony might be the product of
a week or two, something written for a festive occasion at his place of employment as Kapellmeister
of the Hungarian princes of Eszterháza. The “London symphonies,” however, were slowly and
painstakingly done. By that point Haydn was no longer a palace servant and wanted to make a
sensation with the greater public. He succeeded legendarily.
In 1800, with his Symphony No. 1, Beethoven took up where Haydn left off; and four years later he
remade the symphony, and to a degree the whole of music, with the Eroica. Haydn was still active in
those days—he was Beethoven’s teacher for a while—but involved in his late Masses and oratorios.
After his successes with large, ambitious symphonies in London in the 1790s, Haydn never wrote
another—partly because he was not commissioned for one, partly because (unlike Beethoven) he
considered sacred choral music the most important genre.
In the 1770s a group of Haydn symphonies, a number of them in minor keys, were influenced by the
German Sturm und Drang movement, a proto-Romantic state of mind that emphasized the fiery,
extreme, and intimately personal. Thereafter he pulled back to a lighter, more entertaining style in the
symphonies starting in 1775, much of them marked by the operas Haydn was writing in those days.
(For a long time he considered himself mainly an opera composer. When Mozart turned up, he
realized his mistake.)
The symphonies of the 1780s have some of the same popularistic quality, but are generally more
substantial, moving toward the culmination of the London group. In this respect, one sees in groups
of Haydn symphonies the kind of evolution Beethoven made from one symphony to the next.
(Mozart, with his forty-one symphonies, was somewhere in the middle of this pattern.)
Part of what marked Haydn’s symphonies, like all his work, was practicality: he wrote for the
audience and endeavor at hand, tailoring his ideas to the situation. Symphonies 75-77 were written
around 1782 for a planned visit to London that never transpired. For this purpose Haydn decided he
wanted something relatively light and appealing. As he wrote a publisher to whom he hoped to sell
them: “I composed last year three beautiful, magnificent, and by no means overly long
symphonies...all very easy, and without much concertante [meaning solo passages], for the English
gentleman, and I intended to bring them over myself and produce them there, but a certain
circumstance hindered the plan....I assure you that these three symphonies will have a huge sale.”
These three symphonies are written for the kind of small orchestra Haydn was used to in the
Esterházy palace: two or three violins, violas, and cellos to a part, one or two basses, and for winds
only one flute, two oboes, one bassoon, and two horns. This might be called the middle-Classical
orchestra.
What characterizes the whole of Symphony No. 76 are an utterly transparent sound, an emphasis on
atmosphere, color, and rhythmic energy more than on tunes, and a tendency to fall unexpectedly into
minor keys in what would appear to be, but is not, uncomplicated, sunny, major-key music. That is
perhaps the most noticeable of the subtle quirks on display.
The first movement is in sonata form, its first theme a vigorous one in 3/4 marked by sudden flurries
of sixteenths. Here are quirks for connoisseurs: when we think the first theme has finished and the
second is coming, the first theme begins again but heads in a new direction. As we absorb that, new
music appears in a jolting C minor, that idea taking some time in modulating into the true second
theme in B-flat major, which picks up some ideas from the first theme. The development returns to
the C minor idea and gives it a more dashing intensity. That marks much of the development,
alternating with recalls of the lyrical second theme.
Expansive and emotionally wide-ranging, the slow movement in B-flat major is, if all repeats are
taken, nearly twice as long as the opening one; it is the glory and the expressive heart of this
symphony. Call the form ABA 1CA2. The gentle, lilting, rather operatic main theme is scored for
strings only and marked cantabile, “singing.” The second section begins quietly but strikingly in a
shadowy B-flat minor, the winds keening above the strings. This second section is marked pianissimo
—unusual for Haydn, most of whose dynamics are either f or p. The A theme returns decorated, once
again in strings alone. The C section is an abrupt turn to furioso music in G minor marked fortissimo
and staccato—the opposite of the gentle main theme. After a lightly decorated return of A, winds
joining in, there is an extensive coda that recalls all the ideas, ending on the close of the A theme. The
third-movement minuet is a return to peace, with a folksy waltz as Trio.
Call the sonata-form finale bustling and again operatic, its wry main theme full of slurpy ornaments.
The mood is largely delightful, but once again C minor turns up unexpectedly at the beginning of the
development. But that is only a passing cloud in the dashing, perhaps a bit tipsy, proceedings. Written
at the height of Haydn’s maturity, this symphony shows that even when a great master sets out to be
light, easy, and delightful, that does not have to add up to predictable.
Jan Swafford
JAN SWAFFORD is an award-winning composer and author whose books include biographies of
Johannes Brahms and Charles Ives, and “The Vintage Guide to Classical Music.” An alumnus of the
Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition, he teaches at The Boston Conservatory
and is currently working on a biography of Beethoven for Houghton Mifflin.