Given the current rate of artistic productivity, it is hard to realize that at one point in his life Franz Joseph Haydn was turning out three symphonies a year, plus a profusion of other music. For the past decades, scholars and musicologists have been slowly working their way through this overwhelming output—editing, publishing, and casting aside compositions ascribed to him by unscrupulous publish ers in the past. As a result, Haydn has emerged as far more than the pleasant precursor of Mozart and Beethoven— rather, as a composer of towering sensibilities who exploded the limits of “classicism,” an innovator who gave the orchestra a more complex voice. His symphonies are a dazzling display of textures and contrasts, of dynamics and harmonies and a quiet wit.
This unbuttoning of the Haydn genius has, however, been compromised by musico-literary criticism that marks off ten years of his overflowing creativity as a period of Sturm und Drang, which in no way conforms with the placid record of his life. “One might imagine the history of music to be very different if only he had explored the paths suggested in [his “crisis” period],” one critic has written. “They seem to presage not the sociable and lyrical wit of his later work . . . but a style harshly dramatic and fiercely emotional without a trace of sentimentality.”
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