Programme note
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto in D major (1783)
Allegro moderato
Adagio
Rondo: Allegro
Concertos did not take up so much of Haydn’s time as symphonies, though how many he actually wrote remains a mystery. In the most recent update of the New Grove, many of the listed works continue to bear the inscription “lost,” while others are categorised as “doubtful” or “spurious.” When you remember that even tonight’s concerto was once deemed inauthentic, you start wondering why Haydn’s concertos are so often thought to be by somebody else.
Most of them, it must be said, are of minor significance, which is one reason why their authenticity has sometimes been questioned. Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Haydn was not a famed soloist. As a result, he lacked the incentive to produce masterpieces for himself to play. Indeed, for a vast portion of his career, he was confined to the privacy of a rural palace on the borders of Hungary, where he worked for the music-loving Esterhazy family, serving as staff composer, symphonist, and orchestral director. When, eventually, he achieved independence in Vienna, it was not for concertos that he was in demand, but for more symphonies.
Yet the Esterhazy years were those that shaped his musical personality, giving him a fine orchestra with a principal cellist, Anton Kraft, for whom he wrote the D major Concerto. This work was cherished as Haydn’s only surviving cello concerto (except for a period when Kraft was thought to be its composer) until in 1962 the Haydn expert, Robbins Landon, discovered another. Heavily promoted at the time by Rostropovich, with cadenzas specially written by Benjamin Britten, it gave cellists the happy choice between a racy, unfamiliar work in C major, and the serene, much loved, long established D major concerto we shall hear tonight.
Weighed down, as it once was, by the veneer of a heavy nineteenth-century arrangement, it now sounds all the better for the rediscovery of the original score – though nobody should expect the music to sound as audacious as Mozart’s Linz symphony, dating from the same year. The opening movement is in Haydn’s most elegant vein. The central adagio, with a main theme of characteristic breadth, is the movement that comes closest to Haydn’s symphonic style. Humour is reserved for the finale, in which Sir Donald Tovey, Edinburgh’s celebrated musical essayist, detected the strains of “Here we go gathering nuts in May.
© Conrad Wilson
