Programme note
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Symphony No 22 in E flat major, ‘The Philosopher’ (1764)
Adagio
Presto
Minuet e Trio
Finale: Presto
Although Haydn showed clear signs of musical talent from an early age, his path to fame and success was not a smooth one. Neither of his parents could read music and the small town of Rohrau on the Austrian border offered nothing in the way of training for young musical prodigies. With this in mind, his parents accepted an offer from a relative in Hainburg, Johann Matthias Franck, a choirmaster and schoolteacher who proposed to take Haydn into his home as an apprentice and train him as a musician. Although he was just six years old at the time, Haydn never returned to live with his parents; instead, after two years of uncomfortable living in the Franck household, Haydn was taken on as a chorister at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where he lived for the next nine years. When his voice began to break, however, Haydn was of little use to the choir and he was dismissed from his position, effectively rendered homeless and unemployed overnight.
Fortunately, a family friend allowed Haydn to stay in his home for a short time, and Haydn set about forging a career as a freelance musician. While he spent his days earning his keep as a music teacher and street performer, in his spare time he began honing his composition skills and addressing the topic of music theory, which had so far been lacking in his musical education. Through the painstaking completion of Fux’s counterpoint exercises and the study of music by C.P.E. Bach, Haydn’s musical knowledge broadened and his compositions improved. So much so that he soon began to attract the attention of a number of patrons and was eventually employed as Kappellmeister by Count Morzin – his first full-time employer.
After four years with Count Morzin, Haydn accepted the position of Vice Kappellmeister with one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the Austrian empire – the Esterházy’s. He spent nearly thirty years here (having been promoted to Kappellmeister after the death of his predecessor, Gregor Werner) and it was during this period that Haydn wrote some of his most popular and important works. His musical language also changed and matured considerably during this time, gradually moving away from the techniques of the high Baroque and galant style to fully-fledged classicism.
This transition is already marked in the Symphony in E flat Major, ‘The Philosopher’, written just three years after he moved to Esterházy. Formally, the work reflects the leftover strands of the Baroque, with the four-movement plan mirroring the form of the historic sonata da chiesa: a four-movement layout that opens with a slow movement, and in which each movement is in the tonic key. Yet on an internal level the work suggests a move towards the classical style, since each movement is in sonata form – with the exception of the third movement, a minuet and trio, which itself is a classical construct. Haydn plays with this discrepancy of styles throughout the work, alluding to a mysterious and antiquated ‘church’ style in the opening movement through the use of counterpoint, suspensions and imitative textures, before seemingly dispensing with this ‘outmoded’ language in the second movement and setting the symphony off on a new, altogether more contemporary course. It is this thoughtful, provocative mix of styles that appears to have given the symphony its nickname, although Haydn never used it himself.
© Jo Kirkbride
