Merry Christmas all.
So, I know cultural WIs don't usually gain a lot of traction, but this is something I was wondering:
Now we know what Beethoven did with his dedication to Napoléon on the cover page of the "Eroica" symphony (namely, he scratched it out so hard that he tore the page on which the dedication was written). But Haydn and Beethoven are two very different characters. Haydn's spent the majority of his life in a sort of "bubble" at Esterhaza Palace, working for an aristocratic patron, so why would he suddenly endorse the "enemy" of all that he had worked for? He was hardly like contemporary composer, Jan Křtitel Vaňhal (Johann Baptist Vanhal) who came from a family of freed serfs and resolved to never return to this. Yet it would seem Haydn ran the risk of cutting his own throat with his employer, had he written these symphonies?
Clementi wrote a "Great National Symphony" a few years later (I can't find a date of composition for it) simply titled that because it quoted the tune of "God Save the King". The Czech-born, Russian composer, Ernst von Wanczura/Arnošt Vančura, wrote three symphonies in the 1790s, the no. 1 (incorporating Ukrainian folk-tunes), no. 2 (incorporating Russian ones) and no. 3 (based on three Polish dances - the mazurka, the polonaise and the third movement is entitled "alla cosaciak") which were published as "Three National Symphonies for Grand Orchestra". So, was Haydn simply pandering to the ideas of the day? Or was there a darker revolutionary side to the man? Did he resent his employment/isolation at Esterhaza more than his commonly thought? Or was he simply catering to the changing tastes of the waning decade?
More importantly, what if Haydn had written a National French Symphony?
So, I know cultural WIs don't usually gain a lot of traction, but this is something I was wondering:
In a letter written in late August 1789 to the Parisian publisher Jean-Georges Sieber, Joseph Haydn either agreed or proposed that one of four new symphonies under negotiation ‘should be called The National Symphony’. In the end, Haydn never wrote any of the four symphonies for Sieber, yet the very notion of naming one of them in honour of the French nation at this particular juncture, six weeks after the fall of the Bastille, raises intriguing questions about the composer's political sympathies, his knowledge of recent events in France, the concept of the ‘national’ in contemporaneous discourse, the communal tone of the symphony as a genre and the strategy of marketing a new work by associating it with a term full of political implications. Reports of the French Revolution transmitted to Vienna in July and August 1789 had not sugar-coated the gravity or violence of the situation in Paris, making the proposed title all the more remarkable. While we can only speculate as to what form the ‘National’ Symphony might have taken, the idea itself points to the emerging potential of the symphony as a vehicle of political ideas.
Now we know what Beethoven did with his dedication to Napoléon on the cover page of the "Eroica" symphony (namely, he scratched it out so hard that he tore the page on which the dedication was written). But Haydn and Beethoven are two very different characters. Haydn's spent the majority of his life in a sort of "bubble" at Esterhaza Palace, working for an aristocratic patron, so why would he suddenly endorse the "enemy" of all that he had worked for? He was hardly like contemporary composer, Jan Křtitel Vaňhal (Johann Baptist Vanhal) who came from a family of freed serfs and resolved to never return to this. Yet it would seem Haydn ran the risk of cutting his own throat with his employer, had he written these symphonies?
Clementi wrote a "Great National Symphony" a few years later (I can't find a date of composition for it) simply titled that because it quoted the tune of "God Save the King". The Czech-born, Russian composer, Ernst von Wanczura/Arnošt Vančura, wrote three symphonies in the 1790s, the no. 1 (incorporating Ukrainian folk-tunes), no. 2 (incorporating Russian ones) and no. 3 (based on three Polish dances - the mazurka, the polonaise and the third movement is entitled "alla cosaciak") which were published as "Three National Symphonies for Grand Orchestra". So, was Haydn simply pandering to the ideas of the day? Or was there a darker revolutionary side to the man? Did he resent his employment/isolation at Esterhaza more than his commonly thought? Or was he simply catering to the changing tastes of the waning decade?
More importantly, what if Haydn had written a National French Symphony?