Subject-matter in twentieth-century opera has been shaped by influences as divergent as psychoanalysis, the cinema and television, the preference of many composers for chamber opera, the abandonment of verse or rhymed texts as the standard libretto, and an ironic scrutiny of the form of opera itself. ‘Can I find [an ending] that is not trivial?’, the Countess asks at the close of Strauss's last opera, Capriccio (1942). The problem of triviality confronted many composers after Wagner, whose music-dramas appeared as the pinnacle of operatic development. In the new century it was questionable whether opera as a viable art-form had not been consumed alongside Tristan and Isolde in the passion of the ‘Liebestod’, or the Teutonic gods in the fiery collapse of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

One solution was to make triviality itself into an operatic subject, as Křenek so successfully did with his Zeitoper, Jonny spielt auf (1927), which closes with the image of the black jazz violinist Jonny fiddling astride the globe. Another was to absorb Wagner's musical techniques and dramatic ideals into nationally inflected works: Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) owes much to Wagner, but its speech-melody closely resembles the contours of spoken French. A letter Debussy wrote to Ernest Chausson on 2 October 1893 shows how concerned he was to discover a Wagnerian element ‘appearing in the corner of a bar’ (Lesure and Nichols 1987, 54).

To attempt to site the stage works of the Second Viennese School in relation to more encompassing artistic tendencies within opera since 1900 is to come face to face with a number of apparent incongruities. For example, of the six scores which reached a definitive form, only two or three of them – Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lulu, and perhaps Arnold Schoenberg's Moses und Aron – could be said to have achieved a secure place in the international repertory. Furthermore, if totalitarian censorship, much less perceived considerations of linguistic complexity, has failed to exert any lastingly adverse affect on the canonical status of these compositions, then the further critical veneration of Schoenberg's Erwartung, reverently anticipated by Anton von Webern over a decade before the work's delayed first performance in 1924 (see Webern 1912), does not alter the fact that they remain the legacy of Schoenberg and Berg only. While Berg's 1929 lecture on Wozzeck identified the work as the first full-scale opera to have emerged from ‘the movement that people quite wrongly called atonality’ (Jarman 1989a, 154), it could hardly have been expected to predict two further historical outcomes: that of the two major stage works of the 1930s, one (Moses) would remain a two-act fragment, while the other (Lulu), requiring partial completion of just 87 bars, would have to wait more that four decades for its intended three-act performance.

The idea that so aesthetically rarefied a work as Pelléas might have been the occasion of a request (in wartime, too) for a quick autograph from Debussy by a local tradesman's wife with a passionate interest in music reminds us just how widely known and well loved the opera had become in France after the polemics of the work's initial reception had died down. It further helps us to understand why nearly 30 years later, after a fairly dismal decade for the opera during the 1930s, the wartime performances given in 1942 at the Opéra-Comique under Roger Désormière were to be such an important manifestation of national identity and ‘cultural resistance’ during the Nazi Occupation, and also how they managed to exert such a powerful fascination at the collective psychological level, as well as bringing about a certain reinvigoration of the work itself as a musical and dramatic entity (Nichols and Langham Smith 1989, 156–9).

This in turn provides a context – to an extent backward looking and more than a little nostalgic, yet honest and deeply felt – for the renewed passion with which the piece now came to be viewed, both in itself and as an embodiment of French taste and identity; and also for the sense of shock that greeted the groundbreaking, in every sense iconoclastic postwar production by Valentine Hugo, also given at the ‘temple’ of the Opéra-Comique, in 1947.

Why study recordings of Haydn's symphonies? What can they tell us that the usual sources of music-historical data, i.e., paper documents, cannot? The most obvious answer is that recordings capture a performance, providing evidence of performance practices of the past as well as the present. Recordings are also important documents of reception history and can reveal patterns of consumption, changes in taste, variations of musical meaning, and shifts in the musical qualities essential for the definition of a particular musical work. But since the recording process itself is just as much a performance as the activity of the musicians, a study of recordings is also a study of technology. In addition to preserving musical practices, recording inspires them, profoundly altering our musical values.

The ontology of recording

In studying recorded performances, the ontology of a recording is of vital importance. As a historical document, a recording offers a unique portal to a particular moment in the performance history of a musical composition. But the conceptual separation of the recording from the recorded musical object is crucial, for a recording of a Haydn symphony is not simply a recording of Haydn's music. Neither is it a recording of a single performance of a symphony by a particular conductor and orchestra. Also recorded are the acoustics of the hall or studio, the unique properties of the equipment used to make the recording, the placement of the microphones, and the sound of the storage medium itself.

Haydn's sixty-eight string quartets span essentially his whole compositional life, from the “Opus 0” and “Opus 1” works of the late 1750s and early 1760s to the unfinished “Opus 103” of 1803. (The traditional opus numbers are retained here for convenience.) They naturally reflect the changes both in Haydn's own compositional habits and in the status and meaning of the string quartet during that near-half-century. The works do become increasingly grand over time, but the extent to which many of the traits of the later quartets are discernible – albeit in nucis – in the early ones is quite remarkable. Haydn's compositional modes in these works range from galant to learned and passionate, from intensely original and inward looking to approachably public, and from folklike to sublime. Although this oeuvre mirrors many of the stylistic concerns of the period and of Haydn's music overall, the features that most distinguish the quartets are their use of “conversational” textures and devices, their persistent elevation and seriousness, which is intensified rather than undercut by their pervasive wit, and their strikingly tactile and performative use of the medium.

The keyboard was an enduring focus of Haydn's activity and achievement. Composition began for him with improvisation at the keyboard, and he later likened himself to “a living keyboard” touched by imagination. As a performer he was by his own admission no “wizard”; yet he mastered the harpsichord and clavichord in his youth, and skillfully navigated the passage to the fortepiano as it became increasingly available in the 1780s. These three instruments inspired around sixty solo sonatas (Hoboken work-group XVI), a handful of incidental pieces (Hob. XVII), at least forty keyboard trios with violin and cello (Hob. XV), and an odd dozen divertimentos and concertinos for keyboard and accompanying strings (Hob. XIV). This impressive body of work runs the gamut from the solo and accompanied Clavier divertimentos and partitas of the 1750s and early 1760s to the London pianoforte sonatas and trios of 1794–95, bringing him from the loneliness of his attic garret on the Michaeler-platz to a pan-European market. This essay examines how Haydn's keyboard music – while remaining essentially a vehicle for private sentiment – widened its appeal to reach an international audience of publishers and patrons.

One of the standard ways for a critic to set up an argument is to state that the popular image of an artist is misguided. The rhetorical manoeuvre cuts two ways, or would were it not so overused. It sets the critic up as a thoughtful expert and clears the ground for the construction of a contrary image that claims to be truer to life. What remains for both the straw man and the thoughtful expert is the necessity of the image, a narrative trope that tags the artist with certain identifying traits and provides a ready means of orientation for both apprehending the artist's work and communicating about it in social contexts. It would be easy to dismiss these images as packaging or window-dressing, both of which they are, but it would also be a mistake. The images are as unavoidable as they are useful, the basic coinage of the pragmatics of art. They are also symptomatic of the cultural trends that they serve or challenge. None of them should be believed, exactly, but all of them should be taken seriously.

This is perhaps especially true with respect to Haydn, whose fortunes, at least in the English-speaking world, have been tied exceptionally closely to a pair of images with remarkable staying power.

Haydn's oratorios

When Haydn returned to Vienna from London in 1795, he had become a cultural hero. Many of his remaining works originated in collaboration with the cultural-political establishment and were staged as “events” of social and ideological as well as musical import. As a result, his compositional orientation changed fundamentally: he composed little instrumental music except string quartets, devoting himself instead primarily to masses and oratorios. He had composed one earlier oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia (1774–75); the libretto (by a brother of Boccherini) narrates the story of the blind Tobit from the Apocrypha, whose sight is restored by his son Tobias. Haydn fashioned a magnificent example of late Baroque Austrian-Italian vocal music, comprising chiefly long bravura arias; most of the recitatives are expressive accompagnati. In 1784 he modernized the work, shortening some of the arias, adding two magnificent new choruses, and revising the instrumentation; in this form it has been revived with success.

Haydn's remaining oratorios date from the late Vienna period. He collaborated on all three with Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the imperial librarian and censor and the resolutely high-minded leader of the Gesellschaft der Associirten, an “association” of nobles that subsidized oratorios and other large-scale works. The Seven Last Words of Christ our Saviour on the Cross (winter 1795–96) is not a true oratorio, but a reworking of Joseph Friebert's choral adaptation of Haydn's programmatic orchestral work of 1786.

For whom did Haydn write? This simple question, easily enough answered by such obvious recipients as his patrons or the public or particular performers, masks a series of more complex questions about Haydn's career as well as about his muse. How did he balance his own desires with those of his patrons and public? How did he respond to the abilities of the performers, whether soloists, orchestral musicians, or students, for whom he composed? How did he seek to communicate with different audiences, and were his communicative strategies and modes of persuasion always successful? While these questions might be asked of any composer, especially those in the later eighteenth century who had to adapt to an evolving menu of career opportunities, they have special pertinence for Haydn, whose career and works reveal, as well as revel in, the idea of the multiple audience that emerged in this period. This essay will explore the ways in which the shape of Haydn's career, his sometimes inexplicably defensive tone in letters and memoirs, and his musical self-assessments stem from this new source of inspiration. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Haydn, unlike C. P. E. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, left no record of disparaging remarks about the public.