Release Date: 08 January 2001
Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 747313504121
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: HAYDN
Description
Even if we banish from our minds once and for all the dated cliché ‘Papa Haydn’, we can still not help regarding Joseph Haydn as a father-figure in the history of music. His important achievement rested in having raised musical ways of thinking to a new level and, like a good father, having passed on this newly acquired material to his ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’, above all to Mozart and Beethoven. In his rôle as a guiding intellectual influence Haydn may be compared with Immanuel Kant and between the lives of the two there are a number of parallels: the philosopher Kant, in Königsberg, passed many years in externally uneventful surroundings, like Haydn, who from 1761 to 1790 worked, almost without travelling, as Kapellmeister to the princely court of the Esterházys. Both used this isolation to concentrate on the intellectual exercise of composing, on the analysis of forms and structures, on the systematic development of concepts.‘It is not easy to understand’, remarks Peter Gülke in the Haydn Volume of Musik-Konzepte (Volume 41: 1985), ‘ that the man who in his composition formulated the Magna Carta of the bourgeois concert-hall found his most considerable satisfaction in the service of the aristocracy. Since, however, he seldom felt himself in principle restricted, he was able to keep inner freedom for the conception of music that was so forward-looking’. In other words, being in the service of a feudal system — although at the Esterházy court certainly no climate of arch-absolutism reigned — acted on Haydn as an encouragement to inspiration. He must have perceived it as providing intellectual discipline, with artistic freedom realised within a firmly established structure.During his thirty years with the Esterházys Haydn wrote an enormous number of works. The investigation of all these works poses an additional problem in that, even in the composer’s lifetime, and particularly after his death, with an eye to his posthumous fame, a number of works of questionable authenticity appeared under Haydn’s name. There were questions to pose about Haydn’s ‘little’ Cello Concerto in D major, Hob.VIIb:4. The discussion has still, up to now, led to no definitive result. Walter Schulz, in the foreword to his edition of 1948, declares that this ‘little’ D major Concerto ‘has the important merit of being genuine, while there are good grounds for doubting the authenticity of the work often played’ [i.e. the ‘great’ Concerto in D major, Hob.VIIb:2]. The situation presented today is the opposite: with regard to Hob.VIIb:2 we may lay aside all doubts, while Haydn’s composition of Hob.VIIb:4 is uncertain. There are four different sources for this concerto, preserved in Brussels, Dresden and Vienna. Three of these four name Haydn as the composer, while only the Vienna copy mentions a certain ‘
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Various
Various
Lully
