Haydn as Both Student and Composer from NEQ

According to my records, the New Esterházy Quartet (NEQ) of violinists Kati Kyme and Lisa Weiss, violist Anthony Martin, and cellist William Skeen have presented nine concerts juxtaposing the music of Joseph Haydn with that of his students. The last of these took place in January of 2017. Yesterday afternoon in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church NEQ looked at Haydn through the other end of the telescope, so to speak, with a program entitled Haydn & His Teachers. If I were to pick nits, I might have preferred the title “Haydn & His Sources.” Of the four composers on the program that were not Haydn, only two had a teacher-student relationship with him. Haydn learned from the other two by reading their treatises.

Those with a general knowledge of Haydn’s biography know that, when he was about eight years old, he passed an audition to sing as a choirboy at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. The Kapellmeister there, Johann Georg Rutter, was not Haydn’s first music teacher; but it would be fair to say that he was Haydn’s first serious music teacher. He did this primarily by introducing Haydn to his first serious reading matter, the Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux, a treatise on counterpoint whose precepts are as valid today as they were when the book was written in 1725. Haydn was an attentive student; but he almost certainly learned more from Reutter giving him a copy of the Fux treatise than he did from Reutter himself, who gave him only two lessons.

Reutter was represented on the NEQ program by a C major sinfonia (overture) in the standard Baroque form of coupling a Largo with an Allegro. It was as representative of Baroque practices as was the opening Fux selection, an overture with more movements, almost all of which were much shorter than those of Reutter. However, it would be fair to point out that Haydn did not read Fux to learn about such overtures. The topic of Gradus ad Parnassum was counterpoint as it had been practiced by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The text is written in the form of a Socratic dialogue with the author representing himself as the student “Josephus” approaching the master “Aloysius” (Palestrina). Most likely his study of Fux’ text was enhanced by the repertoire of counterpoint he learned as a choirboy.

After having been thrown out of the choir (for cutting off the pigtail of another chorister), Haydn was able to sustain himself by working as both valet and accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora. Haydn would later credit Porpora as providing him with “the true fundamentals of composition.” Porpora was represented by the last of a set of four pieces called “Sinfonia da camera” that he published as his Opus 2.

Manuscript page from Porpora’s Opus 2, Number 4 (from IMSLP, public domain)

The manuscript for this composition shows that it is in three parts, two violins and a continuo. Note, however, the absence of any figured bass numbers. NEQ performed this as a string trio for two violins and cello. This suggested that Porpora’s composition occupied a transitional stage between Baroque trio sonatas and the string quartet genre than would occupy Haydn for most of his life. As a result, NEQ chose to follow the Porpora selection with Haydn’s Hoboken III/19 quartet in C major, the first of the six quartets published as his Opus 9.

The second text source that figured significantly in Haydn’s education was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments. This treatise had as much to do with invention as it did with keyboard technique. For this reason it is as fundamental a text in contemporary music education as is Gradus ad Parnassum.

However, it is also clear that Haydn learned much from listening to (and probably playing) Bach’s music. As Anthony Martin pointed out in introducing the NEQ Bach selection, this was a composer that was just as capable as Haydn when it came to startling the listener with unexpected gestures. “Bach the son” was probably the source of Haydn’s developing his reputation for surprising listening with unexpected twists in his musical discourse.

NEQ demonstrated Bach’s inspiring role by playing the third (in C major) of the six Wq 182 “Hamburg” symphonies. These compositions were scored for an ensemble with parts for two violins, viola, cello/bass, and continuo. However, as was the case with the Porpora selection, the string quartet performance in no way short-changed the content of the score and may have even enriched it through greater transparency.

This was followed by Haydn’s Hoboken III/33, the third of the six string quartets published as his Opus 20. The Opus 20 collection may be the earliest example of Haydn following Bach’s lead in surprising his listeners. All six of the quartets in the set keep setting up expectations, which are then displaced by new twists in the score. As a result the program concluded with a gesture indicating that Haydn was now well on his way to developing his own learning curve. One left St. Mark’s with a sense that one had learned much about music-making, the growth of Haydn’s practices, and the expertise that NEQ brought to informing listeners about those practices.