Curators in the Musical Museum: The Case of Haydn

Bryan Proksch

The idea that the canon of musical works is a sort of museum—an idea advanced by Lydia Goehr, Peter Burkholder, and others—makes a lot of sense. There are certain composers and works from the past with which classical audiences are expected to be at least nominally conversant, and the same holds true in painting or sculpture in physical museums. But the musical museum isn’t really like other museums given the fleeting nature of live performance. Just who are the curators of our musical museum? Why have “they,” whoever “they” are, chosen the composers and works that they have? These are among the questions that preoccupied me in my book RevivingHaydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century.

The radical swings that Joseph Haydn’s reputation has seen over the past two centuries amply demonstrate that the “who” making decisions can be virtually anyone interested in the art form. The “why” underlying their opinions can range from as simple as “because I like it” to as complex as the most verbose musicologists in the world can conjure up.

It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that by the time Haydn died in 1809 he was more famous throughout the European musical world than any other composer who had ever lived. He was a father figure to the Austrians and a strong influence on Beethoven. The Parisians commissioned a set of symphonies and struck a medal in his honor; Napoleon put an honor guard at his house after conquering Vienna. Londoners made Haydn a rich man over the course of his two journeys there in the 1790s. With only a few exceptions, performers, critics, publishers, other composers, and concertgoers lavished praise on his music. Few living composers are correctly identified as a stars whose light will continue to shine for posterity, but Haydn was surely one of them.

In spite of all this, after 1809 a significant cross-section of the musical world seemingly moved on from Haydn in favor of Romanticism. Who decided? It wasn’t the concertgoing public: there is ample evidence from the nineteenth century that audiences continued to want to hear Haydn’s music. Hans von Bülow, one of the towering pianists and conductors of the era, purposefully included works by Haydn on his concert programs not because he liked the music per se but because, as he put it, “symphonies by Haydn and Mozart bring a sold out hall and cost nothing.” Others more overtly attacked Haydn’s music as old-fashioned, usually as part of an agenda to promote living composers writing in newer styles. Composers like Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner said surprisingly dismissive things about his repertoire; Hector Berlioz went so far as to say that the text painting in The Creation made him “shrivel up” every time he heard the “detested” work(no small irony for a composer who himself depicted a decapitated head rolling into a basket in Symphony Fantastique).

In many ways, it was musical amateurs who were keeping Haydn in concert throughout the mid-nineteenth century. George Sand depicted him quite favorably in her novel Consuelo: her Haydn defends Consuelo, whom he has fallen desperately in love with, by charging a man firing a gun at her. Choral societies in every corner of the United States programmed The Creationregularly, partly because people enjoyed seeing the spectacle of the work and the singers enjoyed singing it. Eventually, however, the criticism took its toll: by the end of the century, even audiences were becoming tired of the few works by Haydn still in the concert repertoire. Haydn’s music was well on its way to gathering dust on the bookshelf.

We’re now at the part in the tale where some hero figure would normally rescue Haydn’s music from oblivion, like Mendelssohn supposedly did for J. S. Bach. The problem is that no single person brought Haydn back from the brink. Instead, there were a wide variety of figures in the first decades of the twentieth century who, led by their own unique self-interests, decided that Haydn’s music had something relevant to offer to the musical museum. Now it was their turn to convince audiences to listen to his works with new ears.

None of these composers, critics, teachers, or performers decided that we should hear Haydn from a fresh perspective simply because he was “one of the greats.” Jules Écorcheville, for instance, was a French musicologist who used chronology, namely the centenary of Haydn’s death in 1909, as an excuse to promote French research in music history and modern French composition. Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Charles-Marie Widor, and a few others wrote compositions dedicated to Haydn in that year at Écorcheville’s prompting. Think of the publicity he generated for all the great things being done musically in France — and Haydn’s inclusion was virtually coincidental because 1909 happened to be an anniversary year! Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of the Second Viennese School, not only looked to Haydn for guidance in the ways to forge a new musical style,  but used Haydn in his textbooks in an effort to demonstrate the ways in which one could create coherence in music in the absence of tonal reference points. Heinrich Schenker, picking up the pieces in a shattered post-World War I Austria called out the rallying cry “Forward to Haydn” in the hopes that Austrians would rise again to dominate the musical world by following Haydn’s example. Wanda Landowska, Vincent d’Indy, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arturo Toscanini, Donald Tovey… the list goes on and on. Every one of these great musical minds found a specific reason to embrace and use (in every sense of that word) Haydn to promote their own agendas. And Haydn’s music is great not simply because it is, but because these people effectively argued that it was so.

Before you feel too intimidated by all these famous names taking a lead in changing opinion on Haydn’s music, it might be worth pointing out that often these people were dealing with outside pressures brought on by “regular people.” My favorite example is a young boy named Tom Whitestone who had the audacity to write to conductor John Barbirolli in 1956 complaining that he programmed too much Ralph Vaughn Williams and needed more Haydn because he wrote better melodies. Barbirolli forwarded the letter to RVW, himself an advocate for Haydn’s music, who wrote the boy back: “I am glad you like Haydn; he is a very great man & wrote beautiful tunes. I must one day try to write a tune which you will like.” If that isn’t influence from the public, I don’t know what is.

To me this is all very exciting. In studying critical reception that we’re uncovering factors that shape our musical museum. It turns out that our collective curatorship of that museum is never as simple as “we listen to him because he wrote great music.” Finally, in a real museum a handful of people determine what hangs on the wall and what gathers dust in storage, but in the musical museum, everyone plays a part. There are clear cut reasons for why we listen to Haydn, or anyone else for that matter, and those reasons are as diverse as the people who listen.

Bryan Proksch is assistant professor of music history at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. His research centers on the reception and “revival” of Haydn’s music in the early twentieth century, though he also works more generally on Viennese Classicism and the history of the trumpet. His essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society (2011), the Journal of Musicological Research (2009), the Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Center (2012), the Historic Brass Society Journal (2008 and 2011), theInternational Trumpet Guild Journal (2003, 2007, 2009, and 2011) and elsewhere.