The 2022 Haydn Society of North America (HSNA) Mini-Conference preceded the joint meeting of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory and Society for Ethnomusicology in New Orleans. Unlike recent HSNA conferences that were conducted jointly with other groups (Packard Humanities Institute/C. P. E. Bach Complete Works in Boston in 2019, New Beethoven Research Conference in Vancouver in 2016), this meeting was held solely under the auspices of the HSNA. To honour the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the completion of the ‘Sun’ Quartets, Op. 20, and the ‘Farewell’ Symphony, the call for papers welcomed submissions focusing on these works and others composed in 1772. However, the presentations of the conference gave little indication of this focus, covering remarkably diverse subject matter relating to Haydn's life and works.
One feature of this conference, as with many others of recent times, was the varied ways in which these papers were delivered, owing to the persistent challenges posed by Covid-19. Of the six papers, four different methods were used: in-person delivery by the author, in-person delivery by someone besides the author, a video recording and a live, remote presentation. Attendees were present both in person and on Zoom. Pulling off such a hybrid conference is no small feat and is perhaps even more challenging than a fully remote one.
The morning earned its label as a mini-conference, as it consisted of just six papers. The conference was divided into two sessions, with the first organized around questions of musical style and Formenlehre and the second looking beyond Haydn's music itself. There were inevitable thematic overlaps between the sessions, however, with elements of reception history integrated into the first session and musical style making its way into the second.
The first session of the day traced a path of general to specific – opening with a study of a genre, then moving to responses to an individual Haydn work within that genre, and finally ending with a close reading of a particular Haydn movement. The first paper was written by Yoel Greenberg (Bar-Ilan University) but delivered by Rebecca Cypess; the author was available via Zoom to answer questions afterwards. In ‘Binary-Form Concerto and the Emergence of the Classical Concerto’ Greenberg investigated the convergence of sonata form and concerto form in the eighteenth century, contextualizing his work within several debates that demonstrate the variety of approaches to understanding the concerto of the later eighteenth century. A number of functions have historically been ascribed to the first and second ritornellos – Greenberg called upon contemporaneous theoretical writings while providing intriguing examples of composers finding solutions to the challenges posed by this structure.
The same genre was the subject of the next paper by Sasha Koerbler (Vancouver Island University), which was delivered as a pre-recorded video. Koerbler zeroed in on compositional decisions related to a specific concerto – Haydn's Trumpet Concerto, written for the newly invented keyed trumpet – but not on compositional decisions made by Haydn. Rather, her aim was to determine the faithfulness of later cadenzas to the capabilities of the distinctive trumpet for which the concerto was originally written. This investigation allowed Koerbler to share novel insights about the piece, the idiosyncrasies of the instrument and how contemporary performers have responded to this unique concerto. It yielded a discussion in the Q & A session on our modern relationship to historical improvisation, and whether those historical practices can and should be recaptured. Trying to translate improvisatory moments from Haydn's time to ours has been a rich area for exploration, as evidenced by the work of Tom Beghin and Gilad Rabinovitch.
Robert Wrigley (City University of New York), in ‘Earnestness, Wit, and Attention: The Rhetoric of Return in Haydn's Finales’, closed the first session by offering a new perspective on the role of humour in Haydn's music, using a close reading of the whimsical finale of Symphony No. 98. Taking as a starting-point Scott Burnham's observation that thematic return and ending are prime places for manipulation, Wrigley explored how Haydn may have had rhetorical designs beyond ‘humour’ at such points. He focused on what he termed ‘upbeat fragmentation’, building upon writings by David Schroeder, Melanie Lowe and Nicholas Mathew to emphasize these moments as critical spots for steering the attention of casual audiences. Deconstructing the persistent upbeat fragmentation of the finale of Symphony No. 98 allowed Wrigley to illustrate how Haydn uses this comic effect to draw attention to important structural points in the movement.
The second session of the day began with a paper presented via Zoom by Luca Lévi Sala (Manhattan College), ‘Haydn's Symphonies Scored by Clementi: A New Source of the London Symphonies’. This paper delved into Clementi's remarkably active career as a publisher, discussing his relationship to Haydn's late works. The focus was a set of autograph scores in the hand of Clementi for several of Haydn's London Symphonies. A number of intriguing insights about these manuscripts were offered, including that they were probably used for performance. Sala hopes they will provide clues about Haydn's original autographs for these works.
Investigating another important figure in Haydn's orbit, Rebecca Cypess (Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University) discussed the pianist, singer and composer Marianna Martines in a paper entitled ‘The Motets of Marianna Martines and the Persona of the Devout Woman Artist’. Martines was a fascinating figure, attracting attention in her youth as a skilled performer, and later achieving fame throughout Europe as a composer. Her family lived on the Michaelerplatz in the same building as Nicola Porpora, Pietro Metastasio and Haydn, each of whom served as her mentors and teachers. Cypess's paper examined ideas about creativity and femininity, discussing a tendency at the time to frame creative women as biblical or mythological. She showed how Martines positioned herself as a product of divine inspiration in her motets, via text setting, language choices and stylistic decisions, ultimately linking ideals of public devotion and private sociability. This paper contributed a new perspective to a growing body of research on Martines, who, fortunately, has not been entirely neglected in the past two decades.
If the first two papers of the second session illuminated the musical culture of Haydn's time, the conference's final paper focused on a musical culture that continues to be fascinated with him over two centuries later. This was my own paper (Jacob Friedman, University of Pennsylvania), entitled ‘Contextualizing the Contemporary Reception of Haydn's Keyboard Music’. While the winding trajectory of Haydn's reputation after his death has been the subject of much scholarship, little effort has been made to distinguish the roles played by different genres in his reception history. Using performance data from the twenty-first century and remarks from prominent pianists, I demonstrated how prejudices that hampered Haydn's reputation in the nineteenth century maintain their grip on us, continuing to influence how we engage with his keyboard music today. I concluded with a discussion of how our reception of Haydn's keyboard works might differ from and overlap with our reception of Mozart's; a recent book by Simon Keefe, Haydn and Mozart in the Long Nineteenth Century: Parallel and Intersecting Patterns of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), investigates this very question, indicating the enduring value of exploring reception history in Haydn scholarship.
This conference featured a diversity of perspectives on Haydn's musical world and his listeners across time. In the first in-person conference many people had been able to attend in years, this gathering was an inspiring display of how Haydn continues to connect so many of us centuries later.
