This conference, directly preceding the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, was co-sponsored by the Haydn Society of North America and the Packard Humanities Institute's Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: The Complete Works. Bruce MacIntyre (Brooklyn College, City University of New York), Treasurer of the Haydn Society of North America, opened the proceedings by stating how exciting the event was for both the Haydn Society and the Bach edition: the conference had been a couple of years in the making, was responding to vibrant scholarly activity on these two composers and offered an opportunity to bring leading scholars together in an intimate, small-conference setting. By and large, the event lived up to this billing. It offered scholars a chance to reassess the field following decades of new research and to break new ground for future studies on the relationship between the two composers and their standing with respect to the music and culture of the eighteenth century.
Those in attendance raised important issues on which to focus in future research. Moira Leanne Hill (independent scholar, Minnesota) offered a fresh perspective on the role of eighteenth-century church music director, the last post held by Bach, in Hamburg. While Bach had at one time been judged harshly for not producing many new sacred works during his Hamburg tenure, Hill focused on the arrangement of borrowed and adapted material. For her, borrowing could be a major creative act on the part of an eighteenth-century music director, one that offers an opportunity for musicological analysis and interpretation.
Hill made this argument by focusing not on Haydn or Bach, but rather on the man who replaced Bach in Hamburg in 1788, Christian Friedrich Gottlieb Schwenke. According to Hill, Schwenke has also been misunderstood on account of his extensive use of musical borrowing, or pasticcio. His eleven passion oratorios, performed between 1790 and 1813, borrow or adapt both librettos and large passages of music from the works of several contemporaries, including Haydn and Bach. Focusing on pasticcio as a creative act on the part of the music director, Hill argued that musical borrowing was largely accepted as a practice and depended on the director's taste; that Schwenke used Haydn and Bach demonstrates his competence as a consumer of music. Based on documentary evidence, Hill was able to reconstruct large portions of the composer's lost passion oratorios. The discussion that followed led to a consensus that pasticcio was an important part of the creative process. The topic was revisited later, when Jason Grant (C. P. E. Bach: The Complete Works) identified three new borrowings in Bach's Hamburg vocal works, two of which were borrowings from his own music. Grant also demonstrated the steps that had been followed to recognize and document borrowings for the Bach edition.
Several papers offered analytical approaches to the keyboard works of both composers. Darrell Berg (Washington University in St. Louis) used a familiar discourse on Bach when she pointed to the revolutionary harmonic language found in the rondos and fantasias of the composer's ‘Kenner und Liebhaber’ sonatas, published between 1779 and 1787. She offered a comparison with Haydn's late Sonata hXVI:52, which has a first movement in E flat major, a second movement a semitone higher in E major and a third movement which returns to the original key. Her conclusion echoed Charles Rosen's 1971 polemic, when she stated that Haydn's tonal digressions were always logically integrated while Bach's were not (Rosen, The Classical Style, expanded edition (New York: Norton, 1998), 111–118). Berg's take on this comparison was that Bach was developing a more progressive harmonic language than was present even in Haydn.
James MacKay (Loyola University New Orleans) used the premise that the so-called Sturm und Drang period of Haydn's oeuvre (c1767–1772) was a time of expressive expansion in his harmonic language. MacKay focused especially on the second movement of the Sonata hXVI:46 in A flat major, highlighting formal procedures and harmonic language he claimed were based on Bach's Württemberg Sonatas Wq49/2 and 49/5. In contrast with Berg, however, MacKay argued that in his movement Haydn went harmonically further than Bach, and that this new development in his style foreshadowed an adventurous harmonic language in his later works. These two contrasting conclusions suggested an underlying competition regarding each composer's aesthetic legacy. To be sure, neither Berg nor MacKay intended to engage in a debate over the supremacy of either figure. Nevertheless, the implication of this type of discourse remains one of competition, of a type that strikes me as antithetical to the amicable relationship between the two men; this relationship is documented in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources. Rather than focus the discussion on the question of which composer's harmonic language was more revolutionary, it seems fair to say that each composer in his own right seemed interested in expanding the tonal palette to achieve greater expressive capabilities.
In this light, we might turn to the paper given by Ulrich Leisinger (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum). Leisinger commented on the references to Bach made by Haydn and Mozart during their lifetimes. In his autobiographical sketch of 1776, Haydn mentions how Berlin musicians treated his music unfairly, but there is no evidence that Bach was among this group. Rather, argued Leisinger, one should take the statements the composers directly made about each other at face value. For instance, an essay in the European Magazine and London Review in 1784 (252–254) claimed that Bach was one of those who had criticized Haydn, and that Haydn had got his own back by parodying the style of Bach and others in his keyboard sonatas. Bach's response was to negate the claim with a letter he published in a Hamburg newspaper, writing ‘I must believe with certainty that this worthy man [Haydn], whose works continue to please me very much, is my friend as much as I am his’ (Hamburgischer unpartheyischer Correspondent 150 (20 September 1785), reprinted in Ernst Suchalla, ed., Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach: Briefe und Dokumente, two volumes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), volume 2, 1099–1101).
To return to keyboard works, David Schulenberg (Wagner College), who provided the keynote address, demonstrated an evolving keyboard idiom in Bach and Haydn, with each composer moving from a generic style to one more suited to fortepianos. Schulenberg refashioned well-established ideas concerning the development of keyboard instruments in the eighteenth century and the role that each kind had to play in the music of Bach and Haydn. He concluded by offering some possible works by Bach that may have influenced Haydn's style, although this part of the paper relied more on formal analysis than on matters of keyboard idiom.
My own paper (Adem Merter Birson, Hofstra University) considered the use of galant schemata in Haydn and Bach keyboard sonatas. Focusing on concepts such as multivalence, I argued that Bach and Haydn made similar use of instability and various techniques of musical intensification to dramatize their voice-leading schemata during modulation and at structural cadences in their sonata-form movements. This dramatic approach to composition was common to both composers and may have been a reason for Haydn's statement to Georg August Griesinger that ‘whoever knows me thoroughly must discover that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I understood him and have studied him diligently’ (Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1810), 13; trans. Vernon Gotwals, Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 12). Jim Dalton (Boston Conservatory at Berklee) discussed the usefulness of Haydn and Bach's palindromic minuets for first-year harmony classes. He claimed that analysing musical palindromes is an ideal way to get students thinking about the tonal implications of musical ideas, especially when they involve the proper resolution of chordal sevenths and leading notes.
Although heavy in analysis of keyboard sonatas, the conference did feature mention of Haydn's string quartets. Zoe Weiss (Cornell University) offered a paper on the use of bariolage technique in the second group of the opening movement of Haydn's Op. 64 No. 1. Noting the absence of an analogous passage in the recapitulation, Weiss nuanced the perception of sonata form in Haydn's music and brought a perspective on the role of violin performance in analysis of the quartets. Danuta Mirka (Northwestern University) talked about Johann Nikolaus Forkel's rhetorical figure the ellipsis, to which the composer/theorist refers in his discussion of an unidentified C. P. E. Bach keyboard sonata in the first volume of his Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik ((Leipzig: Schwickert, 1788), 56–58). Mirka discussed similar passages in Haydn's quartets Op. 17 No. 1 and Op. 64 No. 1, citing their identical voice leading and rhetoric; the latter involves a situation in which, according to Forkel, ‘a phrase that has been growing more and more lively unexpectedly breaks off’. She went on to interpret both Haydn's and Bach's use of ellipsis as turning the act of musical performance into an act of comedy.
Peter Wollny (Bach-Archiv Leipzig) discussed Bach's aim to catalogue his compositions for posterity, while Caryl Clark (University of Toronto) documented the history of the twentieth-century premiere in Florence in 1951 of Haydn's L'anima del filosofo, a dramma per musica on the Orpheus theme that was commissioned for London but never performed during Haydn's lifetime. This paper contained the detail that Maria Callas sang the role of Euridice, in one of her earliest performances. Alas, there is no recording.
Whether Bach influenced Haydn very much or not at all, both of these composers had a tremendous impact on the music of the eighteenth century; this conference emphasized that. Ultimately, however, it could have been more comprehensive. As a mini-conference preceding the larger AMS meeting, this event was necessarily limited in size and scope. As a result, many relevant topics were simply not covered. For instance, there was little said on the relationship between the keyboard sonata and the string quartet or symphony, and no vocal music by Haydn was discussed with reference to Bach's influence. Not a single paper focused on Bach's theoretical writings and the centrality of the Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. With so much left unsaid, this conference felt like the start of something that could have been much bigger.
