The two hundredth anniversary of Joseph Haydn's death has brought with it the expected crop of commemorations and celebrations, among which was the conference ‘Haydn: Forms of Expression’ held in Wellington. The weekend was a rich and variegated celebration of Haydn's achievement. There were two concerts by the New Zealand String Quartet. One of them was hosted by The Honourable Chris Finlayson, Minister of Culture, Peter Diessl, Austrian Consul-General, and Elizabeth Hudson, Director of the New Zealand School of Music. This took place at Parliament House, preceded by commentary by the organizer of the conference, Keith Chapin (New Zealand School of Music), and followed by a reception. There was also a performance of the Missa brevis Sancti Joannis de Deo as part of Sunday morning's service at the Anglican Cathedral of St Paul. And there were of course the papers – papers analytical, critical, historical, practical and speculative – from an exceptionally wide range of contributors. The conference theme was of that admirably vague type that covers most eventualities.

In most respects it was an international conference. Participants came from Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Canada, United States, Austria and the United Kingdom. Quite apart from this, any New Zealand eighteenth-century specialist – there are a surprising number of us – is inevitably a member of the international scholarly community (and ‘New Zealand’ as such hardly existed in Haydn's day). Is there, however, anything that could be called a specifically New Zealand response to Haydn, in the sense, for example, that there is arguably a local tradition of Schubert reception, through the impact of Lili Kraus's playing? We need not answer this question at all. New Zealanders will recall Douglas Lilburn's reflection upon his journey on the night train up the North Island: ‘There was something very strange about that experience of speeding through the night with the vivid night smell of the bush country all around me. At that moment the world that Mozart lived in seemed about as remote as the moon, and in no way related to my experience.’(A Search for Tradition: A Talk Given at the First Cambridge Summer School of Music, January 1946, by Douglas Lilburn, ed. and introduced by John Mansfield Thomson (Wellington: Alexander Turnbull Library Endowment Trust and New Zealand Composers' Foundation, 1984)). If we replace ‘Mozart’ (clearly a synecdoche for Western art music in general) with ‘Haydn’, the question remains: what does Haydn have to say to us? Several papers wrestled with this issue, seeking affinities and connections between Haydn's world and ours.

‘The Two Cultures and the Search for Human Nature’, by Robin Maconie (Dannevirke), began with a French officer in occupied Vienna singing ‘In Native Worth’ to the aged composer, moved on to the political implications of the late oratorios, Alfred Hill, Captain James Cook, the Royal Society, Joshua Steele, Stephen Hawking's voice synthesizer, the origins of C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ at Oxford and Cambridge in the eighteenth century, Isaac Milner, William Wilberforce, Samuel Marsden, Thomas Kendall, and still there was more – I could feel my skull expanding as it accommodated this cast of thousands. ‘Haydn's Theology: Exploring the Spirituality of Leadership’, from Peter Lineham and Ralph Bathurst (Massey University, Albany), intriguingly used musical style as a metaphor for leadership style, seeking in Haydn's embrace of uncertainty and ambiguity an alternative to the heroic ‘great man’ conception of leadership that has so dominated the twentieth century.

One of the most engaging papers had almost nothing to do with Haydn himself – Robert Hoskins's (New Zealand School of Music) ‘Captain Cook's Afterlife on the English Stage’, where one great eighteenth-century hero effectively stood in for another. While it is true that in Haydn's time there was virtually no European civilization in the South Pacific, there were plentiful representations of the South Pacific in Europe, and this was an account of one such: William Shield's pantomime Omai (1785), a remarkable combination of showmanship, commercial acumen and a genuine desire to educate. The most direct attempt to bridge the gap, however, was made in a concert by the New Zealand String Quartet that accompanied Haydn's Seven Last Words with images by artist Nigel Brown and poems by Dinah Hawken, both specially created for the occasion. It was a surprisingly moving event.

More international in scope was a group of analytical papers. Peter Adams (University of Otago; ‘Haydn and the Grundgestalt Principle’) and Hamish Robb (New Zealand School of Music; ‘Motivic Treatment in Late Haydn and Early Beethoven Piano Sonatas’) took broadly similar approaches to the music in question, following in the footsteps of Schoenberg/Rufer and Réti and concentrating heavily upon questions of motivic development and derivation. Walter Kreyszig (University of Saskatchewan and the Center for Canadian Studies, University of Vienna), with ‘“… The First Man to Teach Us General Variation and to Extend it to All the Instruments”: Franz Joseph Haydn's Pathbreaking Contribution to an All-Embracing Notion of the Variation in the Slow Movements of His Late Symphonies, Hob. I:82-104’, traced this process in great detail.

Another group of papers stood a little further back from the score, addressing questions of musical meaning as well as musical structure. In ‘Haydn's Late Instrumental Labyrinths’ Nancy November (University of Auckland) took a pair of images from Cesare Ripa's Iconologia and Immanuel Kant's reflections on melancholia as her starting-point, and used these concepts to illuminate a comparison of Haydn's F minor variations and ‘La Malinconia’ from Beethoven's quartet Op. 18 No. 6. In ‘Haydn, Mood, and Time’ Keith Chapin used Heidegger's distinction between directed and non-directed modes of being as a way of exploring the significance to Haydn's teleological use of counterpoint in the final fugal chorus of the Creation. If traditional or archaic counterpoint de-emphasized teleology and suited the non-directed immersion in a mood, Haydn's sonata-influenced counterpoint suited the late eighteenth-century taste for directed experiences in the arts. Appropriately enough, Jen-yen Chen (National Taiwan University; ‘The Seven Last Words: Genre and Expression in Late Eighteenth-Century Musica da Chiesa’) discussed the very work we had heard the previous day. Taking a semiotic approach to genre, he situated this wholly unique work in a rich network of related genres (sinfonia da chiesa, passion oratorio, liturgical music) and social contexts (pietas Austriaca, the Josephine reforms), connecting Haydn's stated intention ‘to awaken the deepest impression in the soul of the listener’ with contemporary ideas about the religious sublime.

There were two practical presentations. Polly Sussex (Auckland) introduced us to ‘Boccherini's Celli: A New Look at Selected Works for Solo Cello in Light of Recent Discoveries’. It seems that when Quantz recommended that a cellist have two instruments, one for orchestral playing and the other for solo work, it is possible he was talking about two entirely different kinds of instrument – one an ‘alto violoncello’ tuned an octave below the violin. The presentation culminated in a delightful performance of one of Boccherini's sonatas on just such an instrument. Shane Levesque (Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts) showed a similar combination of erudition and practical acumen in ‘Extemporaneous Expression: Hidden Opportunities for Improvisation in Haydn's Keyboard Sonatas’. He attended first of all to the business of improvised preluding, then explored the possibilities of cadenzas, decorated fermatas and lead-ins within existing movements, undoing Rosen's carefully constructed defence of the fixity and inviolability of the score with a telling combination of historical and musical argument.

Other papers were chiefly historical in approach. My presentation (Jonathan Berkahn, New Zealand School of Music), ‘Why the Purchasers of Haydn's Op. 40 Sonatas Might (or Might Not) Have Been Disappointed’, began by explaining the appallingly complicated and devious circumstances surrounding the publication of the sonatas, and continued with an attempt to differentiate stylistically between the authentic sonata and its two companions (by Pleyel). Alan Davison (University of Otago) discussed the well-known portrait by Thomas Hardy in ‘Iconography as Reception: Haydn and His London Portraits’. What appears to be a photographic likeness turned out of course to be anything but, laden with the kinds of meaning it was the business of a portrait artist to represent. The paper concluded with a lively discussion of the nature and significance of the music Haydn is holding: if the finger in place is a trope for contemplation of the text, was Haydn's music the first to require study and repeated hearings?

The keynote address by Richard Will (University of Virginia), ‘Haydn's Cosmopolitan Scots’, was unexpectedly modest in scope. No grand assessment along the lines of ‘Where are we up to with Haydn now?’, simply a fascinating account of what is surely one of the the least known and least appreciated parts of Haydn's oeuvre. In comparing Haydn's folksong arrangements to earlier ones for a similar market, he demonstrated how the composer's artistry was apparent even within such restricted bounds.

The conference ended with a roundtable discussion between Richard Marlow (Trinity College, Cambridge), Peter Walls (New Zealand Symphony Orchestra) and Richard Will, moderated by Elizabeth Hudson. Considering the prospects for Haydn performance and reception, its tone was unexpectedly downbeat. Peter Walls had prepared a chart that made clear the extraordinarily tight parameters within which symphony administrators have to work, explaining why Haydn appears so seldom in symphony concerts. But if there remains a sense in which Haydn is still, as H. C. Robbins Landon said, ‘a musician's musician’, there is no doubt that, as we saw throughout the weekend, his music continues to provoke thought, discussion and creative response.