The two hundredth anniversary of Haydn's death has inspired concerts and conferences celebrating the composer the world over. In Budapest, Hungarians seemed particularly aware of this important opportunity for commemoration, as the country has happily claimed Haydn as its native son. To honour the composer, the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the Hungarian Musicological Society and the Hungarian Haydn Society sponsored a four-day gathering at the Erdödy palace, attracting an international group representing several generations of Haydn scholarship. Péter Halász, Zoltán Farkas and Balázs Mikusi, the conference organizers, as well as James Webster, László Somfai and Armin Raab, the programme committee, are to be credited with fashioning a smoothly run, non-hagiographical and multi-faceted celebration of Haydn involving both broad-ranging panels and daily concerts. In fact, one full day of the conference was devoted to a group excursion to Eszterháza, consisting of a tour, led by Terézia Bardi, of the artefacts currently housed there as well as an evening concert of Gassmann and Vanhal symphonies and two Haydn keyboard concertos, performed by Miklós Spányi and the Concerto Armonico in the Esterházy palace.

The more than forty scholarly talks constituting the bulk of the conference touched on performance practice, historiography and analysis, as well as Haydn's historical context. Keynote addresses by Somfai (Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest), Raab (Joseph Haydn-Institut, Cologne) and Webster (Cornell University) painted histories of Haydn scholarship in broad and authoritative strokes of the type only those individuals could make. Somfai's remarks, significant because they included a first-hand report of the similar celebratory conference in 1959, provided a detailed chronicle of the history of Haydn research in the last fifty years. Raab, meanwhile, discussed the future of Haydn research after the impending completion of the collected edition. Finally, Webster, building on the body of work on Empfindsamkeit and sensibility in this era, painted a revisionist portrait of the composer's sensible creative persona, manifested particularly in slow movements. Together, the three addresses gave the impression that Haydn scholarship will continue to offer creative integrations of source studies, performance practice, biography, analysis and reception history.

In fact, many papers at the conference employed such integrated approaches, including several on Haydn's vocal music. Elaine Sisman (Columbia University) argued that in 1779 Haydn used Metastasio's L'isola disabitata as a place for operatic reform in the guise of an occasional piece, while Caryl Clark (University of Toronto) focused on the Jewish tropes in Lo speziale, specifically identifying musical markers of the imagined Jewish body. And Christine Siegert's (Universität Bayreuth) work with neglected sources produced examples of Haydn's practice of writing insertion fragments for his Eszterháza operas. Katalin Komlós (Liszt Ferenc Zenemvészeti Egyetem, Budapest) and Balász Mikusi (Cornell University, and Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest) considered selections of Haydn's vocal output that are often overlooked. Komlós called attention to the innovative musical language of Haydn's late setting of C. F. Gellert's Wie sicher lebt der Mensch, der Staub, and Mikusi re-examined Haydn's part-songs, arguing, through a diversity of examples from the religious to the comic, that the composer redefined the genre. Clemens Harasim (Joseph Haydn-Institut, Cologne) examined the reception of various German-language versions of the Stabat mater.

Other studies of Haydn's vocal music were comparative in nature, such as the argument by John Rice (Rochester, NY) that Act 2 Scene 9 of Haydn's La fedeltà premiata influenced the Larghetto of Mozart's Piano Concerto in B flat major k595. Stefanie Steiner (Max-Reger-Ausgabe, Karlsruhe), meanwhile, situated The Creation within a contemporary interest in ‘music of the spheres’, citing other musical works by C. P. E. Bach, Friedrich Ludwig Aemilius Kunzen, Carl Maria von Weber and Andreas Romberg. The arguments made by Eystein Sandvik (Universitetet i Oslo) and Nicholas Mathew (University of California, Berkeley) contributed new ways of thinking about the historical importance of The Creation: Sandvik examined its political reception history in the early nineteenth century, while Mathew offered that we might consider this oratorio to be among the first true manifestations of the work concept. Finally, Ulrich Leisinger (Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg) discussed the shifting attitudes towards ‘mimetic’ accompanied recitative in reviews of Dittersdorf's oratorio Giobbe (1786) and Haydn's Creation.

The conference also revealed that interest in Haydn's symphonies remains high. Reapplying a familiar stylistic label, Mark Ferraguto (Cornell University) presented evidence that in the 1760s Haydn developed a distinct style of ‘minimalist’ writing in the trio sections of minuets, one that is limited in musical materials and harmonic motion. Felix Diergarten (University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne) considered the two grand pauses at the opening of Haydn's Symphony No. 39 in G minor in the context of changing concepts of symphonic form in the late eighteenth century, and Andreas Friesenhagen (Joseph Haydn-Institut, Cologne) discussed the history of and current problems in performance practice relating to Haydn's symphonies. Two papers explored Haydn's sonata-form practice in the symphonies of the 1760s and 1770s: L. Poundie Burstein (City University of New York) offered an alternative theoretical construct for analysing Haydn's transitions, and Benjamin Korstvedt highlighted examples of surprising ‘medial’ returns to the tonic in development sections. Treatments of specific works included that of Melanie Wald (Universität Zürich), who postulated that the famous ending of the ‘Farewell’ Symphony can be read as a melancholic move on Haydn's part, as well as Zoltán Farkas's (Budapest) reconsideration of the Largo of Symphony No. 64. Lisa Feurzeig and John Sienicki (Grand Valley State University, Allendale) cited several varied uses of the second movement of Haydn's ‘Surprise’ Symphony in early nineteenth-century Viennese theatre. In a broader study of Haydn's approach to symphonic writing, Emily I. Dolan (University of Pennsylvania) stressed the influence of Haydn's orchestration – particularly his use of wind instruments – both on the development of nineteenth-century symphonic writing and on the reception of the composer himself. And finally, in the only consideration of hypothetical music, Mark Evan Bonds (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) offered that Haydn's remark regarding a proposed ‘national’ symphony for Sieber in Paris suggests the composer's political sympathies for France at the time of the Revolution.

While maintaining a dialogue with previous scholarship, several papers presented new models for analysis of Haydn's works. Two studies specifically investigated Haydn's sonata-form practice: Chadwick Jenkins (City University of New York) found in Haydn's String Quartet Op. 33 No. 5 evidence for a model of the recapitulation not as a formal goal, but as a process, and Markus Neuwirth (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, Flanders) offered a comparative study of several of Haydn's monothematic sonata-form movements. Building on the literature that focuses on Haydn's devices for creating coherence in opus sets, Somfai suggested that the slow movements of the B flat and E flat major string quartets in the Op. 76 ‘Erdödy’ set form a pair in their often opposite approaches to the learned style. And returning to vocal music, Nathan John Martin (McGill University) presented a typology of formal schemes for Haydn's operatic arias. In the only paper to deal strictly with the composer's manipulation of metre rather than form or harmony, Roger Mathew Grant (University of Pennsylvania) argued that Haydn's use of hypermetre evolved throughout his career, keeping pace with changing conceptions of time and its measurements as documented in writings of the day. Tom Beghin (McGill University) both entertained and enlightened by showing a recently recorded video of his own performance of Haydn's Capriccio in G major, hXVII:1, and suggesting that the use of a short-octave Viennese harpsichord casts the keyboard player deftly and comically in the position of the Sauschneider depicted in the folk tune that inspired the work. Finally, Jessica Waldoff (College of the Holy Cross) examined the nature of Haydn's writing in C minor, questioning whether the composer's works in that key have a particular ‘mood’, as has been postulated for works by Mozart and Beethoven.

The geographical location of the conference served as an inspiration for other participants to shed light on Haydn's immediate context. Péter Halász (Zenetudományi Intézet, Budapest) discussed the symphonic repertory of Haydn's Eszterháza orchestra, bringing to light many neglected works by Haydn's contemporaries, while Katalin Kim-Szacsvai (Zenetudományi Intézet, Budapest) similarly presented manuscripts and repertory from the St Martin parish church at Eisenstadt. In another study of artefacts of Haydn's environment, Terézia Bardi (Memlékek Nemzeti Gondnoksága, Budapest) showed examples of the Esterházys' own collection of china for the serving of tea, coffee and chocolate. And Péter Barna (Budapest) continued the debate regarding Haydn's own keyboard instruments at Eszterháza.

Several talks contributed to persistent efforts to revise common conceptions of Haydn's place in history. My own paper (Emily H. Green, Cornell University) provided a long list of works dedicated to Haydn, arguing that both Haydn and the dedicators themselves stood to gain from such public gestures. In investigating Haydn reception in the nineteenth century, Martin Loeser (Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald) presented a comparative study regarding the performances of Haydn's oratorios in Paris and Germany, and Thomas Schmidt-Beste (University of Bangor) related the importance of Haydn's music in Zelter's education of the young Mendelssohn. Following the narrative of reception into the twentieth century, Alexander Carpenter (University of Alberta) showed a great deal of evidence that Schoenberg was at best ambivalent towards Haydn's music.

Finally, one of the panels investigated Haydn's ‘career and market’. David Wyn Jones (University of Cardiff) argued that Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister was a kind of guide for Haydn in his duties for Eszterháza. In considering Haydn's interaction with the London marketplace, Thomas Tolley (University of Edinburgh) analysed the iconography of two prints that the composer acquired there, arguing, among other things, that their intertwined depictions of the comic and tragic find a parallel in Haydn's aesthetic. Two other papers examined the place of Haydn's music in the market: Wolfgang Fuhrmann (Bern) suggested that Haydn's writing in the C major Fantasia (hXVII:4) combined both an ‘elitist’ and a ‘popular’ style, helping him market his music to a wider audience, while Michael Kube (Neue Schubert-Ausgabe, Tübingen) situated Haydn's piano trios within a culture of arrangements for that instrumentation.

Balancing these scholarly endeavours were short daily concerts in the Erdödy palace. The Trio Antiqua (Tamás Szekendy, Zsolt Kalló and Csilla Vályi) played the G major piano trio hXV:25, and the Haydn Barytontrio Budapest (Balázs Kakuk, Anna Magdaléna Kakuk and András Kaszanyitzky) treated conference attendees to the D major baryton trio hXI:113. Katalin Komlós also presented a recently restored 1798 Broadwood fortepiano, now housed in the collection of the Museum of Music History at the Zenetudományi Intézet (Institute for Musicology). Between these musical refreshments, the trip to Eszterháza and the many varied panels, the Haydn Bicentenary Conference left the impression that the composer's music continues to lend itself to imaginative performance and analysis. Moreover, the gathering demonstrated that, because of his prominence in his own time, considerations of Haydn's life and works are becoming fruitful ways into discussing larger trends in musical culture. In sum, it seems that more avenues than ever are open for the exploration of Haydn's music and legacy; no matter what the focus of their research, scholars both junior and senior will find an ever-growing learned community ready for dialogue.