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HAYDN'S FORGOTTEN QUARTETS: THREE OF THE
‘PARIS’ SYMPHONIES ARRANGED FOR STRING QUARTET
DAVID WYN JONES
Eighteenth Century Music / Volume 8 / Issue 02 / September 2011, pp 287 - 305
DOI: 10.1017/S147857061100008X, Published online: 25 July 2011
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S147857061100008X
How to cite this article:
DAVID WYN JONES (2011). HAYDN'S FORGOTTEN QUARTETS: THREE OF THE ‘PARIS’
SYMPHONIES ARRANGED FOR STRING QUARTET. Eighteenth Century Music, 8, pp 287-305
doi:10.1017/S147857061100008X
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haydn’s forgotten quartets: three of the
‘paris’ symphonies arranged for string
quartet
david wyn jones
ABSTRACT
In 1787 Artaria, Haydn’s publisher in Vienna, issued three versions of The Seven Last Words: the original
orchestral version, a quartet arrangement prepared by the composer and a keyboard arrangement sanctioned by
him. A year later, in September 1788, Artaria issued three of the recent ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86,in
an arrangement for quartet. While the quartet version of The Seven Last Words has always been accepted as part
of the canon, the three quartet arrangements of the symphonies have been ignored. Sympathetic consideration of
a range of evidence, including the bibliographical, historical and text-critical, suggests that Haydn may have been
the author of these three quartets.
CREATING AND AMENDING THE CANON
Haydn’s string quartets were the first part of his output to be defined as a group of works that was nominally
complete and authentic. In 1802 the composer’s former pupil and long-standing friend Ignaz Pleyel, by then
a thriving music publisher in Paris, issued a Collection Complette des Quatuors d’Haydn, eighty quartets
divided chronologically into fourteen oeuvres and presented in four volumes. ‘Oeuvre 14’ was the latest
available set of quartets by Haydn, the Op. 76 set (hIII:75–80), first published in 1799. Subsequently, in 1806,
Pleyel issued an extended version of the Collection, adding Haydn’s last three quartets, Op. 77 (hIII: 81 and
82) and Op. 103 (hIII: 83). Following the title-page in both editions Pleyel printed a thematic catalogue of the
quartets, claiming that it had been sanctioned by the composer (‘Catalogue Thématique de tous les Quatuors
d’Haydn, avoués par l’Auteur’).
1
While there is no other evidence for this particular claim, the apparent
authority of Pleyel’s publication was affirmed when the 1802 thematic catalogue was used by Haydn and his
copyist Johann Elssler to prepare the list of quartets included in the so-called Haydn-Verzeichnis.
2
The
eighty-three quartets listed by Pleyel, Haydn and Elssler became part of the reception history of the
composer, consolidated in modern scholarship when Anthony van Hoboken used the Pleyel and Elssler list
to define Group III, the quartets, in the first volume of his thematic catalogue.
3
Research for this article was funded by a grant from the British Academy. I am grateful to the following individuals for
assistance of various kinds: David Beard, Otto Biba (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna), Daniel Bickerton, Gareth
Churchill, Vanessa Devaux, Emily Green, Robert Pienicowski (Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel), Rupert Ridgewell (British
Library) and members of the Carducci Quartet. I am also indebted to the constructive comments of two referees and the
editors of the journal.
1 Anthony van Hoboken, Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, volume 3 (Mainz: Schott, 1978),
46–47.
2 Jens Peter Larsen, Three Haydn Catalogues. Drei Haydn Kataloge, second facsimile edition with a survey of Haydn’s
oeuvre (New York: Pendragon, 1979), xi–xiii.
3 Hoboken, Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis, volume 1 (Mainz: Schott, 1957), 359–441.
Eighteenth-Century Music 8/2, 287–305 © Cambridge University Press, 2011
doi:10.1017/S147857061100008X
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However, the canon had begun to be unpicked already in the nineteenth century. In his biography of
Haydn, Carl Ferdinand Pohl pointed out that the so-called Op. 1 No. 5 (hIII:5) was a version of a symphony
in B flat and that two works from Op. 2,Nos3 and 5 (hIII: 9 and 11), were originally sextets for quartet plus
two horns; he also drew attention to a work not in Pleyel’s edition, an early quartet in E flat (hII:6).
4
While
these discoveries were incontrovertible and widely accepted by later scholars, there was the equally prevalent
view that Pleyel’s ‘eighty-three’ represented Haydn’s official tally of quartets and that the composer must
have preferred the quartet version of the two sextets and disowned the E flat quartet.
Jens Peter Larsen pointed out in 1939 that Op. 3, very unusually, did not survive in any contemporary
manuscript sources; in 1952 H. C. Robbins Landon moved the discussion a little further when he indicated
that the nature of the sources made him suspicious about the status of the works; and in the early 1960s László
Somfai articulated the case against their authenticity on stylistic grounds as well as the poor sources.
5
Concrete evidence emerged in 1964, when Alan Tyson and Landon announced their discovery that Haydn’s
name had been substituted for that of Hofstetter on two of the quartets in the first printed edition, by
Bailleux (Paris, 1777).
6
A consensus began to emerge that Op. 3 was not by the composer. It was with this
discovery that Pleyel’s ‘eighty-three’ finally lost its hold on Haydn reception history. The modern accepted
total is sixty-nine: eighty-three minus nine (Op. 1 No. 5,Op.2 Nos 3 and 5, and the whole of Op. 3), plus one
(the early E flat quartet) and counting The Seven Last Words as one work rather than seven sonatas (as Haydn
termed the movements). This total is reflected, for instance, in the authoritative work lists in the 2001 New
Grove and Die ‘neue’ Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
7
In a tradition that has long been preoccupied with authenticity, Haydn scholarship has exercised extreme
caution when dealing with the reverse process, evaluating the authenticity of other quartets that circulated
under the composer’s name in the eighteenth century in manuscript and printed form. Extending earlier
work by Larsen, Landon and Hoboken, a comprehensive article by Georg Feder on quartets attributed to
Haydn scrutinizes the case for no fewer than ninety-nine quartets (including Op. 3): all are shown to be
inauthentic, and alternative composers are given for approximately half of them, including Albrechtsberger,
Franz Dussek, Michael Haydn, Kammel, Krommer, Pleyel and Vanhal, as well as Hofstetter.
8
ARRANGEMENTS FOR QUARTET
Scholarship has not, however, dealt so thoroughly with the many arrangements for quartet of compositions
by Haydn originally written for different forces, arrangements that are attributed in contemporary sources,
both manuscript and printed, to the composer himself. This is strange, given that the quartet version of The
Seven Last Words has always been regarded as part of the canon; even today that work is much more likely to
be encountered, whether in live performance or on CD, in the quartet arrangement than in its original
orchestral version. Arising out of nineteenth-century ideologies of the sanctity of the individual work and
the associated integrity of its creator there has been a surreptitious view that arrangements are by definition
of secondary importance and unless there is categorical evidence of authorship, as there is for The Seven Last
Words, the responsible attitude to take is to disregard them.
4 Carl Ferdinand Pohl, Joseph Haydn, volume 1 (Berlin: A. Sacco, 1875), 337–338, 342–343.
5 Jens Peter Larsen, Die Haydn-Überlieferung (Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard, 1939), 150, 293. H. C. Robbins Landon,
‘On Haydn’s Quartets of Opera 1 and 2: Notes and Comments on Sondheimer’s Historical and Psychological Study’,
The Music Review 13/3 (1952), 186. László Somfai, ‘Zur Echtheitsfrage des Haydn’schen “Opus 3”’, Haydn Yearbook 3
(1965), 153–165.
6 Alan Tyson and H. C. Robbins Landon, ‘Who Composed Haydn’s Op. 3?’, The Musical Times 105 (July 1964), 506–507.
Although published in 1965, Somfai’s ‘Zur Echtheitsfrage’ was written before the article by Tyson and Landon.
7 ‘Haydn, Joseph’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, ed. Stanley Sadie and John
Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), volume 11, 231–232. ‘Haydn, Joseph’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart
[Die ‘neue’ MGG], second edition, ed. Ludwig Finscher, Personenteil, volume 8 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2002), 1010–1011.
8 Georg Feder, ‘Apokryphe “Haydn”-Streichquartette’, Haydn-Studien 3/2 (1974), 125–150.
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Arrangements for quartet were a characteristic part of the genre in the eighteenth century, alongside
original works. Within Haydn’s orbit, the cumulative catalogue issued in 1799 by Vienna’s principal music
dealer in the last twenty years of the century, Johann Traeg (1747–1805), provides appropriate evidence.
9
Organized by genre, the catalogue includes quartets as subsection 19 within ‘Camer-Music’. It lists over one
thousand works, usually in groups of six or three, and makes no distinction between original compositions
and arrangements. Most are original works by composers such as Albrechtsberger, Gassmann, Gyrowetz,
Haydn, Mozart, Pleyel, Vanhal and Paul Wranitzky. Some works by C. P. E. Bach, Holzbauer and Monn are
identified as ‘quartet-symphonies’ – that is, works that could be played either with one player per part or
orchestrally. A particular curiosity is the presence of no fewer than twenty-eight quartets by Handel
(‘Haendel’), mostly overtures to his operas (the titles are given) and another example of the practice of
playing orchestral music soloistically. Arrangements for quartet of music from operas and ballet are
particularly numerous, with over forty-one entries, including numbers from Il matrimonio segreto by
Cimarosa, Der Apotheker by Ditterdorf, Una cosa rara by Martín y Soler, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Don
Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte by Mozart, Il barbiere di Siviglia by Paisiello and La grotta di Trofonio by Salieri.
It was alongside this wider repertoire of arrangements for quartet that Haydn’s original quartets – and those
of his contemporaries – were performed and received.
The quartet version of The Seven Last Words was not the only arrangement of music by Haydn to figure
in the contemporary repertoire for the medium. Coverage in Table 1 below is restricted to arrangements that
circulated in Haydn’s own environment, Vienna and Austria, during the composer’s lifetime.
10
The title-pages of the quartet versions of Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten give the name of the arranger,
respectively Ignaz Mosel and Sigismund Neukomm; the title-pages of the two sets of arrangements of
symphonies give the credit clearly to Haydn; the extant manuscript parts of the two opera arrangements give
Haydn as the composer of the music but do not indicate the name of the arranger. Only two of these six items
have been subjected to particular study, the quartet versions of La vera costanza and Armida. The manuscript
sources for both items are in the handwriting of two copyists associated with Haydn, his personal copyist
Johann Elssler, who worked for the composer from the late 1780s onwards, and a Viennese copyist,
Peter Rampl, who was often employed by Haydn and/or Elssler. On the basis of this bibliographical evidence
the two arrangements are mentioned in the worklists in the New Grove and Die ‘neue’ MGG.
11
In an article
specifically on the Armida arrangement, the compiler of these worklists, Georg Feder, examined the musical
quality of the arrangement, noted that it was variable (especially in its part-writing and voicing of chords)
and suggested that some of the movements could have been prepared by the composer while others may have
been prepared by pupils and sanctioned by the composer.
12
This article will focus on the arrangement of three of the ‘Paris’ Symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86, issued by
Artaria in Vienna. It will not present incontrovertible documentary proof of Haydn’s authorship but, rather,
attempt to build a persuasive case, based on circumstantial and musical evidence, that they may well be by
the composer.
9 Alexander Weinmann, ed., Johann Traeg: Die Musikalienverzeichnisse von 1799 und 1804 (Handschrift und Sortiment)
(Vienna: Universal, 1973).
10 A table that attempted to list extant manuscript and printed sources of arrangements of Haydn’s music for quartet that
circulated in Europe generally in his lifetime would easily exceed fifty items. For instance, RISM A/I lists a total of
thirty-seven published editions of arrangements of symphonies, cassations/divertimentos, keyboard sonatas, piano
trios and oratorios; most of these were published in Paris. Répertoire International des Sources Musical, Series A/I:
Einzeldrucke vor 1800, volume 4 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1974), H 4139–H 4175.
11 The New Grove, second edition, volume 11, 232. Die ‘neue’ MGG, volume 8, 1011. Georg Feder, ‘Die Überlieferung und
Verbreitung der handschriftlichen Quellen zu Haydns Werken’, Haydn-Studien 1/1 (1965), 19, 25.
12 Georg Feder, ‘Die Bearbeitung von Haydns “Armida” für Streichquartett’, in Festschrift Otto Biba zum 60. Geburtstag,
ed. Ingrid Fuchs (Tutzing: Schneider, 2006), 113–126.
haydn’s forgotten quartets
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CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
In December 1787 Artaria, Haydn’s principal publisher in Vienna, indeed the most important of all his
publishers, issued the composer’s recent ‘Paris’ Symphonies in two sets of three: Nos 82, 83 and 84 as Op. 51,
Nos 85, 86 and 87 as Op. 52. Ten months later, in September 1788, three of the symphonies, Nos 84, 85 and 86,
appeared arranged for quartet. Figure 1 shows the title-page. The publication has always been known to
scholarship. Over one hundred years ago the standard history of the firm, written by a family member, Franz
Artaria, and the Haydn authority Hugo Botstiber, listed the publication but swiftly dismissed its musical
authenticity as part of a general pronouncement: ‘From whom the arrangements came is not known,
certainly not from Haydn himself . . . Such arrangements were subsequently very popular; everything was
arranged, transcribed or varied. They constituted a source of continuing annoyance as well as of endless
recrimination and lawsuits for composers and publisher.’
13
A similar, if less high-minded, stance is evident
13 ‘Von wem die Arrangements stammen ist nicht bekannt, jedenfalls nicht von Haydn selbst . . . Solche Arrangements
wurden in der Folge sehr beliebt, alles wurde arrangiert, übersetzt oder variiert. Sie bildeten eine Quelle des
fortwährenden Ärgers sowie ewiger Rekriminationen und Prozesse für die Komponisten und Verleger.’ Franz Artaria
Table 1 Quartet arrangements of Haydn’s music
Work Source References
La vera costanza Manuscript parts in
CZ K, CZ Nlobkowicz
andIFc
Anthony van Hoboken, Joseph
Haydn: Thematisch-bibliographisches
Werkverzeichnis, volume 2
(Mainz: Schott, 1971), 384
Armida Manuscript parts in A Wn,
CZ K, CZ Nlobkowicz
andIFc
Hoboken, Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-
bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis,
volume 2, 421–422
Three quartets in E flat,
B flat and D, from
Symphonies Nos 84, 85
and 86
Printed parts (Vienna:
Artaria, 1788)
RISM A/I, H4142; Hoboken,
Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-
bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis,
volume 1 (Mainz: Schott, 1957), 146
Three quartets in E flat,
D and B flat, from
Symphonies Nos 99,
104 and 102
Printed parts (Vienna:
Artaria, 1800)
RISM A/I, H4158; Hoboken,
Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-
bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis,
volume 1, 203
Die Schöpfung Printed parts (Vienna:
Artaria, 1800)
RISM A/I, H4164; Hoboken,
Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-
bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis,
volume 2, 43 (a reference to the later
Mollo imprint)
Die Jahreszeiten Printed parts (Vienna:
Mollo, 1802)
RISM A/I, H4171; Hoboken,
Joseph Haydn: Thematisch-
bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis,
volume 2, 61
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