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Thursday 4 February
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
Symphony No. 49 in F minor, ‘La Passione’, Hob. I:49 (1768)
1 Adagio
2 Allegro di molto
3 Menuet
4 Finale: Presto
Dated 1768, ‘La Passione’ is one of the most famous of a
whole series of minor-mode Haydn symphonies from around
1770. Some commentators have postulated – with no
biographical evidence – that this outbreak of minor-key
angst was prompted by a ‘romantic crisis’. In any case,
Haydn was the least confessional of composers. Far more
convincing is the notion that, like other composers, including
J. B. Vanhal, Carlo d’Ordoñez (Austrian, despite his name)
and the teenage Mozart (in his ‘little’ G minor Symphony,
K183), Haydn was eager to explore the potential for tragic or
stormy expression in a symphonic language that, thanks
above all to Haydn himself, was rapidly developing in
complexity and expressive power. This proliferation of minorkey
symphonies has spawned the term Sturm und Drang
(literally ‘Storm and Surge’, but more commonly rendered as
‘Storm and Stress’), after a blood-and-thunder play on the
American Revolution by Maximilian Klinger – a convenient
enough stylistic label, though the official Sturm und Drang
literary movement, kickstarted by Goethe’s rampaging 1773
drama Götz von Berlichingen and his sensational novel Die
Leiden des jungen Werther, lay in the future.
‘La Passione’ is the last of Haydn’s symphonies to adopt the
old sonata da chiesa (church sonata) pattern – ie, beginning
with a slow movement. It is also his only symphony to retain
the minor mode for each of the four movements; this,
together with its lean, acerbic orchestral palette (strings plus
oboes and horns, the latter used as a sombre or ominous
backdrop), gives the work an almost unremitting bleakness.
As with so many Haydn symphonies, the origins of the
nickname are obscure, though one story has it that the work
was first performed on Good Friday in the Esterházys’
Eisenstadt palace. Certainly, the title fits the opening Adagio,
with its mournful, burdened tread evocative of the via crucis.
The initial motif (C–D flat–B flat–C) pervades each of the four
movements, a pointer to Haydn’s growing interest in cyclic
integration. The unexpected entry of the recapitulation,
quietly reasserting F minor when the preceding bar led us to
expect a chord of C minor, is paralleled by the underprepared
recapitulations in both the second movement and
the finale – all instances of Haydn’s sophisticated and (here)
disquieting play with his listeners’ expectations.
In the hectic, angular Allegro di molto, even more than in the
Adagio, thematic development and variation spill far beyond
the so-called ‘development’; as so often with Haydn, the
recapitulation is not so much a restatement as a fiercely
compressed reinterpretation of earlier events. The gravely
beautiful Menuet has its own formal surprise in the 12-bar
coda, which introduces a new sighing figure that deepens the
mood of sorrowful resignation. By contrast, the trio, with its
gleaming high horns, provides the one point of repose – and
the sole appearance of F major – in the whole symphony.
The driving, desperate finale revives the second movement’s
Sturm und Drang with a laconic explosiveness of its own.
Programme note © Richard Wigmore
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