J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Vienna and north Germany:
It is difficult to reconcile it with the present religious tranquillity of Germany, and progress of human
reason; but there seems an unwillingness in the inhabitants of the Protestant states of Germany to
allow due praise, even to the musical works and opinions of the Catholics. And, on the contrary, the
Catholics appear equally unwilling to listen to the strains of the Protestants. . . . Messrs. Mattheson
and Marpurg, who have written so much and so well on the Music of most other parts of Germany,
hardly seem to have remembered that there is such a place as Vienna. 41
Unfortunately for Haydn, a disproportionately high number of critics and theorists
were centred in the north; Viennese musical criticism was by comparison in its
infancy. During the middle decades of the century many of these Berlin critics were
fighting a fierce rearguard action against the avalanche of galant, Neapolitan opera that
threatened to sweep away all that was sound and dignified in German music. The
immense popularity of Haydn’s thoroughly irresponsible quartets and symphonies may
have made him a particularly attractive target to certain writers, whose memorably
expressed criticisms have become notorious: ‘Viennese music .... [since] the dignity it
enjoyed under Wagenseil, ... has [under Haydn] sunk into too much triviality ...
Hayden [sic] is eccentric and bizarre; .... just name me one single, solitary product of
Hayden, in which caprice is not at the bottom of it all!’ 42 The hostility of these critics
forms something of a refrain throughout the ‘Esterházy’ volume of Landon’s
Chronicle and Works.
In actual fact, Mary Sue Morrow has demonstrated that on the whole even
north German critics were enthusiastic about Haydn’s music, and that the polemics of
41 C. Burney, A general history of music from the earliest ages to the present period, 4 vols. (London,
1776-1789), vol. IV., pp.589-90; facsimile at
http://ace.acadiau.ca/score/facsim3/index/chap10/589.htm (accessed 8 December 2006).
42 C. L. Junker (1776), in Landon, Chronicle and works, II, p.401.
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