Michael Haydn

Recently there seems to be an increasing interest in the music of Johann Michael Haydn. For a long time he was only mentioned as being the younger brother of Franz Joseph, and a good friend of Mozart, but his music was almost completely ignored. From time to time a record with sacred music or chamber music was released, but he was't appearing on concert programmes and in the record catalogue frequently. 2006 was the bicentennial of his death, and this apparently led to a number of new recordings with his music. One must hope this isn't a temporary wave, but the beginning of a thorough and serious exploration of his oeuvre.

"When the ci-hitty gets into a bu-hoys sy-hist-em, he loses his a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry." So intones W.C. Fields in his Yukon-based Victorian absurdist two-reeler The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). However, if the city you lived in was Salzburg, Austria, the idea of "a-hankerin' for the cou-huntry" was a popular one, and Salzburg's court composer Johann Michael Haydn paid tribute to it through these two little "Abbey operettas" written not for a civic theater, but for the theater at the Benedictine University in Salzburg. Haydn's singspiel Die Hochzeit auf der Alm (The Wedding on the Alpine Pasture, 1763) was intended as a mere opener to Salzburg scribbler Florian Reichssiegel's ponderous five-act Latin tragedy Pietas conjugalis in Sigismundo et Maria; however, it was the singspiel that won the day.

Michael Haydn wrote his Italian "Serenata" to a libretto by Metastasio on the theme of the lover's grief felt by the goddess Diana, who took vows of chastity without thinking that she might be hit by Amor's arrows. This opera in two acts from 1778 celebrated it's premiere during Michael Haydn's lifetime but then was forgotten for more than two centuries; it was first performed again in full in Salzburg in 2018 and now is finally available on cpo.

The King’s Consort’s latest foray into the studio brings us a thrilling new recording of Michael Haydn’s Requiem, and reveals the little-known ‘St Ursula’ Mass to be a truly exceptional work. The Requiem was composed in response to tragedy, the death of Haydn’s patron—the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg—providing the official cloak for an outpouring of grief as much inspired by the death of the composer’s infant daughter. In itself the work is a memorable and confident example of the genre, but its deserved fame has been somewhat eclipsed by the many striking similarities between the Haydn and Mozart Requiems; when Wolfgang Amadeus composed what was to be his last—and most famous—work a full twenty years after Haydn’s memorial to the archbishop had been first performed, he doubtless intended it as the highest of praise to his friend that he borrowed melodies, rhythms, scoring, structure … Such points of musicological interest must no longer be allowed to obscure the worth of the Haydn’s original magnum opus.

"Turkish" music was all the rage in the late 18th century. Mozart and Haydn composed their quota of it, the most famous examples being Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Haydn's Military Symphony. "Turkish" or "janissary" music usually featured exotic harmonies and extra percussion in the orchestra–bass drum, cymbals, and triangle. This delicious disc contains music by the Haydn's younger brother, Michael, who took over Mozart's job in Salzburg after the archbishop kicked him out. It's a perky, expertly written suite of movements that will fascinate anyone interested in good, unusual music in the classical style. Haydn's older brother would have been proud. –David Hurwitz

Johann Michael Haydn, the "Salzburg Haydn" has always stood in the shadow of his elder brother Joseph. He might have gone on to higher profile posts but decided to stay in Salzburg, being regarded highly during his lifetime by colleagues such as Mozart but somehow staying under the radar since his death. Leopold Mozart pointed out that he was a bit of a drinker which may account for a certain lack of ambition, but who are we to speculate.

Mozart did not know how quickly to get out of Salzburg once he developed his own ambitions, but Johann Michael Haydn (1737-1806) apparently had a great time there. Joseph Haydn's little brother learned music as a choirboy in Vienna, worked for several years in Großwarden and Bratislava before settling in Salzburg in 1762. He stayed there until his death. In the correspondence of the Mozart family, Michael Haydn does not come off well; he is portrayed as a lazy figure who regularly looks too deep into the glass. However, excessive alcohol consumption has not stopped him from writing an extensive oeuvre of church music, operas and instrumental music in all genres.

This recording offers us a close look into Michael Haydn's musical activities for the church, the court and its surroundings. The Missa is perfectly in accord with the then current ideals for reform in the Catholic Church: functional, short, simple, modest and linked to the Gregorian tradition. It is amazing how Haydn was able to compose such varied, lively and attractive music within these strict guidelines.

This is part of a series of releases on the Naxos label devoted to the 40 symphonies of Michael Haydn, younger brother of Franz Joseph. These have been commercially successful, and it's easy to see why: there's music of unsuspected high quality here, and you can see why the younger Haydn's work was taken for Mozart's in several cases for decades, and why Mozart, who was spare in his praise of other composers, bestowed it upon this one. All four of these symphonies are in the three-movement form that Mozart had mostly left behind by the late 1770s and 1780s (when the Haydn works were composed), but the individual movements are quite confidently handled, with the elegant but harmonically wide-ranging slow movements perhaps the best of the lot.