Talk:Papa Haydn

(old)

My first reaction was to ask why this isn't in the main Haydn article, although I realize it would probably be out of balance to have such a large amount of text on one topic.

Anyway, I always thought of Papa Haydn as a fond way of talking about the "Father of the Symphony" (contrary to usual custom, nobody knows who the mother was) not to mention the string quartet. Or, even more, as the father of classicism, setting the development of art-music on its familiar linear path. Isn't there some element of that in the persistence of the name? DavidBrooks 18:40, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, DB. I've never heard of this connection, though it seems plausible. I'll try to check further. This is a slightly tricky topic to cover, since the biographers evidently don't like the term and don't talk much about it. Opus33 19:04, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Maybe it would be helpful to remember that "Papa" in German is an affctionate form of "father", roughly equivalent to the anglo-american "Dad". And just like "Dad" it may be used to express a combination of (mainly personal) affection and respect, even if there is no family relation (AFAIK, there have been several american musicians regularly dubbed "Daddy", "Big Daddy" or suchlike). To put more into this address looks to me like over-interpretation.

85.176.15.62 (talk) 01:48, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you. I tried to revise a bit in response. Opus33 (talk) 07:11, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Twinkle, twinkle

Hello, I've never seen any claim in a peer-reviewed source that the 2nd movem3ent theme of the Surprise Symphony is based on "Twinkle, twinkle little star" (or on its French version "Ah vous dirai-je maman"). A reference source *was* provided by the previous editor, who clearly was making a good-faith edit. However, this source looks like it is by a program note author. These guys work on deadline and often commit errors; for instance, the author of these notes got Haydn's name wrong.

I would be happy to include the "Twinkle, twinkle" bit but only if there is a real reference source backing it up. Thanks for your patience, Opus33 (talk) 06:58, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

The Kennedy Center's pretty reliable. Where is Franz Joseph Haydn's name incorrect? But, here are some more:

• Time magazine
• Art Times Journal
• Yosemite Gazette
• Warner Bros. Publications (and Alfred Publishing)

Yopienso (talk) 07:19, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, "peer-reviewed." Not sure that exists; certainly not sure that it's necessary. Let's just take David Dubal's word for it. Yopienso (talk) 08:08, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

Opus33, I'm going to go ahead and restore my edit since the fact is abundantly clear from multiple RSs. We would prefer peer-reviewed material as much as possible, but most of the citations in WP are not from refereed sources. This, after all, is the "Papa Haydn" page; I'll not interfere with the Franz Joseph Haydn page. Please don't revert again without further discussion. I appreciate your care and knowledge. Yopienso (talk) 22:50, 26 August 2011 (UTC)

While were on it, it seems to me I learned a somewhat different version of the little ditty, in particular a different second couplet. Unfortunately this was so long ago I can't recall the details, but I think it went something like "when he wrote tune like these we hope you remember this". Wschart (talk) 13:09, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Thoughts...

I recently came across a number of excerpts/quotes from the last few centuries which I cobbled together after this brief exchange of views some three years ago, and I wondered if any of them were worth incorporating into the current article. I hope I have cited every quote correctly - some are longer than others. Almost every paragraph is taken from the indented work cited below it, with or without double quote marks.

Did Haydn know what he was doing?

1.

"Of course, the old 'Papa Haydn' image of the composer-the innocent who composed music without quite knowing how or why-militates against the idea that he ever thought deeply about his art. Schroeder, however, presents quite a different view, demonstrating that Haydn was, at the very least, aware of intellectual debate from the 1780s onwards and that his musical development is inextricably mixed with it." p. 446

Reviewed Work(s): Haydn and the Enlightenment: The Late Symphonies and Their Audience by David P. Schroeder
Review by: David Wyn Jones
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Aug., 1991), pp. 445-447
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/736237

2

"This view, to oversimplify somewhat, resembles the popular image of the aged Haydn - pious and gentle, rather un worldly, diffident towards his genius and perhaps not wholly aware of it - or, in a slightly different vein, the self-ideal to which Stravinsky once claimed to have aspired: 'a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God'.2 Not surprisingly, the image of the man has gone hand in hand with a tendency to regard the music itself as 'small Bach' - and not just any Bach, but that particular Bach invoked by Stravinsky, the musico-theological paragon venerated by an earlier generation as the 'Fifth Evangelist'. Yet just as this Bach has at last fallen by the wayside in serious studies, and just as 'Papa Haydn' now seems well along to following him there, so too, I suggest, has our inherited understanding. Schuetz outlived whatever value it may once have had." p. 651

Towards a New Image of Henrich Schütz.
Author(s): Joshua Rifkin
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 126, No. 1713 (Nov., 1985), pp. 651-658
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/965034

3.

"(It is above all in this respect [insistent syncopations] that Haydn performances often fail, whereby most interpreters lack the mental agility to deal with the ever-changing 'physiognomy' of Haydn's music, subsiding instead into an ease of manner and a concern for broader effects that they have acquired in their playing of Mozart.) Still more disconcerting is the previously-mentioned way in which Haydn combines his 'omnivorous' passion for humour of all degrees with elements of wayward fantasy and deadly seriousness, which cannot be separated in our experience of the music (although the less fathomable traits have often been discarded - hence the convenience of the 'Papa Haydn' label to fall back upon). Even in such a case as the first movement of Piano Sonata no.48, a simple reaction is not appropriate: the tone is at once matter-of-fact and plainly facetious (compare the tender effect of the unexpected Bb at bar 16 with the preceding bars)." (Interestingly enough, Wagner also saw 'einen gefesselten Damon' active in Haydn's music.)" [13] Too often the opposite view has obtained, as the composer's (enigmatic) modesty has insinuated itself into the ruling conception of his musical personality. Even HC Robbins Landon, for all his liveliness of appreciation, does not quite manage to shake off the old stereotypes. Charles Rosen disappoints still further in this regard, particularly as a writer who has shown such insight into Haydn's musical procedures, when he states:: "The artistic personality that Haydn created for himself (related to, but not to be confused with, the face he wore for everyday purposes) prevented, by its assumption of an easy-going geniality, the full development of the subversive and revolutionary aspect of his art; his music, as E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote, appears to have been composed before original sin." [14] This is just a sophistry for the 'Papa Haydn' image.
[13] For a selection of Wagner's verdicts on Haydn see Robbins Landon, Haydn: Chronicle and Works, Vol. 5: Haydn: The Late Years, Thames & Hudson (London, 1977), pp.423-24
[14] The Classical Style, p.325

"Whichever way one may proceed, the prospects for any sort of comprehensive understanding of Haydn's musical personality are, on past performance, none too bright. Although the image of 'Papa Haydn' may be gradually attaining the status of an historical curiosity as we achieve a richer appreciation of the achievements of the composer, we should at least retain one sense of this mythological tag that may give us greater patience in our search for his artistic 'core': that, as a nominal father-figure, and indeed as 'the source of every single compositorial innovation right up the present day',[22] Haydn may reserve the right to a certain patriarchal inaccessibility as we attempt to establish the artistic and emotional sources of his formidable output. (pp 342-3) [22] Hans Keller, The Great Haydn Quartets, Dent, 1986, p. 26

Haydn's Musical Personality
Author(s): W. Dean Sutcliffe 
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 130, No. 1756 (Jun., 1989), pp. 341-344
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/966030

4.

Perhaps a guiding influence is also provided by the telling remark made late in the book: 'With the exception of the quartets, whose intellectual content has always been apparent to all, Haydn's music has suffered from a blinkered critical attitude, one that tends to patronise the "Papa Haydn" aspect and seriously undervalue the composer's profundity' (p.347). It may be, therefore, that the comparative playing-down of Haydnesque wit and eccentricity, as well as the slightly conservative tone, are calculated so as to emphasise the depth, if not the breadth, of the composer's achievement.

Reviewed Work(s): Haydn: His Life and Music by H. C. Robbins Landon and  David Wyn Jones
Review by: W. Dean Sutcliffe
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 130, No. 1757 (Jul., 1989), pp. 410-411
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1193443

5.

"Webster points out that Haydn's monotonal symphonies and quartets in minor keys are "concentrated and intense"; that minor-key works ending in the major are invariably in flat-side minor keys and were composed after 1780 (before 1780, only four of twenty-two minor-key works in major instrumental genres turned to major, and works in sharp-side minor keys of any year hardly ever went to the major); that minor-mode finales tend to be "serious" as opposed to the more "galant" finales in major, with the Farewell Symphony a notable exception to this characterization (pp. 221-222) But in the late works, the progression from minor to major, sometimes connected to the remote-key juxtapositions of interior movements, may embody a psychological progression far deeper than the conventional view of a turn to "cheerfulness" (a relegation to "Papa Haydn" status that Webster does not suffer gladly)." (p. 299)

Reviewed Work(s): Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in His Instrumental Music by James Webster
Review by: Elaine R. Sisman
Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp.293-305
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3128818

6.

"I have always felt a deep antipathy toward this work [The Creation]... Its lowing oxen, its buzzing insects, its light in C which dazzles like a Carcel lamp, and then its Adam, Uriel, Gabriel, and the flute solos and all its genialities really get on my nerves - they make me want to punch somebody out. The English love a pudding surrounded with a layer of fat; I detest it. Fat is exactly what surrounds the musical pudding of Papa Haydn. Naivete is all very fine, but too much of it we don't need! ... I wouldn't give an apple for the privilege of meeting Eve in the woods; I am sure she is stupid enough to make the good Lord ashamed of himself, and is just what her husband deserves." Letter to Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, dated Paris, 8 Feb. 1859, in Hector Berlioz, Correspondance generale, ed. Pierre Citron, vol. 5 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), p. 654. (p. 357n)

Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult of Genius
Thomas Bauman
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 333-357
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3600908

7.

Such a view of Haydn as the master manipulator, original, boundlessly creative, playful, witty, is given several stunning twists in the final section of the book by Lawrence Kramer. Not only does this 'twentieth-century image of Haydn' help, ironically enough, to keep the Papa Haydn label alive by continually representing its limitations, it owes its inception to one man-Donald Francis Tovey. More specifically, it is 'the Anglophone Haydn' (p.240), and it derives as much from 'certain strains in eighteenth-century British literary tradition' as it does from Germanic music history (p.241).

James Garratt offers a compelling prelude to this by focusing precisely on the century that leant most strongly on the Papa Haydn sobriquet. He believes that, in thrall to what we might dub the 'failure narrative' of Haydn's 19th- century reception, we are inclined to imagine a uniformly unflattering picture of the composer throughout this time; yet many of the famous dismissals might reflect an urge 'to reshape rather than reflect reality' (p.227) when Haydn in fact continued to feature prominently in concert life (p. 127)

Review: Haydn: Light and Shade
Reviewed Work(s): The Cambridge Companion to Haydn by Caryl Clark
Review by: W. Dean Sutcliffe
Source: Early Music, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Feb., 2007), pp. 125-127
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4137280

8.

In "The Portrait of Haydn Over the Course of Time," written for the 1932 bicentennial celebrations, Geiringer shatters the "Papa Haydn" stereotype.

Reviewed Work(s): Joseph Haydn and the Eighteenth Century: Collected Essays of Karl Geiringer by Karl Geiringer and  Robert N. Freeman
Review by: Malcolm S. Cole
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 60, No. 2 (Dec., 2003), pp. 435-437
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4487146

8a.

"All this makes it understandable that his musicians loved their "Papa", as they came to call him. The nickname must not, however, lead to the conception that H. was in any way easygoing... he was certaily adamant as far as the musical activities were concerned. (p. 48)

The Esterhaza musicians honoured him on his name day in 1808, to which he replied with a letter full of fatherly love for his dear children, thanking them for their expression of true filial feelings. (p. 181)

Cherubini came to call on H. in his old age, and H. gave C. the autograph of Symphony 103 (Mit dem Paukenwirbel). He wrote under his name 'Guiseppe Haydn' the words "Padre del Celbre Cherubini ai 4tro di Febr. 1806" (p. 185)

Similarly, the harsh dissonances in the trio of the miniuet of Op. 54, No. 2, contradict all sentimental conceptions of good old "Papa" Haydn"' . (p. 289) On the other hand, the very gaiety and naturalness of his idiom, combined with unbroken homogeneity, earned H. the disdain of the romantic era. The scarcity of discordant and ambiguous moods in his music made people look down on "good old Papa Haydn". Only in the twentieth century, when romantic ideals began to lose their hold on artistic thinking, did a true appreciation of H.'s greatness become possible.(p. 368)

Haydn : A Creative Life in Music (1982) [1946]
3rd revised enlarged ed.
Geiringer, Karl, in collab w/ Irene G. Berkeley 
University of California Press
0520043170
https://archive.org/details/haydncreativelif00geir_0/page/48/mode/1up/search/papa

9.

"...negatively affect the specific context of Haydn reception. 3 As I will argue, this is not an abstract question, but rather one that addresses the precise historical circumstance that brought about Haydn’s demotion, beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing even against the grain of the “performance practice” movement of the late twentieth century, from a master composer of the first rank to “Papa Haydn,” a venerated fogy who helped make Mozart and Beethoven possible but whose music has not stood the “test of time” as well as theirs. As Bryan Proksch writes, “Seemingly the moment after [Haydn’s] burial [in 1809], the musical world set about dismantling his reputation, coining one dismissive cliche after another. ‘Roguish,’ ‘childlike,’ ‘naive,’ ‘old-worldly,’ ‘dainty,’ ‘neighborly, and other terms ... characterize Haydn ... as some kind of cockeyed optimist shackled by his prerevolutionary birth and his employment as a naive wig-wearing servant of the ancient regime.” (p. 4) ... "The gradual process of Haydn settling into this cultural niche, which could have more-or-less permanently demoted him from the pantheon of German masters, has been complicated by at least four factors: Haydn’s evident mastery of his craft, the now-habitual veneration accorded him as an important predecessor to Beethoven (itself a kind of demotion, as “Papa” Haydn), his small corpus of fully “serious” works, and the growing need, verging at times on hysteria, for “classical” venues and institutions to appeal to aging and occasionally more youthful audiences through more readily entertaining musical programming." (p. 84)...

"...Meanwhile, Haydn, having earned the sobriquet “Papa Haydn” as a virtuous forbear who developed the requisite techniques but lacked the vision for how they might serve a new musical order, has been unfairly but inevitably cast into an ancillary historical role. This historical hierarchy, in turn, has reinforced musicology’s preoccupation with the “serious” dimensions of Haydn’s dynamic polarities, in effect focusing not on Haydn but only on that part of him legible from the perspective of a set of musical practices and understandings that evolved only after his career ended, and which left no place for the central dynamic that energized his musical practices. (p. 266)"

"Yet despite Haydn’s occasional appearances in “light classical” concerts, he has never really been at home there, either, and increasingly less so. Regarding the “Farewell” Symphony, for example, audiences will be not only impatient for the sweetly comic payoff but also potentially mystified by the turgid ferocity of the opening movement. They will, in fact, tend to be happier with “Pops” than with “Papa,” since the Pops side of the “light classical” repertory will often enough be based on actually popular music, as with film scores, classicized pop tunes, or concert pieces derived from musicals. On the other hand, Haydn has over the last generation attracted renewed attention in the academy, some of it extremely responsive to what makes him so remarkable a composer and musical thinker.[9] But despite this more serious attention to his lighter side, within the more earnestly serious spaces of musical idealism Haydn will too often seem the unruly child who hasn’t learned to regulate his impulses. Here, the finale to the “Farewell,” the second movements of the “Clock” and “Surprise” Symphonies, and above all the “fart” movement in no. 93, will for many seem silly and inappropriate, as will the returning Janissary instruments at the end of the finale in the “Military” Symphony." (p. 273)

Making Light: Haydn, Musical Camp, and the Long Shadow of German Idealism 
Raymond Knapp
Duke University Press
Durham and London 2018 
https://archive.org/details/makinglighthaydn00knap

10.

"Pohl can claim a place beside the monuments of Haydn scholarship listed above. Even the deservedly familiar volume by Karl Geiringer makes no pretensions to the scope or comprehensiveness of Pohl or Landon, and it has had little independent impact on our views of Haydn's life or music.10 In its masterly balance and freedom from cliché, Larsen's and Landon's article on Haydn for MGG represents an exception, but its limited scope and ungrateful format have prevented it from exercising the influence it deserved; perhaps Larsen's similar article in The New Grove will command greater attention in the English-speaking world." (p. 479)

"Webster considers Philipp Spitta's criticism of Pohl's biography (Joseph Haydn, 3 volumes, Leipzig 1878–1882):

Pohl's view of Haydn thus suffers from an excess of detail and never focuses on H's personality or style. Allied with this (continues Spitta) is Pohl's distinctly Biedermeier view of H: his prose style, with inordinately long digressions, descriptions of journeys and locales that recall travel writing, passages of pure fantasy regarding H's actions or feelings, is closer to recreational readings than serious research. Worse, this combination of excessive concentration on secondary details and Biedermeier tone led Pohl to overemphasize the naive, humorous elements of Haydn's character, to to the perpetuation of the absurd "Papa Haydn" myth. (p. 479).

"Landon tells us all we need to know about Haydn's personality, and he often refers to the darker and more complex side of his nature, but he never focuses on this subject, and so he does not achieve a novel or convincing portrait. For all their balance, [Landon &] Larsen's accounts in MGG [Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart Vol V, Kassel, 1956] and The New Grove still remain overly dependent on the authentic literary accounts. (The "Papa Haydn" myth arose in part because of those accounts, which memorialize Haydn's undeniable piety, humor, and concern for his fellow man at a time when his increasing senility produced a caricature of the whole man.) In these respects Feder has provided an ideal starting point with a careful, brief, substantially revisionist (not revolutionary) view of Haydn's personality based almost exclusively on his own words.[25]
[25] "Joseph Haydn als Mensch und Musiker," in Gerda Mraz, ed., Joseph Haydn. Zeit (Jahrbuch fiir osterreichische Kulturgeschichte, I/2 [1972]: (Beitraige zur Musikgeschicte des 18. Jahrhunderts, II), pp. 43-56; reprint, Osterreichische Musikzeitschrift, XXVII (1972), 57-68.

"Feder concludes that Haydn largely realized that admirable Enlightenment ideal of the honnete homme, whose intrinsic merit in life and work is matched only by his skill in realizing its success in the world. In this portrait the "fatherly" traits coexist, not without tension, with such different ones as highly developed manners, diplomatic skill, critical judgement, sensitivity to criticism, jealousy of his stature as a great composer, and so on. (pp. 493-4)

"...That anyone could have supposed that the astonishing productions of the "Sturm und Drang" years or the tonal and gestural subtleties of the 1780s could have been the work of "Papa Haydn" is difficult to credit. Perhaps when we have accepted Haydn as the resourceful antagonist of Esterharzy's bureaucrats, the brutal exploiter of publishers' weaknesses, the sensitive recipient of Madame Genzinger's confidences, the trusted courier for high diplomatic personages, we will also learn to listen to him as a different kind of composer. It is equally necessary to sweep away the baggage of two centuries' historical and stylistic misinterpretation: (p. 495)

Prospects for Haydn Biography after Landon
Author(s): James Webster
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct., 1982), pp. 476-495
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/742153

10a

"It is unfortunate that the three extensive contemporary accounts stem from the first years of the nineteenth century when Haydn's memory had lost some of its acuity. The two biographies by the portrait painter Albert Christoph Dies (Vienna, 1812) and Georg August Griesinger (Leipzig, 1810), a diplomat and representative for Breitkopf & Hartel, are reliable accounts based on actual visits with Haydn. The third by Giuseppe Carpani (Milan, 1812), who translated The Creation into Italian, fulfills our expectations of a man of letters: it is a literary and fictionalized account, with a connoisseur's appreciation of music." (p. 534)

Joseph Haydn in Literature: A Survey
Author(s): A. Peter Brown and  Carol Vanderbilt Brown
Source: Notes, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Mar., 1975), pp. 530-547
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/896204
Accessed: 26-05-2020 17:21 UTC

11.

See also New Criticism

"Even the sense of 'presence' that seems so strong in Beethoven's compositions is now widely regarded as distinctly different - as existing in a different domain - from the actual personality of a certain man who was born in Bonn in 1770 and died in Vienna in 1827.[10] In Haydn studies, W. Dean Sutcliffe was the first to explore this issue; I too have insisted, for example, that his 'popular' style is not a simple projection of his personality - in particular, that it must not be equated with the (fortunately now discredited) image of 'Papa Haydn' - but is rather his compositional persona; or, more precisely, one of his personas.[11] And yet, a rigid separation between Haydn's personality and his style would itself be problematical. (p. 17)

[10.] Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). [11.] Dean W. Sutcliffe, "Haydn's Musical Personality," The Musical Times 130/1756 (1989), 341-344;

James Webster, "Haydn's Aesthetics," in Cambridge Companion, ed. Clark, 42.

11a

"My remaining examples are drawn from among Haydn's most familiar and best-loved slow movements. I do this because my thesis is that sensibility is so central a component of his musical personality that by and large it has not even been recognized as such. We hear these movements as beautiful, of course, and admire their instrumentation, their chromaticism, and so on; however, locked in as we are to traditional notions of Haydn as witty and not emotional, we don't ordinarily take them as communicating. To paraphrase a famous phrase of Dr. Johnson's, we don't "listen for the sentiment"; we don't imagine Haydn's persona as notionally speaking to Mme. Genzinger, or Mrs. Schroeter, or to the devotees of 'sensibility' in any audience. I suggest that one put oneself in the position of that kind of listener. (p. 25)

"In a word: the concept 'Classical style' was not compatible with an appreciation for the cultivation and expression of deep personal feelings. This lack of sympathy for sensibility (as it were) on the part of traditional modern listeners applied especially to sentiments of an intimate character in the context of instrumental music, or that seemed to be improvised rather than composed, or that were found in the 'high', 'central' genres of symphony and string quartet. To have responded to such sentiments would (even if unconsciously) have been felt to manifest a 'feminine' sensibility (indeed most 18th-century keyboard music, except for the concerto, was destined primarily for ladies), and hence to threaten the 'masculine' hegemony of coherent form and strict part-writing that were hallmarks of the reception of 'Classical style'. Now that those prejudices are (thankfully) withering away, the great extent and heartfelt character of Haydn's sensibility can once again be heard, as it was unquestionably heard in his day. A more sympathetic listening will be better listening." (p. 27)

Haydn's Sensibility
Author(s): James Webster
Source: Studia Musicologica, Vol. 51, No. 1/2, HAYDN 2009: A BICENTENARY CONFERENCE
PART I (March 2010), pp. 13-27
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25746237

12.

Ironic? Satirical? Sarcastic.

Where, too, are the "Wagnerites" of the later eighties, now that Götterdämmerung is fed to school-girls along with Little Women and a subscription to St. Nicholas? And today we are witnessing the easy assimilation of those once formidable Bolsheviki of contemporary letters, the Vers-Librists, and their kindred in the domains of music and painting and sculpture, the fire-eating Futurists. As for Richard Strauss and his once blood-chilling Zarathustra and Heldenleben and Elektra? Why, they have long since been taken to our bosoms along with Papa Haydn and Mozart, and tomorrow will be arranged for the farm-house phonograph, where they will contribute to the simple bucolic joys already enlarged by gasoline and neighborly telephone gossip. (p. 23)

Rodin (addendum to "Thank God for Wilson": The President at His Best) 
Source: The North American Review, Vol. 207, No. 746 (Jan., 1918), pp. 2-23
Published by: University of Northern Iowa
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25121740

13.

The author considers the musical travels of Charles Burney, quoting from The present state of music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United provinces.

"The Italians are apt to be too negligent, and the Germans too elaborate, in so much that music, if I may hazard the thought, seems play to the Italians and work to the Germans. The Italians are perhaps the only people on the globe who can trifle with grace, as the Germans alone have the power to render even labour pleasing."

This is indeed a remarkable bit of aesthetic musing (even if probably under the influence of the then fashionable French Comparaisons), for the recognition of the essential factor of the Italians' and the Austro-Italians' delight in playfulness, of the jeu, the sheer pleasure in making music, was not understood by musicographers and performers for another hundred years or more; the patronizing view of "Papa Haydn" still reflected this lack of understanding. It is surprising, though, that despite his contact with the northern masters who, like Emanuel Bach, denounced the "licentious" music of the south, he spotted and appreciated this quality, even if he detested its chief carrier, the opera buffa. (p. 201)

Tales of a Traveling Music Historian
Author(s): Paul Henry Lang
Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Spring, 1983), pp. 196-205
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/763807

14.

Criticism of a simplistic view of music and its practioners:

If Brahms was pictured as the apostle of boredom, the fault with the Russians was their emotional rawness, their confused meanderings, their inconsequential themes. For the proof of all this the prosecuting attorneys promptly haled Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert into court as witnesses for the true and good and everlastingly beautiful in music; - the dear old papa Haydn, the amiable, inoffensive, serene Mozart, the powerful yet so simple and easily understood Beethoven, and so forth. From them and their methods the laws of the eternally beautiful were extracted and abstracted, but they were then shoved before the young musicians' eyes so closely as to obscure from their vision what really counts and is so different from man-made laws: the natural principles which govern all music, whether it be classic or ultra-modern. The trouble with those who dinned and still din into our ears the musical laws as laid down by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, is that they teach musical history backwards. (pp. 581-2)

Incredible as it may seem, "Papa" Haydn was spared this period of shoulder-shrugging and benevolent schoolmastering not less than any other "classic," that is to say, before the world condescended to place him on a classical pedestal. One need but read occasional remarks of his young friend and disciple Mozart to be reminded of the fact that many "authorities" of those days failed to share Mozart's enthusiastic admiration for Haydn. Any other attitude would have been humanly impossible for the majority, in view of Haydn's bold innovations in form, orchestration, harmony, which so distinguish his works from those of his predecessors and contemporaries. (p. 582)

If Haydn's innovations have lost their appeal of startling novelty the reason is that we do not ordinarily listen to music historically or even musically, but only on the basis of actual tonal sensation. Furthermore, we have artificially bred the notion of Haydn as a "jovial Papa." But Mozart, to whom we owe this widely misunderstood label, never dreamed of characterizing therewith Haydn's music as old-fashioned; he merely alluded to the freshness of Haydn and to the difference in age between himself and the revered master who at the time of Mozart's death had reached his sixtieth year. Unfortunately, musicians ever since, at any rate altogether too many of them, interpreted the "Papa" literally. They adjusted (and adjust) their performance of Haydn's works, except in the case of his oratorios where such nonsense is difficult, to that label; they treat also such passages in Haydn's music with a jovial, grandfatherly smile which sound even for harmonically spoiled ears anything but antiquated and emotionally shallow. (pp. 582-3)

Of course, with these anecdotes I am telling you nothing new, but to remind you of these old stories from Moronia becomes necessary, if my thesis is to stimulate thought in the direction intended. Against this thesis of our habitual and shocking stupidity towards the innovators in music, usually Beethoven serves as a counter-argument. I cannot concede, however, that Beethoven's case diverges essentially from that of other composers who became classics. (p. 584)

Thus, no page in the history of stupidity remains blank and we, too, shall not permit the chapters reserved for us to retain their spotless color of innocence. (p. 586)

Modernists, Classics and Immortality in Music
Author(s): O. G. Sonneck Oscar Sonneck
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct., 1925), pp. 572-590
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/738282

15.

"Ce que L. von Koechel est à Mozart, A. van Hoboken l'est à Haydn! Les trente années qu'il a passées a recueillir les materiaux nécessaires a l'établissement du répertoire des oeuvres de celui qu'on a si superficiellement titré de "Papa Haydn", ont valu au chercheur sagace l'estime de ses pairs. Ceux-ci lui ont offert un recueil de travaux à l'occasion de son soixante-quinzieme anniversaire."

"What L. von Koechel is to Mozart, A. van Hoboken is to Haydn! The thirty years he spent collecting the materials necessary for establishing the repertoire of works by the one so superficially titled "Papa Haydn", have earned the shrewd researcher the esteem of his peers."

Reviewed Work(s): Anthony Van Hoboken. Festschrift zum 75. Jahr, herausgegeben von J. Schmidt-Görg
Review by: Pierre Pidoux
Source: Revue de Musicologie, T. 49, No. 126 (Jul., 1963), pp. 128-129
Published by: Société Française de Musicologie
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/927225

16.

Haydn did not seem to have any outstanding interest for Harty. A few of the symphonies were performed, and well performed, in a stylized manner closely akin to his treatment of Mozart, but apparently he did not see the older composer as the inventive genius and soundly expressive musician he undoubtedly was. The wit was there and certain naive aspects of Haydn's humour, but scarcely the humanitarianism. It might with justice be suggested that the label "Papa Haydn" with its implications of superficial geniality obscured, as it has with others, his proper view of Haydn's greatness. (p. 220)

Hamilton Harty
Author(s): John F. Russell
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul., 1941), pp. 216-224
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/728297

17.

In the absence of credible statements of intentionality (and perhaps not even then), no one to-one equation can be sustained between hypothesized or hypostatized aspects of a composer's personality and stylistic features of instrumental music."18 Such an equation inevitably leads to an essentialist view of the artwork as an epiphenomenon of its creator's personality. This is no better than the "vulgar Marxism" that Carl Dahlhaus loved to ridicule, according to which art is mere "superstructure" over a social-psychological, and ultimately economic, "base." These strictures apply no matter what a particular composer's gender or sexual orientation may have been. "Beethoven the Patriarchalist" is no less reductive than "Schubert the Hedonist," or "Clara the Good Woman," or "Papa Haydn"- or, for that matter, "Beethoven the Hero," or even "Beethoven the critic of the heroic style."

[18] Maynard Solomon, ("Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini". Maynard Solomon, 19th-Century Music, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), p 206. University of California Press, https://www.jstor.org/stable/746501 )

[1] Solomon had previously proposed this hypothesis in "Franz Schubert's 'My Dream'," American Imago 38 (1981), 137- 54, but this study found little resonance in musicological circles until the appearance of "Schubert and the Peacocks."

Music, Pathology, Sexuality, Beethoven, Schubert
Author(s): James Webster
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 17, No. 1, Schubert: Music, Sexuality, Culture (Summer, 1993), pp. 89-93
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/746784

18. (lol)

J. S. - You write: 'Father or Papa Haydn': Had Haydn really any such nickname? My impression is that he was called the "Pope of music": German=Pabst, Italian = Papa; and by confusion of Papa with Papa he is called " Papa Haydn" quite erroneously.' This question has been discussed a good deal lately, and it is never likely to be solved. Your derivation is plausible.

Answers to Correspondents
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 73, No. 1071 (May 1, 1932), pp. 429-431
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/920522

19.

Mr Redfern's own book is a sad affair, thoroughly ill-written and ill thought-out. Often, and always embarrassingly, he wanders into criticism of the music, and his comments on influence in particular are oddly naive. There are innumerable mistakes [...] About Haydn symphonies in the 19th century: 'Those that were published tended to be "corrected" to conform with a picture of "Papa" Haydn as a rather whimsical figure in carpet slippers'. (p. 1225)

Review: Companions
Reviewed Work(s): Beethoven by Rosemary Hughes; Haydn by Brian Redfern; Mozart by Alec Hyatt King
Review by: Stanley Sadie
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 111, No. 1534, Beethoven Bicentenary Issue (Dec., 1970), pp. 1225-1226
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/955839

20.

The Romantics tended to dismiss Schubert's early works, which are clearly Classical, with the important exception of his songs; they preferred to believe that the more personal late works simply burst forth in a paroxysm of Romantic inspiration. This viewpoint is an excellent illustration of the paradox at the center of Romantic thinking and criticism. Since the Romantics admired the idea of a creative hero who burst the shackles of form and ignored the dictates of formalism (a formalism they actually created), one would expect them to look with approbation on a composer who constantly experimented with form and tonality, just as Beethoven did. But they did not, for Schubert's experimentation did not fit into their myth of an intuitive composer.[10]

[10] Haydn's reputation among the Romantics can be seen in a similar light; constant, daring, experimental composer whose music is governed by such logical clarity as to defy romanticization - instead of making him a hero the Romantic mythmakers neutralized Haydn by glorifying (patronizing) the "Papa" Haydn legend. (pp 486-7)

21. This, especially

The cliché in literature is a word or phrase of stereotyped use and exact and rigid significance. It is an expression that has no fluidity. It is as a dry rut into which slips the pen of the writer in careless-or uninspired moments,- a piece of common property, the same to all men and at all times. It is therefore literally " abstract,'" foreign to art of any description, and the cause of intellectual death, either in the phrase itself or to the matter with which it is, brought into contact. (p. 247)

The literary cliche is dishonest; it is pretentious, representing no more than lip-homage; it is a sort of cant-phraseology; and it weakens its great original source. It is seldom used by men who, writing thoughtfully and with care, have lived the life they write about or have leamt to understand art. (p. 248)

Not only are words and phrases dried up into platitude, but also ideas, thoughts, artistic moods, figures and illustrations, and even subjects. (p. 249)

Often the literary platitude is false at root. The every day phrases "old Papa Haydn," "old Bach," "old Pepys," "quaint old Sir Thomas Browne," and the like, are as false as would be the impossible phrases "old Shakepeare," "old Schubert," and "old Mozart "; because old Haydn wrote only a small part of his music, Bach produced his most characteristic and vital music long before he reached the age at which Shakespeare retired, Pepys ended his diary at the age at which Mozart died, and Thomas Browne wrote the " Religio Medici " when he was at the most twenty-nine. These phrases are invented in ignorance and used in indolence. Yet they remain in our literature and journalism,* their equivalents form the foundation of our teaching of musical theory, and few musical critics seem able to avoid them. (p. 249)

May I quote a passage from Mark Rutherford?

". . . he maintained that the principal reason why people are so uninteresting is not that they have nothing to say. It is rather that they will not face, the labour of saying in their own tongue what they have to say, but cover it up and conceal it in commonplace, so that we get, not what they themselves behold and what they think, but a hieroglyphic or symbol invented as the representative of a certain class of objects or emotions, and as inefficient to represent a particular object or emotion as x " or " y " to set forth the relation of Hamlet to Ophelia."

[NB This fictional description of a political writer with no particularly strongly-held political or religious views of his own, comes from Mark Rutherford's Deliverance, a piece of 'autobiografiction'.

Clichés
Author(s): Sydney Grew
Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Jul., 1920), pp. 247-255
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/725913

(Sydney Grew, author of Our Favorite Musicians; Favourite Musical Performers; and The Art of the Player-Piano.)

21a.

On Elgar, and more generally the reduction of complex human beings into a pat dismissive phrase.

" Osbert Sitwell contrasted the old guard with the new, noting that "partisans" of Elgar's music were themselves tottering toward dissolution [...]

"Sitwell's opinions [of Elgar], which were shared by many of the postwar avant-garde and have been echoed since, illumine a series of tropes that have ossified into stereotypes, reducing the complexity of a multifaceted period surrounding the interwar consolidation of British modernism."

Other tropes can easily be inserted into this musicological bouillabaisse. (p. 10)

Edward Elgar: "Modern" or "Modernist?" Construction of an Aesthetic Identity in the British Music Press, 1895-1934
Author(s): Charles Edward McGuire
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 91, No. 1/2, British Modernism (Spring - Summer, 2008), pp. 8-38
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20534522

22.

"1932 hat Blume seine Opposition gegen das traditionelle Bild des Musikers Haydn so ausgedrückt: "Dieses Bild griindlich zu zerstören, ist eine Aufgabe der heutigen Musikwissenschaft." Ich möchte die Bedeutung der vorliegenden kleinen Untersuchung nicht überschatzen, und ich fühle mich nicht berufen, in Fragen einer bildlichen Untersuchung als Autorität aufzutreten.
Aber ich wollte eine ähnliche Tendenz verfolgen. Ganz wie wenn von Haydns künstlerischer Entwicklung die Rede ist, halte ich es für richtig zu versuchen, von den all zu eingewurzelten Vorstellungen einmal abzusehen, und besonders den, wie mir scheint, recht deutlich erkennbaren Gegensitzen der Primairdarstellungen aus den füheren und spiteren Jahren nachzugehen.
Ich glaube, dass wir auch in dieser Weise mit dazu beitragen können, die Nachwirkungen des "Papa Haydn"-Klischees zu bekämpfen, damit wir Haydns Musik in ihrer Fülle und Originalität mit frischen und offenen Sinnen entgegen treten können."

In 1932 Friedrich Blume expressed his opposition to the traditional image of the musician Haydn as follows: "To destroy this image thoroughly, is a task of today's musicology. "I do not want to overestimate the importance of the present small investigation, and I do not feel called to act as an authority in questions of a visual examination. But I wanted to follow a similar trend. Just as when talking about Haydn's artistic development, I think it is right to try to ignore the all-too-entrenched ideas, and especially what I think is the clearly recognizable contrasts of the primary representations from the past and later years. I believe that in this way we can also help to combat the aftermath of the "Papa Haydn" cliché so that we can counter Haydn's music in its fullness and originality with fresh and open senses. (Translation by MinorProphet (talk))

Zur Frage der Porträtähnlichkeit der Haydn-Bildnisse
Author(s): J. P. Larsen
Source: Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 12, Fasc. 1/4 (1970), pp. 153-166
in German
Published by: Akadémiai Kiadó
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/901356

23. And this, again, especially

It may be strange that we should consider a revaluation of composers like Bach and Handel, Mozart and Haydn, whom we seem to know so well, and of whom we mostly have a traditional, established picture. But such traditional pictures may be misleading, even harmful, since they may tend to influence the approach to the composer's music - on the performer's part as well as the listener's. Above all they can characterize the composer and his work in too limited a way which may be regarded as universally valid. Such characterizations not only may be misleading, but also are used indiscriminately in the approach to works of varying natures. Of all these general characterizations the most misleading is certainly the notorious 'Papa Haydn': it has probably done more than anything else to impede the understanding of Haydn's music. (p. 163)

He was largely treated as 'Papa Haydn' until Wyzewa, in 1909, rightly drew attention to a remarkably different, expressive spell in his development around 1770. (p. 165)

This short survey should make it clear that neither the 'Papa Haydn' cliché nor any other similar designation will suffice to give an impression of Haydn's personality as a composer. (p. 166)

Joseph Haydn Born 31 March 1732 * Died 31 May 1809. Haydn: Repertory, Interpretation, Image
Author(s): Jens Peter Larsen
Source: The Musical Times, Vol. 123, No. 1669 (Mar., 1982), pp. 163+165-166
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/961850

24.

But the myth of "Papa Haydn," who could not speak any foreign language, who did not read literature, in short who did not have a general education to speak of, has been destroyed once and for all by Herbert Zeman, Georg Feder, David Schroeder, James Webster, Sisman and others.[28]

[28.] Georg Feder, "Joseph Haydn als Mensch und Musiker" in Joseph Haydn und seine Zeit, Jahrbuch fur Osterreichische Kulturgeschichte 2 (Eisenstadt, 1972); Herbert Zeman, ed., Joseph Haydn und die Literatur seiner Zeit, Jahrbuch fur Osterreichische Kulturgeschichte 6 (1976), and especially Maria Horwarthner's 'Joseph Haydns Bibliothek—Versuch einer literarhistorischen Rekonstruktion," pp. 157-207 [translat- ed in this volume]; Schroeder, Haydn and the Enlightenment-, Webster, Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony, Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation.

Chapter Title: Haydn as Orator: A Rhetorical Analysis of his Keyboard Sonata in D Major, HOB.XVI:42 
Chapter Author: Ton Beghin
Book Title: Haydn and His World 
Book Editor(s): Elaine Sisman 
Published by: Princeton University Press 
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt7rqdr.9

25.

A specific genre of musical fiction seems to have grown up around Beethoven's last symphony, invoking Haydn:

Haydn is frequently invoked in fictional accounts of the symphony’s genesis, as we shall see below, but there he appears as “Papa Haydn,” clearly in the role not of professional precursor but of spiritual guide and mentor. (p. 16)

Somewhat in this same vein, the Ninth gave rise to an apparently uniquefictional genre, a collection of originary myths focusing on that work itself. What is remarkable about these stories—apart from the fact that they were written for adult readers and published in journals specific to the musically literate—is their reliance upon fictions of divine intervention to explain the genesis of the symphony. In one, Beethoven is visited in his room by a procession of “good and evil spirits,” at one extreme Satan, who offers to aid in the composition for his usual fee—Beethoven marks crosses in his manuscript to ward him off—and at the other a benign father who “bears a remarkable resemblance to papa Haydn” and does finally prove helpful.[57] Another (also featuring Haydn prominently) hangs upon Beethoven’s temptation to the sin of despair and his rescue by the brief, miraculous restoration of his hearing; as the sounds of spring momentarily surround him, a shepherd’s pipe plays the chorale “Freu’ dich sehr,” and the idea for the great symphony is born.[58] (pp. 26-27)

[57.] “Die ‘Neunte Sinfonie’ von Beethoven: eine phantastische Definition,” Neue Musik-Zeitung 6 (1885): 105.

[58.] “Die Neunte: eine Phantasie.” Deutsche Musiker-Zeitung 20 (1889): 35–63, 47–48. This story appeared in a separate “women’s section” of the journal, a regular feature titled Mildwide: Für die Frauen, durch die Frauen. Tusa observes that this chorale tune was frequently mentioned as a source or reference for the “Ode to Joy” melody (“Noch einmal,” 116).

Chapter Title: Beethoven as Secular Humanist: Ideology and the Ninth Symphony in Nineteenth-Century Criticism 
Book Title: Music in Other Words 
Book Subtitle: Victorian Conversations 
Book Author(s): RUTH A. SOLIE 
Published by: University of California Press 
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pp6qz.4

26.

Beyond this, Webster's study is a major contribution to research on Haydn's character and ought to make it easier for us to rid ourselves once and for all of the 'Papa Haydn' myth and the personal - and musical connotations that lie behind it. (p. 462)

Journal Article
Review: Beethoven, 1...
Reviewed Work: Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes by L. Lockwood, P. Benjamin
Review by: William Drabkin
The Musical Times
Vol. 126, No. 1710 (Aug., 1985), pp. 462-463 (2 pages)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/964311 

27.

Papa Haydn; ein Jugendbuch über Joseph Haydn. 
Authors: Hinderks-Kutscher, Retraut. 
(Franckhs Musiker-Biographien fur junge Menschen.) 
Stuttgart: Franckh'sche Verlagshandlung, [1957]. 
[173, (1) p., illus., 12mo]

cited in:

Other Publications
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Mar., 1958), pp. 220-244
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/893099

28.

More musical clichés:

"In general, there is a querulous in Mr. Barzun's criticism of Berlioz's critics, an extreme over-sensitiveness, though he has been so close to his hero, has so identified himself with him, that he has lost sight of the universality misconceptions about men of genius. the wild, temperamental, Romantic Berlioz a more distorted figure than the Papa Haydn who provided musical entertainments for the nobility, the infant prodigy Mozart who was dandled on the lap of Marie Antoinette, the libertine Schubert who scribbled pretty songs on the backs of menus, the pedant Bach who begot fugues and offspring with equal austerity? And is not this gallery even now being enlarged with caricatures of Hindemith the sewing-machine contrapuntist, Schoenberg the slide-rule formalist, and Stravinsky the retrogressive classicist?

Review
Reviewed Work(s): Berlioz and the Romantic Century by Jacques Barzun
Review by: Lawrence Morton
Source: Notes, Second Series, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Sep., 1950), pp. 562-564
Published by: Music Library Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/889793

29.

The image we have of Haydn, perpetuated by such platitudes as "Father of the S or SQ" and "Papa Haydn" is particularly outmoded. Only in the last 40 years have these condescending appellations begun to be challenged by eg Larsen, Botstein, Webster, Sisman et al. Part of the difficulty is that H wrote so much - even the acknowledged experts such as Hoboken and Robbins Landon were dismayed by the enormity of the task of even listing and describing each work. REF PLS More and more documentary evidence has appeared since the 1950s: for example: (MinorProphet (talk))

"The premium that early Romantics such as Jean Paul and Wackenroder placed on instrumental music, similar to the approach to the instrumental music of Beethoven evident in E.T. A. Hoffmann, was based on a normative expectation of what the impact of music ideally ought to be. (p. 255)

Although "music as experience" retained its prestige with particular composers and sectors of the public, later in the century the emphasis shifted to an allegiance to music as text, to the printed score, which became analogous to a book that might be sampled, read, studied, and returned to at will. The character of this approach to music demanded of the listener and amateur a self-conscious awareness of history, tradition, and precedent. An attitude towards music as a mirror of the historical moment, representative of the generation of Eduard Hanslick and Johannes Brahms, was not uppermost in the early Romantic enthusiasm for music.

Despite such shifts in fundamental expectations and norms of reception over the nineteenth century, the critical response to Haydn's music—whether understood as a performed event or as a text to be studied and re-read—did not change. The significant disputes during the nineteenth century involving musical taste and culture altered the view of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, but not the understanding of Haydn. In the case of no other major composer was there as little evolution, so much consistency, so little genuine shift in aesthetic judgment and response. And until quite recently, this static and recalcitrant nineteenth-century perception seemed to have left an indelible mark on twentieth-century assessments of Haydn as well. (p. 255-6)

Aha! ETA Hoffmann, Schumann, and Hanslick are to blame:

"In comments made in 1839, Schumann hailed "Altvater" Haydn as welcome relief from "this chronically diseased era of music," in which one only rarely could be "inwardly satisfied." Haydn, whose music offered satisfaction because of its conservative integrity, provided relief from a painful awareness of inadequacy by being "clear as sunlight . . . bereft of any sense of ennui with life, and inspiring nothing except for joy, love of life, and a childlike happiness about everything. . ." (p. 258)"

Review by Hanslick of a concert:

"One began as usual with Haydn, the father of the quartet, a praiseworthy custom, so long as one does not neglect the sons in relation to the father. The representation of the old master with two works in a cycle of six evenings is entirely sufficient." [...] "It is revealing that one always refers to "a Haydn quartet" whereas one is precise with regard to the specific work one is talking about in the case of Beethoven. It is important for the hearer of Beethoven which of the series of Beethoven quartets he wishes to hear, because they are all distinctly individual, which is not the case with Haydn. (p. 259)

Nonetheless, for both pro- and anti-Wagnerians, the underlying expectation remained the same: music was supposed to be capable of inspiring and commanding the interior of one's soul, and Haydn's music failed to do so, whereas Bach's and Mozart's, not to speak of Beethoven's, did. (p. 261)

Haydn as a "personality" in the nineteeth-century sense was nowhere to be found: he had transcended the mundane and the purely human by writing himself out of his own music. He invented music as a formal, abstract enterprise—without however developing its capacity to be profound and therefore transcend conventional morality. Neither Wagnerians nor anti-Wagnerians seemed to need to delve beyond this position. (p. 262)

This late-nineteenth-century consensus regarding Haydn seemed so all-pervasive that it motivated Hermann Kretzschmar to weigh in with a long dissent about the composer's profundity and emotional depth. In the introduction to his discussion of the Haydn symphonies in his classic guide to the concert repertoire, Führer durch den Konzertsaal, he took issue with the conventional view. "An astonishingly large number of music lovers and musicians, including names possessed of the most celebrated reputations, believe that they can honor 'Papa' Haydn with a mixture of condescension by considering him 'genial' and 'childlike'. . ."

To understand Haydn, Kretzschmar believed, one had to concentrate on how he transformed the mundane and rendered his material majestic and mythic. In Kretzschmar's view, Haydn should be compared to Aeschylus and Sophocles. Like the great Greek tragedians, he transformed the simple into the profound. Indeed, Kretzschmar's association of Haydn with Aeschylus and Sophocles was a rare perception. (pp 262-3)

Why, then, did the nineteenth century consistently define Haydn's compositional mastery in terms of simplicity, humor, cheerfulness, geniality, folksiness, order—all implying an absence of passion and a lack of emotional, narrative, and psychic relevance? (p. 265)

The cultural conservatives of the 1840s and 1850s failed to realize that in rescuing the formal part of the eighteenth-century musical tradition, they were abandoning the philosophical ambitions from which it had sprung. In order to rethink Haydn, the stubborn veneer of nineteenth-century habits of reception, which have extended well into this century, must be dissolved and scraped away. When we try to understand Haydn from the perspective of the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth, we rapidly realize that Haydn's music carried for its listeners and contemporaries gravity, philosophical depth, passion, and complex beauty. His formal achievements, celebrated as such by nineteenth-century criticism, engendered in his own lifetime precisely that emotionally intense response later enerations considered somehow missing.[59] And this means, of course, that formal achievements—as Haydn himself did not fail to point out—were never only what Haydn was about. (p. 281)

Chapter Title: The Demise of Philosophical Listening: Haydn in the 19th Century 
Chapter Author(s): Leon Botstein
Book Title: Haydn and His World 
Book Editor(s): Elaine Sisman 
Published by: Princeton University Press 
1997
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctt7rqdr.10

30.

It is equally absurd to be always talking of "Papa" Haydn, as if from the first he had played the part of a father in the classical movement. On the contrary, he was, as I have said, a seeker, an experimenter, who had still to clarify his own position and attain the culmination of his own creative powers.

Haydn and the Viennese Classical School
Author(s): Guido Adler and  W. Oliver Strunk
Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1932), pp. 191-207
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/738732

31.

Cadences are successions of chords so chosen and arranged that a key appears to be set off from those it most resembles, and that its fundamental tone is significantly strengthened by being placed at the end. But if the cadence were really a definite means to establish a key, we would not find, in the midst of a piece of music, cadences to various keys or degrees, the so-called modulations. And the classicists would not have been obliged to add many such cadences together if their feeling for form had not indicated that a key is not definitely established through a cadence. Therefore the familiar endings, consisting of a number of cadences of various combinations are often further extended through repeated successions of V-I, and concluding in several repetitions of I. Thus "the last prevails," a method of procedure which Wagner, as is known, ironically characterized as grandfatherly in "Papa Haydn." NB Where does he say this? But unjustly so; for Haydn knew how difficult it is to set up a key definitely and how necessary such persistent emphasis was for apperception by his audience. (p. 9)

Problems of Harmony
Author(s): Arnold Schönberg tr. Adolph Weiss
Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1973), pp. 3-23
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/832310

32.

Aha! Hanslick was a fan of Berlioz, who hated Haydn (p. 46) (See above no. 6.)

Proksch says that Hanslick mostly just reiterated old ideas about H's "childlike simplicity". "neatly framed glimpse into how Haydn's music was revered to the point of irrelelevance (p. 46)

Hanslick reviewing a concert: "One began as usual with Haydn, the father of the quartet, a praiseworthy custom, so long as one does not neglect the sons in relation to the father."(p. 46)

"The fundamental paradox with which Hanslick grappled was the idea that H. was a necessary part of the Vienniese tradition whose music sounded so different that it was impossible to include him as a part of that tradition. The end result was that Hanslick set H. apart in music history using the idea of a "Haydn era" (Haydn'schen Periode). This "Haydn era" is clearly a historical locale with a popullation of one." (LOL) (p. 47)

"However, it is telling that later writers [than Pohl] more consistently chose to go back to the earliest biographers of H. - the quasi-interviews by Griesinger and Dies - when searching for a quotation, relating the more human side of the person, or attempting to discern the inner workings of the mind." (p. 59)

Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century
Volume 124 of Eastman studies in music, ISSN 1071-9989
Author	Bryan Proksch
Publisher	Boydell & Brewer, 2015
9781580465120

"Papa Haydn". It's like a nervous tic: everyone says it, everyone has to say it, it's an inescapable 'truism': but as Symphony No. 7 (Beethoven) shows, Weber never said that "Beethoven was ripe for the madhouse", it was an invention by Schindler. Same for "Papa Haydn" - I suggest no serious informed musician ever said and meant it. In the end, this endlessly clichéd phrase simply infantilises any significant approach towards a mature appreciation of one of the more profound and dedicated musicians who ever lived. Anyone for tennis? MinorProphet (talk) 03:40, 2 August 2023 (UTC)