Kantaten mit Orchester fur das Furstenhaus Esterhazy, and: Arien und Szenen mit Orchester, 1. Folge, and: Volksliedbearbeitungen Nr. 101-150: Schottische Lieder fur William Napier (review)

Joseph Haydn's contributions to music are mainly acknowledged in the instrumental genres, specifically his role as the "father" of the symphony and string quartet and his elevation of these genres to central positions in Western art music. Arguably, this appellation could expand to cover Haydn's keyboard sonatas and piano trios as well. Such hyperbole is not so easily applied to the composer's vocal works, however, which have, with the exception of the Masses and the two late oratorios, taken a secondary or tertiary place within Haydn's oeuvre and within the history of their genres. The repertory in the three recently published volumes of the Joseph Haydn Werke here under review can be counted among the least familiar of Haydn's vocal output: the Italian cantatas with orchestra composed in the 1760s for particular occasions within the Esterházy princely house; a series of insertion and substitute arias for Haydn's adaptations and enhancements of operas for performance by the Eszterháza opera troupe; and a group of Scottish folk song arrangements published by William Napier in 1795. These volumes also embrace a wide spectrum of contexts and requirements, ranging from virtuoso professionals in the princely chamber and theater to rank amateurs of minimal technical accomplishments performing in drawing rooms.

In the mid-1760s, Haydn began to keep a record of his output in the so-called Entwurf-Katalog (draft catalog; facsim. reprod. published in Jens Peter Larsen, Three Haydn Catalogues = Drei Haydn Kataloge: Second Facsimile Edition with a Survey of Haydn's Oeuvre, Thematic Catalogues Series, 4 [New York: Pendragon Press, 1979]). As originally planned, this catalog was to be a highly organized affair arranged by genre, with each page containing incipits in the right-hand column and their designations written in the left. Apparently Haydn had not anticipated the extent of his output, and eventually he began to squeeze entries (both with and without incipits) into the left-hand column, often to the point that it becomes difficult to decipher which notations belong together. Haydn further complicated these entries by emending them in later years. Such is the situation with regard to the Italian cantatas of the 1760s. On pages 17 and 18 of the Entwurf-Katalog, six of these works are listed in the left column under the generic rubric Coro, with incipits and titles for the first three, an incipit for the fourth, and only the designations "quinto" and "Coro 6^to " for the final two works. As Heinrich Christoph Koch attests, "coro" is certainly one of the most encompassing of designations in use at the time (Musikalisches Lexikon [Frankfurt am Main: August Hermann dem Jüngern, 1802; facsim. reprint, ed. Nicole Schwindt, Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001], cols...