RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 8 0 Y R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R The recording industry has created and met numerous goals over the past century: setting down Richard Wagner’s complete Der Ring des Nibelungen, all the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, all the cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach. Much of this was enabled and driven by the emergence of the long-playing record (LP) in 1948, which created a huge need for product to fill those longer sides. Another goal was recording the complete 106 canonical symphonies of Joseph Haydn, partly because of their excellence and variety, partly because they were just there. Fortuitously, the rise of the LP coincided with the postwar growth of serious investigation into and publication of accurate scores of these pieces. Unsurprisingly , the issuing of LPs of Haydn followed the changing market fortunes of the LP and later the compact disc (CD), particularly after the commercial emergence of stereo recording just before 1960. Many of these recordings have come and gone, but most are recently available again on CDs from two kinds of source: smaller reissue houses that provide such music as backups to regrettably vanished or worn LPs, and the recording industry itself through its twenty-first-century obsession with re-releasing its older re- 1 8 1 R cordings in massive boxes at bargain prices. New Haydn symphony series have started appearing since 2000, but the older ones continue to return in these formats, usually with minimal or no notes. Joseph Haydn’s symphonies more than justify the attention. They were written over four decades, from 1757 to 1796, and they eventually made Haydn the leading symphony composer of the eighteenth century. He was born in Rohrau, Austria, not far southeast of Vienna. He and his younger brother, Michael, trained at St. Stephen’s in Vienna, although he was thrown out early for playing a practical joke. At twenty-five he entered the service of Count Ferdinand Morzin, where he wrote his first seventeen or so symphonies . When Morzin dissolved his musical group in 1761, Haydn was recommended to the musical Prince Anton Esterházy, in whose household he was assistant to the conservative Kapellmeister Gregor Werner. Less than a year later, Prince Anton died and his brother Nikolaus assumed the title. If Anton loved music, Nikolaus adored it, and he realized what a treasure he had in Haydn. When Werner retired in 1765, Haydn became full Kapellmeister . He essentially had an audience of one, Prince Nikolaus , and the prince was open to progressive musical changes that Werner would never have tolerated, something Haydn exploited fully. Nikolaus was extraordinarily wealthy and thus also able to indulge his other mania, building. His late brother had expanded and modernized Schloss Eisenstadt, southeast of Vienna; in 1766 Nikolaus began converting a hunting lodge of his father’s into Schloss Esterháza, farther southeast across the Neusiedler See from Eisenstadt in what today is Hungary. This was very much grander than Eisenstadt, and it would be Haydn’s home for many years. (There was also an Esterházy residence in Vienna, for the winter season.) In 1768 the prince built an opera house at Esterh áza, and in 1773 he added a marionette theater, in which operas could be performed by puppets. Haydn wrote operas for both, as well as symphonies, string quartets, and other music. By 1776 opera had become the prince’s consuming mania, and the opera season, which Haydn managed, expanded. Unfortunately , in that year the opera house burned, but this allowed the prince to build an even larger one, completed only in 1781. By 1780 1 8 2 F A U L K N E R Y the season already consisted of 93 performances of eight operas, four of them new; six years later the season ran for eleven months, mounted seventeen operas, nine of them new, in 125 performances . Unsurprisingly, Haydn’s symphonic production dropped o√ during this period. But Haydn’s situation had otherwise improved. In a new contract dated 1779 he was allowed to write music for...