Konzerte für Orgel (Cembalo) und Orchester by Joseph Haydn (review)

With this volume, the Haydn-Institut continues its difficult and important work presenting the complete works of Joseph Haydn (Joseph Haydn Werke, hereafter: JHW). This series is rapidly becoming the gold standard in complete editions, particularly with its updated publication guidelines that require stemmatic analysis of sources in the absence of autographs (an unfortunately common problem with Haydn's works). It is lucky indeed that the organ concertos were neglected until now by the JHW, since there is hardly a collection that needs this up-to-date musicological method more than this repertoire. Together, the new volume contains six works: a pair of smaller concertos in C major (Hob. XVIII:5 and Hob. XVIII:8); a pair of largerscale concertos (Hob. XVIII:1 in C major and Hob. XVIII:2 in D major); the organ and violin concerto in F major (Hob.XVIII:6), and the Concertino in C major (Hob. XVIII:10) in an appendix.

Haydn's organ concertos occupy an odd niche. Lacking true bravura soloistic writing, they are rarely heard in the concert hall. Instead, the organ concertos represent a tradition of concerted music serving as an ornament to the Catholic liturgy in Austria, Southern Germany, and Italy, and they are just as rarely heard today in this sacred environment. These concertos are puzzling, even maddening, because they raise so many questions. What was the intended solo instrument: organ, harpsichord, piano—or does it even matter? To what extent was the soloist supposed to dominate the ensemble, since the solo part is so often intertwined with the orchestra? What exactly were the accompanying forces, and were instruments outside the "Viennese church trio" included? Why do some of the copies diverge so much from each other? Is the soloist supposed to play continuo during the tutti passages, and if so, what should be played? And of course, since we are dealing with Haydn, we must ask if the attributions are even authentic.

This edition brings together for the first time all the sources and copies for each concerto, which finally allows these questions to be satisfactorily addressed, if not always answered. It is the result of decades of intense scrutiny of the source material, and absent a discovery of further autographs, I expect that it will represent the final word on the state of this repertoire. As an entry in the JHW, it has certain natural limitations as a text for performance, but as a critical edition, it is truly outstanding.

Interest in Haydn's organ concertos grew after Georg Feder reexamined the keyboard concertos in the Hob. XVIII series and realized that some of them must have been originally written for organ. Besides finding important instrumentation information found in Haydn's Entwurf-Katalog, he noted that the organ in Southern Germany and Austria had a very specific range and a short octave, and this allowed him to positively identify some concertos as originally composed for organ, since they rather consciously avoided those notes not found on the organ's keyboard. After Feder's article, however, only three new editions of any of the organ concertos have appeared, each with different editorial teams (in their review of modern editions, the editors of the present volume omitted Paul Tegel's 1997 doctoral essay that created a performance edition of Hob. XVIII:2). The present new edition provided the Haydn-Institut with an opportunity to collect all the source material, reexamine the repertoire as an integral unit, and apply clear musicological and editorial standards to each concerto.

The inability of previous researchers to compare all the different copies meant that they were unable to rank the usefulness of each copy. This problem has been decisively solved by the JHW and with this new edition, we finally have a stemmatic assessment of the sources of each concerto...