jun 1, 1795 - London Symphony

Description:

Just as the expectation that the two themes would contrast was primarily a later phenomenon, so too were descriptions of the overall shape of the mvoement (exp. dev. recap.) as a three-part form. These descriptions originated in textbooks written in the 1830s for use in conservatory courses at Paris and Berlin. For Haydn and his eighteenth-century audience, symphonic form was made intelligible through a tonal, not a thematic, contrast. The thematic requirement was not contrast, as it would later become, but rather its working out tonally.

It is also important to understand why Haydn's thematic efficiency came to command such authority. He gave the reason for it when he wrote of another composer's work in his diary that it darted from idea to idea, made nothing of the themes, and so one was left "with nothing in one's heart." Haydn's economy and logic of thematic development were valued not as a demonstration of technical virtuosity but as an intensifier--and a deepener--of feeling. Haydn created musical events and processes that indeed left one with something in one's heart.

When Haydn first took up the genre of symphony it was mainly a distinguished sort of party music. He left it a monumental genre that formed the cornerstone of a canon, a publicly recognized body of works deemed by lovers of art to have universal or defining value within their culture--a value no longer associated exclusively with a single social aristocratic class. In their public eloquence, Haydn's late sympnoies thus symbolized a gradual democratization of high art. In this way the former employee to a princely house became one of the emblematic figures of the Enlightenment.

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