Conductor's note

Classicism doesn't always have to be light-hearted

Two dark works by brothers Joseph & Michael Haydn

by Bart Van Reyn

Summer 1798. Joseph Haydn has yet to recover from the war of attrition that had been the composition process of Die Schöpfung. These were uncertain times: Napoleon had won four major battles against Austria that year, causing enormous tension and uncertainty and posing an increasing threat to peace in Europe.

Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy had already tightened his belt and sent his Feldharmonie of woodwinds down the lane, which presented Haydn with a challenge: compose a mass for an orchestra of only strings, organ, trumpets and timpani. The result became one of his most brilliant works, he called it Missa in Angustiis (mass in anxious times), in which he constantly uses the timpani and trumpets to weave the dark undertones of the threat of war throughout the work.

By the first performance, meanwhile, Napoleon had suffered a heavy defeat at the Nile, against Lord Nelson's Englishmen. The latter then came to visit the palace of Esterházy in 1800 It was there that he is said to have met Haydn, after conducting this powerful war mass, since popularly christened Nelsson Mass.

An equally dark work sounded at Joseph Haydn's funeral in 1809: a Requiem written by his younger brother Michael in 1771. The opening movement bears striking similarities to Mozart's Requiem, which should come as no surprise: Mozart must have heard it as a teenager in Salzburg, where he became a colleague of Michael Haydn a year later.

Haydn wrote the work in barely two weeks, after the death of their employer, the archbishop of Salzburg, but also mostly overcome by grief for his infant daughter who had died shortly before.