2 - Haydn's sacred vocal music and the aesthetics of salvation

Summary

Now and then Haydn said that instead of so many quartets, sonatas and symphonies, he should have written more vocal music, for he could have become one of the leading opera composers.

Thus Haydn's biographer Georg August Griesinger transmitted the ageing composer's assessment of his œuvre – the only one of its kind that has come down to us. Although this sentiment appears in the middle of Griesinger's only sustained discussion of Haydn's ideas about his art, it has rarely been taken seriously. The reason is obvious enough: it radically conflicts with the traditional modern focus on the composer's instrumental output – ‘the father of the symphony’, the first great exponent of the string quartet, the master of wit and irony, the hero of ‘Classical style’–a focus that is maintained even in the most interesting recent new approaches to Haydn's music. Among his vocal works, only The Creation and The Seasons, a few Masses and the occasional ‘canzonet’ from the London years have enjoyed much resonance in modern musical life or scholarship; the rest–like his ‘early’ or ‘immature’ instrumental music–has been systematically marginalized.

Yet vocal music constitutes fully half of Haydn's œuvre. Admittedly, during the 1780s and the first half of the 1790s he composed relatively little vocal music (and hardly any sacred music) and his most familiar instrumental works originated precisely during these years. But this emphasis was atypical.