Phonograph Monthly Review, Vol. 6, No. 6 (1932-03)

March 1932, Vol. VI, No. 6 105 The fourth and fifth, and especially the sixth, are remarkably fine works that should be far better known than they are. The Inter- national String Quartet and the Leners pro- vide performances that could hardly be bettered. Regrettably, the Flonzaleys were never re- corded in Haydn quartet (unless of course one is included among their unissued works). A casual hearing of many of these works will disclose all the familiar Haydnesque qualities of good humor, naivite, and spright- liness. But a more careful study will reveal much more. Haydn’s melodic and architect- ural construction is the work of a finished craftsman. Spontaneous as the flow may be, it is not the natural, uncultivated song of a musical peasant. A glimpse at a Haydn man- uscript will show with what care he wrote, re-wrote, deleted and added, until the eventual spontaneity was laboriously ac- quired. There may be nothing revolutionary in his use of the orchestra. He never rebels at the bounds which could hold Beethoven for so brief a period. But in the perfect balance of parts, the harmonious blending of tonal colors, the deft and delicate use of every instrument, one finds again the hand of the master craftsman. Looking deeper in- to his works than the surface, We can find a lyricism often comparable with Mozart’s, a lustiness comparable with that of no other music. There is ingenuity, but there is also restrained strength and sweep. And through it all there blows the sanest, most healthful air of all music. Haydn assuredly is not one of the poets of music, but he is just as assuredly one of its great masters of prose. His vitality and joie de vivre renders his music indomitable by age or development of idiom. It is rich in sentiment, honest and unashamed, spring- ing from the rich soil of Croatian folksongs, but the sickly cast of sentimentality never sulliest the delicate surface of this eternally virginal music. Brenet has found in the words of Heine, written of another genius, the finest insight into Haydn’s music: “. . . the serenest grace, an ingenious sweetness, a freshness like the perfume of the woods, a natural truthfulness . . . and even poetry. No, this last quality is not absent but it is poetry without the thrill of the infinite, without the charm of mystery, without bitterness, irony, or morbidity; I might almost say, the poetry of perfect health.” In our incredibly sensitized, decadent music and lives of today, Papa Haydn brings a glorious breath of the “poetry of perfect health.” One has a twinge of regret that music outgrew its innocency and childlike heart, that Beethoven should come after him to stir music with the storm of human pas- sions, that Wagner should fuse them into al- most unbearable white heat, that Strawinski should evoke from the past the fearsome echo of barbaric lust, even that Delius should “summon up remembrance of things past” in a nostalgic introspection that touches us too deeply, too intimately. Whatever may have been the passion and pessimism in Haydn’s own life, he brought to his art only joy. And since that childlike joyfulness is one to which we may never return, it is a staunch support of sanity and health in an all too insane today. Papa Haydn wears his wig and two hun- dred years as lightly as his smile, a smile that is never a grin, and never a grimace. A HAYDN DISCOGRAPHY (Words marked with an asterisk are acoustically recorded, and have not yet been replaced by electrical versions). Symphonies D minor, B. & H. No. 2 (“London”), cond. Barbirolli (Victor; N. G. S.) D minor, No. 4 (“Clock”), Toscanini (Vic- tor), Harty (Columbia). G major, No. 6 (“Surprise”), Koussevitzky (Victor), Blech (H. M. V.), etc. G major, No. 11 (“Military”), Kleiber (Vox) G major, No. 13, Krauss (Victor). G major, No. 16 (“Oxford”), Knapperts (Polydor). F sharp minor* No. 18 (“Farwell”), cond. unnamed (*Polydor). Toy Symphony, Weingartner (Columbia), Victor Concert Orch., etc. (Note: No. 13 is also known as No. 88 in the new B. & H. list, or as No. 8 in the Peters catalogue. The “London” and “Clock” symphonies are frequently listed in D major, instead of D minor.) Orchestral Works Overture in D, Heger—Vienna Philharmonic (European H. M. V.). Eighteenth Century Dance, Stokowski— Philadelphia Orch. (Victor). Concerto in D for ’cello and orchestra, Sug- gia, cond. Barbirolli (H. M. V.). —Adagio only, Hekking (Fr. Columbia), Bettermund (Polydor), Casals (Fr. Co- lumbia) . Theme and Variations in E flat, Victor orch. (Victor Educational Series). Quartets F major, Op. No. 5, Lener Quartet (*Colum- bia.)