IN the bestselling US book Tuesdays with Morrie, the narrator gets intellectual and spiritual sustenance from a somewhat unlikely source – a weekly hospital visit to a dying friend. Though I haven't read that book, its title came into my head in connection with a musical endeavour which has just got under way in Dublin.
The Orchestra of St Cecilia has just embarked on a performance of the complete symphonies of Haydn. It has never been done in Ireland before. It will take years. In the current financial climate it’s not just an unlikely undertaking; it borders on the unhinged. But thank goodness for unhingement: for imagine the delight, the enchantment, the sheer smile-inducing joy of spending Sundays with Haydn.
The man responsible for this musical treat is Lindsay Armstrong, the orchestra’s artistic director. What put such an ambitious wheeze into his head? “Well, we’ve just done all the Bach cantatas,” he says, breezily. “So we were looking around for another big project.” There are 200 Bach cantatas – a matter of 60 gigs spread over 10 years – so perhaps the 100-plus symphonies of Haydn looked modest by comparison. It didn’t seem all that modest to conductor Prionnsias Ó Duinn, mind you.
“Lindsay phoned me up and said, ‘Listen – I want to do all the symphonies of Haydn’. I said, ‘You’re kidding. All 104 of them?’ He said, ‘No. All 108’.”
It turns out that when Haydn’s works were recatalogued, a few extra symphonies turned up in drawers and under tables and wherever else missing symphonies get to. Which didn’t deter Armstrong in the slightest. “When I found out that there were 108, that was the magic number,” he says. “Because it divides beautifully by three. Three into 108 is 36; six concerts into 36 goes six; so it’s going to take us six years. Which is perfect.” All this number-crunching would doubtless have amused Papa Haydn, whose sense of humour was legendary. As Ó Duinn points out, the music is embued with joy and fun, bubbling away just under the surface all the time. But there’s more to Haydn than jolly capers. “He was employed at Eszterháza, a huge palace way out in the Austrian countryside. And he had to sign a contract – a very strict contract. He could not appear anywhere in the building without his powdered wig and white stockings. At the time he signed, he was already one of the most recognised composers in Austria. So you have to ask, why would he sign a contract like that? And the answer is, it was a permanent job. Which resonates very much in our psyche today.” He also, of course, had an orchestra at his disposal. And boy, did he put it to good use.
"Haydn is known as the father of the symphony, not because he invented the form, but because of the quantity and quality of the music he wrote in that idiom, and the way he developed it," says Ó Duinn. "His first symphonies are like the ones he would have heard as a young man, mostly by the Bach family. But he's pushing out the boat all the time, in style and in duration. By the last lot, he's showing Beethoven and Schubert the way forward. And the way we're programming it, with an early, a middle and a late-period symphony at every concert, shows that development very clearly." The composer was also forward-thinking in other ways. "The Farewellsymphony is the first time musicians really went on strike," says Lindsay Armstrong. The work's final movement is constructed in such a way that the orchestra gets smaller and smaller – and at the first performance, as each musician finished, they slipped quietly off stage, leaving Prince Eszterhazy looking at an empty auditorium.
“The prince got the hint, and the musicians got more money without there being a revolution or people getting shot,” says Armstrong.
The Farewellis, along with the Clockand the Toy, among the more familiar of Haydn's symphonies. But Ó Duinn confesses to a fondness for the less well-known works, some of which have rarely – if ever – been performed in Ireland.
“Haydn was also the father of the string quartet, and in the early symphonies particularly, you’ll find his love of the string quartet coming through. I frequently reduce to a quartet for the minuets and trios, which makes it very intimate. A real chamber music approach.”
Just to recap, then. Sundays with Haydn. Three very different works in an hour. A brief introduction by Ó Duinn which sets the musical scene each time. Oh, and there’s the venue. Newman University Church on St Stephen’s Green: a little bit of Byzantium in the heart of Dublin. Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman was, by all accounts, a fine violinist who had an affinity for the music of Haydn. “There’s a letter he wrote to his sister,” says Ó Duinn. “He had just come back from a performance of Haydn’s first symphony – and he apologised to his sister for the incoherent letter. He said, ‘The first symphony of Haydn is really echoing in my ears and distracts my attention by its beauties’.”
As this series proceeds there will, no doubt, be plenty of people wandering around St Stephen’s Green in exactly that state. If you hurry, you can get in on the act as well. There are three more Sundays left in this year’s series of Haydn concerts: tomorrow and February 20th, and March 6th and 13th. You can book by e-mail on orchsc@eircom.net, or by phone at 01-4126134. It’s a wonderful way to spend a Sunday afternoon. It might even put a smile on your face. And heaven knows, we could all do with one.