HAYDN: Symphony No. 94 in G major, "Surprise"
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31 or April 1, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He wrote this symphony in 1791 and led its first performance in London on March 23, 1792. The date and place of the first performance in this country are not known. Alfred Hertz led the first San Francisco Symphony performances, in January 1925, and since then the work has been played here under the direction of Enrique Jordá, Sir Thomas Beecham, Josef Krips, Alexander Schneider, Christopher Hogwood, and most recently, in March 1992, Günther Herbig. The score calls for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two horns, two trumpets, and timpani.
The story is familiar—the death of the seventy-six-year-old Prince Nicholas Esterházy in September 1790, the disbanding of most of the musical household by his son, the pension granted to Haydn and the continuance of the Capellmeister title as a sinecure, the composer’s delight at his newfound liberty, his removal to Vienna, the appearance one December morning of a stranger who announced, “I am Salomon from London and I have come to fetch you.”
Johann Peter Salomon, born 1745 in Bonn, an admirer of Haydn’s since the 1770s, had settled in London in 1781 and was active and successful there as violinist and impresario. He happened to be on the continent when he heard of Esterházy’s death and he lost no time in setting out for Vienna, where he made Haydn a splendid offer—£1,000 for an opera, six symphonies, and some miscellaneous pieces, plus a £200 guarantee for a benefit concert. That story, too, is a familiar one—the farewell with Mozart at which both shed tears, the rough crossing from Calais to Dover (“But I fought it all off and came ashore without—excuse me—actually being sick,” he wrote to his friend Marianne von Genzinger), the stunning success of his London concerts and the symphonies 93-98, the honorary degree from Oxford, the gentle love affair with Mrs. Rebecca Schroeter, the news of Mozart’s death, the return to Vienna in 1792. And in 1794-95 there was a second, equally triumphant stay in England.
The Surprise Symphony, one of the first London lot, became instantly and vastly popular. Credit for the invention of the nickname was claimed by Andrew Ashe, a flutist in Salomon’s orchestra, who wrote into his own copy that “my valued friend Haydn thank’d me for giving it such an appropriate Name.” Much ink was devoted in the early years to the issue of the surprise, biographers and memoirists squabbling irritably about what Haydn had said to whom and what nonsense the other fellow’s anecdotes must be. Did he, in planting the bang that delights us long after it can surprise, say, “This will make the women jump?” Was he thinking of the elderly gentleman he had noticed at the concerts and who unfailingly went to sleep the moment the music began? Sleepers do actually seem to have been a problem as Londoners staggered from their heavy dinners—plenty of sherry before, hock and Burgundy during, and port afterwards—into the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, and Haydn specified that his new symphonies were to be placed at the beginning of the program’s second half.
The prize for the prettiest exegesis goes to the critic of The Oracle, who wrote after the first performance that “the surprise might not be unaptly likened to the situation of a beautiful Shepherdess who, lulled to slumber by the murmur of a distant Waterfall, starts alarmed by the unexpected firing of a fowling-piece.” Finally, we should note that the surprise was an afterthought: Haydn’s original manuscript page still exists, the repeat literal and indicated by the customary combination of colon and double-bar.
Donald Tovey pinpointed “dramatic surprise at the moment” as the essence of Haydn’s symphonic procedure. This symphony is full of surprises of every kind. The very beginning, a soft cantabile of woodwinds unpreceded by any sort of formal call to attention, is absolutely original. Strings continue the phrase—another surprise: One doesn’t expect a change of color so soon—and when the dialogue offers to repeat itself, the strings let it be known that they have things to say too serious, too dark, too mysterious for flutes and oboes and bassoons. After this, the way the fast part of the movement starts is another surprise still—piquantly off-center in its harmony, a bit ambiguous too about which beats are up and which down. This is altogether one of Haydn’s most liberated symphonic movements, a brilliant play of long-range strategy and colorful detail, ablaze with energy, quickened by humor.
We have to make an effort to realize that once upon a time the tune of the Andante did not exist. Nine years or so after writing it, Haydn quoted it in the song in The Seasons that describes the farmer whistling as he follows his plough. Haydn’s patron and librettist, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, was annoyed. He wanted a quotation from one of the popular operas of the day, and Haydn had indignantly to set him straight: His tune was as popular (in both senses) as anything in any opera. In the symphony, Haydn offers a set of variations on the tune, variations exquisitely tactful in their simplicity, breathtaking in their inventiveness. Pathos is rare in Haydn, and the more piercing therefore when it does occur. Hardly anything in a Classical symphony is more touching than Haydn’s half-minute of closing music—the nursery song now heard through a veil of harmonies more mysterious than any we have experienced since the introduction, the lowest notes of horns and a soft drumroll casting their shadows, and with a single flute contributing its shy flecks of light. (One would like to imagine it was Mr. Ashe, but I fear not, for he more often played second flute.)
What follows is a minuet in name only. Haydn specifies a very quick tempo, and the first phrase is accompanied by the unmistakable oom-pah-pah of something far more rustic than a minuet. The finale is Haydnesque comedy at its richest. It even has a fine fortissimo surprise of its own, one obscured by many generations of corrupt editions that tamed Haydn’s exuberant explosion into a decorous crescendo.
—Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in July, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.
More About the Music
Recordings Adam Fischer and the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra (Nimbus) | George Szell Cleveland Orchestra (Sony Essential Classics) | Colin Davis and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Philips Duo)
Reading Haydn: His Life and Works, by H.C. Robbins Landon and David Wyn Jones (Indiana University Press) | Haydn (Oxford Composers Companion), edited by David Wyn Jones (Oxford University Press) | The Music of Joseph Haydn: The Symphonies, by Antony Hodgson (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press)