Franz Joseph Haydn
Concerto for Oboe & Orchestra
in C major
Franz Joseph Haydn was born
in Rohrau, Austria in 1732 and died in Vienna in 1809. Haydn almost certainly
did not compose this concerto; see below. The score calls for solo oboe,
2 flutes, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings. Duration is approximately
23 minutes.
*****
Franz Joseph Haydn’s brother Michael
was also a fine composer, but did you know that Haydn had three other composer-brothers
as well? Their names were Dubious, Spurious, and Doubtful. These unknown
Haydn brothers were as industrious as their more famous namesake, responsible
for dozens of concertos, scores of masses, several operas, and more than
a hundred symphonies. All suffered the indignity of having their work attributed
to Franz Joseph before the rightful authors could be sorted out.
The explanation is simple. Music
publishers were desperate for works by the superstar Haydn, and some of
the more unscrupulous ones—well, nearly all of them, actually—were not
above attaching Haydn’s name to works by lesser composers in order to
sell those works at a much higher price. The result was a mountain of works
falsely attributed to Haydn and full-time employment for music scholar.
Dealing with the symphonies was
easy: the real Haydn wrote over a hundred of them, and why bother with
more? But the concertos were different, for Haydn composed very, very few
concertos—we only have a handful of them. Everyone would like to have
more Haydn concertos, so the scholarship applied to ferreting out the spurious
ones has been less, ah, rigorous.
The task of authenticating a doubtful
score is sometimes relatively easy, such as when a concerto movement also
appears note-for-note in another composer’s piece. (Recycling was as popular
in the eighteenth century as it is today, but generally speaking it was
acceptable to recycle your own works, not someone else’s.) Sometimes,
though, it can take a great deal of forensic investigation, including handwriting
analysis, examination of inks used, and even the watermarks on the score’s
paper. In most cases the real composer can be determined with certainty.
But in the case of Doubtful Haydn’s
Oboe Concerto, no such determination has ever been made. Ultimately it
has boiled down to stylistic elements—a place where opinion is the only
evidence—and orchestration. The Oboe Concerto is scored for an orchestra
that includes trumpets and tympani. Haydn never included those instruments
in his concertos nor, according to the sniffier scholars, would he ever
have done. Stylistically the work sounds much “later” than it is purported
to be—not radically so, but enough to cause doubt. In the end, it seems
that a librarian somewhere simply wrote the name “Haydn” on the thing—in
handwriting clearly not Haydn’s—and that was that. So the attribution
has moved, over the years, from Doubtful Haydn to Spurious Haydn even though
no one is quite sure who actually did write it.
Rest assured: all of this agonizing
would never have happened if the Concerto were not a lovely piece, and
if oboists might wish it were by the great master himself, they are gratified
to have a wonderful (and rare) classical-era oboe concerto to play. The
opening Allegro spiritoso is indeed spirited, with an ear-catching
excursion into a minor key in the development. The Andante is simply
gorgeous, no doubt much of the reason why oboists cling to this concerto
so tenaciously. And the jaunty Rondo: allegretto is rustic in a
Haydnesque way—nearly enough to get you to forget the trumpets and drums—and
full of charm as well. It seems that Spurious was a very fine composer,
too!
- Mark Rohr
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