Symphony No. 48, Maria Theresia
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. He composed his Symphony No. 48 in C in about 1769 for his employer Prince Nicolaus Esterházy’s court orchestra; it would likely have been premiered soon after its composition in the Esterházy palace at Eisenstadt or at the prince’s country estate, Eszterhàza. First BSO performances: February 20-22, 2025, Alan Gilbert conducting.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 48 is scored for 2 oboes, 2 horns, timpani, strings (first and second violins, violas), and basso continuo—e.g., cello and/or double bass or bassoon plus harpsichord. As was standard practice in early symphonies, the composer would have directed its performance from the keyboard.
Beethoven completed nine symphonies, Mozart about 41, Haydn about 108. These numbers do not represent the decreasing importance of the genre, but rather the opposite: the increasing seriousness and ambition of symphonies, a process Haydn spent much of his career shepherding, which his successors inherited and took in their own directions.
When Joseph Haydn began writing symphonies they were a relatively light genre, not as important as sacred vocal music or opera, not as popular as chamber music and concertos. And on the whole symphonies were not played in public concert halls by big orchestras, but by small bands in the private music rooms of wealthy and aristocratic music lovers. Some courts in Europe had their own extensive musical establishments. That situation had everything to do with what sorts of music got written, and its scope and style.
This was Haydn’s milieu: for most of his career he was a uniformed court servant, a Kapellmeister running the musical establishment of the Hungarian house of Esterházy. He was responsible for directing the orchestra, hiring and firing, playing chamber music, conducting opera performances, and composing to order from his prince. It was a killing job, but Haydn thrived in it with an indefatigable creative energy. Over the decades he grew from an obscure figure to the leading composer of his time. Every genre he turned to, he broadened and intensified. By the end of his career he had raised the string quartet to the king of chamber genres and the symphony to the king of instrumental works. That is where they stood when Beethoven and Mozart took them up in their maturity.
Beethoven wrote nine symphonies because for most of his career they were the most important of his works, so each of his symphonies was a singular advance, an evolution that Haydn might have taken a decade to achieve. So while each Beethoven symphony is a singular individual, we think of Haydn’s in terms of periods. From his middle period, Symphony No. 48, written in 1768 or 69, is part of a distinct, fascinating, and a bit mysterious collection of pieces by a number of composers, including Mozart, that come under the general description of “Sturm und Drang.”
Call the movement, attitude, sensibility, aesthetic that came to be called Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) a passing disturbance in the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason. It was a rebuke to Enlightenment ideals: anti-rational, passionate to the point sometimes of hysteria, exalting subjectivity over objectivity. The movement was named for the 1776 play Sturm und Drang by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger, and in the theater exemplified by Friedrich Schiller’s play The Robbers, at the premiere of which men were screaming and women fainting.
Haydn’s connection to Sturm und Drang has long been noted, but it is far from a clear-cut connection. For one thing, most of his pieces reflecting that spirit were written before Klinger’s play gave a name to the movement. Nor did he ever comment on Sturm und Drang in regard to his work or anything else. Yet the vagueness of his connection makes the relevant works not less interesting but more so: they are a collection of pieces intense, quirky, even subtly subversive. Recall the end of the Farewell Symphony, in which the players one by one pack up their instruments and leave the stage. Sturm und Drang works include Mozart’s symphonies in G minor and some of the improvisatory, subjective outings of C.P.E. Bach. One of their general characteristics is that they tend to be in minor keys, which were special things in the Classical period. Of Mozart’s 600 works, only around 30 are in minor. They also leaned toward strong unto stormy contrasts, formal experiments, and a generally heated atmosphere.
This brings us back to Haydn’s Symphony No. 48 in C, which acquired the name Maria Theresia, that being the Empress of Austria, because it was assumed to be written to mark her visit to the Esterházy estate. In fact, the symphony appears to have been written earlier than her visit, but it kept the name because a good many works in those days were given nicknames to mark them amidst a flood of pieces. Thus among Haydn’s many string quartets we find “The Joke” and “The Bird” and among his symphonies “The Bear,” “The Hen,” and so on.
The classic Haydn Sturm und Drang symphony is No. 49, called La Passione for its dark-toned mood. No. 48 in C suggests the Sturm und Drang atmosphere in its often inward quality and some impassioned stretches that emerge unexpectedly. The symphony begins brilliantly with pealing horns (trumpets were later added), setting a mood of outsized gaiety, approaching manic at times. There is a driving nervous energy that abides to the end, and in the middle a development section unusually long and fervent for the period, the storms of Sturm und Drang simmering beneath the surface.
A solemn slow movement also features horns, now in a noble mode. The movement is largely soft, whispering, interior, the strings muted, all beautiful unto ethereal. The precious tone of the period called the galant is entirely missing here; instead there is a poignant sense of meditation. Next comes a minuet movement, this one robust and jovial. The lingering presence of Sturm und Drang emerges in the middle Trio, a sudden turn from bright C major to a troubled, eruptive C minor.
So far the gaiety in this symphony has been questioned in one way or another—until the finale, which is a dashing romp, winds and strings passing zippy figures back and forth. It should be noted that Haydn’s works don’t on the whole have Beethoven’s sense of storytelling from beginning to end. The general high spirits of this finale may be intended to put to rest any shadows, but there is no sense of a conclusion to a drama. Meanwhile, this is a major-key symphony. In minor-key pieces, like most of those associated with Sturm und Drang, there tends more a sense of a unified atmosphere and implied story from beginning to end, as in Haydn’s next symphony, the brooding La Passione, and works of Mozart sometimes called “demonic,” including the two G minor symphonies and the D minor piano concerto.
Sturm und Drang was a passing episode in the arts and culture that had largely burned out on its excesses by the 1780s. Nonetheless, it stands as a prophecy of the wildnesses and excesses of the 19th century, which we call the Romantic. Haydn in 1769 was entering into his wild period, still writing for orchestras of 20 or so players in palace music rooms, but he was pushing the scope and ambition of his music toward the late symphonies, which would be written for the larger orchestras and public concert halls of London. There he would raise the genre of symphony to the level of ambition and expressive intensity where it lay when Mozart and Beethoven took it up and took it further.
Jan Swafford
Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose most recent book, published in December 2020, is Mozart: The Reign of Love. His other acclaimed books include Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.