Symphony No. 99
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, on March 31, 1732, and died in Vienna on May 31, 1809. Haydn wrote his Symphony No. 99 in 1793 in anticipation of his second trip to London the following year; the first of the second group of six of his dozen “London” symphonies, it was premiered in the city on February 10, 1794, under the composer’s direction.
Symphony No. 99 is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
In 1793, when he wrote his Symphony No. 99 in E-flat, Joseph Haydn was 61 and at the summit of his powers and his fame, regarded by most as the preeminent composer of his time. He had from 1791 spent 18 months in London, where he had premiered a half dozen symphonies to tremendous acclaim and equivalent profit. This had also marked the end of his twenty-eight year sojourn as house composer—meaning a liveried servant—of the Hungarian house of Esterházy. His duties at that court, involving running an orchestra and opera company and composing constantly to order, had helped make him into a historic composer. As he wrote, “I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.”
Starting as an obscure court composer, in those years his music and his fame slowly spread around Europe. All the same, his position as a servant, though he handled it faithfully, had never seduced him. When the old prince died and he was finally pensioned off, he wrote a woman friend, “This little bit of freedom, how sweet it tastes! I had a good prince, but at time I was forced to be dependent on base souls. I often sighed for release…. Even though I am burdened with more work, the knowledge that I am not bound to service makes ample amends for all my toil.”
In his own estimation, however, Haydn was not the greatest composer of his time. That honor he bestowed on a young friend of his named Mozart. For one thing, Haydn had long considered himself primarily an opera composer, writing works for the Esterházy court theater, which was an important opera center. When Mozart arrived in Vienna, Haydn no longer considered himself the master of opera. When somebody asked him for an opera after that, he replied: you should hire Mozart. As Haydn told the young man’s father Leopold, after a reading of string quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn, “Before God and as an honest man, I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name. He has taste, and, furthermore, the most profound knowledge of composition.” When Haydn got word during his first London sojourn that Mozart had died, “I was for some time quite beside myself over his death. I cannot believe that Providence should so quickly have called an irreplaceable man into the next world…. Posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.” On his way to London for his first visit, meanwhile, he had stopped off in Bonn, where he encountered a hopeful future for music in the form of another young talent named Beethoven, who would become his pupil in Vienna.
Haydn had not only befriended and mentored Mozart, he learned from him, one of the things he absorbed being an interest in the clarinet. After his triumphant first visit to London Haydn had been invited back and commissioned for six more symphonies. In Vienna he set to work on them in preparation for his next trip in 1794. He began with No. 99, in which for his first time he included clarinets in the winds. With the eventual 12 “London” symphonies, the culmination of his art, Haydn would complete the process of raising the symphony to the king of instrumental works, which is where it lay when Beethoven took it up and turned it into arguably the crown of all musical genres, each work a powerful individual.
The reason Haydn elevated the symphony to its modern position had only partly to do with his creative ambitions. It had also to do with the setting. In music, the setting has an abiding influence on what gets written and how. When Haydn began writing symphonies they were a relatively light matter, not expected to be too serious, and they were mostly played by orchestras of some twenty players in private music rooms as part of grab-bag programs that might include concertos, arias, quartets, what have you, and might be played with the movements broken up among other items. But Haydn with his relentless creative energy poured the full force of his creativity into symphonies as into everything else, and steadily expanded them in imagination and expressive weight. That evolution reached its conclusion in the “London” symphonies.
That achievement required a particular setting. If most symphonies were still done in private houses, Paris and London had a thriving concert scene with big orchestras playing in big halls, attended by a broad paying audience. The Paris scene had inspired both Haydn and Mozart to more expansive works. Now in London Haydn had at his disposal the grandest of stages and, after his first trip, an adoring public to fill the halls. He could be as bold and expansive as he wanted. A symphony now could become an event in itself. No. 99 begins with a solemn slow introduction that previews the harmonic explorations that will mark the symphony: after beginning in the home key of E-flat he drifts to distant E minor. The introduction also foreshadows that in this work, dealing with clarinets for the first time in a symphony, Haydn will be cautious with them, rarely assigning them a solo role and giving them more rests than the other winds. A Vivace assai breaks out with an amiable theme, Haydnesque in being so natural a melody that it seems more discovered than created. Trumpets and drums create a festive effect, which was their usual role at the time. The exposition proceeds in good humor, mostly involving the opening theme though there is a touch of a new idea featuring, finally, the clarinet. Much of the expansive and harmonically meandering development will expound on that more shadowed new idea. The recapitulation condenses the exposition. Haydn was much responsible for shaping the familiar musical outline we call sonata form, but he was more free in using it than most of his contemporaries.
A touching and somewhat formal Adagio is second, like a stately slow dance full of bowing. It includes an interlude for winds alone, a rare thing in those days—perhaps something else Haydn had picked up from Mozart, though he omits the clarinets. The movement ends on a rich expanse of full orchestra.
The overall mood of the symphony being easygoing and good-humored, that applies to the Minuet, which makes lavish use of an orchestra that is so much bigger and many-colored than in Haydn’s middle symphonies: the twenty-man orchestras of two oboes and horns and strings in his middle years has grown to full winds in two parts, trumpets and drums, horns, and a big contingent of strings.
His reveling in these new forces and their possibilities of contrast and drama continues in the Vivace finale with bits of fugue in the generally boisterous atmosphere and the winds throwing ideas back and forth. In the “London” symphonies we feel how close we are to Beethoven. And in that, why in his time and well into Beethoven’s time, Haydn was called “father of the symphony.”
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.
The American premiere of Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 took place in a Harvard Musical Association concert under the direction of Carl Zerrahn at the Boston Music Hall on November 17, 1870.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performances of Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 were led by Wilhelm Gericke on January 29 and 30, 1886.