If Haydn Had Written For Oboe, vol. 2

There’s hardly anyone not familiar with Haydn’s canonical image, omnipresent in his popular biographies: the endlessly jovial old man, ‘Papa Haydn’, pious, amiable, easy-going and industrious, without a hint of a tortured soul, that hallmark of genius in new European culture since Romanticism. This deliberately contrast-free, and yet remarkably truthful image of the great master, created towards the end of his life, corresponds well to his artistic career, also apparently devoid of storms and crises. In the composer’s lifetime, his music was greeted with enthusiasm not in Europe alone, but in overseas colonies as well. He died a venerable old man, having known in full the sweetness of recognition and the love of his contemporaries. A telling example of the attitude towards Haydn in the classical age are the words by Ernst Ludwig Gerber that introduce the master in his Historischbiographisches Lexikon der Tonku?stler from 1790: “Our greatest man, great in every small thing and even greater in big things, the pride of our times.”