Old World charm

He may not appeal to the “fevered modern soul,” wrote J. Cuthbert Hadden of Joseph Haydn in his biography of the famous Austrian Classical composer, “but there is an old-world charm about him which is specially grateful in our bustling, nerve-destroying, bilious age.”

Hadden published those words in 1902, 10 years before the Titanic sank and 30 years before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor. No doubt Hadden would find the world and its soul even more fevered, bustling, and nerve-destroying today.

The corollary, of course, is that he would be even more “specially grateful” for Haydn’s “old-world charm”—something Sony Music Entertainment apparently grasps, too. On its Legacy imprint, it has recently released Max Goberman: The Symphonies of Haydn; and on Sony Classical, Haydn: Paris Symphonies by the Zurich Chamber Orchestra under the direction of Sir Roger Norrington. The latter comprises new recordings, the former old. Both offer hope to those intent on believing that the clock of time’s hands can be, at least temporarily, turned back.

The Goberman recordings, named for their conductor, are the fruit of monumental restoration efforts. Recorded between 1960 and 1962, they run to 14 CDs containing 45 symphonies and three opera overtures and represent the extent to which Goberman succeeded in accomplishing the greatest of his goals: to record all of Haydn’s symphonies in versions of unsurpassed definitiveness with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra.

Goberman died at 51, leaving his dream unrealized. What he accomplished, however, has long buoyed Haydn enthusiasts with access to the limited-edition vinyl albums and CDs in which the recordings have fitfully appeared.

Legacy’s box has its detractors, mostly Goberman-Haydn enthusiasts so conversant with the audio differences between this or that previous version of the recordings that they can detect which ones Legacy’s Anthony Fountain used when the master tapes proved elusive and occasionally take issue with his choices. They represent a minority perspective. And even they concede that, on the whole, the project does justice to Goberman’s—and, one suspects, Haydn’s—vision.

What was Haydn’s vision? He was an observant (some say devout) Roman Catholic, but he did his candidacy for canonization no favors by entering (just how far is debated) into several affairs that he justified by citing the “infernal” nature and barrenness of his wife, with whom he was tragicomically ill-matched.

Yet he also had a habit of inscribing his compositions “Soli Deo Gloria” (like Handel) or “Laus Deo” (“Praise God”) and of crediting God with both his gifts and his cheerfulness. He combined and developed both over his long life in ways that would eventually earn him the sobriquet “Father of Instrumental Music.”

Haydn befriended, admired, learned from, taught, and mourned Mozart. He was directly inspired by C.P.E. Bach and composed sonatas that inspired Beethoven’s. Whatever his failings, Haydn overcame them and sought to replicate in his quintessentially Classical works the happiness attendant upon a life rightly ordered.

What makes the Zurich Chamber Orchestra’s three-disc, Norrington-conducted Paris Symphonies somewhat valuable in the context of the Goberman box is that they comprise six symphonies (Nos. 82-87) that Goberman did not live to record and that thus go a long way toward completing the immense portrait he intended to leave to posterity.

Norrington is no Goberman. He sometimes encourages faster, looser, and louder performances than many among the Haydn faithful would prefer. But Haydn has survived less thoughtful interpretations. And, thanks in part to Norrington, he will continue to do so.