Haydn Symphony nº 102 in D major Hob. I:101 "The Clock - Die Uhr"

MITO Chamber Orchestra, Jun Märkl, conductor. After the overwhelming success of his first London trip in 1791-2, Haydn returned to Vienna, where he bought a new house for his family and settled into a comfortable domestic life, while continuing to compose and giving some music lessons (including a few to the young Beethoven). But the lure of the excitement he had experienced in England was strong, and when Johann Peter Salomon invited him to return to London for some more concerts, Haydn didn't hesitate. He arrived in England in February 1794, and over the next few months presented another series of concerts with Salomon, including the premieres of his Symphonies Nos. 99-101. No. 101 was first performed under Haydn's direction at the Hanover Square Concert Rooms on March 3, 1794. Following a mysterious D-minor introduction which already anticipates the direction of movement of the principal theme the first movement is a light-footed presto in six-eight time. The secondary theme proves to be more a variant than a contrast; the development is a surprisingly contrapuntal. The piece took its sobriquet from the ticking, the movement of a metronome-like ostinato accompaniment on the bassoon and the string pizzicato in the second movement, a grand form of song with elements of variation. Bassoons and pizzicato strings provide the tick-tock at first, accompanying a graceful, slightly coy tune. There is a stormy interlude at the movement's center; then the tick-tock returns, this time played by the flute and bassoon two octaves apart. The minuet is borrowed from the flute-clock pieces of 1793; the dissonant beginning seems to owe itself to a musical jest on the part of the composer: like musicians who sleep through the harmonic change in the accompaniment (Beethoven also develops his Pastoral with similar effects in the scherzo s village musician scene much later). With the third movement, probably the longest and most complex of Haydn's minuet movements, the symphony's nickname becomes doubly appropriate. Back in 1793 in Vienna, Haydn had given his patron Prince Esterházy the gift of an elaborate musical clock, for which he also wrote a set of 12 short pieces; one of those 12 pieces became the basis for this grand, ceremonious movement. The slightly comical trio section seems to evoke a not-very-talented village band, whose "wrong" notes and other quirks were often "corrected" by the symphony's later conductors and publishers. The finale is an extremely elaborate sonata rondo, the developmental sections of which are interspersed with fugati; without exaggerating, this finale can be called one of the summits of Haydn s compositional mastery which in this case consists less of demonstrated erudition, but of the unassuming way in which this scholar inserts the presto finale. Haydn composed Symphony No. 101 in the scope of his second trip to England. It emerged in two stages: the second to fourth movements still in Vienna, the first movement in England. Its premiere performance took place on 3 March 1794. The Morning Chronicle reports after its first performance: Nothing can be more original than the subject of the first movement; and having found a happy subject, no one knows like Haydn how to produce incessant variety without once departing from it. Thought extremely simple, the arrangement of the accompaniment in andante was ingenious, and never before had we heard a more delightful effect than the trio in the minuet. - It was Haydn; what can we, what need we say more? The sobriquet The Clock stems from the Vienna publisher Johann Traeg, who published a piano version of the andante as Rondo. The Clock in 1798. To some extent such sobriquets can elicit an exaggerated degree of expectation, however. Thus Jacob (1952) reports of an incident following the performance of the symphony in 1928 in Vienna by the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini: one of the listeners lamented in the artists room that he did not hear the clock except for in the andante. He had expected to hear tone painting with a persistent clock-related theme, thus a story of the clock, and felt highly disappointed.