Joseph Haydn visited London in two one-year trips. Learn how his experience in London's musical and cultural scene dramatically impacted his later compositions from guest Dr. Denis McCaldin, director of the Haydn Society of Great Britain.

In this episode, you’ll:

• Discover the reasons behind Haydn’s decision to temporarily relocate from Austria to England.

• Hear how he was received by London society and the influence of its concert culture

• Understand how these trips culminated into one of Haydn’s greatest works, The Creation.

For the best experience, please watch the video at the top of the page.

Episode Transcript and Timestamps

DANIEL ADAM MALTZ: Grüß Sie and welcome to Opus 18 of Classical Cake, the podcast where we discuss topics relating to Viennese classical music and Austrian culture while enjoying a delicious cake.

I'm your host, Daniel Adam Maltz.

If you’re new here, welcome!

Haydn’s fame spread across Europe but, as court composer to the Esterhazy family, he could rarely leave his remote post. When music-loving Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy died, his son, Prince Anton Esterhazy, drastically reduced the responsibilities of his father's orchestra. So, 60-year-old Haydn was free to embark on the trip of a lifetime: A total of two years in London.

My guest today is Dr. Denis McCaldin: conductor, musicologist, and director of the Haydn Society of Great Britain.

Dr. McCaldin, thank you for joining me.

DR. DENIS McCALDIN: It's a pleasure.

Featured Cake: Eccles Cakes [1:03]

MALTZ: Normally, we enjoy a cake and coffee together while we record in person, but England just started another lockdown.

When things are a bit more normal, we'll enjoy Eccles cakes together in person.

Eccles cakes are small, flakey pies filled with currants.

So, let’s dig in.

Why did Joseph Haydn go to London? [1:23]

MALTZ: Johann Peter Salomon convinced Haydn to make the one month journey to London. Who was he?

McCALDIN: Salomon was an immigrant who worked in London as a violinist and entrepreneur. He ran a very successful orchestral series, and he went pretty frequently around Europe looking for talent for his performances.

He knew that Haydn had been released from his contractual duties. So, I believe the story says he came to Haydn's house and said, 'I am Peter Salomon. Tomorrow we will have an accord,' which is a meeting. And they did that.

MALTZ: Solomon was German and spoke German. And so he was, perhaps, more easily able to convince Haydn. Because Haydn was at the end of his life, more or less. He was at the end of his career, retirement age. I mean, we know he lived much longer, but he was an old man by all standards of living.

McCALDIN: Indeed he was. And it was typical of his marvelous outward looking enthusiasm, that he was prepared to take this on. And, as you remember, Mozart was very worried that he wouldn't have success in London because he didn't speak the language and he hadn't travelled as Mozart had.

MALTZ: That's the quote where Mozart tells him, 'but you don't even speak English' and then Haydn poetically says, 'but my language' he was referring to music 'is understood all around the world.'

MCCALDIN: Exactly so.

Haydn’s reception and social circle in London [3:08]

MALTZ: So what was his reception upon arriving in London?

McCALDIN: Well, unlike Vienna and Austrian culture — which he'd known really much more intimately — the newspapers were very powerful in Britain. The press was not under censorship as it was largely in the Austrian dynasty. The press had been banging the drum for him. Salomon had been part of that, making sure that the right kind of press releases got out. So even before he arrived in 1791, there was an awareness that this famous composer was coming to Britain.

MALTZ: I see. Because he was already famous the world over. I mean, he had built his reputation over the years.

McCALDIN: Yeah, primarily through chamber music actually. So many things happened in that part of the latter half of the 18th century. Publishing became really effective and successful. There was lots of money to be made in publishing because it was the way in which domestic music making could get access to music that they could otherwise only hear in the concert hall. So, transcriptions of symphonies and, in Haydn's case, the quartets did a great deal to make him more popular and better known throughout Europe.

MALTZ: So what was his social circle in London? Who did he see regularly? What was his day to day like?

McCALDIN: Well, he stayed with Salomon to start with. I think in Great Pulteney Street, where we've put up a Haydn plaque to make sure that people in London know that he came to London.

He complained enormously about the noise because he had a really heavy schedule with Salomon. Salomon wanted a symphony every other week, more or less or even more often than that. So he had to get down to work.

And yet, he was hugely important as a guest. He soon was really invited to every kind of society from the smart to the local pub. And one of his talents was his ability to get on with anyone, including the royal family — whom he wasn't at all fazed by. And so I think he had a very wide circle very early on.

MALTZ: And, of course, the royal family was from the House of Hanover, so they spoke German.

McCALDIN: Indeed, that was a plus — as it had been with Händel. In a way, there is a story to be told about the parallels between Händel's visits to London, which ended in him living here and Haydn's, which ended with him nearly living here, being invited by the royal family, as you implied.

You mentioned the social side of his life. I think the key thing, which is a nice story in itself, is his fondness for women. Women were attracted to him, I think, because he was such a natural, rounded personality. He had a blob on his nose, which he thought made him ugly, but no lady ever commented about this.

There is a nice story to be told about Haydn's London ladies and my daughter, who's an opera singer, has put together a program which has done some of the concert halls in Britain called Haydn's London Ladies. It really shows how much he drew on his female friendships.

He had a particular friend called Mrs. Schroeter, who was the wife of a court musician who died. So, she was the widow Schroeter. And there's a lot of correspondence between the two of them when he was in London, which tell you so much about the man and about some intimate feelings with a close friend.

Concert life in London [7:30]

MALTZ: What was concert life like in London at this time?

McCALDIN: Well, of course, he wasn't a virtuoso performer. Unlike a lot of musicians in the 18th century who really were performers first and composers second because they wanted to write pieces for themselves. Haydn was basically a rather modest fiddler and pianist.

His concert life was a nice combination, which was very practical in the 18th century, of the orchestra seated in an effective way so that Salomon, the leader, would stand up — the leader of the first violins — and Haydn would sit at the fortepiano so they could see each other with eye contact. The two of them would lead the orchestra through all the tricky corners and that sort of thing.

That was pretty successful in those days. The piano was acting as a kind of continuo — just covering the corners and helping out, especially when things went wrong. It was used to rescue.

MALTZ: I love playing continuo and leading Haydn symphonies from the keyboard.

McCALDIN: It's a wonderful experience — especially, I think, for solo performers like pianists. I mean, you have your chamber music and everything else, but being in there in an orchestra is a joy.

MALTZ: London managed to have a rather robust and successful public concert life before other places in Europe.

McCALDIN: Indeed. The same part of that not being the kind of seriously limiting, I suppose. It's a monarchy in Austria. I know it was an emperor, but the rules were all coming out of court, whereas in Britain there was considerable freedom because it was such a busy commercial place. So the middle class, as it were, were wealthy enough to be able to afford subscription concerts. And that meant that — although the aristocracy was still important in terms of patronage — that wasn't the whole story. The patronage was spread across several different classes of audience.

MALTZ: And where were his pieces performed?

McCALDIN: At the Hanover Square Rooms, which is no longer there. But, Hanover Square is still there.

London’s impact on Haydn’s compositions [10:07]

MALTZ: How did his experiences and impressions of London — of concert life in London, everything that was new — shape his compositional style and output?

McCALDIN: Quite a lot. Interesting, he kept a diary. The Haydn London Notebooks are a marvelous source of things that he was impressed with, like how much coal cost and that sort of thing.

I think the things that he picked up — the more he could make dramatic and theatrical effects and, indeed, comic effect in his symphonies, the more he would please his audience. So he would incorporate things like folk tunes, which might be recognized. He certainly was very clear that dance music was a key part of what his audience would like... and surprises. I mean, the whole joy of Haydn's late symphonies is they could perhaps all be called the surprise, not just one of them.

MALTZ: And so what pieces did Haydn write in London?

McCALDIN: Well, particularly those London symphonies, the ones -- the 90s and onwards. So they've nearly all got names like The Military, The Drum Roll, The Surprise, The Clock.

And, as those names suggest, each of those has a novelty in it. He really knew the showbiz side and I think thrived on it because it gave his mind something new to fix on and then use his immense technique within the language of music.

MALTZ: What I find interesting that came out of his London compositions is this sort of idea of grandeur. And everything seems bigger. The orchestras are bigger. He's using full forces, Because we know at Esterhazy he was oftentimes working with just a few musicians. It's not that he was at a want for musicians, it's just a different type of ensemble.

McCALDIN: Indeed. And he had to learn to use that, interestingly. You make a very good point.

The Creation [12:33]

McCALDIN: It's wonderful to come to a piece which was not written in London, which is The Creation, the great oratorio — which we think the script was written for Händel.

When Haydn was leaving London for the second time, Salomon, his friend that we've mentioned so much already, gave him this script as a sort of a hint because Haydn and he had gone to a big Händel celebration of Messiah. And Haydn had been absolutely knocked out by the massive effects of the big performance of Messiah, which you just mentioned, and in a way all of he learned in England from because… Sorry, let me just recap there. He went back to Vienna at the end of his London visit and then set to write The Creation and all the skills and new colors he'd found in the big London orchestra are writ large in the representation of chaos.

I've written a paper about this in which I say that it's like the Wagnerian tone color, the Schoenbergian tone color principles, because almost every bar is a new instrumental color and nobody had ever done that before.

So, if you look at the first two pages of Creation, you'll see the clever way in which he uses just a bar of each color to create this uncertainty of chaos, even a little double bass solo and things like that, which are very, very rare in 18th century music.

MALTZ: It is interesting, he obviously chose to go back to Vienna and we'll get to that a little bit later. But he took with him this inspiration from London, you have this idea of the sublime, this massive oratorio, massive forces. And he sort of took that back with him to Vienna and then started writing more in that way.

Honorary doctorate from Oxford? [14:59]

MALTZ: It was at the end of his first trip to London that Oxford decided to bestow upon him an honorary doctorate. What led to that decision?

McCALDIN: That was a nice story. There's a man called Dr. Burney who was instrumental in helping to look after him when he came over and Burney put him up for a doctorate. Oxford had already got quite a good reputation and, of course, went on to give doctorates to a lot of famous musicians. So Burney was his sponsor.

If you want to get a doctorate yourself, sir, you'll have to get a sponsor — unless you get it by hard work, which is probably how you're going to get it. For an honorary degree, you have to have a sponsor.

Why did Haydn leave London and then come back? [15:48]

MALTZ: And so why did Haydn leave after one year?

McCALDIN: Because he was given the hard word by the Esterhazy family.

MALTZ: So he was called back to the court.

McCALDIN: Yes, just like Händel.

MALTZ: Interesting. So Haydn went back to Austria for two years and then travelled back to London. What prompted the second trip?

McCALDIN: Well, the second trip, I think, in a way, was when the richest music came because, of course, he learned a lot on the first trip. He knew how to cut corners and many of his old friendships, he could open up again. That's when, again, the various ladies helped him. A woman called Anne Hunter, who was a poetess, wrote quite a lot of text for him. I think the second visit was just building on the kinds of music he hadn't been able to explore the first time.

Of course, he was commissioned to write an opera on the Orpheus legend, which then it wasn't possible to perform it. And he spent a lot of effort on that.

Going back to Vienna [17:10]

MALTZ: So as you mentioned earlier, in his second trip in 1794, King George invited Haydn to remain indefinitely in London.

McCALDIN: That's right.

MALTZ: Haydn gave a very, in my opinion, Haydnesque reply… very typical for him where he said that he was like an old tree. And if you took him out of the ground where he grew then he would simply die. What do you think he meant by this?

McCALDIN: I think it's true. I mean, I don't know how well you feel it applies to other people. I think the thing about getting beyond 60 probably is that people are often drawn to their roots. You'll notice very much if a married couple, one of them dies, sadly, the other will often go back to their own roots for comfort and a sense of safety.

I think that was strong in Haydn's case, particularly as it was the time of the Napoleonic Wars. The possibility of traveling after 1794 was very uncertain. So he thought if he didn't go then, he might never get back and never be able to die in the land at which he was born. I think he felt pretty sentimental about his homeland. Which, of course, is a theme that runs through most of our lives.

MALTZ: Do you think that even though he enjoyed London immensely and was able to learn and take a lot of it into his own use that he felt that his inner culture -- his just being -- was Austrian, you know, because he kept his -- even the music he wrote in London, even though it's a bigger scale, I mean, it's not an entirely different person. It's still Haydn.

McCALDIN: Oh, yes. I think it would be surprising if it was any more different. And this is, of course, why your earlier points about going as a man of 60... by the time most of us are 60, we're pretty well set in our ways. And, if we're writing music, we'll probably write it in that way, and don't alter it very much.

I think it's probably true to say that he was also a bit nervous about the immense pressure he was on to the two visits he had in London. He does complain quite a lot about being overworked and I think he sort of had a sense that he would never get any peace in London. People would be always dropping in, always saying, 'Will you write me something for my daughter's wedding?' or something. He would just not really have the rest that he felt by 1794 he truly earned.

MALTZ: Haydn's biographer, Georg August Griesinger, wrote that Haydn quote "considered the days spent in England the happiest of his life. He was everywhere appreciated there; it opened a new world to him."

Thanks, Dr. McCaldin for sharing this Classical Cake with me.

McCALDIN: Thank you very much, indeed, Daniel. It's been a great pleasure.

Suggested resources to learn more [20:12]

Visit the Joseph Haydn Society of Great Britain.