[A shorter version of this article
appeared in the New York Philharmonic Program book. Copyrighted
portions reproduced by permission. Ed.]
Concerto for Oboe and Chamber
Orchestra, C major, Hob. VIIg: Cl
(Revised by Rolf Julius Koch)
Formerly Attributed to
FRANZ JOSEPH HAYDN
Born March 31, 1732, in Rohrau-on-the-Leitha
Died May 31, 1809, in Vienna
Sometimes it seems to exasperated musicologists that the most prolific composer of the Haydn family was neither the amazingly productive Franz Joseph Haydn nor his almost equally industrious younger brother Michael Haydn but, instead, a sort of illegitimate sibling of both, who goes by the name of Spurious Haydn. Indeed, where Joseph's catalog includes a mere 107 symphonies, fourteen masses, thirty-odd concertos and concerted works, twenty-six operas and a few hundred other scores, his phantom brother Spurious Haydn (occasionally referred to by experts as "Doubtful Haydn") has been credited with the astounding total of over 150 symphonies, more than a hundred masses, some three dozen concertos, eight operas and additional works too numerous to mention - all purloined, as it were, from minor eighteenth-century composers such as Stamitz, Dittersdorf, Gyrowetz, Hoffstetter, Vanhal and Pleyel, and presented to the public under Franz Joseph Haydn's name.
Today, well over ninety percent of these pseudo-Haydn scores are consigned to the oblivion that, rightly or wrongly, is the fate of most agreeably unimportant galant and Classical works. Spurious Haydn symphonies, in fact, never received much attention from publishers or performers; recognized for what they are by astute scholars, they were excluded from the first critical edition of Haydn's works, begun in 1907. Since genuine Haydn symphonies were, after all, so numerous, musicians regarded spurious ones as a nuisance of which everyone was well rid.
By contrast, the prevailing attitude toward spurious Haydn concertos has always been quite equivocal - particularly solo concertos for various string and wind instruments. Far from being plentiful, unquestionably genuine Haydn concertos of this sort are so rare - only seven now survive - that musicians and publishers have been relatively tolerant of plausible and not-so-plausible fakes. During our century, at least ten spurious or doubtful string and wind concertos have been available in modern editions under Haydn's name, a few appearing as late as the 1950s. Unlike the spurious symphonies, these concertos, when unmasked, did not always disappear quickly. Some were still receiving performances under Haydn's name years after being conclusively identified as the work of other composers (Karl Stamitz, Michael Haydn, Christian Cannabich, Giovanni Giornovichi, Giambattista Costanzi, Leopold Hofmann), and even today a few occasionally continue the imposture: on record covers, in the concert hall and (worst of all) in printed editions (the so-called "Haydn Flute Concerto," actually written by Hofmann, has been particularly tenacious).
The spurious Oboe Concerto in C Major falls into another, even more problematic category, because its actual composer has never been discovered. Since no other name can be associated with the piece, one cannot avoid mentioning Haydn's when referring to it, even though stylistic evidence against Haydn's authorship is overwhelming. The score was surely composed later than 1790, and perhaps even after the turn of the century, for it exhibits traits typical of such post-Mozart composers as Kuhlau, Hummel, the mature Clementi, Dussek, Danzi and Kozeluch. The distinguished Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon states that the Oboe Concerto "is certainly not by Haydn, but an attractive and bright work by a good minor master," while the equally astute Haydnist Karl Geiringer dismisses it more bluntly in a footnote as "spurious." Haydn's own catalogues, moreover, contain no indication that he ever composed any oboe concerto; in fact, it would probably be impossible today to find a single expert who believes that he wrote this one. The arbitrary attribution to Haydn was made by an anonymous nineteenth-century German librarian of demonstrable incompetence, who, for no good reason, scrawled the name "Haydn" over older markings on an unsigned manuscript score.
It has recently been realized that the folklike last-movement theme of this Oboe Concerto also appears in a Wind Octet by Leopold Kozeluch, a late-Classical Czech composer ac tive in Vienna whose style, as noted earlier, bears some affinity to that of the Concerto.
While these congruences by themselves do not provide the tangible proof that would allow responsible scholars to assign the score definitely to any composer, they nevertheless constitute better evidence for Kozeluch's authorship than any that might ever have existed for Haydn's.
Whoever composed it, this C Major Oboe Concerto is a work of appealing gusto and unforced charm. The slow movement is particularly effective, with a serenely poised melody of real expressive distinction as its main theme. In fact, the score as a whole is unusually good pseudo-Haydn (far more interesting than, for example, the feeble Hofmann flute concerto that is still sometimes palmed off as Haydn). The Oboe Concerto's main flaws are an oversupply of short-breathed and stereotyped themes, a sometimes sluggish and garrulous narrative style and a harmonic complaisance that too often lets the music sit down with an ungainly bump at cadences and semi-cadences.
During October and November of 1986, this Concerto was played eight times by the New York Philharmonic under its Music Director, Zubin Mehta, with Joseph Robinson, the orchestra's principal oboist, as soloist. These performances utilized Rolf Julius Koch's heavily revised version of the Concerto, recently published by Peters (at the moment, Koch's edition is far easier to find in full score than is the original). Koch has substantially reorchestrated the piece, completely recomposed some passages (particularly in the first movement), and introduced many other editorial changes of a less drastic nature. The publisher, in a foreward, maintains that Koch has, in fact, improved a flawed work by remedying "numerous harmonic and sonic awkwardnesses ... I longueurs in the tutti' sections and ... raw and heavy-handed orchestration."
While Koch's revisions came as a shock to listeners familiar with the original, it should be stressed that an editor is sometimes justified in altering the shape and character of a score in which mastery is only intermittent. We are not dealing here with an authentic Haydn concerto, after all, and there is no a priori' reason to think that the genuine Spurious Haydn composed by an eighteenth-century second-rater must be superior to the spurious Spurious Haydn produced through the efforts of a skilled modern editor. One thinks, for example, of the severely streamlined Boccherini-Grutzmacher B-flat Major Cello Concerto, cleverly compiled from two unrelated Boccherini works; for while that score may cause purists to gnash their teeth, it is still considered by most cellists to be a more viable concert piece for today's audiences than Boccherini's originals. Unfortunately, unlike Grutzmacher, who patently admired Boccherini, Koch plainly feels contempt for his original composer, and, in his "Haydn" Oboe Concerto revision, eliminates so many stylistic traits of which he disapproves that the new version seems lacking in personality. Moreover, Koch is so bent on turning the robust, discursive and expansive first movement into something delicate, efficient and terse that he discards Classical form - a highly arguable decision.
The original version of the Oboe Concerto, similar to many 1790s concertos, called for a rather large orchestra - 2 oboes, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, and strings. Koch, seeking a more transparent effect presumably intended to suggest instead Haydn of the 1770s, eliminated the timpani altogether and used a smaller wind section: 2 flutes and 2 horns. Ironically, Koch's wind complement is by no means typically Haydnesque (it is not used in a single Haydn symphony or concerto, although 2 oboes and 2 horns is a frequent grouping). Nevertheless, it makes sense in an oboe concerto, since it enables the soloist to stand out easily from the accompanying winds. However, by removing the original trumpets and drums Koch has decidedly changed the overall atmosphere. Some listeners might complain that he has deprived the score of a certain festal grandeur that its composer unquestionably aimed at; Koch would doubtless retort that he has purged the Concerto of gratuitous bombast caused by its anonymous creator's mistaken aims.
Yet whatever Koch may argue, it becomes obvious when the score is examined in detail that certain passages vividly conceived by the composer for trumpets and drums (or for trumpets and horns in octaves) suffer significantly by being reassigned to flutes. Problems begin in the fifth measure of the Concerto, where the Koch version:
seems patronizing in its Toy Symphony cuteness - a far less appropriate effect than the original's boldness. The thematically similar close of the introductory ritornello (originally scored for trumpets, oboes, horns an octave lower and timpani):
is ineffective on Koch's flutes in this register, and indeed, the editor, recognizing this, raises them an octave for the repetition indicated above; but even at that pitch, the bracing militance of the original is missing. Koch's removal of trumpet-drum punctuation also weakens at least two other important passages:
1) the return from A minor to C major 6 in the first-movement development, where a welcome moment of Beethovenian grandeur is lost, and
2) the refrain heard between variations in the finale, which, in Koch, loses some of its zest.
As indicated above, Koch has also made structural changes in the first movement (Allegro). The rather straggling opening ritornello has been shortened by some twenty-five measures, and some sententious pauses and repetitions have been eliminated from the postexposition ritornello, abbreviating the music by seven measures. Whatever one thinks of the practice of shortening ritornellos, Koch's cuts are syntactically irreproachable. The major themes of the introductory ritornello, here labeled "Theme A" and "Theme B," have been preserved (note, however, Koch's bass-line changes, typical of his efforts throughout to achieve transparency):
In the solo exposition, Koch sticks closely to the original score until the music reaches the dominant key. Here, the anonymous composer provided a surprise: instead of repeating theme B above, as might have been expected, he introduced a charming new melody, rather Mozartcan in cast (Theme C):
Although unexpected, the use of a new theme to open the second subject in a solo exposition is by no means abnormal Classical practice. As Sir Donald Francis Tovey's Mozart analyses proved, the order of themes in a Classical ritornello does not determine the order in which they appear later; it was only in postMozartean times that the ritornello was treated as a "first exposition" with two fixed subjects.
Koch, however, is either unaware of the freedom available to Classicists, or else is worried by the failure of theme B to appear later in the exposition. Accordingly, he now composes a restatement of theme B and uses it to open the second subject in the solo exposition: in his version, theme C is removed from the Concerto altogether. Koch would doubtless claim that he has thus given the score greater structural cohesion, but, as it happens, his interpolation gets him into trouble later in the movement. For when B reappears in the post-exposition ritornello, it shows signs of having worn out its welcome. Realizing that this theme will not bear another full restatement, Koch is forced to the most un-Classical expedient of omitting virtually the entire second subject from the recapitulation, giving the movement a decidedly lopsided form. The original, in which theme C was recapitulated in typical Classical fashion, had no such problems of formal balance, and, in that respect, must be judged as being far more satisfactory than Koch's version.
Koch leaves the second movement (Andante) practically untouched. His most noticeable change eliminating the repeat of this vacuous tutti measure
--decidedly improves the score. Utilizing an orchestra of strings alone (both in the original and in Koch), this movement begins with a normal sonata exposition (the second subject featuring meditative oboe pauses) and continues with a full development section, ending, after a dramatic transition, with a quiet reprise of the opening theme.
Despite its title, the Rondo allegro finale is actually a set of variations containing one independent minor-key episode, which is heard between the third and fourth variations. The puckish minuet-like theme is in A-B-A form supplemented by a jubilant little orchestral refrain:
The composer chose to omit the refrain after both the second and fourth variations. It should also be said that, as a rule, the two appearances of the A section in a single variation are apt to be ornamented quite differently. While Koch provides coloristic variety in the second variation, rescoring the middle section for winds and the closing section for pizzicato strings, he makes few changes elsewhere. He has, however, provided the Concerto with a new four-measure conclusion. The score originally ended with a final statement of the long-absent refrain. Koch excises the refrain, composing in its place a brief and witty valedictory for the soloist, which he has almost certainly modeled on the firstmovement close of Haydn's E- flat Piano Sonata, Hob. XVI/49.
In sum, Koch has unquestionably achieved his aim of producing a version of the C Major Oboe Concerto once attributed to Haydn that is shorter and - with its smaller instrumental complement - cheaper to perform than the original. It is also appropriately ornamented throughout. But he has sacrificed so many features of the original that are likeable and Classically satisfying that his version cannot, in the last analysis, be recommended for performance. It remains interesting, of course, for study; in fact, performers who wish to simplify some of the original tutti textures should carefully examine what Koch has done with them. Otherwise, oboists would be better advised to program the original, perhaps trimming some of the tutti's and thinning a few of the excessively frequent passages where the anonymous composer doubled trumpets with oboes.