Haydn: Capriccio on 'Acht Sauschneider müssen sein', Hob. XVII/1 (1765) with score

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Performer: Bart van Oort (fortepiano)

From an article written by Andras Schiff:
I had the pleasure and privilege of conducting Haydn's Symphony No 80 in D minor in Salzburg recently. It's an astonishing work, full of surprises, and almost completely unknown. The first movement is typically Sturm und Drang until the exposition is suddenly interrupted by a charming and elegant dance-like theme. In the development section, Haydn introduces unusually long pauses and, with daring modulations, makes unexpected excursions into strange tonalities. The last movement - the Presto - is a tour de force of rhythmic ambiguities: the listener has to guess where the upbeats and the downbeats are; only after 32 bars does Haydn introduce rhythmic regularity. It's ingenious, and extremely funny. But in Salzburg no one laughed. No one even smiled. It seems to be much easier to make an audience cry than it is to make them laugh. There are many music-lovers who won't even admit that humour has a place in what we call classical music. These are people who have no difficulty recognising sadness, tragedy, grief, majesty and grandeur - because these are serious attributes, and they want their beloved music to be "serious". For them jokes are made of cheap, vulgar and inferior matter that cannot be tolerated on the altar of High Art.

Haydn was writing for a public that understood perfectly his musical language. In Eisenstadt and Esterháza, in Vienna and Paris, and first and foremost in London, he was surrounded by a small but knowledgeable circle of professional and amateur musicians who received each new work with interest and appreciation. His audience was familiar with his earlier compositions, they knew his personal style and recognised immediately the unusual features of a new symphony. Musical expectations and surprises did not have to be explained, and Haydn's humour was able to flourish. Today's listening community is of course very different, and all too often we feel the need of a "Japanese booklet" to enlighten certain members of the audience.

Haydn's keyboard works are full of delicious surprises. Take his early Capriccio in G major, which takes as its theme the folk song Acht Sauschneider müssen sein. The text of this song is a humorous one: it describes castrating a pig, an operation for which no fewer than eight expert butchers were needed. Haydn translates this into musical terms by wandering wildly from one key to the next, presenting the main theme in its entirety or in fragmented form through various registers of the instrument. There is nothing conventional about this piece, nothing that would have met listeners' expectations.