The “Military” symphony owes its nickname to its extraordinary second movement, which features an extended percussion section found nowhere else in all 104 of Haydn’s symphonies, as well as a martial trumpet call that is perhaps the greatest of the innumerable surprises in this composer’s works. It is as close as Haydn ever came to program music, and its timeliness was not lost on the audience of the London premiere. At the time, England was at war with revolutionary France, and March 1794, when this symphony was first performed, marked the beginning of Robespierre’s reign of terror just across the English Channel. Of the twelve symphonies Haydn wrote for London, the “Military” was by far the most enthusiastically received. When it was repeated a week after the first performance, the Morning Chronicle wrote:

…the middle movement was again received with absolute shouts of applause. Encore! encore! encore! resounded from every seat: the Ladies themselves could not forbear. It is the advancing to battle; and the march of men, the sounding of the charge, the thundering of the onset, the clash of arms, the groans of the wounded, and what may well be called the hellish roar of war increase to a climax of horrid sublimity! which, if others can conceive, he [Haydn] alone can execute; at least he alone hitherto has effected
these wonders.

Another reviewer, writing after yet another performance, found the cymbals “discordant, grating, and offensive,” though he conceded that such sounds were in fact appropriate for depicting the horrors
of war. 

Contemporaries must have found the sudden outburst in a distant key, immediately following the trumpet fanfares, as jolting and frightening as anything ever written in a symphony. Nor is the “military” style restricted to the second movement. The closing theme of the first movement bears a striking resemblance to the famous “Radetzky” March by Johann Strauss Sr., written about half a century later (although we cannot be sure whether audiences heard this particular theme as “military” in 1794). The extra military percussion reappears in the last section of the final movement. In addition, the main theme of this finale, certainly not a military-sounding melody in itself, became a folk-tune in England that shows up in manuscripts of country dances as “Lord Cathcart’s Welcome.” (Lord Cathcart was a well-known military figure of the time.)

These associations would in themselves guarantee a special place for this symphony among Haydn’s works. But there is even more that is unusual here. The slow opening sounds like a separate movement rather than a slow introduction to the fast movement. The latter, surprisingly, begins with the chirping trio of a flute and two oboes, and the entire movement consistently treats the high woodwind as a special solo group within the orchestra. 

In the first half of the third-movement minuet, Haydn, instead of repeating his musical phrase literally as he normally does, completely re-orchestrates the melody. And the finale treats its main theme in ways totally unheard-of in 18th-century music. Ushered in by a startling timpani solo, the development section of this finale reaches keys that couldn’t be further removed from the original G major; the music actually travels all the way around the circle of fifths.

Yet the most stunning of the symphony’s movements remains the second, the “military” Allegretto. Given its great originality, it may come as a surprise that its opening theme was “recycled” from a work written some years earlier, in 1786/87. In that year, Haydn received a commission from King Ferdinand IV of Naples, who was married to a Habsburg princess from Vienna. This musical monarch played an instrument known as the lira organizzata, which was a form of hurdy-gurdy. (The hurdy-gurdy is described in the New Harvard Dictionary of Music as a “string instrument…with a crank at the end opposite the pegbox. When the crank is turned, a rosined wooden wheel adjacent to the bridge and touching the strings rotates, causing the strings to sound.”) 

Ferdinand asked for works utilizing two of these instruments; presumably he wanted to play them with his instructor, an Austrian diplomat named Norbert Hadrava. Haydn complied by composing no fewer than five concertos for the King. He thought highly of this music, but the unusual scoring prevented further hearings. Therefore, he revived some of them in London by having the hurdy-gurdy parts played by a flute and an oboe, and turned the “Romance” of the third concerto into the second movement of his newest symphony. It is a miracle what re-orchestration can do: Haydn left the music virtually unchanged, though he enlarged his instrumental forces (most notably, he added the famous percussion instruments, as well as a pair of clarinets). The variations on the melody, with the alternating uses of major and minor, are exactly the same in concerto and symphony. Then, at the point where the concerto movement ends, Haydn added the trumpet fanfare and that extraordinary coda. With unerring instinct, Haydn picked from his vast output an obscure movement that he could turn, with just the right number of changes, into one of the greatest successes of his life.

Notes By Peter Laki