World Premiere: 1772
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere 
Instrumentation: 2 oboes, 1 bassoon, 2 horns, strings
Duration: 22 minutes

It was on the strength of such works as Haydn’s Symphony No. 44 that the Classical style entered the period of its full maturity around 1770. The uncluttered textures, periodic melodies and carefully segmented forms essential to the stylistic vocabulary of Classicism had appeared as early as 1720 in Italy, and were first hammered into an independent symphonic genre about twenty years later. Haydn began composing symphonies in 1759, and experimented constantly with the form for the next decade before hitting upon the manner of combining the instrumental and compositional resources of the Classical style with the expressive profundity of older Baroque music. He jostled techniques borrowed from fugues, church sonatas and concertos with balanced, folk-like melodies, simple dance forms and purified harmonies until his perfected versions of the symphony, quartet and trio emerged quite suddenly just after 1770. “In the development of almost any great composer,” wrote the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon, “there comes a surge of brilliant works that mark the advent of his maturity.... Not even the finest of the works prior to 1770 quite prepare us for the fascinating and profound series of symphonies written [by Haydn] in 1771 and 1772.” The Symphony No. 44 is among the first masterworks of the German symphonic tradition.

The Symphony No. 44 is said to have gained its sobriquet — “Mourning” — because the composer asked that its slow movement be played at his funeral. (The request, if true, would have been difficult to grant in any case, since Haydn died in Vienna on May 31, 1809, just two weeks after Napoleon’s troops had occupied the city.) The Symphony’s somber E minor tonality is heightened by enormous rhythmic energy and expressive tension to create a work that Robbins Landon judged to have “overwhelming intensity,” reaching “new heights of nervous power” in its finale. “These new symphonies [of the early 1770s] still impress for their striking sincerity and directness,” wrote Jens Peter Larsen. “In their own time, they must have come as a revelation. The symphony was by that date more or less established as an elegant piece of entertainment for a noble audience, and Haydn had the courage to write symphonies that were completely different.”

The Symphony No. 44 opens with a bold, unison presentation of its craggy main theme — a sharp leap upward, followed by quiet, sighing figures and a pathos-laden melody for the violins. The music becomes more animated, and moves grudgingly and with little conviction into the brighter major tonality of the subsidiary subject. The development section is restless and premonitory, and leads seamlessly to the recapitulation of the earlier themes, which are returned fully in the sunless home key of E minor. After the enervated drama of the first movement (Robbins Landon wondered if some of Haydn’s lost incidental music for a production of Hamlet might have ended up in this Symphony) comes not the expected Adagio but instead a Menuetto written as a strict canon [i.e., imitation] at the octave (the movement is subtitled “Canone in Diapason”) between the outer voices. The placement of this dance-based movement as the second element in the architecture of the Symphony is a stroke of genius, since its abbreviated form and restrained expression allow it to serve as a buffer separating the tragic opening Allegro and the deeply felt Adagio. (Beethoven adopted the same structural plan in his Ninth Symphony for a similar reason.) As a foil to the rugged strains of the Menuetto, Haydn wrote a sweet, lyrical central trio in the halcyon tonality of E major. The blissful strains of the Adagio, given in the veiled sonority of muted strings, are not only beautiful in their own right but also throw into relief the turbulent character of the surrounding music. The finale, according to Robbins Landon, “is perhaps the most concentrated and overwhelming Sturm und Drang [‘Storm and Stress,’ i.e., strongly expressive] movement Haydn ever wrote: in the development section, the tension, and the line, rise in jagged motivic sequences to the point of exhaustion.” It is with such highly charged 18th-century symphonic adventures as this remarkable Symphony that the seeds for musical Romanticism were sown