Beethoven's Early Years In Bonn

[Hofrat]

Originally posted by robert newman:

You will nod your head that, for example, virtually 100 symphonies have at one time or another been credited to Mozart and that well over 250 have at one time or another been credited to Haydn. Such amazing facts will not shake you, however. You will, no doubt, say that such things are, well, just annoying details. In fact, in this special case (that of the 'Vienna School') they are typical. And this (with respect) is the problem.

Dear Mr. Newman;

Yes, this is very true. I know for a fact that the "musicologist" Robert Sondheimer claimed to have found 90 unknown symphonies by Haydn. I put his title "musicologist" in quotation marks because virtually everything Sondheimer claimed was suspected by the music community and later proven to be fraudulent!


Hofrat

[Peter]

Originally posted by robert newman:

I've been quite busy over the past few months so have not replied to various posts on this thread.

Hi Robert, Any news on the identity of the copyists?

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Peter]

Originally posted by robert newman:

You will nod your head that, for example, virtually 100 symphonies have at one time or another been credited to Mozart and that well over 250 have at one time or another been credited to Haydn. Such amazing facts will not shake you, however. You will, no doubt, say that such things are, well, just annoying details. In fact, in this special case (that of the 'Vienna School') they are typical. And this (with respect) is the problem.

Yes but how many of these works did Haydn and Mozart actually claim themselves to have written? How many of them did they list in their own inventories and how many of them did they have published?

I would also like to know how you can say Luchesi should be seen as a great composer and then admit that your theory hasn't yet been proven? In other words you keep stating as fact that which is theory and speculation.

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[This message has been edited by Peter (edited 12-22-2005).]

[robert newman]

Dear Administrators,

I have tried yesterday to post on this thread in response to various comments made by Kalimac, Peter and others but my post simply has not appeared on the thread. Can you please say if this thread is no longer operational ?

Thanks

Robert Newman

[Peter]

Originally posted by robert newman:

Dear Administrators,

I have tried yesterday to post on this thread in response to various comments made by Kalimac, Peter and others but my post simply has not appeared on the thread. Can you please say if this thread is no longer operational ?

Thanks

Robert Newman

You seem to be able to post now Robert so try again, if your post doesn't appear then please contact me. Thanks, Peter.


------------------
'Man know thyself'

[Kalimac]

Thank you for reappearing, Mr. Newman, but you haven't at all answered my question. You write that I asked about "symphonies by Haydn and Mozart" but I did not. I asked specifically about whether the Mozart trilogy K.543/550/551, officially dated to 1788, are known to have been in the collection in 1784, four years before they were supposedly written. For that is the claim, and the only claim, offered by the Lucchesi theory which would amount to documentary evidence that something is funny with the received history. (I said nothing about Haydn symphonies, for I saw nothing to indicate that "unwritten" Haydn symphonies were there, though I may have missed something. If the London symphonies, say, are in the 1784 inventory, tell me about it.)

You've provided a lot of statements to the effect that an inventory was taken at Bonn in 1784, which I was already willing to accept (though it still snags on Peter's question of who the copyist "A.R." was), but you do not confirm that the 1788 Mozart symphonies, or indeed any Mozart symphonies, are among them. Instead you say, "there is not a single reference to any work by Mozart," by which I guess you mean that IF "Mozart" symphonies are there, they are not credited to Mozart. You do not answer my question as to how we can know that among the works credited "as 'anonymous' or as 'by different authors'" are the works we know as Mozart's. Are there incipits in this catalog?

Then you say that there is another catalog "made by Luchesi himself from 1785 onwards" which definitely includes symphonies now credited to Haydn and Mozart. But you do not say:
1) Which works by Haydn and Mozart;
2) How we know for sure that these works are in fact in this catalog (are there incipits?);
3) To whom they are credited in the catalog;
4) How we know that works listed in a catalog made from 1785 ONWARDS [emphasis added] were necessarily in the collection in 1784.

Another possibility is that, even without incipits in the catalog, we can somehow match up manuscripts that are today in the Modena collection on a one-to-one basis with works in the 1784 catalog. But you do not address that point either.

I do not know, but it seems to me that your description of the 1784 catalog with its "by different authors" implies that it was not a catalog of individual specific works but just a listing of groups of manuscripts. "Oh, look, here's a big wad of symphonies by a whole bunch of different people. Let's just write that it's a large number of symphonies 'by different authors.'"

There are many other questions raised by your latest posts, and many other questions of mine you have not addressed except to say that my criticisms of Taboga are in some unspecified way "not really very useful." Well, replies to my criticisms would be useful to ME, and it's ME (and others like Peter) whom you and Taboga have to convince.

[Kalimac]

Peter: Concerning Mr. Newman's reported problems in posting, I should report that when I posted my latest, and the system automatically "reloaded", what it sent me to was not the current page 3 of this topic, but a part of page 2 which it identified as page 3. Only by going back to the "General Discussion" page and coming back in again was I able to find my post. Possibly something similar happened to Mr. Newman and he thought his post did not appear. Or he might be referring to some other post which did in fact not appear.

[Kalimac]

On the subject of symphonies known to have been falsely attributed to Haydn and Mozart:

There is nothing at all unusual about this. A vast number of 18th century symphonies exist in manuscripts attributed to two or even more composers. The same is true with works of earlier periods. Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" is a reworking of works by Pergolesi. Well, it turns out that they weren't by Pergolesi. Oops.

The same applies in literature. Consider Shakespeare. Even leaving aside the question of whether Wm. Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the works with his name on them (alternate theories elevate some puzzling questions into supposed insurmountable obstacles, and then attempt to explain them by leaping over obstacles yet more insurmountable, which strikes me as a fair description of the Lucchesi theory also), a number of plays have been attributed to him which he did not write or may have had a small hand in ("Edward III", "Arden of Feversham"). Biblical books like Isaiah, Psalms, and Proverbs have addenda in different styles and of obviously later date stuck on the end, "piggybacking" on the prestige of the originals. There's an important post-classical philosopher known only as "Pseudo-Dionysius" because Dionysius is the name on his works, but all we know is that Dionysius certainly didn't write them. Of the author's real identity we know nothing.

We must distinguish between various reasons that a work may be given a false author's name.

In Haydn's case, it was largely "piggybacking" by publishers without Haydn's knowledge or consent. Haydn was the most renowned symphonist of his time (but he must have been the greatest charlatan of all time to have built up that reputation entirely fallaciously, as Taboga claims), so publishers found they could sell more copies of a symphony by, say, Pleyel, if they put Haydn's name on it.

Mozart was not so renowned as a composer in his day, so there wasn't so much of that. Relatively few symphonies have been falsely attributed to Mozart, and they come from other reasons. Copies made by the young Mozart of others' works (the most effective way to learn to compose in a day prior to textbooks was to copy a work out note-by-note) were taken by hasty early scholars to be Mozart's own. The greatest uncertainty as to the number of Mozart's symphonies comes not through false attribution, but from the question of what counts as a symphony.

There were occasional cases where composers did pass of works of others as their own, usually when under intense time pressure - we have the two Pleyel trios that Haydn sent to England - but these are rare, should not be confused with the above cases, and their very transparency suggests that other works were not falsified. Mozart's K.444 symphony, which is by Michael Haydn, was definitely used by Mozart in concerts, but I don't believe there's evidence that he passed it off as his own; the attribution was made by scholars who found Mozart's copy.

Then there are "land-grabbing" polemicist scholars, so enamoured of some composer that they attribute anything and everything they can find to their favorite. Such was the case of the guy who claimed he found dozens of previously unattributed symphonies by Haydn. And so also is the case of the Lucchesi land-grabbers.

The fact is, as I posted before, that we have catalogs compiled by composers themselves of their own works, we have their letters, we have their drafts (yes, even Mozart's), we have modern stylistic analysis. We can postulate that the composers were pathological liars in their catalogs and letters, that they somehow fooled all their contemporaries into thinking they were proficient composers when they were all along stealing wholesale from the unprotesting Lucchesi, that they planted fake drafts and sketches among their papers to fool subsequent scholars into thinking they wrote the works. Against this kind of theory we have the alternate idea that Haydn and Mozart actually wrote the works with their names on them and that everyone but Taboga and Newman has always thought they wrote. I know which way I'd bet.

[Droell]

I'm actually comfortable with the notion that Mozart (and Haydn) cheated, though for different reasons. In the case of Mozart, the evidence has been there all along: Prodigious output, even as a kid, letter-perfect manuscripts, etc. As Mr. Newman pointed out, Mozart's career - and life, in general - fell apart after his father died, which makes me wonder if the father, not Wolfgang, wasn't the driving force.

It brings up the issue of context. What if you're a reasonably competent composer, stuck in some small hamlet (Leipzig comes to mind, I don't know why), writing very nice music for the locals, and that's all there is? You send manuscripts to the big fancy publishers (in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, etc.) & they send them back with the question, "who are you?" Sounds to me like the same thing that writers, stuck in the boonies, face, to this day.

Riding to the rescue comes the itinerant virtuoso on a whirlwind tour of your tiny town. You go to the concert as a professional courtesy. Then, star-struck, you rush to meet the performer afterwards. Whereupon you learn he's willing to pay cash money for compositions you may have lying around. You think of the wife & kids & you think, sure, why not.

Why should there be only a handful of composers? Located, by some amazing accident, only in the great metropolitan centers? Is composition that hard, is musical talent that scarce? What if you were traveling from town to town, singing for your supper. What if you discovered a surprising amount of unknown talent out there? Would you be tempted to take advantage of it?

Which brings up the most prolific composer of all time: Georg Philipp Telemann. Was he guilty of the same sin, and, if so, was this not an uncommon practice? How much good music was written, and lost, in small towns, what fraction of it escaped to be mis-credited to better-known men?



[This message has been edited by Droell (edited 12-22-2005).]

[Hofrat]

Originally posted by Droell:
I'm actually comfortable with the notion that Mozart (and Haydn) cheated, though for different reasons. In the case of Mozart, the evidence has been there all along: Prodigious output, even as a kid, letter-perfect manuscripts, etc. As Mr. Newman pointed out, Mozart's career - and life, in general - fell apart after his father died, which makes me wonder if the father, not Wolfgang, wasn't the driving force.

It brings up the issue of context. What if you're a reasonably competent composer, stuck in some small hamlet (Leipzig comes to mind, I don't know why), writing very nice music for the locals, and that's all there is? You send manuscripts to the big fancy publishers (in Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, etc.) & they send them back with the question, "who are you?" Sounds to me like the same thing that writers, stuck in the boonies, face, to this day.

Riding to the rescue comes the itinerant virtuoso on a whirlwind tour of your tiny town. You go to the concert as a professional courtesy. Then, star-struck, you rush to meet the performer afterwards. Whereupon you learn he's willing to pay cash money for compositions you may have lying around. You think of the wife & kids & you think, sure, why not.

Why should there be only a handful of composers? Located, by some amazing accident, only in the great metropolitan centers? Is composition that hard, is musical talent that scarce? What if you were traveling from town to town, singing for your supper. What if you discovered a surprising amount of unknown talent out there? Would you be tempted to take advantage of it?

Which brings up the most prolific composer of all time: Georg Philipp Telemann. Was he guilty of the same sin, and, if so, was this not an uncommon practice? How much good music was written, and lost, in small towns, what fraction of it escaped to be mis-credited to better-known men?



[This message has been edited by Droell (edited 12-22-2005).]

I know of an interesting "backward" mis-accreditation. For a very long time, it was believed that Haydn did not write his D major 'cello concerto, rather that it was written by the principle 'cellist in Haydn's orchestra, Kraft. Only with the discovery of a manuscript, signed and dated by Haydn himself, were musicologists able to rightfully accredit Haydn with this work.


Hofrat

[robert newman]

Hofrat is sure that the Cello Concerto long credited to Kraft is now proved beyond reasonable doubt to be a work of Joseph Haydn.
Frankly, I don't agree despite the fact that we certainly have a signed and dated manuscript in Haydn's own hand.

This might seem to be a very strange opinion but I will try to justify this in some detail soon. (Haydn got in to a real mess in his Esterhazy career with dozens of works being fraudulently sold in his name which he, Haydn, never even wrote. There was a time when he, Haydn, simply wrote out in his own hand at Esterhazy numerous works that were simply not his, this in an attempt to gain credit for them and to further his already great fame and prestige). The whole extraordinary story deserves telling in some detail. This I will try to do soon.

Regards

Robert

[robert newman]

I hope this very short article will go some way to showing that the works catalogued at Modena, Italy which eventually arrived there from the Bonn music archive are to a great extent one and the same works that were inventoried at Bonn in 1784 by Neefe, during the absence of the Kapellmeister Andrea Luchesi - the difference being, of course, works that were added to the Bonn archive after May 1784.

In answer to the question raised of how we can prove that symphonies inventoried in 1784 without the name of the composer being given are the same ones credited to 'Mozart' and 'Haydn' by the time of their arrival in Modena, we can start by considering the following -

1. In the May 1784 Bonn Inventory the section dealing with symphonies gives us the following -

8 Symphonies under the name of 'Hadyn'
11 in the name of 'Heyde'
28 Symphonies listed as 'de differents auteurs' (these listed on p.258 of the Inventory)
10 Symphonies listed separately as 'de differents auteurs' (these listed on p.260 of the same Inventory)
1 Work 'Seven Last words of our Redeemer'

Thus, a total of 58 Symphonies

(There are no incipits).

Now, compare that with the list of symphonies catalogued in the Este Library at Modena -

38 Symphonies in the name of 'Haydn'
4 anon. 'returning' symphonies (credited to Haydn and Mozart)
6 'Symphonets' entered in the name of 'Haydn'
9 Symphonies entered in the name of 'Mozart'
1 'Le sette parole del Ns. Redentore'

Thus, a total (again) of 58 Symphonies.

I think it can be argued that this correspondence between the two records is not coincidental - that what arrived (eventually) in Modena was that which was sent from Bonn, of which this small part (symphonies) is typical.

The catalogue kept by Luchesi up to 1791/2 (known as C53/1) and still held at Modena
gives us no 'anonymous' works of any kind. It lists works by composers alphabetically. And it credits these works to Haydn or Mozart.

This is not to suggest that no real difference exists between these two different records. By the time of their arrival in Italy these works had been tampered with in a great number of cases with their original covers ripped off (so as to remove possible evidence of their true composer) and with attempts being made (in ink) to catalogue them prior to their arrival at Modena.

In the case of 'Haydn' masses the same is true.

It is known that the Bonn music archive was removed by Max Franz in October 1794 before the arrival of the invading French army. He took it to his castle in Bad Mergentheim. And it's also known (by the research of the archivist at Modena, Dr Chiarelli) that the Bonn music archive left Mergentheim shortly after the death of the Elector of Bonn, Max Franz in 1801. It did not go directly to Modena.

Regards

Robert

[Peter]

Originally posted by robert newman:

I hope this very short article will go some way to showing that the works catalogued at Modena, Italy which eventually arrived there from the Bonn music archive are to a great extent one and the same works that were inventoried at Bonn in 1784 by Neefe, during the absence of the Kapellmeister Andrea Luchesi - the difference being, of course, works that were added to the Bonn archive after May 1784.

In answer to the question raised of how we can prove that symphonies inventoried in 1784 without the name of the composer being given are the same ones credited to 'Mozart' and 'Haydn' by the time of their arrival in Modena, we can start by considering the following -

1. In the May 1784 Bonn Inventory the section dealing with symphonies gives us the following -

8 Symphonies under the name of 'Hadyn'
11 in the name of 'Heyde'
28 Symphonies listed as 'de differents auteurs' (these listed on p.258 of the Inventory)
10 Symphonies listed separately as 'de differents auteurs' (these listed on p.260 of the same Inventory)
1 Work 'Seven Last words of our Redeemer'

Thus, a total of 58 Symphonies

(There are no incipits).

Now, compare that with the list of symphonies catalogued in the Este Library at Modena -

38 Symphonies in the name of 'Haydn'
4 anon. 'returning' symphonies (credited to Haydn and Mozart)
6 'Symphonets' entered in the name of 'Haydn'
9 Symphonies entered in the name of 'Mozart'
1 'Le sette parole del Ns. Redentore'

Thus, a total (again) of 58 Symphonies.

I think it can be argued that this correspondence between the two records is not coincidental - that what arrived (eventually) in Modena was that which was sent from Bonn, of which this small part (symphonies) is typical.

The catalogue kept by Luchesi up to 1791/2 (known as C53/1) and still held at Modena
gives us no 'anonymous' works of any kind. It lists works by composers alphabetically. And it credits these works to Haydn or Mozart.

This is not to suggest that no real difference exists between these two different records. By the time of their arrival in Italy these works had been tampered with in a great number of cases with their original covers ripped off (so as to remove possible evidence of their true composer) and with attempts being made (in ink) to catalogue them prior to their arrival at Modena.

In the case of 'Haydn' masses the same is true.

It is known that the Bonn music archive was removed by Max Franz in October 1794 before the arrival of the invading French army. He took it to his castle in Bad Mergentheim. And it's also known (by the research of the archivist at Modena, Dr Chiarelli) that the Bonn music archive left Mergentheim shortly after the death of the Elector of Bonn, Max Franz in 1801. It did not go directly to Modena.

Regards

Robert

I don't see that this proves anything other than there being 58 symphonies listed - there could be all sorts of reasons for them being misattributed. We do still need to know who AR was - if he was Anton Reicha then that definitely proves the 1784 inventory was added to after that date and as Robbins Landon states, it is unreliable. This fact is crucial, yet I'm still waiting for an answer!

------------------
'Man know thyself'

[robert newman]

Peter,

I understand you are very keen to know who the copyists were of those works credited at Modena to Haydn and Mozart. Unfortunately (as is so often the case in such things) the answer remains the same as it was a few months ago - we simply do not know at this time who these copyists were.

I agree that Reicha would normally be assumed to have been involved. But I think it also true that these initials are not definitive proof. It's nevertheless important (and no doubt right) that this mystery should be solved. I would like to examine them very closely this Spring.

So the subject is actively being looked at and within the next few months (this already discussed in correspondence with Giorgio Taboga in Italy over the past few months) it's hoped that we can resolve this one way or the other.

As far as the number of symphonies corresponding this, I think, surely does indicate that the Bonn music archives did, eventually, arrive in Modena. It's reasonable to assume so - more so than to assume otherwise, I suggest.

Please bear in mind Peter (and this fact may easily be overlooked) it was common practice for musical manuscripts which lacked a named composer to be automatically credited to the Kapellmeister at the time - this practice being observed right across Europe but clearly not practiced at the time when the Inventory of 1784 was made in Bonn. Had this been observed these works would, of course, be credited as works by Kapellmeister Luchesi. But he (Luchesi) was of course in Italy at the time.

Regards

Robert

[Chaszz]

Robert, you never consider the important question of why Luchesi would have kept quiet and not declared himself the true author of these great works, especially the last four Mozart symphonies. To my mind there can be only two answers:

1. The Vienna Classic boosters you refer to, not content to merely propagandize on the superiority of Autrian music, were a kind of mafia and actually threatened Luchesi with physical harm if he told the truth. So he caved in and kept quiet.

My reply to this is, why didn't he go back to Italy and compose there, then taking credit for everything that he wrote. Why stay in a place that was systematically ruining his reputation?

2. He was paid well to produce masterpices supposedly by Mozart and Haydn and to then shut up about it. In this case he could have stopped accepting the money and quit the deception. If he continued accepting the money and doing the work, then he fully deserves his obscurity today, and has nobody to blame for it but himself.

To accept your version, one must accept that three hugely talented musicians, all with enormous pride in their achievements, were willing to take credit for things they didn't do, or deny themselves credit for what they did do: Haydn, Mozart and Luchesi. Not very likely I would say.

Like Peter, I find it very hard to believe that those last four Mozart symphonies were by somebody who is not and was not widely known as a genius. It doesn't add up. I agree with Peter that it makes more sense to be skeptical about the all-around autheticity of the Modena collection.