Symphony No. 26 in D minor, Hob. I:26 (‘Lamentatione’)

Program notes

About the Work

In the late 1760s Joseph Haydn, then in his mid-thirties and in charge of the music at the Esterházy court, began to write symphonies in minor keys, something he had hardly done before. They are restless, abrupt pieces, and later writers borrowed a label from German literature for them: Sturm und Drang, storm and stress. The Symphony No. 26 in D minor is one of the earliest. Haydn’s manuscript is lost, so the date cannot be fixed, but the scholar H. C. Robbins Landon placed it in 1768 or perhaps 1769.

The nickname, which was in use in Haydn’s lifetime but probably did not come from him, points to what makes the piece unusual. It seems to have been written for Holy Week, and Haydn built old church melodies into it. In Austria at the time the Passion story was chanted in the days before Easter to traditional plainsong formulas, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah were sung to chant as well. Haydn quotes the Passion chant in his first movement and returns to chant in the second. Some scholars, Landon among them, have gone further and heard the first two movements as a kind of illustration of the Passion story, with separate phrases for the narrating Evangelist, for Christ and for the crowd. Others doubt that Haydn meant anything so literal and point out how freely he treats the borrowed tunes. For a long time the Easter connection was forgotten altogether, and an early twentieth-century edition called the piece a Christmas symphony.

The orchestra is small: two oboes, two horns and strings, with a bassoon and perhaps a harpsichord joining the bass line. The symphony has three movements and lasts a little over a quarter of an hour.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens in a rush, with driving syncopations in the strings that seem all rhythm and no tune. Then the music brightens abruptly into F major, and under a busy line of running notes in the first violins the first oboe and the second violins play the chant: plain, even notes that sound like something from another world dropped into the middle of a symphony. Listen for the loud, declaiming phrases and the quiet, slow-stepping answer between them. When this music comes back at the end of the movement it is in D major, with the horns added, which gives it a blaze it did not have before.

The Adagio is built on chant in the same way. The oboe and second violins carry the melody in long notes, like the tune in a chorale prelude, while the first violins walk gently around it. It is calm, consoling music, and the simplest thing in the symphony.

Haydn then ends, unusually, with a minuet and no fast finale. It is no courtly dance. The minuet returns to D minor and is full of sharp contrasts of loud and soft and phrases of irregular length, and the trio in the major, with its offbeat accents, gives only brief relief. The symphony closes in the minor.