Symphony No. 88 in G major, Hob. I:88

Program notes

About the Work

Haydn completed his Symphony No. 88 in 1787. It was the first symphony he wrote after the six he had sent to Paris, and it was composed for the orchestra of the Esterházy court. It has no nickname and belongs to neither of the famous sets, the Paris or the London symphonies, yet it has long been one of the most often played of the 104.

Its route to the public was irregular. Johann Peter Tost, who led the second violins in the Esterházy orchestra, travelled to Paris in 1788 with the scores of this symphony and its companion, No. 89, together with a set of string quartets, and sold them to the publisher Sieber. He also sold Sieber music that Haydn had not written. When the publisher complained, Haydn’s reply was brief: “Thus Herr Tost has swindled you.”

The orchestra is the standard one of the 1780s: flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. Haydn does something unusual with it. The trumpets and drums are silent throughout the first movement, where an audience of the day would have expected them, and are held back for the slow movement, where it would not. It was only the second time he had used them in a slow movement.

That slow movement, a Largo, has had distinguished admirers. Brahms is reported to have said of it: “I want my Ninth Symphony to sound like this.”

Riccardo Muti places the symphony at the head of a programme that runs from Haydn through Richard Strauss’s look back at the Baroque to Beethoven’s Fourth. The presenters of the Eisenstadt concert quote him calling Haydn “an architect of music” and the true bridge to Beethoven. The programme is given at the Musikverein on 8 and 10 May, and on 13 May in the Haydnsaal of Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt, the palace of the family Haydn served.

What to Listen For

Adagio, Allegro. A short, ceremonious slow introduction, and then the strings alone start the Allegro with a light, quick theme. Almost everything in the movement is made from that one tune: where a second theme should arrive, Haydn gives a new twist on the first. Listen for accompaniment patterns that turn out to be themes in their own right, and for the solo flute that decorates the main tune when it comes back.

Largo. A solo cello and an oboe together sing a broad melody, and the movement is little more than that melody repeated with a different accompaniment each time. Its calm is broken, without warning, by loud chords for the full orchestra. Here the trumpets and timpani are heard for the first time in the symphony, and the shock is deliberate.

Menuetto: Allegretto. A robust minuet with a rustic accent. In the trio, bassoons and violas hold a drone in bare fifths, like a bagpipe, and the drone then slides down in parallel, a progression that harmony teachers forbid.

Finale: Allegro con spirito. A rondo on a tune of repeated notes that starts on the weak part of the bar, so it always seems to arrive a fraction early. The movement runs like clockwork, with hardly a rest. In the middle Haydn springs a learned surprise, an elaborate canon, and then lets the tune back in as if nothing had happened.