Forty years ago Robert Murrell Stevenson published a ground-breaking article on Haydn's relationship with the Iberian world (‘Haydn's Iberian World Connection’, Inter-American Music Review 4/2 (1982), 3–30, available at https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/IAMR/article/view/52768). This work remains even today an essential starting-point for anyone interested in the field, as it offers an astonishing mine of data and interpretations that only an eminent mind like Stevenson's could have assembled in the pre-internet era. But at the time it had hardly any resonance either among Haydn experts or among musicologists based in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking regions. For the former, it represented research on the margins of the canon of eighteenth-century European music, far from the traditional musical centres of interest at the time (essentially, selected cities of Western Europe). For the latter, it dealt with a subject that was at that time tacitly excluded from the scholarly agenda for eighteenth-century Iberian music, which was then based on three pillars: the main native composers, religious institutions (especially cathedrals) and exceptional musical genres, particularly the theatrical and the sacred (such as the villancico). Stevenson's work remained in no man's land, so to speak. To use another metaphor, it was like a precious stone of such exotic originality that musicology did not quite know how to deal with it.
Four decades later, it is not evident that this scenario has changed substantially. It is undeniable that musicological research on the eighteenth century has gained considerable strength in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, with a continuous growth in both results and numbers of practitioners. The impact of Iberian scholarship on musicology in the United States and Canada is also very noticeable, with the field burgeoning in recent years, as can be seen by its increasing prominence in conference programmes, publications and certain patterns of the musicological job market. By broadening its focus from Western Europe to other territories of the globe, musicology has begun to explore new musical sources. But Haydn and some other composers of the late eighteenth century are only now beginning to take a place – albeit still very discreetly – in the narratives of music history of Latin American countries.
Haydn is also beginning to take a place in musicological research on Iberian contexts. This turn of events is particularly apt in the case of Spain, owing to the composer's direct connections with particular Spanish patrons and institutions. Haydn's relationship with Spain began in the early 1770s and became intense: there are hundreds of sources from the period scattered throughout archives and libraries. What is worthy of special attention, however, are those personal and direct relationships that he established with various Spanish institutions and patrons in the 1780s. In those years, Haydn himself sent several manuscripts from Eszterháza to the court in Madrid, such as the opera L'isola disabitata and his Symphonies Nos 62 and 74, among others, at the request of members of the royal family. The Royal Palace archive collected over sixty symphonies and a dozen baryton trios, many in authorized copies emanating from circles close to the composer; some of these sources mysteriously ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, as Stephen C. Fisher discovered and described a few years before Stevenson's previously mentioned article (‘A Group of Haydn Copies for the Court of Spain: Fresh Sources, Rediscovered Works, and New Riddles’, Haydn-Studien 4/2 (1978), 65–84).
The Countess Duchess of Benavente, María Josefa Alfonso Pimentel, achieved the unusual feat of being able to count on Haydn's services from a distance between 1783 and 1789. The contract between them required the composer to submit copies of the opera Orlando paladino as well as some symphonies, chamber works and masses, although he only partially fulfilled it. It has also been suggested that Haydn composed two quartets at the express request of José Álvarez de Toledo y Gonzaga, the famous Duke of Alba painted by Goya with some of the composer's songs in his hand. At least, that is the information that seems to be deduced from Haydn's own words in a letter to his publisher Artaria on 5 April 1785 (see Dénes Bertha, ed., Joseph Haydn: Gesammelte Briefe und Aufzeichnungen: Unter Benützung der Quellensammlung von H. C. Robbins Landon (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1965), 136). There is a consensus that one of these quartets corresponds to the String Quartet Op. 42, although research has yet to provide stronger documentary evidence for this. Of all Haydn's direct contacts with Spain, the best known was with the wealthy Cofradía de la Santa Cueva de Cádiz, for whom he composed The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross in 1786. This highly original work was premiered on Good Friday in the Oratorio de la Santa Cueva in the Iglesia del Rosario in Cádiz (and not in the cathedral, as the elderly Haydn mistakenly told his biographer Georg August Griesinger, who describes it as the ‘Hauptkirche’ of the city in his Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1810), 32). Despite its unusual structure of a succession of slow movements with spoken sections in between, The Seven Last Words was a resounding success in Spain. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, it was common practice for it to be performed during Holy Week in churches and in sacred concerts. In short, commissions such as these contributed in a decisive way to spreading the prestige of Haydn and his work all over Spain, while at the same time offering us an extensive field of research that still calls for further attention.
Haydn undeniably left a deep mark on the ears and hearts of several generations of musicians in Spain. The available evidence is already more than sufficient to confirm that the Spanish reception of Haydn is a particularly complex phenomenon that is simultaneously related to genres, spaces and institutions. Future research would involve concentrating on at least four areas: first, the function and scope of the preserved sources, often with creative variants and adaptations dictated by local usage (including the extensive repertory in religious archives that is still little explored); second, reconstructing the channels, commercial or private, through which prints and manuscripts were disseminated, thus connecting the main European publishers with consumers; third, the decisive influence of Haydn's work on the compositional practice of local composers, especially in genres such as masses, symphonies, quartets and trios; and fourth, the composer's impact on the aesthetic and intellectual ideals of listeners and amateurs, as reflected in a wide range of documents such as treatises, correspondence and administrative sources, among others. Study of these four areas would doubtless shed further light on the imposing reputation and influence of Haydn in Spain during his own lifetime.
Several instrumental genres were also enriched by the influence of certain composers who became familiar to many in the public and private sphere. As the string quartet took root in Madrid in the 1770s, Boccherini and Haydn were the main points of reference, as was the case throughout much of Europe. But they were not the only ones. François-Joseph Gossec, Jean-Baptiste Davaux and Pierre Vachon, for example, also left their mark on such an important local composer as Gaetano Brunetti, of whose quartets no fewer than fifty are extant (see Miguel Ángel Marín, ‘Haydn, Boccherini and the Rise of the String Quartet in Late Eighteenth-Century Madrid’, in The String Quartet in Spain, ed. Christiane Heine and Juan Miguel González Martínez (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016), 59–119). His output of fifty-two string trios also contains clear evidence of the influence of Boccherini and, above all, Haydn. Meanwhile, the works of Carlo Antonio Campioni, Giovanni Battista Viotti and Ignaz Pleyel were not only well known, but also served as models for some of Brunetti's passages. For example, the Larghetto of his Trio l132 opens with a phrase that can be related to the beginning of the initial Larghetto of Campioni's Trio Op. 7 No. 7, while the theme of the Cantabile sostenuto of the former's Trio l117 is inspired by the Andante of the latter's Trio Op. 7 No. 2. Some passages from the Allegro moderato of Brunetti's Trio l16 bear a striking resemblance to passages from Viotti's Op. 2 No. 2, while in the first movement of Trio l125 one can detect borrowings from Pleyel's Trio Op. 17 No. 2 (according to the detailed analysis of Lluís Bertran, ‘Eligiendo las piezas: los tríos de Gaetano Brunetti y la recepción de la música instrumental europea’, in Instrumental Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Spain, ed. Miguel Ángel Marín and Màrius Bernadó (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2014), 383–456; see especially 398–400, 410–412, 419 and 423–424, with their musical examples). Something similar can be said about the development of the symphony in late eighteenth-century Spain. Again, Haydn occupied a central place, as attested to by the more than eighty copies of his symphonies – and another fifteen false attributions – preserved in the archives of cathedrals, which were common venues for the performance of orchestral music in the Catholic sphere, as is well known. But other European composers are equally well represented in these collections, in particular Pleyel (with at least twenty-nine symphonies), as well as Friedrich Schwindl, Carl Joseph Toeschi, Johann Christian Bach, François-Joseph Gossec and Adalbert Gyrowetz (see Héctor Santos, ‘Música orquestal en las catedrales españolas entre c. 1770 y c. 1840: funciones, géneros y recepción’ (PhD dissertation, Universidad de La Rioja, 2019)). All this evidence has opened up promising lines of research that, although still at an incipient stage, may allow us to assess more precisely the impact of Haydn and other composers and to reveal a rich web of influences and connections.
From the contexts indicated here, there emerge at least two areas for further investigation. The most immediate involves further study of international networks of music printing and publishing, which developed throughout the long eighteenth century but underwent a rapid acceleration from the 1770s onwards (see Rudolf Rasch, ed., Music Publishing in Europe 1600–1900: Concepts and Issues, Bibliography (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005)). The simultaneous development of an international compositional style (particularly for emerging instrumental genres), the consolidation of engraving as the most popular form of publishing music (and one that reproduced the nuances of musical notation more clearly than could movable type) and the intensification of domestic musical practice as a means of socialization and development of cultural prestige contributed to this unprecedented expansion of the music market. Spain was by no means left out of these new commercial dynamics. The fact that music printing in eighteenth-century Spain had barely taken off had distracted researchers from what is now becoming evident: the existence of an intense and well-established commercial music network through which abundant prints and manuscripts circulated. This network was composed of several European publishers and numerous Spanish booksellers, who established various kinds of relationships with each other.
A recent case from my own research has shown, for example, that from the 1770s to 1820s around forty different editions of Haydn quartets – either printed editions or published manuscripts based on them – were known in Spain. The prints were published in cities as diverse as Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Florence, Leipzig, London, Lyon, Paris, Venice and Vienna. What kind of supply chain made it possible for a quartet printed in Paris to be on sale in Madrid within a few weeks and then end up in the archives of the cathedral of Ávila or in the library of an amateur in Mallorca, for example? (Miguel Ángel Marín, ‘Haydn en la iglesia: cuartetos de cuerda en instituciones eclesiásticas españolas’, Revista de Musicología 44/1 (2021), 107–164). There are three essential questions about the way this market functioned and its enclaves of exchange that may guide future research: first, who participated (publishers, printers, booksellers, copyists and buyers); second, what products circulated (genres, formats, composers and arrangers); and third, how this market was regulated (sales strategies and prices, rates of demand, advertisements and legal frameworks, among other aspects).
Another perspective to study is the cultural transfer implied by these connections. Along with the physical objects themselves (the scores or the instruments), there travelled cultural, aesthetic and social practices associated with their use. The emancipation of chamber instrumental genres, the new ways of socializing in, through and around musical performance, the configuration of compositional reference models, and the beginnings of a mode of attentive and active listening are practices – then emerging throughout many parts of Europe – that also developed in Spain. These processes of cultural transfer, for which one of the first steps was the circulation of music and musicians, inevitably implied a process of reinterpretation and resignification. The object and its consumption (the score and its performance) acquired a new meaning in the place of arrival, which did not merely reproduce the ‘original’, but transformed and adapted it according to the requirements and conditions of the new space and the creative dispositions of those involved. At the heart of this methodological framework lies the central question of what we could call, in a broad sense, the historiography of mobility: studying the history of music by taking into account phenomena as diverse as migrations, diasporas and exiles as well as the history of networks, technology, and diplomacy and cultural mediation, among other issues. (For two recent studies relevant to Spain see the articles by Juan José Carreras and María Cáceres-Piñuel, ‘Presentación: movilidad, internacionalización y espacios de la música’, and by Mélanie Traversier, ‘Renewed Orientations for the History of Transnational Music Mobility in the Age of Enlightenment’, both in Artigrama 36 (2021), 19–28 and 87–113 respectively, as part of a recent issue dedicated to the phenomena of mobility and music. For the case of Beethoven see Teresa Cascudo, ‘Beethoven, recepción, discursos y prácticas canónicas’, in Un Beethoven ibérico: dos siglos de transferencia cultural, ed. Teresa Cascudo (Granada: Comares, 2021), 1–13.)
The importance of understanding these phenomena as processes of cultural transfer, and not as the imposition of an exogenous model, is demonstrated by the change in musicological perspectives on the very concept of ‘Viennese Classicism’. More than three decades ago, James Webster had already questioned the reception of Viennese Classicism as a higher stage of compositional perfection, characterized by balance, order and symmetry – with sonata form as its highest expression – which composers of the time supposedly aspired to master and towards which they directed their creative efforts (see Haydn's ‘Farewell’ Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style: Through-Composition and Cyclic Integration in His Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 347–357). Such a claim has led to teleological narratives that evaluate the merit of a composition in terms of its distance from that theoretical, idealized perfection, as might be seen in the introduction of Francesc Bonastre to his edition of Bernat Bertran's Symphony in E flat major, composed in 1798 (Barcelona: Biblioteca de Catalunya, 1991). As Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven were taken as the most refined emblems of this model, the resulting argument was inevitable: the greater the presence of these composers in Spain and the greater the number of traits associated with these composers detected in Spanish works, the more ‘Viennese’ the music of the Spanish would purportedly be and – by extension of such logic – the more important the role they would occupy in history. The problem, of course, is that Viennese Classicism was not the perfect and homogeneous model that musicologists, particularly from the Germanic sphere, had wanted to see. To put it bluntly, it is more a historiographical fiction than a compositional style.
The key question is not whether the music composed in Spain was more or less ‘in tune’ with the model associated with Vienna, nor is it the degree of its ‘distance’ in comparison with that idealized model (distance translated into ‘backwardness’ or ‘primitivism’ by traditional narratives until very recent years). The challenge, rather, is twofold. First, to establish when and how those relevant compositional features that are associated with Vienna – but of course also with other innovative places such as Paris, Mannheim, Berlin and London – became known to musicians active in Spain. And second, to determine to what extent these elements were integrated by Spanish composers and, where appropriate, how they coexisted with their own tradition and various specific musical circumstances that could alter the meanings and functions of these works. The story that we should try to tell, therefore, is not that of a process of approaching a stylistic ideal, but that of a compositional tradition (the Spanish one) that was modestly integrated into European musical life with its contingent factors, limitations and particularities. (These arguments are further developed in my chapter ‘Joseph Haydn y el clasicismo vienés en España’, in Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica, volume 4: La música en el siglo XVIII, ed. José Máximo Leza (Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2014), 484–500.)
From this perspective it is important to think afresh about the geographical scale of observation, particularly in the case of Spain – the borders of which expanded in the early modern age to include colonized territories in the Americas and Southeast Asia, as well as parts of Italy during certain periods. By establishing the geographical reach of Spanish musical culture during the long eighteenth century, the space for analysis is expanded and aspects that have hitherto remained hidden come to the surface. For one thing, the perimeter of the resulting map contrasts markedly with the usual perimeter of many studies, suggesting the need to relocate or nuance the spatial limits of certain phenomena. The historiography of mobility should, then, include other issues already familiar to eighteenth-century scholars such as long-distance trade, colonial settlements or cosmopolitanism, and, in general terms, the recent interest in global history in the field of musicology, as Olivia Bloechl has recently pointed out in this journal (‘Editorial’, Eighteenth-Century Music 17/2 (2020), 173–176).
The dissemination of Mozart's Requiem in D minor, k626, can serve as a case in point. One of the first performances of this work in the Americas took place on 19 December 1819 at the Igreja do Parto in Rio de Janeiro. Conducted by José Maurício Nunes García (1767–1830), mestre de capela at the cathedral and a person of mixed African and European heritage, the orchestra was made up of musicians trained in Brazil within performance traditions that were distinct from those in Vienna (or Western Europe, in general). The Salzburg-born composer Sigismund von Neukomm (1778–1858), who was temporarily based in the Brazilian city, was a witness to – and perhaps the driving force behind – this event. How would the work of Mozart have sounded and been listened to there? Neukomm made his readers aware of the specific profile of the conductor and the performing circumstances when recounting this premiere for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung:
Der Eifer, mit dem Hr. Garcia allen Schwierigkeiten entgegengearbeitet hat, um endlich einmal auch hier ein Meisterwerk unseres unsterblichen Mozart's zur Aufführung zu bringen, verdient den wärmsten Dank der hiesigen Kunstfreunde, und ich meinerseits rechne es mir zur Pflicht, diese Gelegenheit zu benutzen, um unsere europäische Kunstwelt auf einen Mann aufmerksam zu machen, der es nur seiner zu grossen Bescheidenheit zuzuschreiben hat, wenn seiner vielleicht erst bey dieser Gelegenheit zum erstenmale öffentlich gedacht wird . . . seine Bildung blos sein eigenes Werk ist . . . Die Aufführung des Mozartischen Meisterwerkes liess nichts zu wünschen übrig; alle Talente wetteiferten, um den genialen Fremdling Mozart in dieser neuen Welt würdig zu empfangen. Dieser erste Versuch ist in jeder Hinsicht so gut gelungen, daß er hoffentlich nicht der letzte in seiner Art sein wird. (Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (19 July 1820), columns 501–503, quoted in Ulrich Konrad, ‘Sigismund von Neukomm: Libera Me, Domine d-Moll Nv 186. Ein Beitrag zur liturgischen Komplettierung von Wolfgang Amadé Mozarts Requiem D-Moll KV 626’, in Dienst der Quellen zur Musik: Festschrift Gertraut Haberkamp zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Oliver Schöner (Tutzing: Schneider, 2002), 432.)
The zeal with which Mr García worked, against all odds, in order finally to bring to performance here a masterpiece by our immortal Mozart, deserves the warmest thanks from local lovers of art, and I, for my part, consider it my duty to use this opportunity to draw the attention of our European art-world to a man who can only put it down to his too great modesty that he is being publicly noticed for the first time on this occasion . . . He is entirely self-educated . . . The performance of the Mozartean masterpiece left nothing to be desired; all the talents competed to give the foreign genius Mozart a worthy welcome in this new world. This first attempt succeeded so well in every respect that I hope it will not be the last of its kind. (My translation)
Beyond the mark it might leave on listeners, it is clear that Mozart's work left a perceptible impact on Nunes García's compositional activity. His own Requiem contains a multitude of passages unmistakably modelled on Mozart's mass, as Ricardo Tacuchian has identified (‘O Requiem mozartiano de José Maurício’, Revista Brasileira de Música 19 (1991), 33–52). Mozart's Requiem also reached the cathedral of Santiago de Chile a little later, in 1853, thanks to a copy commissioned in Madrid, which in turn was based on a copy or published manuscript of the first edition (Leipzig, 1800), known in Spain at least since 1806. Once it arrived in Chile, the original scoring of the copy was so strange to them that it frustrated any attempt to use it to bring some novelty to the cathedral repertoire: a local musician noted in 1882 that it was ‘very good music that has not been performed here for lack of elements [that is, instruments]’. This comment probably refers to the basset horns, but perhaps also to the whole instrumental ensemble and its sonority, which were far removed from the compositional practices of the time (see Alejandro Vera, ‘La importación y la recepción de la música sacra en el Chile decimonónico: el caso de la Catedral de Santiago’, Anales del Instituto de Chile 32 (2013), 75–124).
These two examples illuminate a dimension to studying the reception of Mozart's Requiem that would go completely unnoticed if musicologists look only to Europe. It seems evident that the dissemination and impact achieved by certain composers, works or musical practices can only be properly gauged if certain phenomena are observed from a position far removed from what have traditionally been the sole centres of musicological attention. This is, in fact, one of the main objectives of the I+D+i (Investigación, desarrollo e innovación) project ‘La música como interpretación en España: historia y recepción (1730–1930)’, funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación – Agencia Estatal de Investigación (PID2019–105718GB-I00) that I am co-directing with Teresa Cascudo from 2020 to 2023. But, once again, the methodological premise of observing from the frontier also implies a relevant question related to scale: the ‘frontier’ is not only on the margins of the world, in the remoteness of the American or Asian colonies. Provincial towns or small centres of Western Europe can also be taken as frontier places from which a quite different reality can sometimes be contemplated. One can imagine that such an argument might even have been familiar to Haydn himself. Much of his career (indeed, until his travels to London in the 1790s) was spent in a relatively remote place like Eszterháza, far from Vienna and any other major musical centre of the time. It was again Griesinger, his first biographer, who transcribed the words he reportedly heard Haydn say: ‘I was set apart from the world, there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so I had to become original’ (translation from Vernon Gotwals, Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 17; original text: ‘Ich war von der Welt abgesondert, Niemand in meiner Nähe konnte mich an mir selbst irre machen und quälen, und so mußte ich original werden’, in Griesinger, Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn, 24–25). Whether Haydn's originality is to be explained by his peripheral location, or whether it is a historiographical topos shared, for example, with Boccherini, settled for years in a small and equally remote court like Arenas de San Pedro – he was ‘so remarkable in every respect, that one is tempted to believe that he knew no other music that his own’, according to François-Joseph Fétis (‘Biographie: Boccherini’, Revue Musicale 3/5 (July 1829), 538) – could be the subject of analysis. But the fact is that Haydn also observed his reality from his own frontier.
As I argued years ago in my book Music on the Margin: Urban Musical life in Eighteenth-Century Jaca (Spain) (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2002), the musicological attention focused on the great capitals (or, for that matter, the most prestigious musical institutions) has made us forget that the majority of the population in the eighteenth century was concentrated in towns with fewer than ten thousand inhabitants. If one is interested in proposing a representative narrative of the past, then perhaps our research should go a little beyond the big cities. Again, the dissemination of Mozart's Requiem can appropriately illustrate this idea. In Douai, a middle-sized French town, the Requiem was first performed as early as 1806 – earlier than in many large European cities – while small-sized Olot and middle-sized Orihuela, both Spanish towns, preserve two manuscripts of Mozart's work copied by local hands around 1815 (see respectively Guy Gosselin, ‘L’œuvre de Mozart dans les spectacles lyriques et les concerts du nord de la France au début du XIXe siècle’, in Mozart et la France: de l'enfant prodige au génie (1764–1830), ed. Jean Gribenski and Patrick Taïeb (Lyon: Symétrie, 2014), 163–177, and Miguel Ángel Marín and Aurelio Sagaseta, Mozart's Requiem in Pamplona (1844): Study and Music Edition (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2020), xiii). As a point of comparison, it may be recalled that in England, for example, single movements of the Requiem only began to be performed outside London after that year: in Birmingham in 1817 and 1823, in Derby in 1822, and in Oxford and York in 1823 (see Rachel Cowgill, ‘“Hence, base intruder, hence”: Rejection and Assimilation in the Early English Reception of Mozart's Requiem’, in Europe, Empire, and Spectacle in Nineteenth-Century British Music, ed. Rachel Cowgill and Julian Rushton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 22). Provincial cities were not a priori necessarily irrelevant, nor ‘backward’ in musical terms. From this viewpoint, the words of Pierre Vilar (1906–2003), the great scholar of Spanish history, take on a revealing meaning: ‘The history of the world is best observed from the frontier’ (quoted in Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), xv). This premise should be part of our musicological toolbox.
