Discovering Music: Haydn’s Symphony Number 100
Radio 3
THE BBC has always been educational. When it was set up, education (along with entertainment and information) was deemed to be was an essential part of the corporation’s role. It was from BBC radio, in the good old days, that I was first exposed to the wonders of drama, music and literature. This is especially true of music. It would simply not otherwise have been possible to hear so much good quality music as could be had at the flick of a switch. Not only did Auntie BBC regularly broadcast concerts and operas, but the corporation also went out of its way to explain, explore and illustrate the wonders, pleasures and excitement to be had from music.
As Julian Lloyd Webber will tell you at every opportunity, with the state of our schooling now, this service is needed more than ever. It always shocks me, when I watch BBC 2’s University Challenge, how little the supposed crème de la crème of our educational system seem to know about classical music. In one recent edition, Wagner’s thundering Tannhauser Overture was unrecognised.
The BBC continues its Reithian duties in that splendid Radio 3 series, Discovering Music. Charles Hazlewood recently gave us a pretty good guided tour of Haydn’s marvellous Symphony 100 – the military symphony. Apart from the musical invention, melodiousness and fascinating harmonic modulations of this score, there’s the arresting use of “Turkish” percussion that gives the symphony its military nickname.
Wars in the 18th century exposed western Europe to the excitement of Turkish military musical effects – exotic percussion, bells, cymbals, drums, triangles and so on – which affected not only army bands but opera and concert music.
As Hazlewood pointed out, this Turkish music features particularly in Mozart’s opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail and also in his Turkish Rondo and the Fifth Violin Concerto. In military bands, it created the craze for black drummers with turbans and exotic uniforms. The bass drummers’ tiger skin is a relic of this craze today.
Beethoven was fond of this Turkish music – note his music for the drama The Ruins of Athens. From his earliest sketches, we can see that he intended his Ninth Symphony should contain Turkish music in the finale. He also wrote military marches.
As this Turkish music is such a feature of Haydn’s Symphony 100, I wish Hazelwood had made more of it. As an illustrated lecture, this was top quality radio broadcasting. But we should have heard more clashing cymbals and thumping bass drum. I could hardly hear the triangle at all.
Still, Hazlewood is doing a grand job. This kind of programme is to be encouraged and, given the fact that that this year’s wretched Proms contained hardly any Haydn symphonies at all, I say more power to his elbow. But I wish the BBC Concert Orchestra’s percussion section had a bit more power to their elbows, too.
Robert Giddings
