Gott Erhalte Franz Den Kaiser - Composition

Composition

As elsewhere in Haydn's music, it has been conjectured that Haydn took part of his material from folksongs he knew. This hypothesis has never achieved unanimous agreement; the alternative being that Haydn's original tune was adapted by the people in various versions as folk songs. For discussion, see Haydn and folk music.

One claimed folk source of "Gott erhalte" is a Croatian song, known in Međimurje and northern regions of Croatia under the name "Stal se jesem". The version below was collected by a field worker in the Croatian-speaking Austrian village of Schandorf.

Irrespective of the original source, Haydn's own compositional efforts went through multiple drafts, discussed by Rosemary Hughes in her biography of the composer. Hughes reproduces the draft fragment given below (i.e., the fifth through eighth lines of the song) and writes, "His sketches, preserved in the Vienna National Library, show the self-denial and economy with which he struggled to achieve seemingly inevitably climax, pruning the earlier and more obviously interesting version of the fifth and sixth lines, which would have anticipated, and so lessened, its overwhelming effect."

The original version of the song (see autograph score, above) included a single line for voice with a rather crude piano accompaniment, with no dynamic indications and what Jones calls "an unevenness of keyboard sonority." This version was printed in many copies (two different printers were assigned to the work) and sent to theaters and opera houses across the Austrian territories with instructions for performance. The Vienna premiere took place in the Burgtheater on 12 February 1797, the day the song was officially released. The Emperor was present, attending a performance of Dittersdorf's opera Doktor und Apotheker and Joseph Weigl's ballet Alonzo und Cora. The occasion celebrated his 29th birthday.

Not long after, Haydn later wrote three additional versions of his song,

• He first wrote a version for orchestra, called "much more refined" by Jones.

• During 1797, Haydn was working on a commission for six string quartets from Count Joseph Erdödy. He conceived the idea of composing a slow movement for one of the quartets consisting of the Emperor's hymn as theme, followed by four variations, each involving the melody played by one member of the quartet. The finished quartet, now often called the "Emperor" quartet, was published as the third of the Opus 76 quartets, dedicated to Count Erdödy. It is perhaps Haydn's most famous work in this genre.

• The last version Haydn wrote was a piano reduction of the quartet movement, published by Artaria in 1799. The publisher printed it with the original cruder piano version of the theme, though a modern edition corrects this error.

After the last Emperor, Charles I, died in 1922, monarchists created an original stanza for his son Otto von Habsburg. Since Austria had deposed its emperor in 1918 and become a republic, this version never had official standing.