Michael Haydn - Works

Works

Michael Haydn never compiled a thematic catalog of his works, nor did he ever supervise the making of one. The earliest catalog was compiled in 1808 by Nikolaus Lang for 'Biographische Skizze'. In 1907 Lothar Perger compiled a catalogue of his orchestral works, the Perger-Verzeichnis, for Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, which is somewhat more reliable than Lang's catalog. Thus, some of Haydn's instrumental works are referred to by Perger numbers. And in 1915 Anton Maria Klafsky undertook a similar work regarding the sacred vocal music. In 1982, Charles H. Sherman, who has edited scores of many Haydn symphonies for Doblinger, published a chronological catalog of Haydn's symphonies, which some recording companies have adopted. Later, in 1991, Sherman joined forces with T. Donley Thomas to publish a chronological catalog of all Haydn's music, which used a single continuous range of numbers, as does Köchel's catalog of Mozart's music. Further important amendments to the Sherman/Thomas catalogue have been made by Dwight Blazin.

The task of cataloguing Haydn's music is simplified by the fact that he almost always put the date of completion on his manuscripts. Guesswork is necessary when the autograph manuscript of a given work did not survive to posterity.

Haydn's sacred choral works are generally regarded as his most important, including the Requiem pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismundo (Requiem for the death of Archbishop Siegmund) in C minor, which greatly influenced the Requiem by Mozart, Missa Hispanica (which he exchanged for his diploma at Stockholm), a Mass in D minor, a Lauda Sion, and a set of graduals, forty-two of which are reprinted in Anton Diabelli's Ecclesiasticon. He was also a prolific composer of secular music, including forty symphonies and partitas, a number of concerti and chamber music including a string quintet in C major which was once thought to have been by his brother Joseph.

There was another case of posthumous mistaken identity involving Michael Haydn: for many years, the piece which is now known as Michael Haydn's Symphony No. 25 was thought to be Mozart's Symphony No. 37 and assigned K. 444. The confusion arose because an autograph was discovered which had the opening movement of the symphony in Mozart's hand, and the rest in somebody else's. It is now thought that Mozart had composed a new slow introduction for reasons unknown, but the rest of the work is known to be by Michael Haydn. The piece, which had been quite widely performed as a Mozart symphony, has been performed considerably less often since this discovery in 1907.

Indeed, several of Michael Haydn's works influenced Mozart. To give just two examples: the Te Deum "which Wolfgang was later to follow very closely in K. 141" and the finale of the Symphony No. 23 which influenced the finale of the G major Quartet, K. 387.