Papa Haydn - "Papa" As Pejorative

"Papa" As Pejorative

This usage, which arose in the 19th century, is characterized thus by Höslinger: it is "a more patronizing, even dismissive one. In comparison with Romantic artists and Romantic music, Haydn and his output were seen as genial, but naive and superficial."

With the rise of acclaim for Haydn's music during the 20th century, the patronizing sense of "Papa Haydn" caused scholars and critics to become leery of the term, seeing it as a distortion of the composer's work. For example, Haydn scholar Jens Peter Larsen wrote (1980):

For years the nickname 'Papa Haydn' has characterized the composer. Used by his own musicians and others as a tribute of affection and respect, the expression increasingly took on misleading connotations, and came to signify a benevolent but bewigged and old-fashioned classic. The recent revival of interest in Haydn's music has made plain that the traditional picture had become a caricature, and that it gave a false impression of richness and diversity of his development as a composer.

Because music education materials still tend to reflect 19th-century sources, the patronizing sense of "Papa Haydn" is well known to musicians, reflected in conventionalized, bewigged portraits of the composer (see right), or in the lyrics of the rhyme below, commonly taught to children (it is sung to the first bars of second movement of the Surprise Symphony):

Papa Haydn's dead and gone

but his memory lingers on.

When his heart was filled with bliss

he wrote merry tunes like this.