Symphony No.49 in F minor (“La Passione”)

While there is no documentary evidence that Haydn intended the Symphony in F minor to be performed at Passiontide, it is not difficult to imagine how it came to be known as “La Passione” within two years of its composition in 1768. Apart from the fact that it is cast in the form of a sonata da chiesa (or church sonata), with a slow first movement, it opens in a mood of lamentation with a sombre melody in F minor on the strings followed a few bars later by a descending line of syncopated sobbing motifs on first violins. In spite of the intervention of a kind of second subject in a marginally more positive A flat major, the grieving atmosphere is scarcely relieved by it.

There is, however, another and possibly complementary explanation for the passionate temperament of the 49th Symphony. Like several works Haydn wrote at this time - the “Trauer” Symphony in E minor is the outstanding example - it was influenced by the German “Sturm und Drang,” the brief but unstoppable romantic revolution that spread through the arts in the late 1760s, setting fire to classical conventions and emotional inhibitions until it burned itself out in the early 1770s. The Allegro di molto is an essential “storm and stress” conception in its briskly urgent tempo, its emphatic dynamic contrasts, the wide leaps and impetuous rhythms of its main theme and its austere refusal to compromise the unhappy implications of its minor tonality. It is linked to the preceding Adagio not only by its harmonic identity, moreover, but also by its main theme, which is derived (with octave displacements) from the first three or four notes of the work.

Dramatic continuity is sustained to the end by the prominence of the same harmonies and the same thematic motif in both the Menuet and Finale - although the F major middle section of the third movement does offer the one more than momentary glimpse of light in the whole symphony. The last movement is no less stressful than the Allegro di molto. While sharing most of its stormy characteristics, it proceeds at an even quicker tempo and is even more concentrated in construction by being based on just one, closely persecuted, main theme.

Gerald Larner©