Symphony No.94 in G major (“Surprise”)

UH/14 - haydn: symphony no.94

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Symphony No.94 in G major (“Surprise”)

Adagio - vivace assai

Andante

Menuet: allegro molto

Finale: allegro di molto

There is more than one surprise in Haydn’s “Surprise” Symphony. The timpanist in Salomon’s orchestra, for which Haydn wrote the work in London in 1791, must have been surprised to find that he was required to retune one of his instruments in the middle of a movement. No one had ever asked him, or any other timpanist, to do that before. For the London audience the major surprise was surely the extraordinary Allegro molto tempo of the Menuet. As for the famous fortissimo chord near the beginning of the Andante, it seems to have taken even Haydn by surprise: certainly, it is not included in the first version of the manuscript, which had to be altered to make way for what was evidently a last-minute inspiration. It was obviously effective, since a newspaper report referred to the “surprise” the day after the first performance - directed by Haydn himself in the Hanover Square Rooms on 23 March 1792 - and it was a disproportionately significant factor in preserving the popularity of the work at a time when nearly everything else by Haydn had been forgotten.

The “Surprise” is not, in fact, the most likely candidate for popularity among Haydn’s symphonies. Harmonically, it is by no means ingratiating, as the strings of the orchestra demonstrate immediately after the lovely little woodwind chorale at the start of the Adagio introduction. The Vivace assai, moreover, is neither the most charming nor the most amusing of his first movements. It is a masterly but severe process of continuous development of a theme which, though not unattractive, is more motif than melody. The composer relents a little by introducing two new themes in the dominant but he does not go so far as to involve them in the harmonic adventures in the development section and, far from emphasising their presence in the recapitulation, he reduces their joint effect by separating them with more allusions to the main theme.

The second movement, on the other hand, would be a winner with or without the loud full-orchestral chord which so surprisingly intrudes on pianissimo pizzicato strings. A set of variations on a C-major theme of nursery-tune simplicity, the Andante is all the more delightful for the stern and even stormy intrusion of C minor harmonies in the middle. The Menuet - which is quicker than any Haydn had written since that of his Symphony No.28 in A - is just as entertaining as the Andante, although in this case it is not so much a matter of playful humour as of rustic energy in the outer sections and agile fluency on bassoon and violins in the central Trio.

Having kept the symphony briskly on the move up to this point - the steady quaver tread of the Andante scarcely qualifies it as a slow movement - Haydn is not inclined to lose the momentum in the Finale. At the same time, however, while prescribing a tempo quick enough to match the Vivace assai, he avoids the severity of that movement. The main theme of the Allegro di molto is distinctly more cheerful and, though it gets into some interesting contrapuntal situations, neither it nor its like-minded second-subject companion experiences much harmonic pressure at any stage in what must be one of the most elegant of all Haydn’s sonata-rondo constructions.