Menuet sur le nom de Haydn

On the hundredth anniversary of Joseph Haydn’s death in 1909 the Revue Musicale published a special issue including short musical tributes – all based on the same given theme – by six of the leading French composers of the day. There would have been more if they had all been able to understand how the notes BADDG could be derived from the letters HAYDN. Saint-Saëns, for example, told a colleague that he was writing to the editor “asking him to prove to me that the two letters Y and N can signify the notes D and G. I ask you to do the same.” Ravel, however, entered whole­heartedly into the cryptic spirit of the enterprise. On one level an elegant eighteenth-century pastiche with a teasingly chromatic middle section, the Menuet sur le nom de Haydn is also a witty compendium of scholastic techniques, presenting the five-note theme in its original form, extending it, repeating it, reshaping it with octave displacements, reversing it, inverting it… and that’s in only the first twenty-six bars.