Joseph Haydn's ethnicity
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The question of what nationality were the ancestors of the composer Joseph Haydn was a lively and controversial issue in Haydn scholarship during a historical period lasting from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. The principal contending ethnicities were Croatian and German. Mainstream musical scholarship today generally adopts the second of these two hypotheses.
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[edit] Kuhač's Croatian hypothesis
During the late 19th century, the Croatian ethnologist Franjo Kuhač gathered a great number of Croatian folk tunes in fieldwork. Kuhač was struck by the resemblance of a number of these tunes with themes found in Haydn's works, and suggested that Haydn knew these folk tunes and incorporated them into his work. Other scholars disagreed, suggesting instead that the Haydn original themes had circulated among the people, evolving gradually into more folk-like forms. For details and examples, see Haydn and folk music.
Haydn never set foot in Croatia, but in fact he almost certainly lived in the vicinity of Croatian speakers. This is because a considerable migration in previous centuries had resulted in a considerable number of Croatians dwelling far to the north of Croatia, in the Austro-Hungarian border region. This aspect of Kuhač's claim is considered uncontroversial, though the relative fraction of the local population that was Croatian-speaking is in dispute.
Kuhač went on to claim that the reason Haydn used so many Croatian folk tunes in his music is that he was himself a member of the Croatian diaspora, and thus a native speaker of Croatian and a direct participant in Croatian folk culture. Kuhač also claimed that "Haydn" as a name is of Croatian origin ("Hajdin"), and likewise that the name of Haydn's mother, Maria Koller, was Croatian.
Kuhač wrote his works in Croatian, which would have been a barrier to scholarly transmission at the time. However, his works were studied by the English-speaking musicologist Henry Hadow, who promulgated them further in his book A Croatian Composer (1897) and in the second and third editions of the prestigious Grove Dictionary).
[edit] The "Haydn as German" hypothesis
In the 1930's, the German musicologist Ernst Fritz Schmid took up the issue of Haydn's origins, searching in parish records and elsewhere for evidence of Haydn's ancestry. He concluded on the basis of his research that Haydn was not Croatian, but German in ethnic origin, and likewise that the names "Haydn" and "Koller" are German.
Schmid's work, just like Kuhač's, has been impugned as being motivated by nationalist zealotry rather than a thirst for the truth. In particular, the period of Schmid's research coincided with the rise of Nazi Germany, which emphasized German ethnicity as a matter of political doctrine.
[edit] The views of more recent scholars
However, despite this, later Haydn scholarship seems to have been sufficiently impressed by the data Schmid gathered to accept his general premise that Haydn was of German ethnic origin.
Among the scholars who accept Schmid's finding are the musicologist Karl Geiringer, writing both in his Haydn biography and the fourth edition of the Grove Dictionary. In the 1982 revision of his biography, Geiringer wrote (p. 4):
- "Schmid undert[oo]k elaborate genealogical research, tracing the family names back to the Middle Ages and producing most valueable data about Haydn's ancestors. According to his final conclusions, here can be no doubt that the Haydn and Koller families were of German origin."
Geiringer's position in turn is endorsed French scholar, Michel Brenet, and by Mary Hughes in her own Haydn biography.
The Danish scholar Jens Peter Larsen, writing in the 1980 New Grove, says of this question:
- "the matter must be regarded as settled by [Schmidt's work]. It may we be said that Schimd 'was even more intent to prove Haydn a German than Kuhač and Hadow had been to prove him a Slav' [quotation from Scott, in the fifth edition of Grove]. But the weight of the documentary evidence that supports his case is decisive."
In the current version of the Grove Dictionary, the Haydn biography (by James Webster) does not even mention the old controversy, other than to cite Schmid's work in the bibliography.
[edit] Haydn's remark on Croatians
Somewhat peripheral to the controversy is the existence of a recorded remark by Haydn himself expressing an implicit opinion about Croatians. The remark was recorded by the composer and pianist Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who studied with Haydn in Vienna around the year 1800; it is recorded in Kalkbrenner's memoirs, published 1824. (Kalkbrenner refers to himself in the third person.)
- "He received instruction [from Haydn] during the remainder of his stay at Vienna, which was nearly two years. In the first quartet he attempted to write under this great master - the young artist thought he must put forth all his learning as well as all his imagination, and when he produced it, anticipated that he must inevitably receive no usual quantity of praise The moment Haydn cast his eyes upon it, he exclaimed - hey day! what have we here! Calmuc, Siberian, Cossack, Croat - all the barbarians of the world jumbled together - he laughed heartily, but tempered his severity with some commendation - telling him that there was by far too much fire, but that it was better to have too much than too little and that time and experience would bring his exertions to more favourable issue."[1]
[edit] Notes
- ^ Quoted in Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 306
[edit] References
- Brenet, Michel, Haydn, Paris 1909.
- Geiringer, Karl, Haydn: A Creative Life in Music, New York, Norton, 1946.
- Hadow, Henry, Haydn: A Croatian Composer, London, 1897. (Excerpted in link above.)
- Hughes, Rosemary, Haydn, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1950.
- Larsen, Jens Peter (1982) The New Grove Haydn. New York and London: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-01881-1
- Robbins Landon, H. C. and David Wyn Jones (1988)Haydn: His Life and Music, Thames and Hudson.
- Schmid, Ernst Fritz, Joseph Haydn: ein Buch von Vorfahren und Heimat des Meisters. Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 1934
- Scott, Marion M. (1950) "Haydn and Folk-Song," Music and Letters 31: 119-124.
- Webster, James (2001) "Joseph Haydn", article in the on line edition of the New Grove.
