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Camerata Salzburg
Roger Norrington
This work originated as incidental music to a comic play in five acts centring on the eponymously 'absent-minded' hero, Leandre. Notwithstanding hypotheses to the contrary, it is the only Haydn symphony that can be documented as having originated as stage music. This unique status correlates both with its oddities of style and with the fact that it is a six-movement symphony a generic anomaly that in 18th-century Austrian music is found only in overtly programmatic works.5 The first movement served as the overture, the second through fifth as entr'actes, and the last as a kind of 'finale' after the play was over.
The first movement (overture) resembles that to Symphony No. 50, in key, metre, presence of slow introduction, and much else. The one obviously illustrative passage occurs in the second group of the exposition: having landed on a local subdominant, the music tarries there for no fewer than twelve bars, dying away melodically (stuck on a single note), dynamically ('perdendosi'), and rhythmically: it has literally 'lost its way'. More puzzling is the entry, shortly after the beginning of the development, of the beginning of the 'Farewell' Symphony: is 'Haydn himself here pretending to have lost his way?
In the ensuing Andante, the contrasting themes have been read as portraying the stage-characters themselves: first the placid Isabelle, then the martinet Mme Grognac; then, in the development, a 'French' dance-parody may suggest the dissolute Chevalier whom Isabelle foolishly loves; and so on so easily that it is worth recalling that most of these associations are speculative, even those that derive from the (also speculative) reviews of the 1770s. Listeners are encouraged to make their own.But it is too tempting to relate the gimmick in the finale to Lèandre's tying a knot in his handkerchief in order not to forget that it is his wedding night. His 'recollection' is represented by the music's suddenly break-ing-off after only a few bars, while the violins tune their lowest string, which they had 'absentmindedly' left on F, up to G.
Minuet and Finale in C: This pair of movements survives in a partial, undated autograph now in Berlin.9 Haydn apparently composed them in 1773-74, in order to 'complete' the two-movement overture to L'infedeltà delusa into a four-movement symphony (as he certainly did to produce No. 50). Indeed, two sources that he sold to Spain actually transmit such a symphony. Later, however, he separated these components out again, selling the overture to Artaria, who published it as one of a set of six in 1782, and temporarily using the finale (not the minuet) in a preliminary version of Symphony No. 63. The latter, however, was almost immediately replaced by the definitive finale (see Volume 10).10 Thus the combination of overture and minuet+finale as a symphony proved to be temporary, and in fact scholars and performers have so far continued to regard these two movements as a fr
