"New" Scores

Jean Sibelius has finished his eighth symphony (in his boulder-like head; it is not yet completely written down). From Brahms's massive skull came four symphonies, from Tchaikovsky's high crown six, from Beethoven's shaggy pate nine. Mozart's wonderfully broad forehead gave out no less than 41. But when tough old Joseph ("Papa'') Haydn sat down at the age of 72 to catalogue his works, he could shake his egg-shaped head till it nearly cracked, but he could not for the life of him remember all those nice symphonies he had written. Their authenticated number: 104.

Five years later Papa Haydn was dead and his head was off--stolen from his grave by ardent phrenologists. When the loss was discovered and the culprits pressed for its return, they surrendered a skull which passed for Haydn's. But it was not. Like a historic football, the real article was kicked around Austria for 75 years until it landed in a glass case in the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. The Esterhazy family (on whose estate Haydn lived and was mostly buried) announced that until the skull was returned, no one could have access to the valuable collection of Haydn manuscripts in the family library. Last November a truce was made. By last week Haydn was whole again, and the Esterhazy papers were unlocked for the world to see.

Another big step in Haydn scholarship was taken in Manhattan last week when the New Friends of Music (no kin to the Vienna Friends) played the first of five editions by Musicologist Alfred Einstein (distant kin to Physicist Albert Einstein) of "new" symphonies probably never played since Papa Haydn conducted them for the Esterhazys a century and a half ago: Nos. 67, 71, 77, 80, 87. Having examined all the great Haydn collections, except the Esterhazys', Dr. Einstein had made diligent revisions, here deleting a spurious passage put in by an overenthusiastic conductor, there restoring an eccentric "lost" bagpipe trio, until the scores were as authentic as he could make them. After the concert, critics gave editor and performers a vigorously genial nod; so, perhaps, did Papa Haydn's harried head.

Last Monday Critic Lawrence Oilman had the sniffles. Reading Donald Tovey's recondite Essays in Musical Analysis, he came across a sentence which made him hop out of bed and call up NBC's Musical Commentator Samuel Chotzinoff. Did Mr. Toscanini know that Wagner's original prelude to the third act of Tannhauser, which got only one performance (at the opera's world premiere, 1845), was much longer than the one usually played? Arturo Toscanini, who has a memory like a telephoto camera, could remember having seen some such score. On Tuesday a phone call was put through to the Library of Congress in Washington. Music Librarian Harold Spivacke burrowed all day, late at night emerged in dusty triumph with a lithograph of the score (purchased for the Library by Carl Engel in 1922). On Wednesday photostat copies were hurriedly made and airmailed to Mr. Toscanini. On Thursday NBC copyists frantically scribbled scripts for the 105 men in the NBC orchestra. On Friday they rushed through a single rehearsal. On Saturday they proudly played it for the world to hear. After all that pother, it turned out to be a diffuse and windy hash which Wagner had had excellent sense to reject.

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