Haydn from the ‘Frontier’

The Royal Palace archive collected over sixty symphonies and a dozen baryton trios, many in authorized copies emanating from circles close to the composer; some of these sources mysteriously ended up in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, as Stephen C. Fisher discovered and described a few years before Stevenson's previously mentioned article (‘A Group of Haydn Copies for the Court of Spain: Fresh Sources, Rediscovered Works, and New Riddles’, Haydn-Studien 4/2 (1978), 65–84). Despite its unusual structure of a succession of slow movements with spoken sections in between, The Seven Last Words was a resounding success in Spain. [...]the beginning of the twentieth century, it was common practice for it to be performed during Holy Week in churches and in sacred concerts. [...]commissions such as these contributed in a decisive way to spreading the prestige of Haydn and his work all over Spain, while at the same time offering us an extensive field of research that still calls for further attention. Future research would involve concentrating on at least four areas: first, the function and scope of the preserved sources, often with creative variants and adaptations dictated by local usage (including the extensive repertory in religious archives that is still little explored); second, reconstructing the channels, commercial or private, through which prints and manuscripts were disseminated, thus connecting the main European publishers with consumers; third, the decisive influence of Haydn's work on the compositional practice of local composers, especially in genres such as masses, symphonies, quartets and trios; and fourth, the composer's impact on the aesthetic and intellectual ideals of listeners and amateurs, as reflected in a wide range of documents such as treatises, correspondence and administrative sources, among others.