How to File a Grievance Through Music — Haydn’s Farewell Symphony

Months had passed — long enough that the players could barely remember what their families looked like. The autumn of 1772 at Esterháza Palace was dragging on past every previous year. The men left their wives and children behind in Vienna and Eisenstadt and could only guess at what was happening back home.

The Kapellmeister noticed. He could have walked into the Prince’s chambers and stated the problem outright. He didn’t. He picked up a pen instead.

Autumn 1772: What Actually Happened at Esterháza

Esterháza Palace sat in what is today Fertőd, Hungary — at the time it was Habsburg territory, the summer estate of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. The Prince was a serious music lover by any reasonable measure, and he had built himself a miniature Versailles in the marshlands: opera house, marionette theater, ballroom, the works. There was one catch built into the design. Because it was a summer estate, the musicians’ families were not allowed to live there with them.

In a normal year, this was manageable. The season ran, you went home, you saw your wife. 1772 was not a normal year. Autumn deepened, leaves dropped, and the Prince showed no signs of giving the order to pack up and head back to Eisenstadt. The faces of wives and children in Vienna started to feel less like memories and more like rumors.

The Kapellmeister noticed the mood shift. A Kapellmeister in an eighteenth-century court did everything at once: composition, conducting, personnel management, payroll questions, instrument maintenance, contract disputes. Closest modern equivalent is something like music director, except music directors today don’t usually also have to sign off on which horn player is allowed to take leave next Thursday. Haydn was forty years old and eleven years into the job. He could have walked up to the boss and said, “The men are struggling, sir.” He did not. He wrote a symphony. A symphony where, at the end of the last movement, the players stand up one at a time and walk off the stage.

According to the biography Georg August Griesinger published in 1810, the Prince listened, sat with it overnight, and the following day said this:

“Well, if they all want to leave, we may as well leave too.”

— Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (as relayed in Griesinger, 1810)

That night the court packed up, and within days the musicians were back in Eisenstadt with their families. The story of a composer who moved his boss through music alone has been retold for two and a half centuries, and that retelling is most of why you have probably heard of this piece at all.

That’s where ninety-nine percent of English-language program notes stop. “Charming anecdote, isn’t it?” Polite applause, lights down, move on. The story has at least three more layers that almost never make it into the printed notes — and each one is more interesting than the one that did.

F-sharp Minor: Why the Horn Section Had to Pack Extra

Haydn wrote more than a hundred symphonies in his career. He composed in F-sharp minor exactly once. This one. Look through every other major composer of the 1770s and you will find F-sharp minor symphonies you can count on one hand and have fingers to spare. There is a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with taste. The reason was sitting in the hands of the horn section.

Horns in 1772 had no valves. The little buttons you see modern horn players pressing — that mechanism didn’t exist yet. Instead, players changed the fundamental length of the instrument by swapping in a different crook, a curl of brass tubing that fit between the mouthpiece and the body of the horn. F major piece, F crook. D major piece, D crook. Horn players carried a small collection of these crooks in their cases like a golfer carries irons. There was a standard set you brought to work, and a non-standard set you scrambled to find when someone wrote you out of your comfort zone.

The problem with an F-sharp crook is that it was not part of the standard set. When a horn player in 1772 opened his case, he had F, D, G, E-flat, maybe B-flat. He did not have F-sharp. The moment Haydn put pen to staff paper and committed to this key, his two horn players received what amounted to a memo: source or borrow a crook you do not currently own, get it to the palace, learn to play it in time for the premiere, and please do not lose it.

Before a single note had been written, this piece was already not normal. The annoyance of the players was etched into the manuscript paper at the moment of conception.

There is also context worth knowing. The piece sits at the high-water mark of the Sturm und Drang period — a short-lived aesthetic movement in late-eighteenth-century German-speaking Europe that prized intensity, minor keys, collision, and darkness as virtues in their own right. Haydn’s symphonies No. 26, 39, 44, 45, and 49 all belong to this stretch. No. 45 goes further than any of the others. It includes a formal experiment in which a minor-key symphony ends in its parallel major — that is, in a key with the same starting pitch but a brighter quality. F-sharp minor’s parallel major is F-sharp major. Same root, completely different lighting.

Put another way, the composer didn’t just smuggle his colleagues’ complaint into a piece of music. He used that complaint as cover to push a formal experiment he had been wanting to try anyway. Two birds, one stone. It was also a politically shrewd move from an eleventh-year employee who knew exactly how to get the boss to sign off on something the boss might otherwise have questioned.

Movement by Movement: A Live Broadcast from 1772

I. Allegro assai — Anger Walks In

No introduction, no warming up, no “ladies and gentlemen, please direct your attention to.” F-sharp minor, 3/4 time, agitated unison theme charging in from the opening bar. This is the standard opening posture of a Sturm und Drang minor-key symphony: grab the listener by the lapels and start dragging.

The interesting part lives in the middle of the movement, in what classical theorists call the development section. Eighteenth-century symphonic first movements had an unwritten game rule: you state two themes up front, then in the development section you take those same two themes and chop them up, combine them, twist their joints around. That’s the whole job. You don’t get to introduce new themes in the middle of a development. That’s cheating.

Haydn cheats. In the middle of the development, a completely new theme in D major walks in like it owns the place. Whether you read this as the composer’s protest getting visibly louder, or as Haydn’s restless mind refusing to play by the rules, depends on which framing you prefer. Either way, the first movement is already signaling that this symphony does not intend to follow the manual. The rule-breaking that culminates in the fourth movement is announced in the first.

📜 악보 지점: Haydn Symphony 45, I. Allegro assai, mm. 1–16 — F-sharp minor theme (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Haydn Symphony 45 1st movement Harnoncourt

II. Adagio — A Brief Visit from the Calm Adult

A major, 3/8 time. The first movement’s fury vanishes as if it had never happened. If you choose to read the symphony through the labor-complaint framing, this movement sounds like the musical equivalent of “sir, please don’t take this personally.” A diplomatic pause inserted to keep the boss listening.

That reading works only inside the anecdote frame. From a pure-music perspective, this is a textbook Sturm und Drang slow movement: the standard late-eighteenth-century technique of alternating storm and calm to keep the listener’s emotional thermostat shifting. Both readings hold simultaneously, and the fact that they hold simultaneously is part of why the piece keeps working two and a half centuries later.

III. Menuet: Allegretto — Politeness with a Side-Eye

F-sharp major Menuet, F-sharp minor Trio. Major and minor switch places twice inside a single movement.

One line of housekeeping first. An eighteenth-century minuet movement is normally a three-part sandwich: Menuet → Trio → Menuet again. The Trio is the contrasting middle slice, named for the older convention of having that section played by exactly three instruments. The name stuck even after the actual three-instrument scoring stopped being literal. So “Trio” in this context just means “the middle section that sounds different on purpose.”

The Menuet itself comes from the court ballroom. It is the most thoroughly aristocratic dance form available — “I bow respectfully toward the boss” set to music. Haydn writes the outer minuet in F-sharp major, hits all the expected courtly bows, and then drops an F-sharp minor Trio into the middle. It’s the equivalent of bowing politely and then throwing the briefest darkest glance at the floor on the way back up. And in the Trio, the horns get a solo. Six seconds of vindication for the two players who lugged that special F-sharp crook across the Hungarian countryside.

IV. Finale: Presto–Adagio — The Exit Scene

This is the movement that has kept the piece in repertoire for two hundred and fifty years.

The finale comes in two parts. The opening Presto looks and sounds like a perfectly normal F-sharp minor finale. Fast, hard-driving, on its way to slamming the door. Just when you expect the final cadence — the moment where the symphony should bang shut — the music stops. And then, instead of finishing, an Adagio begins. The standard eighteenth-century rule that a minor-key symphony ends with a fast minor-key finale has just been broken in front of you. Quietly. As if the symphony itself had walked off the prescribed path mid-sentence.

📜 악보 지점: Haydn Symphony 45, IV. Finale — entry into Adagio at m. 121 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

From the start of the Adagio onward, the players leave the stage one by one or in pairs. The oboes and horns drop out first; the two horn players, whose extra crook had been the price of admission to this whole adventure, get to pack up early. Bassoon goes next, then the contrabass, then cello, then viola. The violins thin out last, line by line. The score itself shows exactly which bar each desk falls silent — I’ll leave the precise measure numbers to the score captions rather than turning this into a chart.

The piece does not end in F-sharp minor. It ends in F-sharp major. The symphony that started in minor finishes in its parallel major — same starting pitch, completely different lighting. No new harmonic territory is opened up. Only the lighting changes, dark to bright. This is one of the rarest formal moves in the late-eighteenth-century symphonic repertoire, an extreme expansion of the so-called picardy third (the old practice of letting just the final chord of a minor-key piece flip into major). Here the picardy idea isn’t a chord, it’s the entire closing section. The ending isn’t “out of the darkness, light.” The ending is “everyone else has gone home; the two people left are sitting in the light.”

🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Haydn Symphony 45 Farewell Abschied Dorati

The two players left at the end are the first and second first violins. One of them is the concertmaster, Luigi Tomasini. The other is the composer himself. That detail is large enough to deserve its own section, and we’ll get to it shortly.

Hold On — Did Any of This Actually Happen?

This is where ninety-nine percent of program notes are already wrapping up. “Charming anecdote, isn’t it? Composer protests with music!” Polite applause. Move on to the next piece in the program.

The problem is that the primary source for the story is a recollection from thirty-eight years later.

There is no contemporary 1772 record of the anecdote in the Esterháza court diaries. No movement order from the following morning sending the household back to Eisenstadt. No letter of grievance from the musicians, no princely countersign, no anything. The first written appearance of the story is in 1810, in the biography Georg August Griesinger compiled by interviewing Haydn in his late seventies. The same year, Albert Christoph Dies published a separate biographical account that includes a similar version of the story. His source was also Haydn himself, also at the end of his life.

Thirty-eight years, recalled by a man in his late seventies. James Webster, the musicologist who took this problem most seriously, published a Cambridge University Press monograph in 1991 about it. The book is titled Haydn’s Farewell Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style, and it argues something specific.

Webster does not deny the story. He thinks the broad outline — players were exhausted, Haydn used the symphony to convey the situation, the Prince understood the message — is plausible. What he questions is whether the specific details survived thirty-eight years of memory intact. The visual flourish of “the musicians blew out their candles as they left” is not documented in any 1772 source. The precise quotation attributed to the Prince is unverifiable. The timing of “the next morning the order came down” cannot be confirmed against the court records. These details may well be a mix of later performance tradition and the warm self-editing that happens when an elderly artist tells a story he knows people enjoy.

Webster’s actual center of gravity sits somewhere else. His core argument is that the symphony itself was designed as a single large form spanning all four movements — that the strange D major theme that walks in during the first movement’s development, the displaced calm of the second movement, the F-sharp minor twist in the middle of the third, the false ending and Adagio of the fourth, are not four separate movements wearing the same clothes. They are four parts of one continuous arch. Even if you remove the anecdote about labor complaints completely, the symphony is already a finished, self-explaining work on purely musical grounds.

From here, the conclusions split. You can take the story at face value and listen to the symphony as documentary theater. You can set the story aside and listen only to the internal structure. You can hold both at once. The one thing worth saying clearly: believing without knowing and believing with knowing are not the same thing. The symphony sounds larger once you know the source limits of the story attached to it. Thirty-eight years of distance are part of what you hear.

For what it is worth, in the English-language program notes circuit, Webster’s skeptical reading is occasionally mentioned but almost never integrated into the main story. The dominant version remains the warm one. So this is the place to flag the gap and let you decide how to listen.

The Last Two Seats: Why Haydn Stayed Until the End

One more layer that program notes rarely touch.

The two musicians who remain on stage at the end of the fourth movement are the two first violins at the front desk. Cross-reference the surviving 1772 Esterháza personnel records — H.C. Robbins Landon’s Haydn at Eszterháza (1978) and the Hungarian National Archives material it draws on — and the names of the two players who would have occupied those seats are concertmaster Luigi Tomasini and the Kapellmeister, Haydn himself. The score leaves the last two desks holding the final F-sharp major cadence, and those last two desks are the concertmaster’s and the composer’s own.

📜 악보 지점: Haydn Symphony 45, IV. Finale — closing first-violin duet (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

What does that mean.

Haydn, writing this piece, encoded into the score the message: I will deliver the complaint, but I am not leaving with them. This isn’t a joke. It is the composer locating himself inside the political situation, in writing, on staff paper. He stands with the players, but he does not abandon his post. He nudges the Prince, but he does not walk out on him. The eleven-year veteran of a feudal court knew exactly how to balance those two stances, and he didn’t just balance them in his head. He balanced them at the last desk of the first violins. That is one place where you can applaud out loud.

This detail also matters for a reason that goes beyond palace politics. By making the physical act of performance — players standing up, walking off, leaving the stage in real time — part of the work’s design, Haydn produced one of the only eighteenth-century cases of what later musicologists call theatrical or performative composition. Edward Said and Richard Taruskin both reach for Symphony No. 45 when they need an ancestor for John Cage, Mauricio Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen — the twentieth-century composers who treated the act of making the sound as material for the piece itself. A bridge between two eras two hundred years apart was laid down on one autumn night in 1772.

Charles Rosen made an adjacent point in 1971, in The Classical Style. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8 closes its fourth movement with a string of comic fake endings. Mahler’s Ninth dissolves at the end into something that barely qualifies as sound. Those two strategies look opposite, but they are both descendants of the same parent: the moment in 1772 when an eighteenth-century symphony refused to end the way symphonies were supposed to end. Surprise-ending technique has many later children. This is one of the earliest places they all come from.

So, to tally it up: in one twenty-five-minute symphony, Haydn (1) delivered a labor grievance to his employer, (2) experimented with a key signature he would never use again, (3) ended a minor-key symphony in its parallel major when no one was doing that yet, (4) made the physical act of performance into compositional material two centuries before “performance art” had a name, and (5) placed his own seat at the very end of the score to declare, in writing, where he stood. It is the sort of work output that makes you wonder how anyone can be that good at their job.

First Listen: Just These Things

The whole symphony is about twenty-five minutes. Not long.

If you are short on time, the last six minutes of the fourth movement are enough to grasp the story. Watch it on video if you can — the experience is sharper visually than aurally. Players actually stand up, one by one, and walk off the stage. The texture thins, the lighting shifts, and the last two violins close in F-sharp major. A twenty-five-minute symphony suddenly turns into the ending of a film.

If you have more time, start from the first movement. The opening fury and the closing silence are a matched pair. Listening from the start makes the arc from grievance to quiet resolution land harder. If you have spent any time at all working under a boss who does not read between lines, the first sixty seconds will feel uncomfortably familiar.

While you listen, hold two thoughts at once. First: this symphony is a workplace memorandum from 1772 about a season that went on too long. Second: this symphony is the most ambitious formal experiment of the late-eighteenth-century Sturm und Drang. You hear the piece in full only when both lenses are active at the same time. Pick one and you are getting half of it.

Five Recordings Worth Knowing

Nikolaus Harnoncourt / Concentus Musicus Wien / Teldec, 1990 — The period-instrument benchmark. The F-sharp natural horns crack and split exactly as eighteenth-century horns did, and that roughness is the point. The closest you will get to the acoustic of the room at Esterháza without a time machine. Why I picked it: this is essentially the only recording where the horn-crook backstory becomes audible rather than theoretical. If you have spent years on smooth modern-orchestra horn sound, the opening minutes may feel unvarnished. If period sound takes some adjustment for you, take the second recording instead.

Adam Fischer / Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra / Nimbus, 1987, recorded in Eisenstadt — Recorded in the very town the musicians were trying to get home to, by a band drawn from Austrian and Hungarian players. The instruments are modern, but the contextual restoration is the strongest of any recording out there. Why I picked it: when you want the eighteenth-century atmosphere without the acoustic adjustment period, this is the best landing pad. If you specifically want the gritty character of natural horns, go back to Harnoncourt.

Leonard Bernstein / Wiener Philharmoniker / DG, 1985 (live video exists) — Modern instruments, a more romantic reading. On pure audio, Harnoncourt has the edge. On video, Bernstein is the one to reach for. The 1985 Vienna concert captured the players physically standing up and walking off the stage on camera, and watching it is the fastest way to understand what the music is actually doing in three-dimensional space. There is one caveat: Bernstein’s fourth-movement Adagio leans into elegy almost to the point of mourning, which thins out the eighteenth-century wit a little. If you are listening for musical interpretation first, Harnoncourt remains the better choice.

Antal Doráti / Philharmonia Hungarica / Decca, 1972 — The classic complete-symphonies cycle. On any single symphony, Doráti is a step behind the three above. If what you want is to listen to Haydn’s symphonic output as a whole rather than zoom in on one work, the Doráti box set is still the canonical answer. If your interest is specifically the Sturm und Drang minor-key cluster — Nos. 26, 39, 44, 45 — Trevor Pinnock with The English Concert on DG Archiv (1992) is a sharper pairing. The contrast between first-movement intensity and closing-movement dissolution is at its cleanest there.

Listening with the Score

Two places where reading the score while listening changes the experience.

First, the entry into the Adagio in the fourth movement (around m. 121). With the page in front of you, you can see who falls silent at which bar. The thinning is not a vague gesture. It is a written sequence — a precise piece of choreography in print.

📜 악보 지점: Haydn Symphony 45, IV. Finale — m. 121, Adagio entry, thinning out (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

Second, the very last two lines of the score, the first-violin duet that closes in F-sharp major. On the page, there really are only two staves carrying sound. Two desks. The same two desks that, in 1772, were occupied by the concertmaster and the composer himself.

Henle’s Urtext edition of Hob.I:45 is the most authoritative modern score. If you want a comparison with how the music looked on a 1772 music stand, the early printed edition on IMSLP is freely available and worth a side-by-side glance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Further Reading

• The Applause Trap Tchaikovsky Built — How the Pathétique Became “the Sad Symphony” by Mistake
• Bach Mass in B minor BWV 232 — A Dying Man’s Two-Hour Job Application
• Brahms, Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 — The 21-Year Myth and Clara’s Birthday Card

• Beethoven Symphony No. 8 — The Movement That Turned the Metronome Into a Punchline
• Mahler Symphony No. 9 — On the Idea of an Ending That Dissolves
• John Cage 4’33” — When the Act of Performing Becomes the Piece
• Haydn’s Sturm und Drang Minor-Key Symphonies — A Guide to the 1768–1772 Cluster
• Mozart’s Requiem — A Guide to the Mystery That Was Left Unfinished