Haydn Go Seek: A centenary tribute to music sleuth H. C. Robbins Landon

It’s pretty remarkable that we have so much music from the 17th and 18th centuries, isn’t it? Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart—that choral mass or piano sonata you love survived either because it was published during the composer’s lifetime, or because somebody found a manuscript or a hand-written copy much later in a dark palace cellar, a monastery attic, a secret library or a musty choir loft. 

A few times in history, an essential composer’s genius was saved from history’s junk pile because of a single person’s tireless efforts. Felix Mendelssohn ensured Johann Sebastian Bach would be remembered by playing the old master’s music in public. The two men worked in the same German city, more than a century apart. Mendelssohn raised the money for the first public statue of Bach, and paid for some of it himself.

Likewise, hundreds of pieces by Joseph Haydn would still be collecting European dust but for the work of one scholar—a colorful character named H. C. Robbins Landon, who was born 100 years ago this month. Part Cold War music spy, part merry prankster, Landon made rescuing Haydn gems from obscurity his life’s work. Most of Haydn’s music was unknown 80 years ago, and only about 10 percent of it had been published. Think about that: Haydn is one of the Classical era’s giants, but without a 20th-century rediscovery and a champion to promote him, he might be a musicological footnote today. Largely because of Landon, the boxed set of Haydn’s complete works takes up 150 compact discs. Beethoven’s entire output, by comparison, fits on 85.

Landon spent decades following World War II unearthing Haydn manuscripts that were waiting for someone to care enough to become obsessed with their rescue. He turned into something of a Cold War spy, wheedling his way past the Iron Curtain on the strength of his magnetic personality and a few paper-thin boasts. Landon co-founded the Haydn Society, which produced debut recordings of Haydn works like The Creation and the Lord Nelson Mass. Ditto for Mozart’s C minor Mass and his opera Idomeneo, which was more or less unknown at the time because no one had a complete score. Landon discovered the original orchestra parts so it could be reverse-engineered.

These recordings made big splashes on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Landon wrote in his memoir that in New York, “customers stood around in record shops open-mouthed, stupefied by the thought that music of such high quality had never been recorded before.” Those records were powerful inducements to put the music on concert programs, and American orchestras did.

Before he flew to Austria to start his Haydn quest, before his years at Boston University, and before Swarthmore College expelled him for having an “affair” with a Quaker girl, a North Carolina high school teacher named Mathias Cooper pointed Landon in Haydn’s direction. Cooper played one of Haydn’s London symphonies for him (#93) on a phonograph record when he was just 13. Landon was hooked, and decided he wanted to chase down more astonishingly beautiful pieces of music like those. Nobody knew how many operas Haydn had composed, or how many string quartets, or how many choral masses. This was music that hadn’t been heard, in many cases, for 200 years. 

And no one had put together a reliable catalog of Haydn’s works like the ones dedicated to Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. Even second-tier masters like Dietrich Buxtehude and Heinrich Schütz had them. Landon hoped to produce one, but never got past the symphonies. He edited and published the first complete edition of all 104, a monumental achievement.

He was in Austria for the summer of 1947 as a newly minted college graduate, interviewing musicians for a college radio network, and planned to go to Harvard for a graduate degree that fall. But the thrill of discovering his first neglected Haydn score made him quickly decide he wasn’t going home—not even when the U.S. announced that it would reinstitute the military draft in 1948 to raise a peacetime army. Instead of landing in the regular army, Landon walked into the Army of Occupation headquarters and asked a colonel to put him to work as a writer. It turned out that they were looking for historians to chronicle the liberation of Italy, and they hired him on the spot despite his sole qualification being a freelance article he had written for Musical America. 

So Landon now had a military assignment that exempted him from the regular draft. He had a salary. He also had a legitimate reason to traipse across Europe in search of rogue concertos and orphaned chamber music: He had to be on the road anyway to collect documents and interview people for his day job. Landon once drove 200 miles to Milan, driven by an inescapable feeling that he should browse an obscure music shop. Wedged in between stacks of unattributed manuscripts there was a hand-copied score of Haydn’s opera La fedeltà premiata with corrections in Haydn’s handwriting but no mention of the composer’s name anywhere. 

He spent so much time with his nose buried in the minutiae of Haydn’s handwriting that he was able to prove the master didn’t write more than 50 pieces published under his name. Landon nuked the famous “Toy” symphony, concluding that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s father wrote it. (That attribution, too, was challenged later, but it’s still not Haydn’s.) How did scholars get so many things wrong? Austrian printers in the 18th century sometimes stuck Haydn’s name on pieces by unremarkable journeyman musicians, knowing the sheet music would fly off the shelves that way. It became, as second-rate journalists sometimes say, too good to check.

Landon split his time between manuscript-hunting and producing records for the Haydn Society. While listening to a Vienna Philharmonic rehearsal of one of Haydn’s lesser known symphonies (#56), he was surprised to learn that the horn players couldn’t reach the highest notes in their parts. No matter: he figured out that Haydn’s horn players at the sprawling estate of his patrons, the super-rich Esterházy family, had instruments that were pitched an octave higher than what was common in 1950. So he had some made for the players in Vienna. It’s that sort of monkey-wrenching that made Landon famous. He later titled his memoir Horns in High C.

Tales of his improvised spycraft cemented his legend. Esterházy Palace was in Hungary, on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. He wanted to see the library there, of course, and managed to get a rare visa from the Hungarian embassy in Vienna in 1958. Landon had been writing unsigned music columns and European concert reviews for the Times of London to pay his bills—a common practice for occasional freelancers at the time—and he warned the embassy that they really didn’t want to mess with a very serious and important Times press credential. It worked. They probably thought he was a war reporter, and Google was still 40 years from launching. Who could tell?

The Soviet government in Hungary had seized all the Esterházy Haydn papers, just like the Czechs had looted all sorts of works of art in Prague. But Landon charmed his way into the state library and discovered a piece Haydn wrote for the king of Naples. His James Bond-ish tendencies surfaced again in Romania, where one of his Soviet minders was so eager to help a Times journalist that he threatened a monk who had refused to let anyone see his manuscript of Haydn’s lengthy 1766 St. Cecilia Mass. He was annoyed by this religious man defying the anti-religious communist government, so he promised Landon he would keep at it: “Those wretched monks, they will talk!” he said. “We do have our methods, you know.”

Landon got photos on microfilm, delivered by Swedish embassy staff who brought it to him in Pisa, Italy. 

He made dozens of trips to Soviet Bloc countries, frequently inventing his own plot twists. A librarian in Prague warned that the secret police would be very interested in anyone from the West who shot hundreds of photos of library documents in the space of just a few days. And his custom Leica camera, which could squeeze 100 images on a roll of film, could be enough to get him arrested. So he and the library staff came up with a solution: They walked his exposed film over to the police and gave it all to them. The Romanian equivalent of the East German Stasi developed it for free, just to see what he’d been up to.

Landon was also the necessary spoilsport who debunked much of the Mozart mythology in the play and movie Amadeus. Antonio Salieri didn’t poison Mozart: He promoted his music for years. Mozart certainly didn’t dictate his Requiem to Salieri. And despite the Hollywood portrayal of his wife Constanze as a superficial woman who had little to do with her husband’s success, Landon showed she was a shrewd manager and a gifted negotiator. Constanze politicked her way to an unusually generous widow’s pension and helped commission concerts of Mozart’s music as benefits for herself and their children. 

His book 1791: Mozart’s Last Year is a fantastic and easily readable chronicle, and he came into the project with credentials aplenty. Decades earlier he had produced the very first recording of Mozart’s Posthorn Serenade, and the first of a Mozart concerto on a genuine vintage fortepiano. He also edited the Jupiter symphony in 1955 for the Neue Mozart Ausgabe, the authoritative catalog of the composer’s works. (The publishers offered him the job of presiding over the entire collection, but he declined because there were still monasteries and museums to explore for lost Haydn treasures.)

One Landon story made me smile more than all the others, so it bears including. Rumors had circled about a manuscript copy of a previously lost Haydn mass living in the big but scattered collection at the Göttweig Abbey in Austria. The Missa rorate coeli desuper was a “missa brevis”—literally a “short mass,” whose 7-minute brevity Haydn achieved by “telescoping” the text of longer movements like the Gloria and Credo. That means he overlaid different parts of the Latin texts in different voice parts so the musicians could get through all the words faster than normal. The Vatican hated this practice, because it sacrificed audience comprehension. 

Landon asked the abbott why a supremely religious Catholic like Haydn, who often wrote “Laus Deo” (Praise be to God) at the end of his scores, would risk angering Rome by hurriedly plowing through a mashed-up Nicene Creed. The reply? “It was cold in those churches.”

Later in life, H. C. Robbins Landon created TV shows for the BBC, demystifying Haydn and Mozart with merry-prankster charm the way Richard Feynman had done with physics and Leanard Bernstein had done with his televised New York Philharmonic “Young People’s Concerts.” He’s one of music history’s unsung heroes, born on March 6, 1926 in Boston.

And guess what? There are at least 32 more lost Haydn works, known only because they were included in catalogs—including one that Haydn maintained himself. So get cracking. They’re out there. Somewhere.