Haydn and folk music

This article discusses the influence of folk music on the work of the composer Joseph Haydn (1732–1809).

Haydn was of humble family, perhaps unusually so for a famous composer. His parents were working people (his mother Anna Maria was a former cook, his father Mathias a master wheelwright). They lived in an obscure rural village, and had no musical training. This is not to say they were unmusical, however. Mathias was evidently a folk musician; according to Haydn's own testimony, his father 'played the harp without reading a note of music', having taught himself the instrument while a journeyman. According to the oldest biographies of Haydn (written with the help of interviews with the composer), the Haydn family frequently sang together as well as with their neighbors. The early Haydn biographer Georg August Griesinger, based on interviews with the composer, wrote

Before he reached the age of six, Haydn was sent away from his family to receive formal musical training. But since even at this tender age, the child was already showing musical talent (he recalled, "As a boy of five I sang all [my father's] simple easy pieces correctly'), it seems fair to say that Haydn began his musical career as a folk musician.

Many scholars have argued that this early connection to folk music remained with him for the rest of his life: that throughout his career, Haydn took advantage of folk tunes, deploying them in strategic locations in his music. Haydn's early biographer Giuseppe Carpani claimed that the adult Haydn even did field work, collecting folk songs from the people as did Bartók and Vaughan Williams over a century later.

Haydn is claimed to have borrowed folk tunes from several ethnic groups, including Austrians, Gypsies, and Croatians. The attribution of a tune to a particular ethnicity is not at all straightforward, because (as David Schroeder notes) "folk tunes are frequently transmitted across national boundaries". Schroeder give the following cautionary tale: "The source for a tune in the opening movement of an early cassation for string quintet (Hob. II:2) is identified by [Franjo] Kuhač as a Croatian drinking song, 'Nikaj na svetu', and by [Ernst Fritz] Schmid as a German folksong, 'Es trieb ein Schaefer den Berg hinan'. With this precaution in mind, here are some of the folk sources that have been adduced for Haydn's music.

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