Joseph Haydn was a pioneer in the development of the keyboard sonata, the string quartet and the symphony, and made a significant contribution to the opera repertory. His smaller output of individual songs is less well-known. Most date from the last three decades of his long composing career, once he had detached himself from the shackles of employment at the Esterházy court and was free to enter the lucrative market of music for domestic consumption.

In 1781 and 1784 Haydn’s publisher issued two sets of twelve German Lieder (songs), which Haydn – a fine tenor singer himself – hoped to perform at Viennese soirées, confidently extolling their 'variety, naturalness and beautiful melodies'. A decade or so later, while visiting London for the second time, Haydn published two sets of six songs with English texts, under the title Original Canzonettas.  

Some time later he added several more individual songs to his canon, including O Tuneful Voice and The Spirit’s Song, both to texts by his friend Anne Hunter, widow of the eminent surgeon Sir John Hunter. Haydn wanted his chosen texts to embrace a range of emotions, 'both light and shade’, and these songs exploit a fashionable vein of Gothic melancholy.

The Sailor’s Song, a setting of an anonymous ballad celebrating British maritime bravado, opens the second set of Original Canzonettas, published in 1795; while Ein kleines Haus (A Little House) was another individual song, dating from the autumn of 1800.

In the late 1790s Haydn, no longer obliged to live in servants’ quarters in a princely palace, bought himself a house in a Viennese suburb, where he lived until his death. It’s tempting to speculate that this song celebrates his new-found domestic independence. The last two Haydn songs in today’s programme, Geistliches Lied (Sacred Song) and Das Leben ist ein Traum (Life is a Dream) come from the second volume of German Lieder, published in 1784. The last, setting a text by Johann Gleim, is a dramatic, quasi-operatic piece bewailing life’s brevity.

One by-product of Haydn’s London visits was his vast output of British folksong arrangements, commissioned by the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson. In 1793 Thomson embarked on a monumental project to collect and publish a comprehensive anthology of traditional folksongs from the British regions, enlisting the services of contemporary continental composers such as Haydn, Beethoven and Weber.

His commissionees included Johann Nepomuk Hummel, a piano prodigy who had studied with both Mozart and Haydn, and toured Europe from the age of 10 onwards. Hummel was also a proficient composer, and in the late 1820s he provided 20 song settings for Thomson’s mammoth project.

For the sake o’ Somebody sets a poem by Robert Burns: the 'Somebody' is Bonnie Prince Charlie, for whose safety the poet prays. Pibroch of Donhuil Dhu was originally a traditional march played on the bagpipes. Before them we hear Zur Logenfeier, a song written in honour of Freemasons to a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Poet and composer were both associated with the influential Amalia Lodge in Weimar, where Hummel worked as Kapellmeister from 1819 onwards.

In 1827 Hummel visited the dying Beethoven in Vienna, and attended a private recital of songs by Franz Schubert, then approaching the final stages of his tragically brief life.

Ashley Riches and Joseph Middleton end their recital with four masterly Schubert songs, published as a group in his last summer. Die Sterne (The Stars) sets a poem by Karl Gottfried von Leitner, a native of Graz, where Schubert stayed on holiday in the autumn of 1827. This serene evocation of an infinite starry universe is dated January 1828. The text of Jägers Liebeslied (Huntsman’s Love Song) was penned by Schubert’s long-time friend Franz von Schober, and set by the composer while he was living with Schober’s family in the spring of 1827. It’s characterised by typical 'hunting' idioms in the bright key of D major.

Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied (Traveller’s Night Song) magically captures the poet’s comparison of slumbering nature with his desire for eternal peace. Finally, Fischerweise (Fisherman’s Ditty) sets a poem by another close friend of the composer, Franz Xaver von Schlechta, a civil servant and amateur Romantic poet. Fischerweise was performed at Schubert’s last public concert in the Philharmonic Society Hall in Vienna on 26 March 1828. He died, aged 31, just over six months later.

_{Notes by Wendy Thomson}