In his one surviving portrait, Michael Haydn appears earnest, anxious, even scornful. A respectable composer, he was overshadowed in life by his older brother Joseph: the great Franz Joseph Haydn, composer of sixty-eight string quartets, friend and confidant of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the man history remembers as ‘the father of the symphony.’ Michael is remembered as Joseph’s little brother.

Perhaps it’s through this lens that some detect a concealed musical indictment in works such as Michael Haydn’s Four Sonatas for Violin and Viola of 1783 — a project which, outrageously, his brother’s friend Mozart would go on to ‘complete’ as his own String Duo No. 2 in B♭ Major for Violin and Viola, K. 424. Haydn’s sonatas have a marked tension between a dominant theme, proudly and effortless delivered by the violin, and the halting auxiliary melody of the viola that nips at its heels, constantly interrupted, never fully acknowledged. A musical comment on his celebrated sibling, perhaps, as are the faint echoes of folk tunes specifically written for the Anderthalb.

A curiosity of the late Renaissance, the Anderthalb (in German, ‘one and a half’) took the form of a pair of instruments: one fully-fledged, the other purposely enfeebled. An outgrowth of the musical traditions of the commedia dell’arte, the greater and lesser Anderthalb were played by a balladeer and his fool, their songs contrasting the heroism of one against the bungling of another. The irony was that lesser instrument always carried the theme, as it was the fool who inevitably triumphed over his arrogant companion. These Anderthalbs predate the classical period of Haydn by more than a century, but in his legacy and perhaps his music their biting spirit lives on.

Published February 2, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.