Esterhazy/Eszterhaza
Post categories: Denis McCaldin
| 14:28 UK time, Friday, 12 June 2009
While I was in Austria, I was glad to see that the Radio 3 Haydn Day on May 31st went off well and that it prompted our regular bloggers, and a few new ones, to write in.
My trip to Eisenstadt over the same celebratory period was good. The town is slowly expanding as local shopkeepers realise that it's worth supporting the visitors that come to explore the place where Haydn lived and worked. Also the links between Austria and Hungary are much stronger now that the communists are no longer in power.
Sunday 31st May - the actual Haydn Bicentennial Day - was wonderfully rich. It started at 8.30 am as residents and visitors queued to get in to the Bergkirche for a live TV broadcast of the Creation Mass in a liturgical setting. Then a speedy dash down the hill to the Esterhazy Palace found us just in time to hear another TV relay, this time of The Creation.
Thomas Quasthoff was the eloquent baritone, with the Austro-Hungarian Orchestra and the 50-voice Vienna Chamber Choir also in top form. It was moving to hear this great work performed on this special day in the richly decorated Haydnsaal, where the composer had given so many of his first performances. Audience, orchestra, chorus and soloists were all there to celebrate Haydn's achievements, and the performance was led by Adam Fischer, who conducted from memory and without a trace of egoism.
After lunch we drove through the countryside in the spring sunshine to the Esterhaza Palace in Hungary, where Prince Nikolaus created his 'new Versailles'. To be able to explore the apartments and walk down the avenue of trees joining the musicians' house with the main building, as Haydn himself had done so many times before us, was truly memorable.
Fortified by a visit to a wine-cellar in nearby Sopron, we returned for yet another broadcast - this time at 9 pm. Showing admirable stamina, Fischer and his players were onstage again - this time performing the Scena di Berenice and the Farewell Symphony in the gracious rococo drawing-room on the first floor of the palace. Players and audience then mingled on the lawn in the starlight to watch a final firework display and to drink a glass or two of sekt to Haydn's memory.
It was quite a day!
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