Haydn always regarded his two visits to London in 1791‑92 and 1794‑95 as the happiest times of his life. His first trip was an unalloyed triumph, artistically, socially and financially, possibly even romantically. Events in France, and Prince Anton Esterházy’s reluctance to let his Kapellmeister disappear again so soon, meant that Haydn’s projected second London visit was delayed until early 1794, during the coldest winter in living memory. In his trunk were piano trios, a new symphony, No 99, plus parts of Nos 100 and 101, still work in progress. Settling into lodgings in Bury Street, St James’s, Haydn immediately plunged into the hectic round of Monday concerts directed by violinist-impresario Johann Peter Salomon in the Hanover Square Rooms.

With audience euphoria by now guaranteed, the three new symphonies were unfurled in rapid succession at Salomon’s concerts, played by a 60-strong orchestra that, unlike in 1791‑92, included clarinets. All three provoked orgies of superlatives from London’s press. Symphony Nos 100 and 101, especially, combined Haydn’s trademark symphonic power and sophistication with effects calculated to make a direct appeal to his audience. No 100’s ‘military’ Allegretto, evoking ‘the hellish roar of war’, became the sensation of the season, as the big bang in the Surprise Symphony had been two years earlier. On March 3, 1794, a month before the premiere of the Military, Londoners delightedly encored what one critic dubbed the ‘charming’ tick-tock Andante of Symphony 101. The movement became another instant hit. A few years later a Viennese publisher issued a keyboard arrangement titled Rondo … Die Uhr. The nickname Clock was always waiting to happen.

Reviews of the Clock Symphony were predictably ecstatic. ‘Nothing can be more original than the subject of the first movement’, enthused The Morning Chronicle, ‘and having found a happy subject, no man knows like HAYDN how to produce incessant variety without once departing from it.’ The whole movement – a vast symphonic jig – grows with unquenchable élan from the ascending scale sounded in the bleak D minor introduction. In the third movement Haydn expands a little minuet he had composed for mechanical organ into the longest and (in some performances) most combative of all his symphonic minuets. Based on a serene, songful theme, the sonata-rondo finale is a tour de force of wit and ingenuity. Everything evolves logically from the rising scale traced by the first three notes (an obvious link with the first movement here). En route to its exultant close, the finale encloses a D minor episode of sustained fury and a gossamer pianissimo fugato that Mendelssohn surely remembered in the Scherzo of his Octet.

That Morning Chronicle review also noted that ‘we never heard a more charming effect than was produced by the trio to the minuet’. Beneath a pointedly naive flute solo, the strings initially ‘forget’ to change the harmony, then correct themselves on the repeat. Haydn here conjures a village band, just as Beethoven did in the sleepy bassoon and oboe solos in the Scherzo of the Pastoral. It’s an innocuous joke, which Haydn’s audience evidently enjoyed. Later editors were unamused, and duly ‘corrected’ the out-of-kilter harmony.

Another misreading that crept into early editions is the articulation of the Andante’s ‘clock’ theme. In the second bar of the melody, after a till-ready bar of ticking pizzicato, the violins skip up to a B natural, marked by Haydn with a staccato dot. Perhaps thinking this too flippant, editors changed the staccato to a slurred note. This may seem laughably trivial. But with the smoothed phrasing we lose a twinkle of Haydnesque wit, especially at the deliberate tempos favoured by most conductors until the 1970s.

THE ROMANTIC LEGACY

In critic-speak ‘deliberate’ is, of course, a favoured euphemism for plain slow. Contemporary evidence suggests that in Haydn’s day andantes and minuets were taken considerably faster, and allegros a little slower, than became the norm by the mid-19th century. Virtually all the earlier recordings of the symphony’s Andante, from Arturo Toscanini in 1929 onwards, conjure a venerable grandfather clock, with four oh-so-steady quaver beats to the bar. Like other musicians of his generation, Toscanini viewed Haydn ‘backwards’, through a Beethovenian prism. Yet despite the constricted recorded sound and the inevitable use of a corrupt text, his 1929 performance (whose New York orchestra included musicians who had played under Mahler) still compels with its vivacity and care for detail. The outer movements truly dance. When the Italian maestro recorded the Clock with the NBC Symphony in 1946‑47, in pretty awful sound, grace and affection had seeped out of his interpretation. He does at least play the wrong-harmony joke in the Minuet’s Trio. But what sounded genially relaxed in 1929 now becomes harried, with that merciless attack characteristic of Toscanini’s NBC recordings.

Among other conductors born in the 19th century, Hermann Scherchen conducts a less than ingratiating Vienna State Opera Orchestra in a dogged performance that never takes wing. There’s barely a glimpse of Haydn the humorist, Haydn the subversive, either here or in the sober, steadfast reading from Otto Klemperer. The darting Presto first movement is tamed to a jogtrot, while the Andante outdoes all comers in trancelike slowness. Klemperer does, though, score by dividing his violins left and right, as Haydn intended. There are gains throughout, not least when the Andante erupts from rococo decorum to a cosmic battle between ricocheting antiphonal violins.

With what seems like gleeful perversity, Thomas Beecham used the most corrupt Haydn texts available to him, then had fun liberally adding his own dynamic markings. In his studio recording the pacing is barely quicker than Klemperer’s (Beecham takes the finale faster in a live BBC recording – ICA Classics, 7/18). Yet as you’d expect from one of music’s sensualists, Beecham moulds the phrasing more affectionately. In some moods I find it hard to resist the caressed violin lines above the Andante’s ticking pizzicato. The (joke-free) Trio, exquisitely played by flautist Gerald Jackson, becomes a nostalgic, Watteauesque idyll. Yet along with his added dynamics, Beecham is fond of pepping up the music with unmarked accents, as in the first movement’s prancing main theme. He also omits repeats at will.

Haydn initially marked the Clock’s first movement Presto ma non troppo, before settling on a plain Presto. At first I thought Pierre Monteux, with the VPO, too slow. But I soon adjusted to his unhurried – and flexible – tempo, such is the airy grace of the Vienna Philharmonic’s phrasing. Monteux, like Klemperer, divides his violins, to obvious advantage in the first movement’s bantering exchanges or the finale’s fugato, where he draws playing of scintillating lightness from the largish Vienna band. He also phrases in long spans, eschewing Beechamesque nudges in the melodic line. The Andante, at the most mobile tempo encountered so far, is delightfully spry – ferocious, too, in the central G minor eruption – while the Minuet has swagger without pomposity. The timpani, always crucial in late Haydn, are clearer than in any pre-1970 recording.

Dominated by the shining Berlin violins, Herbert von Karajan’s Clock Symphony is an ultra-sophisticated and, to my ears, joyless affair. Textures are smooth and sleek, with potentially disruptive brass neutered until they disconcertingly cut through at the climax of the finale’s D minor eruption. You could never accuse the brass (artificially spotlit?) of reticence in Leonard Bernstein’s comparably massive 1970 New York recording. If you want Haydn-as-proto-Beethoven, with the harmonic drama of the outer movements powerfully etched, this could be the answer. (As Haydn’s pupil in 1793, Beethoven may even have seen sketches of the Clock.) Bernstein was one of the first conductors to use a reliable modern edition, though his would-be playfulness in the Andante (including a coquettish flick on that staccato top B) is compromised by a lumbering tempo. His implausibly drawn-out Minuet outdoes even Karajan’s in grandiloquence.

Antal Dorati’s performance, in his Decca complete cycle, hasn’t worn well. The strings of the Philharmonia Hungarica lack finesse, the first movement is a whirl of relentless bluster, while the Minuet combines a ponderous tempo with almost brutally fierce accentuation. Wind, brass and timpani are soaked up by the strings in tutti textures, as they tend to be in another early 1970s recording, from the LPO under Eugen Jochum. More vital and refined than Dorati, Jochum hits on a perfect ‘walking’ tempo for the Andante; and his Minuet is the most lustily bucolic of any version to date. The finale’s fugato is deftly shaped, at a true pianissimo. But, as with Dorati, the moments when Haydn charmingly adds a flute or bassoon to the violin line barely register in the reverberant acoustic.

After labouring over each note in the Adagio introduction – Haydn as Bruckner – Georg Solti, also with the LPO, conducts a string-saturated, ultimately bland performance. It’s far outclassed by the near-contemporary version from Colin Davis, recorded in the glowing Concertgebouw acoustic. Davis and the engineers ensure that we savour the distinctive characters of the fabulous Concertgebouw woodwind, both in tuttis and in moments such as the Andante’s delicate flute-bassoon duetting. Davis’s tempos seem spot on. With pointed cross-rhythms, the Minuet balances elegance and rowdy rusticity. And when Haydn ups the temperature – in the adventures of the first movement’s recapitulation or the minor-key outbursts in the Andante and finale – Davis unleashes the full, resplendent power of the orchestra. By 1794 Haydn had acquired a reputation as a ‘noisy’ composer. Here the fortissimos blaze thrillingly, as the composer surely intended.

Davis’s performance is founded on lithe, carefully shaped bass lines. Ditto the likeable chamber-scale versions by Neville Marriner and Jeffrey Tate. Both place a premium on textural clarity. With pointed phrasing, Marriner just about vindicates his slow tempo for the Andante. His is one of the last versions to ‘correct’ the harmony in the Trio. Using a scholarly text, Tate also chooses old-fashioned tempos in the Andante and Minuet, though he always keeps the rhythms buoyant. I like the way he brings out the moments of harmonic questioning in the first movement, and the relaxed opening of the finale. This is, after all, Vivace, not Presto. These days Adám Fischer’s Haydn is almost certain to provoke, unlike the traditional-sounding Clock he recorded in 1987 as part of his complete Nimbus cycle. The playing is only so-so, though it’s often hard to hear exactly what’s going on in the vast, washy acoustic of the Eisenstadt Haydnsaal.

WINDS OF CHANGE

On record, at least, the period-instrument movement came late to Haydn. In 1988 Nikolaus Harnoncourt gave the Concertgebouw a semi-authentic makeover (vibrato-light strings, natural brass) in a Clock that both fascinates and exasperates. Unmuzzled trumpets have a field day in the raucous tuttis. More than in almost any other performance, the Andante’s G minor eruption conjures the éclat terrible of war. The Minuet is speeded up to an abrasive quick waltz, with antiphonal horns and trumpets beating the hell out of each other. The anti-Beecham version? Yet as ever, Harnoncourt the rabble-rouser jostles with Harnoncourt the Romantic. The opening of the Andante has a wistful, almost elegiac cast, while the finale is the slowest, most caressingly phrased on disc.

By this time Frans Brüggen had recorded what by my reckoning was the first Clock on period instruments. Authentic here by no means equals quick. Indeed, Brüggen takes the Andante at a traditional tempo, with four beats to the bar – too slow for my taste. But he always gives his players space to phrase expressively in the quick movements. I loved the soft, pastel woodwind, including a charming flute-as-pipe in the Minuet’s Trio. Bassoons are chirpily prominent. You’re unusually aware, too, of the clarinets, used by Haydn to colour and reinforce the tutti sonorities but never allowed to step out as soloists.

A trio of ‘authentic’ recordings followed in the early 1990s, led by Roy Goodman and the Hanover Band. The strings can sound thin for music designed to showcase the sheer physical power of a large orchestra. Goodman’s plinking fortepiano continuo can rarely be suppressed. And the Minuet-as-waltz out-Harnoncourts Harnoncourt in brassy aggression. Whatever my reservations, there’s a raw excitement in Goodman’s performance, etched in bold primary colours.

Alongside Goodman, Sigiswald Kuijken and La Petite Bande (too petite for the Clock) tend to sound safe and pallid – and he eschews the harmony joke in the Trio. Unlike Roger Norrington, whose hyper-alert performance with the London Classical Players has a twinkle in the eye and an infectious rhythmic lift. A decade or so after Haydn’s death Carl Czerny provided metronome markings for his piano reduction of Haydn’s late symphonies. We can never know what Haydn would have thought, of course. But Czerny’s markings are worth pondering. At his suggested 76 bars per minute the Minuet becomes a fast waltz – a reminder that by 1815 the waltz was all the rage in Europe. Harnoncourt and Goodman take the cue. Not so Norrington, whose springy Minuet retains something of an ancien régime poise. But in the Andante Norrington follows Czerny’s brisk tempo (116 quavers to the minute) almost to the letter, creating the most realistic timepiece of all – compare it with your clock at home! It’s short on sentiment but engagingly dapper – ferocious, too, when the cataclysm erupts at the movement’s centre.

In his similarly conceived 2009 Stuttgart performance (you’d hardly guess this wasn’t a period band) Norrington takes the Andante faster still. This is the jauntiest clock on disc. I find it too unrelenting. Conversely, the Trio passes in a haze of dream, with charming touches of decoration from the flute. Fuelled by incontinent brass, the remorselessly accented finale breaks another speed record. I was left gasping.

BACK TO THE MAINSTREAM

Since 1990 few Clock recordings have remained untouched by the period-instrument revolution. One exception is Leonard Slatkin’s rather featureless, string-heavy performance with a less than immaculate LPO (the violins just about cling on in the finale). The versions conducted by Claudio Abbado and Charles Mackerras are another matter. Abbado’s Chamber Orchestra of Europe are arguably the classiest band of their type. Abbado doesn’t divide the violins antiphonally (though there is audible separation between firsts and seconds); and he ‘corrects’ the village-band harmony in the Trio. Perhaps Abbado simply found the joke unfunny. But this is a wonderfully inspiriting Clock: shrewdly paced, naturally shaped, subtly and vividly coloured (with precise differentiation between piano and pianissimo), and flawlessly executed by a band of virtuosos. One tiny detail speaks volumes. In the first movement, scampering downward scales (inverting the rising scale of the main theme) usher a repeat of the exposition. Whereas in most performances the scales just happen. Abbado shapes them into a furtive diminuendo. Haydn, you sense, would have smiled.

If Charles Mackerras’s St Luke’s Orchestra is not quite in the COE’s league, his performance is similarly compelling – direct and unaffected, in the best sense. Choosing virtually identical tempos, he scores over Abbado by dividing the violins and playing the Trio’s wrong-note joke. Gravity and roguish grace are held in ideal equilibrium in the Andante. Using natural brass and authentic wooden timpani sticks, Mackerras encourages a more astringent ‘period’ sound world than Abbado. Antiphonal violins cavort capriciously in the first movement’s development, while the finale is a marvel of delicacy and grace at speed.

INTO THE MILLENNIUM

Among a clutch of period recordings of the Clock to appear since the millennium, Richard Hickox is prompt, reliable but ultimately unmemorable, despite some delectable work from the Collegium Musicum 90 woodwind. Nicholas McGegan, recorded in a swimmy acoustic, patently enjoys the comedy of the Andante. But acoustic apart, his performance suffers from undernourished violins and an over-emphasis on the bar line.

True to form, Marc Minkowski adds his own obbligato gasps and foot-stamping in his live recording with Les Musiciens du Louvre. Powered by shrieking trumpets and horns, his Minuet becomes an anarchic riot of cross-rhythms. The extreme contrast for the Trio – relaxed tempo, hushed, feathery strings, flute-as-shepherd’s pipe – typifies the whole performance. The opening Presto, at a rapid but pliable tempo, quivers with tigerish energy. Minkowski relishes the many moments when Haydn seems to take himself by surprise. Yet a spirit of unruly impulsiveness (no one surpasses Minkowski for explosive shocks) coexists with careful long-range planning. Climaxes in the outer movements are thrillingly built and clinched, with hollering brass and timpani that crack like gunfire.

Other recent Clock recordings – and this is inevitably a far from complete survey – use modern instruments with varying degrees of historical awareness. Howard Shelley conducts a pleasant, ‘straight’ reading: nothing to irritate but little that lingers in the imagination. Thomas Fey had recorded all the ‘London’ Symphonies bar the Clock with the Heidelberg Symphony Orchestra when serious injury struck. The orchestra’s leader, Benjamin Spillner, stepped into the breach with a period-style performance that has all the Fey hallmarks. Think Harnoncourt (Fey’s one-time teacher), then add some. According to taste, tempo manipulations – say, in the first movement’s exposition repeat – can be quizzically witty or plain annoying. The Trio is one long, languid decelerando. The Heidelberg brass out-screech all comers, not least when ramming home the dissonances in the Andante’s storm. Whether or not you succumb, this is a performance of restless imagination. Nothing is taken for granted. And the Heidelbergers’ playing is consistently brilliant.

Too often in recordings of Classical symphonies repeats sound like (or are) carbon copies of the original. Not so with Spillner, or in the version conducted by Robin Ticciati. Set in motion by perkily pointed bassoons, his Andante almost rivals Norrington for high-stepping briskness. The central eruption sounds a touch frenetic. Elsewhere I enjoyed this performance, superlatively realised by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, without reserve: from the varied phrasings and colourings of the Presto (Ticciati bends the tempo more subtly than Spillner) to a finale that marries exhilaration and lyrical grace. Ticciati, like Spillner and Minkowski, gives the drums their head, though levels of timpani violence are carefully calibrated.

In similar vein is the version by the equally brilliant Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen under Paavo Järvi. Järvi’s finale, dispatched with bravado, is a notch faster than Ticciati’s. Ideally I’d like more violin power at climaxes. But Järvi’s performance combines an elfin quick-wittedness (say, in the violins’ antiphonal dialogues in the Presto), a sure control of symphonic tensions and a wide-eyed delight in Haydn’s sheer unpredictability. From the cheeky staccato on that top B natural, the ticking Andante is pure ballet. More than in any other performance, the playful Allegretto scherzando of Beethoven’s Eighth is already in view.

THE FINAL CUT

Like other late named Haydn symphonies, the Clock immediately entered the repertoire after its triumphant London premiere, and has never left it. It’s a work too easy to take for granted, as some conductors reveal. But such is the music’s bubbling, irreverent inventiveness that it has happily withstood repeated bouts of concentrated listening. In the right hands the Clock is one of those Haydn works guaranteed to raise the spirits and induce a smile, as it evidently did back in 1794, when one critic wrote that ‘passages often occur which render it impossible to listen to them without excitement’. Joy, and a sense of gleeful discovery, are of the essence in any performance.

A dozen or so recordings, from Monteux in 1958, via Davis, Norrington and Mackerras, to Ticciati and Järvi in our own day, fulfil my criteria. Pacing is crucial, especially in the Andante, which must unfold at two beats to the bar, not a waddling four, and the Minuet, where the portly need not apply. Almost as important, for me, are antiphonally divided violins. That said, no Clock delights, excites and, yes, moves me as consistently as Abbado’s with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. True, he expunges the ‘wrong-harmony’ joke. But Abbado gets everything else exactly right, from the fine control of tension in the misty Adagio introduction to the finale’s fleet, feathery fugato that, as so often, has you marvelling at the players’ corporate virtuosity.

TOP CHOICE

COE / Claudio Abbado (DG)

No ‘wrong-note’ joke in the Trio, and less rampantly extrovert than some. But under Abbado’s benignly alert direction the COE play with fabulous virtuosity and colouristic subtlety. The Minuet has an infectious Austrian swing, while the Andante perfectly balances wit and sentiment.

Read the original Gramophone review

PERIOD CHOICE

Les Musiciens du Louvre / Marc Minkowski (Naïve)

I wouldn’t want to be without Brüggen and Norrington. But Minkowski, tempering spur-of-the-moment impetuosity with long-range symphonic thinking, conducts the most viscerally exciting period Clock on disc. If his Andante doesn’t make you smile, nothing will.

Read the original Gramophone review

MODERN CHOICE

Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen / Paavo Järvi (RCA)

‘Thrilling’ was my initial verdict, and it still thrilled on a second and third hearing. Järvi’s period-meets-modern performance will be too fast and fierce for some, but there’s plenty of deft shaping en route.

Read the original Gramophone review

HISTORIC CHOICE

VPO / Pierre Monteux (Decca Eloquence)

If you like your Haydn on an ample scale – Haydn himself did – Monteux and the Vienna Phil, with antiphonally divided violins, are unbeatable. The old magician directs a flexibly paced performance of grace, puckish wit and, where needed, formidable symphonic power.

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today