Haydn's Canonic Minuets

Authors

James S. MacKay, Loyola University (NO)Follow

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Haydn composed many hundreds of minuets during his long career, enriching the courtly dance with compositional skill and ingenuity. One of the ways in which he sought to elevate the minuet genre was through contrapuntal artifice, including canon. The famous “Hexenmenuett” (“Witches’ Minuet”) from his “Quinten” Quartet, Op. 76 no. 2, dating from 1797, is the most famous of these works, in which the viola and cello duplicate the leading voice of violins I and II at the distance of an octave. Haydn’s interest in canonic minuets dates back to the early 1760s, however. Minuets from three early symphonies (Nos. 3, 23, and 44) are in canon, along with a keyboard minuet from the early 1770s (Hob. XVI: 25), and another from a baryton trio (Hob. XI: 94) dating from the same time-period.

This study, building on the concepts of Denis Collins, Alan Gosman, Melanie Lowe, and Gretchen Wheelock, examines these five early canonic minuets, exploring Haydn’s rationale for incorporating the strictest type of counterpoint into what is typically the lightest movement of Classical multi-movement works. Various precedents for canonic minuets (by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Georg Philipp Telemann, among others) exist in mid-18th-century Europe: moreover, the Baroque musical taste of Haydn’s employer and patron, Nikolaus Esterházy, likely played a role. Haydn’s canonic minuets display his playful command of polyphony: the fusing of stylized dance and learned style in these movements displays his lifelong quest to compose "a really new minuet."

Recommended Citation

MacKay, James S. (2025) "Haydn's Canonic Minuets," HAYDN: Online Journal of the Haydn Society of North America: Vol. 15, Article 5.
Available at: https://remix.berklee.edu/haydn-journal/vol15/iss1/5