Sammartini, Mysliveček, Haydn

Abstract

Giovanni Battista Sammartini’s name has been consistently prominent in the discourse on the origins of the concert symphony, whether hailed as a pioneer of the genre or deemed a merely marginal figure in its development. It has hardly been recognized, however, that an anecdote first shared 1809 in Georg August Griesinger’s Biographische Notizen über Joseph Haydn and later in Le Haydine by Giuseppe Carpani – who was most likely the original source of the story – played a conspicuous role in shaping the perception of Sammartini and his compositional output. In this anecdote, Josef Mysliveček spontaneously identified Sammartini’s quartets or symphonies as a source of inspiration for Haydn, which the composer strenuously denied. Discussing examples from roughly one-and-a-half centuries of scholarly writing about Sammartini, the article traces the anecdote’s impact and suggests that it not only prompted the composer’s incorporation into the discourse on the early symphony in the first place, but also profoundly influenced the way his music was perceived and contextualised from the nineteenth century onwards.