Fou Ts’ong’s Haydn

Recent scholarship has confronted a tendency, stemming from the nineteenth century, to associate Haydn with a lack of emotional depth (Botstein 1997, Botstein 1998, Garratt 2005, Proksch 2015, Friedman 2021). Many pianists have also pushed for renewed recognition of Haydn’s keyboard music, against comments such as those by András Schiff (“[Haydn is] one of the worst clichés in classical music” (1999). Alfred Brendel, for instance, urges us to step away from a view of Haydn, propagated by Hanslick and Adorno, “as a stepping stone for Mozart and Beethoven” (2010). Paul Lewis, too, declares that the time has come for Haydn’s music to be “as widely programmed as that of [Mozart and Beethoven]” (2021). This paper contributes to the increasing interest in Haydn’s reception history and performance practice (Beghin 2015) by highlighting the approach taken by Chinese-British pianist and pedagogue Fou Ts’ong, who was among the earliest pianists to develop a deep interest in the composer’s keyboard music in the early 2000s. Fou performed all-Haydn recitals in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Taipei in 2009 (the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death), then recorded “Haydn: Piano Sonatas” (Meridian, 2011). I explore Fou’s understanding and interpretation of Haydn, and argue that Fou’s views strongly echoed eighteenth-century understandings. Fou perceived Haydn as a composer of (Kantian) genius – an idea espoused by Haydn’s biographer Georg August Griesinger in particular – and regarded the composer as a man of both sensibility and humour, as perceived by many of Haydn’s contemporaries, composers and critics alike. In contending that performing Haydn’s keyboard sonatas demands (intellectual) understanding and (sympathetic) imagination, qualities prioritized by eighteenth-century philosophers, Fou even suggested that a student’s musical