Great events are often foreshadowed. The preparations for Haydn's tercentenary are well underway in Basel, where the Joseph Haydn Stiftung has initiated the project ‘Haydn2032’, the aim of which is to perform and record the complete Haydn symphonies in European cities with the orchestras Il Giardino Armonico and Kammerorchester Basel, directed by Giovanni Antonini. The individual concerts and recordings, five of which have already been accomplished, combine the symphonies with other works by Haydn and his contemporaries.

After concerts carrying the themes ‘La Passione’, ‘Il filosofo’, ‘Solo e pensoso’ and ‘Il distratto’ (with the works subsequently recorded and published by Alpha Productions / Outhere Music), the latest project, ‘L'homme de génie’, was dedicated to Haydn's Symphonies Nos 19, 80 and 81 in combination with Joseph Martin Kraus's Symphony in C minor (vb142). For the first time in the history of Haydn2032, the concerts were accompanied by an academic conference, hosted by Wolfgang Fuhrmann (Universität Mainz) and Christian Moritz-Bauer (Universität Wien) in cooperation with the Internationale Joseph-Martin-Kraus-Gesellschaft. Under the title ‘Sturm und Drang Revisited: Haydn, Kraus und andere’ the symposium tackled a subject that has become anathema to musicology in general and to Haydn scholars in particular. The difficulties of finding direct and concrete connections between, say, Haydn's music of the early 1770s and the literary movement that flourished between 1772 and 1782, subsequently called Sturm und Drang after Klinger's drama of 1777, seem insurmountable: too deep is the scepticism about a diffuse concept of ‘Zeitgeist’ that considers roughly contemporary phenomena in different arts to emerge from a single cultural essence. While the music industry still successfully employs the label Sturm und Drang, it has become a truism in academic discourse that a musical Sturm und Drang phase cannot be substantiated – at least ‘pending further notice’, as Volkmar Braunbehrens (Freiburg) summarized the current state of the art. According to Armin Raab (Joseph Haydn-Institut, Cologne), Haydn scholarship would still prefer to get rid of the inconvenient concept altogether. In musicology at large, it has at best been tolerated as a name for a musical topic or idiom, though recently Clive McClelland has described the term as ‘no longer fit for purpose in the discipline of topic theory’ and suggested tempesta (a term referring to depictions of storms in early opera) as an alternative (Clive McClelland, ‘Ombra and Tempesta’, in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory, ed. Danuta Mirka (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 281). If scholars decide to put the subject on the agenda again, it seems as if the moment of ‘further notice’ has now come. Have new possibilities arisen to rescue some facets of the Sturm und Drang concept for music scholarship? To cut to the point: all is rather quiet on the Haydn front. The actual protagonists of this symposium were ‘Kraus und andere’ (Kraus and others).

Literary studies, for obvious reasons, have less trouble with the concept of Sturm und Drang. Leonhard Herrmann (Universität Leipzig) introduced it as a movement that on the one hand marked a failure of Enlightenment but on the other continued Enlightenment through its own attitude of criticism. Further hallmarks of the movement were the passionate pose, the insurgency against conventions, potentates and social conditions, an emphasis on aesthetic sensibility (as opposed to rational reasoning), and a new language characterized by exclamations, expletives and ellipses. In the wake of Sturm und Drang, music was considered to be the art capable of achieving the utopia of a communication and sensation beyond the boundaries of reason and language. Stefan Hulfeld (Universität Wien) focused on Sturm und Drang as a theatrical movement. Even if the dramas of this movement had little success in their own time (in Vienna, by the way, they were prohibited by Joseph II), drama and dramatic theory were central points of reference in the discussions of the Stürmer und Dränger.

It makes sense, then, to look for a musical Sturm und Drang in theatrical music. Ursula Kramer (Universität Mainz) addressed this task by investigating late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century incidental music. While neither Haydn nor Kraus wrote incidental music for dramas of the Sturm und Drang, there are several examples by other composers, as Kramer demonstrated by reference to music for Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen by Carl Jacob Wagner (1817), music for Schiller's Die Räuber by Joseph Adolph Leibrock (1834) and Johann André’s Macbeth music of 1778–1779 (Shakespeare was one of the admired models for the movement). The examples by Leibrock and André at least are obvious attempts to write a form of music appropriate to the dramas and their gestures. This pertains not only to their essentially passionate mood, but especially to the melodramas they contain, where expressive musical fragments are strung together in free association, without a specific musical logic or form. At least in the case of André, this music is also contemporary with the literary Sturm und Drang. Surprisingly, even Haydn came back on stage here: Kramer pointed to performance material from Hamburg that indicates which symphonies were played as incidental music for specific dramas. Haydn's Symphony No. 44 (one of the composer's so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies) was in fact used as incidental music for Schiller's Die Räuber, played in Hamburg from 1782. Haydn's work, hence, was at least functionalized as Sturm und Drang music, as it were.

If incidental music is one practicable way to rescue the term for music history, aesthetic writings by musicians are another. Along these lines, Sascha Wegner (Universität Bern) considered Joseph Martin Kraus's essay Etwas von und über Musik für's Jahr 1777. The question posed in the subtitle of Wegner's presentation (‘Enlightenment or Sturm und Drang?’) proved to be a rhetorical one: as mentioned above, Sturm und Drang was not simply opposed to Enlightenment, it also continued the latter by other means, and if Kraus's essay is full of enlightened ideas, its language (characterized by those very exclamations, expletives and ellipses mentioned above) nevertheless makes it a work in the spirit of Sturm und Drang. In this essay, Kraus apostrophizes Gluck's work – and his Iphigénie en Aulide in particular – as a kind of music that is fit to be mentioned in the same breath as the poetry of Klopstock, an admired father figure for the protagonists of the Sturm und Drang. In fact, Gluck proves to be of greater importance to Kraus's music than Haydn, who is frequently referred to as a major influence on Kraus in the literature. At the beginning of Kraus's Symphony in C minor (probably written, at least in part, during his stay in Vienna in 1783) the composer makes a reference to the beginning of Gluck's Iphigénie en Aulide. Is this symphony Sturm und Drang music, then, and is Kraus a Sturm und Drang composer? The very example of Kraus makes clear how difficult these labels remain when applied as essentialist characterizations of a whole oeuvre, not to mention a whole epoch. Joachim Kremer (Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart) described how Kraus, having met Gluck in Vienna, moved on to Paris in 1784, where he started to assimilate different styles. He heard Didone abbandonata by Piccinni (Gluck's alleged antipode) fifteen times and gave detailed accounts of how it moved him to tears. Much of his subsequent music, the intermèdes for Molière's Amphytrion that were written in Paris, for example, clearly shows traces of French classicism. Equally, Kraus's opera Aeneas in Carthago, whose complex history of composition and reworking was sketched by Jens Dufner (Beethoven-Haus Bonn), can hardly be described as being a musical expression of Sturm und Drang.

A better case in point could be Kraus's highly expressive song ‘Der Abschied’, as presented by Gerhart Darmstadt (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg). Kraus versified and composed it to say farewell to his close friend Samuel Liedemann. What Darmstadt's presentation made clear is that just as the literary movement cannot be reduced to being in opposition to the Enlightenment, nor can musical elements of Sturm und Drang be reduced to being in opposition to Empfindsamkeit, the ‘sensitive’ style that aimed to express ‘natural and true’ emotions. Rather, much of it seems a continuation of Empfindsamkeit with new and intensified means.

For all that, the conference witnessed no new attempts to find new and direct connections between Haydn's career and the Sturm und Drang. This case is still ‘pending further notice’ – when arguing on the level of production. On the level of reception, composers and compositions (amongst them works by Haydn) were indeed used in discussions of the Sturm und Drang – frequently, but not exclusively, music in what we today consider to represent that idiom. If we use concepts like Sturm und Drang to describe some sort of substance permeating an epoch or the oeuvre of one composer, they continue to distort the complexity and inconsistency of historical processes. If, however, we employ them as tools to describe single movements and strands of discourse that have different degrees of continuity and opposition to other strands of the time, if we consider them as concepts whose influence on specific musical practices and works must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, then they remain useful tools for considering music in a wider context of cultural practices. Joseph Martin Kraus, on whom much work remains to done, proves to be a fascinating case in point. Pending further notice, the case of musical Sturm und Drang is not yet closed.