On 28 August 1789 Haydn wrote the following to the Parisian music publisher Jean-Georges Sieber:

As it turns out, Haydn never wrote any of these four symphonies for Sieber, nor did he ever call any of his subsequent works a ‘National Symphony’. But the idea of a ‘National Symphony’ in a letter to a Parisian publisher only six weeks after the fall of the Bastille is rich with implications.

This letter is the last of three we know that Haydn wrote to Sieber, all of them from the period between April and August of 1789; none of the publisher's letters to the composer has survived. The correspondence revolves around Haydn's proposal to sell four (as yet unwritten) symphonies, among other works, to this Parisian publisher. Haydn had originally entrusted this task to the violinist Johann Tost, who had journeyed from Eszterháza to Paris at some point in late 1788 or early 1789, but Tost's duplicitous behaviour – the details of this messy affair have been related elsewhereFootnote ² – compelled Haydn to contact Sieber directly in a series of letters:

1. (1) Eszterháza, 5 April 1789, Haydn to Sieber. The composer has been informed by Tost that Sieber had purchased four symphonies and six piano sonatas, and the composer is surprised that he has not yet heard from Sieber about the details of this arrangement. ‘I regret being bound to Herr Tost for the four symphonies, because he still owes me 300 f [Gulden] for the 4 pieces. If you will take over this debt … I guarantee to compose these four symphonies for you. But Herr Tost has no rights at all to the six pianoforte Sonatas, and has thus swindled you; you can claim your damages in Vienna.’Footnote ³

2. (2) Eszterháza, 27 July 1789, Haydn to Sieber. The discussion centres once again on the four symphonies. The original letter recently came to light again and was sold to an anonymous buyer at a Sotheby's auction in London on 10 June 2009. The catalogue for that sale includes the following partial transcription from the first page of the letter:

   Ich verpflichte mich … die 4 Sinfonien sobald möglich zu Componieren… . Hingegen bitte ich Sie, um den Herrn Tost ebenfalls zu überzeugen, und um … alle übrige … gestellte Forderung diese 4 Sinfonien zu begegnen, mir eine Authentisierte Schrift von Ihrer Seite zu meiner Rechtfertigung zu überschicken. Damit sowohl ich von Ihrer, als Sie von meinerseits gesichert, und dem Herrn Tost ein Ewiges stillschweig[en] auferlegt wird …

   I oblige myself … to compose the four symphonies as soon as possible… . In return, I ask you to persuade Herr Tost to provide a statement, authenticated by you, that will relinquish all other prior conditions concerning these four symphonies. With that, both you and I can be mutually assured, and an eternal silence may be imposed upon Herr Tost.Footnote ⁴

3. (3) [Lost] Paris, 8 August 1789, Sieber to Haydn. Haydn's letter of 27 July is annotated with the remark ‘repondu du 8 aust 1789’.Footnote ⁵

4. (4) Eszterháza, 28 August 1789, Haydn to Sieber. See above.

5. (5) [Lost] Paris, ?September 1789, Sieber to Haydn. Haydn's letter of 28 August 1789 is marked ‘répondu’ but without a date.Footnote ⁶

Had the full correspondence survived, we would doubtless have a better idea of what was behind the ‘National Symphony’ specified in the letter of 28 August. But we must play with the partial hand we have been dealt, even if this involves a degree of speculation at times.

Sieber was a native of Bavaria – he was baptized as Johann Georg Sieber in 1738 – who had emigrated to Paris in the late 1750s and figured actively in the musical life of the capital until his death there in 1822. He played both harp and horn in various ensembles from the 1760s into the 1780s, was appointed first horn in the Académie royal de musique in 1762 and served in the same capacity in the Concert spirituel from 1777 to 1786. Sieber is best remembered, however, as a music publisher who issued works by composers such as J. C. Bach, Mozart, Dittersdorf and, above all, Haydn.Footnote ⁷ By the time Haydn began dealing directly with him in 1789, Sieber had issued dozens of publications of works either by Haydn or attributed to him, including all six of the ‘Paris’ symphonies in parts (1788), the string quartets Op. 17 (1773), Op. 33 (1783) and Op. 50 (Nos 2–4, 1785), the Stabat mater (1785) and the orchestral version of Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1788). How many (if any) of these publications were authorized remains unclear, though it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of them were, given Sieber's long-term business relationship with Artaria, Haydn's principal publisher in Vienna.

Haydn's direct correspondence with Sieber was in any event part of a larger project to cultivate and expand his connections with publishers, impresarios and musical institutions in Paris. These included, most famously, the Concert Spirituel and the Concert de la Société Olympique, the latter of which, under the leadership of the Comte d'Ogny, had commissioned the six ‘Paris’ symphonies of 1785–1786. Haydn had also authorized Tost to sell Symphonies 88 and 89 (1787) in Paris, and d'Ogny would later commission Symphonies 90–92 as well (1788–1789). Indeed, Haydn's popularity in France had never been greater than at the end of the 1780s: of the 110 symphonies performed by the Concert spirituel in the years 1788–1790, no fewer than ninety-four were by Haydn, with twenty performances during the month of March 1788 alone.Footnote ⁸

The suggestion of the title ‘National Symphony’ may well have come from Sieber rather than Haydn; if so, the idea most probably would have been put forward in the publisher's lost letter of 8 August. The phrasing Haydn uses in his letter of 28 August reveals nothing conclusive about the source of the title: the nota bene can be interpreted either as a point of emphasis, or it could simply set off a specific point (the naming of one symphony) from the more general discussion about the set of symphonies as a whole. If the original idea for this title did in fact come from Sieber, Haydn explicitly – and by all appearances enthusiastically – endorsed it.

What, then, might Haydn have understood by either proposing or agreeing to write a ‘National Symphony’ for a Parisian publisher so soon after the fall of the Bastille? Not surprisingly, Haydn left no written response to the events of that time: throughout his life he remained circumspect about his political beliefs and opinions. The conventional image of the composer tacitly assumes an essentially conservative political outlook, but this perception rests more on the absence of documentation than on actual sources.Footnote ⁹ We nevertheless know from his personal library and from his correspondence and London notebooks that he was keenly aware of and curious about the world around him, including the realms of science, commerce, technology and (from the London notebooks in particular) politics.

For information on the latest developments in France, the composer would most likely have turned to one or the other (or both) of the region's major newspapers, the Wiener Zeitung and the Pressburger Zeitung. The Wiener Zeitung, by far the larger and more important of the two, was a twice-weekly publication that covered both domestic and foreign news for its readers and served, in effect, as the journal of record in Joseph II's Vienna. Indeed, Joseph himself relied on it for the promulgation of his many decrees in the 1780s.Footnote ¹⁰ It was not yet, however, an official or even semi-official newspaper of the Habsburg court. On the contrary: in 1787 the emperor had explicitly declined an opportunity to take financial (and thus also editorial) control over this most venerable of Viennese publications, which had been publishing continuously since 1703, first under the name of the Wiener Diarium and more recently (since 1780) as the Wiener Zeitung. Imperial court documents from 1787 record that it would ‘seem neither advisable nor appropriate … for the state to weave itself into the editorship of the Diarium and presume for itself a certain degree of control, even if only veiled, over the content of newspapers’.Footnote ¹¹ Given the long history of censorship in the Habsburg empire, this decision may well seem surprising. But there was rarely need for intervention for a publication like the Wiener Zeitung, which, like other Viennese newspapers, limited itself almost entirely to reportage, transmitting official declarations and dispatches it had received from other sources, with very little in the way of accompanying commentary or editorials. Although nominally subject to censorship, these organs of the press remained relatively free throughout the 1780s as far as reporting on events in France was concerned. Not until the summer of 1790 would the Austrian monarchy begin any kind of systematic counteroffensive to shape public opinion towards the French Revolution.Footnote ¹²

We cannot say with certainty that Haydn saw the Wiener Zeitung on a regular basis, but circumstances strongly suggest that he did. We know from his correspondence that when he was not in Vienna he was eager to hear news from the capital. And on purely professional grounds Haydn would have wanted to keep abreast of the music publishing scene in Vienna, where the Wiener Zeitung had long served as the principal venue in which all the city's music publishers announced their new publications. Indeed, the composer's bitter complaint to Artaria in January 1782 about the unauthorized and premature publication of the Op. 33 string quartets was prompted by an announcement in the Wiener Zeitung itself. Haydn opened his letter to the publisher with these words: ‘It was with astonishment that I noted, while reading through the Wiener Diarium [i.e., the Wiener Zeitung], that you intend to issue my quartets in four weeks’ (‘Mit erstaunen durchlas in dem wiener Diario, wie daß Sie meine quartetten in 4 wochen heraus geben werden’).Footnote ¹³

The Wiener Zeitung can thus serve as a useful barometer of Haydn's knowledge of events in France, supplemented no doubt by conversations and perhaps the occasional Masonic meeting.Footnote ¹⁴ But these remain undocumented, so we must rely primarily on the reporting of Vienna's leading newspaper at the time to get a sense of what he and his interlocutors might have known.Footnote ¹⁵ The dispatches from Paris that appeared in the Wiener Zeitung, compiled from various unidentified sources, were remarkably unvarnished. Even from the perspective of more than two hundred years later, these reports do not convey any sense of having been sanitized or expurgated. They certainly do not minimize the violence that was taking place at the time. There was, as we might expect, a time lag between events on the ground and their appearance in print: it generally took about two weeks for developments in France to reach readers in Vienna. Thus reports of the storming of the Bastille appeared in the Wiener Zeitung of 29 July, and they describe at some length the violence of the moment, with graphic accounts of stabbings, shootings and severed heads being paraded on pikes.

Throughout July and August of 1789 the Wiener Zeitung continued to report both specific and general acts of mob violence in some detail, even after the initial wave of unrest on July 14 had passed. The newspaper's otherwise fairly optimistic and positive report in the issue of August 5, for example, concludes with the following:

Some of the newspaper's accounts about recent events in France run to four or five full pages, far beyond the standard space allotted to other stories from abroad. It is clear that the editors of the paper recognized the momentous nature of what was happening. Indeed, the chief editor of the Wiener Zeitung, Conrad Dominik Bartsch, is known to have seen the early stages of the French Revolution as part of a broader movement towards the achievement of Enlightenment political ideals. Bartsch was a Freemason, a protégé of Joseph von Sonnenfels and for a time Secretary of the Viennese lodge ‘Zur gekrönten Hoffnung’.Footnote ¹⁷

In the summer of 1789, then, events in France were still being reported in a tone that was essentially positive. This was still a time in which it seemed reasonable to believe that fundamental reforms could be achieved within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, and, as a noted scholar of the Austrian Enlightenment recently observed, Austrians of the time ‘could not fail to be aware of the similarities between many of the decrees of the National Assembly and the reforms of Joseph II’.Footnote ¹⁸ The Wiener Zeitung's account of the resolutions of 4 August provides a case in point. On this night the National Assembly voted to abolish all feudal privileges, and members of the aristocracy almost literally fell over themselves taking the floor to express their support for sweeping concessions to the bourgeoisie. When the Wiener Zeitung described these proceedings in its issue of 22 August, it laid out each resolution point by point and in great detail. At the same time, the newspaper did not ignore the darker side of what was going on and once again concluded its report on an ominous note: ‘In general’, the Wiener Zeitung informed its readers, ‘things are still quite unsettled in the provinces, and acts of violence, murder and other crimes are being committed on an almost daily basis’ (‘U[e]berhaupt geht es in den Provinzen noch sehr unruhig zu, und werden fast täglich Gewaltthätigkeiten, Mordthaten, und andere Ausschweifungen verübet’).Footnote ¹⁹

Haydn may also have had access to the Pressburger Zeitung. Its reports on events in France were not nearly so extensive as those of the Wiener Zeitung, but the general tone is no different. In its issue of 22 July 1789 it reported an address to the National Assembly that included the statement, ‘The life of the king is in danger’. On 1 August the newspaper devoted more than two full pages to the fall of the Bastille, with reports of violence against members of the nobility. ‘Things look deplorable in this capital city and along the entire way to Versailles at the moment’, the newspaper's dispatch observed. ‘A general uproar predominates… . The wrath of the mob no longer knew any bounds; the acts of violence were without number’ (‘Bejammernswürdig sieht es dermalen in hiesiger Hauptstadt, und längst dem Weg bis Versailles aus. Es herrscht ein allgemeiner Aufruhr… . Die Wuth des Pöbels kannte keine Schranken mehr; die Gewaltthätigkeiten waren ohne Zahl’).Footnote ²⁰ A week later, the newspaper reported that the turmoil in Paris had spread to ‘almost all the cities of the kingdom’. And signs of reconciliation over the following weeks were tempered by this observation in the issue of 22 August: ‘The Goddess of Discord continues to hold her black flag, darkening France's horizon.’Footnote ²¹

In short, then, the story that was getting through to Vienna was abridged but unexpurgated, and decidedly mixed: progress in the form of concessions from the crown and the aristocracy; progress in the general sense of movement toward an equality of law and the abolition of feudal privileges; but also violence in the form of lynchings, acts of arson and mob rampages. Readers at the time would of course have had no inkling of the Terror yet to come, including the execution of the king and queen (who, it should it be remembered, was Joseph II's sister). Yet no one could have ignored or been unaware of the underlying sense of violence and turmoil that was part of the social landscape of France in those early months of the Revolution.

Questions of reform and the gradual transformation of monarchical rule were in any case very much on the minds of the Viennese in August 1789. On 1 June Joseph II had abrogated the Belgian constitution, which in short order would lead to war and the overthrow of Habsburg rule in Belgium. In July he had imposed a stamp act on publications issued in the Habsburg domains, effectively shutting down a number of journals that could not sustain themselves financially in the open market.Footnote ²² The war against the Turks was not going well and was draining public morale. Many Hungarian nobles, resentful at Joseph II's various curtailments of Hungarian quasi-autonomy and his transfer of the Crown of Saint Stephen from Buda to Vienna, were becoming increasingly restless and outspoken in their opposition to the emperor.

News of the Bastille's fall was not greeted with equanimity at the Hofburg. A report written by the British chargé d'affaires in Vienna on 29 July describes how Joseph II, upon learning the news, was thrown into ‘transports of passion’, uttering the ‘most violent Menaces of Vengeance’.Footnote ²³ This response would not have been known publicly at the time, of course, but it provides at least some sense of the informal attitudes and unofficial responses that would have emanated from the court and been passed by word of mouth during the summer of 1789.

It was within this context that Haydn either proposed or agreed to write a ‘National Symphony’. As scholars of French history have long recognized, this word held special resonance at the time. For the French, ‘national’ meant something different from the political leadership of the king: the nation was an entity to which even the king owed allegiance. By the 1780s the word had become virtually synonymous with ‘public’.Footnote ²⁴ The Third Estate, representing the bourgeoisie and thus the vast majority of the French population, had withdrawn from the Estates General in June 1789 to reconstitute itself as the National Assembly, bypassing the aristocracy and the clergy. By early July even Louis XVI had to acknowledge the reality of this new body, and on 26 August the assembled delegates would approve the Declaration of the Rights of Man, whose third article proclaims that ‘the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body or individual may exercise any authority that does not proceed directly from the nation’. ‘National’ had become a kind of slogan, an adjectival shorthand for anything having to do with the Third Estate and the forces of change, whether it be achieved by violent or peaceful means. The people of Paris celebrated the fall of the Bastille with cries of ‘Vive la nation’ and ‘Vive la nation du tiers etat’.Footnote ²⁵ Personal wealth and comfort had to be sacrificed for the good of the nation. ‘Nation’ was one of those words that meant many things to many people, but in the summer of 1789 its associations with the turmoil in France were particularly strong.Footnote ²⁶

‘National’ had also become a buzzword in Joseph II's Austria: the emperor himself spoke repeatedly of such ideals as Nationalbildung, a Nationaltheater and a National-Singspiel. The term figured prominently in the Austrian press of the time as well, for, as in France, ‘nation’ was more or less synonymous with ‘the people’ or ‘the public’.Footnote ²⁷ Yet Haydn never proposed or approved a ‘national symphony’ for anyone other than a Parisian public. And given the extensive reportage in the leading newspapers of Vienna and Pressburg, it would be difficult to imagine that he remained oblivious to the resonances of this term in France under these particular circumstances.

Commercial motivations certainly played their part. On at least one earlier occasion, Haydn had accepted the idea of marketing his music by associating it with events of the day. In 1783 Artaria had commissioned a keyboard reduction of what we now know as the Symphony No. 69 in C major; the publisher suggested to Haydn that the piano reduction of this work be issued under the nickname of ‘Laudon’, in honour of the Austrian Field Marshal Ernst Gideon, Freiherr von Laudon (1717–1790). In his reply Haydn criticized the poor quality of the transcription and suggested that the finale be eliminated altogether, on the grounds that it did not lend itself to being reduced for a keyboard instrument. But he accepted the publisher's suggestion of the nickname, noting that ‘the word “Laudon” will contribute more to sales than any ten finales’ (‘Das wort Laudon wird zu Beförderung des Verkaufes mehr als zehen Finale beytragen’).Footnote ²⁸ Sieber, for his part, would have been aware of the commercial appeal of catchy nicknames that were already circulating for several of the ‘Paris’ Symphonies, including ‘L’ours' (‘The Bear’, No. 82) and ‘La poule’ (‘The Hen’, No. 83). The notion of a ‘National Symphony’ might in fact be viewed as a kind of latter-day counterpart to ‘La Reine de France’, the name by which the Symphony No. 85 had been circulating since the year of its premiere in 1786, supposedly because the second-movement Romance was a favourite of Marie Antoinette's.Footnote ²⁹ We do not know if Haydn was aware of this nickname at the time, but Sieber would certainly have recognized the potential for marketing a ‘National Symphony’ in the political climate of the late summer of 1789.

In the case of the unwritten ‘National Symphony’, however, there are at least two significant differences that distinguish Haydn's approbation from his earlier endorsement of ‘Laudon’. First, the idea for the nickname ‘Laudon’ was applied well after the fact, perhaps as much as a decade after Haydn had actually composed the work. Second, the appellation was in no way even remotely controversial. Field Marshal Laudon was a military hero, revered by Austrians for having defeated the Prussian army of Frederick the Great in a series of battles during the Seven Years' War. Laudon, moreover, had already been the object of dozens of poems and songs in the preceding decades: this symphony was merely one more in a long series of artistic works issued in his honour.Footnote ³⁰ So by 1783 neither Haydn nor Artaria would have been going out on a limb to associate one of their new publications with a military hero.

The same cannot be said of the designation ‘National Symphony’ in the late summer of 1789. Haydn, as noted, would have recognized the potential commercial appeal of this title to the French public – which is to say, the French nation – yet he was just as surely aware of its potentially controversial nature. Nothing aboutthe Revolution, good or bad, was perceived as inevitable by the end of August 1789. At the time, many saw the most recent events in France as a necessary step towards constitutional monarchy. Yet the direct assault on Europe's most powerful monarchy was without precedent and the resulting turmoil was seen to carry risks as well as potential. France was moving into uncharted waters, and the spectre of violence served as a reminder that progress, if and when it came, would not be without its costs. Accounts of the violence and bloodshed associated with these changes, as we have seen, were readily accessible to the Viennese public, including not only Haydn but also his patron Prince Nicolaus Esterházy, a staunch political supporter of Joseph II.

We should also keep in mind that in the summer of 1789 Haydn was still very much in the service of Prince Nicolaus. In spite of his international fame, and in spite of his commissions from Paris and elsewhere, the composer could not travel as he wished. As late as May 1790 he complained from Eszterháza to his confidante Marianne von Genzinger that he could not go to Vienna, even for a day, even when the Prince himself was in the capital. And a month later he bemoaned his situation with still greater intensity: ‘Once again it has happened to me that I am compelled to remain at home [in Eszterháza]. Your Grace can imagine what I thereby lose. It is indeed sad always to be a slave; yet Providence wills it’ (‘Nun trifft es mich abermahl, daß ich zu Hauß bleiben mus[s]. Was ich dabey verliehre, können sich Euer gnaden selbst einbilden. Es ist doch traurig, immer Sclav zu seyn: allein, die Vorsicht will es’).Footnote ³¹ The Prince died a few months later, freeing Haydn to sign a new contract for England, where he arrived on New Year's Day 1791. Nine months after his arrival there he wrote again to Marianne von Genzinger, but in a very different tone:

Given the pervasive nature of censorship throughout the Habsburg Empire and the charged atmosphere of the mid-1790s in particular, Haydn would not have dreamed of writing openly about his views on the political events of the day. His comments to Marianne von Genzinger are thus all the more extraordinary. Brief and oblique though they may be, they offer us a glimpse into his deeper feelings about his lifelong status as a servant and his latent resentment towards the intrinsically hierarchical structure of a society based primarily on heredity rather than merit.

Haydn's attitudes towards the French Revolution later in life are not necessarily those he held in 1789. He was no doubt horrified, along with many others, at the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793 and of Marie Antoinette in October of that same year. The London audiences that thrilled to Haydn's new works, moreover, included their share of French aristocrats who had fled the bloodshed of the Terror. By the time Haydn returned to Vienna for good in 1795 ‘national’ had begun to mean something rather different, with connotations more closely associated with what we today think of as nationalism.

Finally, what might the ‘National Symphony’ have been like had Haydn actually written it? Here we can only speculate. Perhaps it would have incorporated or made reference to some tune identifiably ‘French’, in much the same way that the opening of the slow movement of his Symphony No. 98, written for an English audience in 1792, makes a feint towards ‘God Save the King’ before settling into a melodic line of Haydn's own invention. Or perhaps the ‘National Symphony’ would have been somehow marked as ‘French’ in style, either in whole or in part. The idea of ‘national’ styles in music was certainly common enough in the eighteenth century, and Richard Will's inventory of relevant symphonies and symphonic movements from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries includes more than two dozen works.Footnote ³³ Carl Dittersdorf, for example, had written a Sinfonia nazionale nel gusto di cinque nazioni that dates from the mid-1760s – one of its movements imitates what Dittersdorf considered to be the ‘French’ style in music – and Leopold Kozeluch had written a Sinfonia francese in the mid-1780s. The title of Kozeluch's symphony in all likelihood derives from the rondeau slow movement in duple metre. Václav Pichl's Sinfonia alla francese in E flat major z6, dating from no later than 1773, includes a similar slow movement.

But, significantly, what Haydn proposed to his French publisher, or what his publisher proposed to him, was not a ‘French’ symphony, or a symphony in the ‘French style’, but a ‘national’ symphony, and the distinction is significant. The symphony was the instrumental genre best suited to expressing the emotions of a substantial body of people: it was performed by a large ensemble in a large space before a large audience.Footnote ³⁴ This was not intimate music but music on a broad scale, and it is certainly no coincidence that if Haydn were to have written a ‘national’ work of any kind, it would have been a symphony, and not a sonata or string quartet. The idea of a symphony as an expression of communal emotion at a specific moment in time would in any event become a reality only a year later with Paul Wranitzky's Symphony entitled ‘A Magyar Nemzet Öröme’ (‘Joy of the Hungarian Nation’), a work occasioned by Joseph II's decision in early 1790 to restore most of the traditional rights and privileges he had revoked from Hungary earlier in his reign. In a letter dated 28 January 1790 Joseph II agreed to summon the Hungarian diet (which he had previously refused to do), return the crown of Saint Stephen from Vienna to Buda and finally to attend a ceremonial coronation in Pressburg as King of Hungary. The first edition of Wranitzky's symphony, issued by André of Offenbach in early 1790, describes the programme of the work's three movements in some detail and in Hungarian rather than in the more conventional French, Italian or German:

When Joseph II died on 20 February 1790, André hastily revised the title page – following instructions, no doubt, from Wranitzky and his patron Count Janós Esterházy – to honour the coronation of Leopold II; the ‘Joy of the Hungarian People’ phrase nevertheless remains in the Hungarian (though not the Latin) version of the later, bilingual title page. The relationship between the music and its original programme may in any event have been superficial from the start. Ferenc Bónis suggests that Wranitzky applied the original movement titles to an existing three-movement work that happened to include Hungarian verbunkos (‘gypsy’) episodes in its rondo finale, a feature that can be found in the works of many other composers both before and after, including Haydn, Mozart and Dittersdorf.Footnote ³⁶

David Wyn Jones has nevertheless rightly pointed to Wrantizky's ‘Joy of the Hungarian Nation’ as a significant moment in the history of the symphony as a genre, the first work of its kind to convey a specifically political message, at least in the form of its presentation.Footnote ³⁷ In the wake of the French Revolution, the symphony was no longer merely a vehicle of entertainment, but a potential means of political propaganda. It seems safe to say that Haydn had mixed motivations for either proposing or agreeing to the title of ‘National Symphony’. It would be naive to suggest that his motivations were entirely idealistic: clearly, he would have realized that a topical title like this would improve sales of the work, especially in France. Yet it would be cynical to claim that the composer's motivations were wholly commercial and without personal risk: ‘national’ was not a value-neutral term at the time, and for this particular time and place – Paris in the late summer of 1789 – it carried unusually vivid connotations associated decidedly with change rather than with the status quo. In any event, Haydn's unwritten ‘National Symphony’ conveys at the very least the idea of a political symphony half a year before Wranitzky's ‘Joy of the Hungarian Nation’ and some fifteen years before Beethoven's ‘Eroica’, with its cancelled dedication to Napoleon. Many later composers would go on to make explicit associations between symphonies and specific nationalities, but the idea itself, it would seem, originated in response to the French Revolution.Footnote ³⁸