Among the many Hungarian refugees who fled the country in the wake of the Soviet invasion in 1956 were eighty young musicians from Budapest who decided to form an orchestra together. This new ensemble, the Philharmonia Hungarica, ultimately found a home in the West German town of Marl, where it had a distinguished career as a touring and recording group until eventually disbanding in 2001. Amidst the Cold War tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, the propagandistic potential of this ensemble did not go unnoticed: the Philharmonia was presented as a bastion of Eastern European cultural excellence on the western side of the Iron Curtain, a showcase for Hungarian exiles who had fled the Soviet tyranny to live in the democratic West. Thus the orchestra’s activities came to be subsidized heavily by Western government agencies who wished to wage a “war of ideas” against communism. Donors to the Philharmonia Hungarica included the West German government and a consortium known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which funneled American money into European anti-communist causes, including funds from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. In the waning years of the Cold War, former intelligence agents revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had been bankrolled and largely organized by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is slightly disquieting to think that the Philharmonia Hungarica’s most famous achievement—its pathbreaking complete cycle of Haydn symphonies recorded under the direction of Antal Doráti—would not have happened without the support of the C.I.A.

The Doráti Haydn has been rightly hailed as one of the greatest achievements in the history of recorded classical music. These recordings introduced listeners to an enormous repertory of orchestral music that had been largely unperformed and unknown except to specialists, achieving a consistently high level of performance throughout more than thirty hours of orchestral playing. The cycle stands in retrospect as one of the most impressive accomplishments of the Decca record label, alongside landmarks such as the complete Ring Cycle conducted by Georg Solti and Britten’s premiere recording of his own War Requiem. But the Cold War political background of the recording project illustrates how fragile this undertaking was, and how easily it might not have happened. It is unlikely that any established orchestra with commitments to a conventional season schedule would have had the time to take on a project like the complete Haydn symphonies, a project that according to Doráti’s calculations required three and a half years and two hundred eighty-one recording sessions, for a total of eight hundred forty-three hours.

Conditions in the 1960s were ripe for a revival of interest in Haydn’s symphonies. The indefatigable musicologist H. C. Robbins Landon had been working for decades to promote Haydn’s music and had just published a new edition of the complete symphonies; he would contribute booklet notes to the Doráti recordings. The Decca engineers had achieved arguably their highest standard of recording quality for their classical music division and committed to send the same staff members—producer James Mallinson and recording engineer Colin Moorfoot—to supervise the entirety of the multi-year project, ensuring a consistent sound across every disc of the recording. Doráti himself was a seasoned recording artist who had already made dozens of acclaimed orchestral recordings and was thoroughly at home in the recording studio. But Doráti was also recording at a time when interest in early music was at its peak. Post-war revivals of previously unknown music by composers such as Monteverdi and Vivaldi were creating an increasingly lucrative market for recordings of unfamiliar Baroque and early classical works, and a new generation of musicians was being trained in the idioms and performance styles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thanks to a generation of pioneering Baroque performers and instrument makers, Doráti could rely on the availability of a harpsichord and a player capable of reading a continuo part, a skill required for Haydn’s early symphonies but rarely taught to earlier generations of musicians.

Doráti’s Haydn project began at just the right moment, with an orchestra ideally positioned to take on an ambitious project, a public primed to explore lesser-known early repertoire, and a recording company willing to dedicate major resources to the project (with a little help from the C.I.A.). All of these overlapping synchronicities help to explain why Doráti succeeded where so many other conductors failed. In the 1980s and 1990s, one conductor after another tried to record a new cycle of Haydn symphonies to compete with Doráti’s, and each of them was forced to stop after the record companies pulled the plug on the project: Bruno Weil with Tafelmusik, Roy Goodman with the Hanover Band, Christopher Hogwood with the Academy of Ancient Music, Derek Solomons with L’Estro Armonico. In the early years of the twenty-first century, a few conductors finally completed their own cycles of Haydn symphonies: Ádám Fischer with the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies with the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, and most recently Thomas Fey and Johannes Klumpp with the Heidelberger Sinfoniker. Each cycle has different advantages and disadvantages from the listener’s perspective, but the circumstances of their release show that each conductor had to struggle hard to finish his project: the Fischer and Fey/Klumpp cycles were released only after painfully long gestation periods (sixteen and twenty-six years, respectively), and Davies’s cycle is a compilation of live concert recordings, a cost-saving measure to save on studio time. A fifth complete cycle is currently in progress under the direction of Giovanni Antonini, titled Haydn 2032 and planned to be completed in time for the three-hundredth anniversary of Haydn’s birth.

After numerous delays, Decca has now released its newly remastered version of the Doráti Haydn, including the complete symphonies, a disc of twenty-four minuets, and the oratorios Il ritorno di Tobia, The Creation, and The Seasons, available on various streaming platforms or in physical form as a box set of forty-one discs. Two generations after their original release, these recordings have made their mark on the orchestral literature; even the lesser-known early- and middle-period Haydn symphonies in Doráti’s cycle are now available in multiple competing recordings. But only a small number of specialists can claim any familiarity with the entire cycle of Haydn symphonies; internalizing one hundred six eighteenth-century symphonies is the work of a lifetime. The programs of present-day orchestras show, for the most part, that the most frequently performed Haydn works are the late symphonies with memorable nicknames (the Surprise, the London, the Drumroll): in other words, the same ones that held the most prominent place in the repertoire in the early twentieth century. For most people, then, listening through the Doráti Haydn will mean hearing a repertoire of mostly unfamiliar music, although with frequent moments of recognition of themes and gestures that would be taken up by later composers: the instrumental imitation of vocal recitative in Symphony No. 7 Le midi, anticipating the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth, or Symphony No. 13, whose finale uses the same theme as the finale of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. On this traversal, I was particularly struck by Symphony No. 61, with its energetic first movement, beautiful Adagio, and rollicking hunt-style finale worthy of Looney Tunes.

Like Schubert’s songs and Bach’s cantatas, Haydn’s symphonies seem likely to remain an underexplored canonical repertory, one whose importance is acknowledged by musicians but is too large for most people to explore in its entirety. Doráti’s recording project, despite the many doors it opened, did not change that; the early- and middle-period Haydn symphonies will never have the same presence in the orchestral repertoire as Beethoven’s symphonies. Doráti’s cycle did, however, arguably represent a pivotal moment in the tradition of performing Haydn’s music. The release of Haydn’s entire output of symphonies revealed to mainstream listeners for the first time the stylistic breadth of Haydn’s output over approximately a forty-year period of stylistic change (from roughly 1756 to 1795). Despite the consistency of Haydn’s personal voice, the stylistic affinities of this music seemed to pull in two different directions, with the early symphonies assimilating readily to the new marketing category of “early music” (contrapuntally based works for a small ensemble with harpsichord continuo) and the later symphonies resembling the familiar works of Mozart and Beethoven written at roughly the same time. The result was that in the years following the release of the Doráti recordings, the work of Haydn began increasingly to come apart, with the newly discovered early- and middle-period works claimed by period-instrument ensembles and the familiar late symphonies retained by modern symphony orchestras. In the contemporary concert hall, performances of Haydn by symphony orchestras playing modern instruments usually feature the late symphonies (from No. 82 onward), and the earlier symphonies are played almost exclusively by specialist early-music groups.

The increasing relegation of “early music” to separate period-instrument ensembles is now an established feature of our musical landscape. It is now relatively rare for a symphony orchestra using modern instruments to play Bach or any other Baroque composer, aside from the obligatory performances of Messiah or The Four Seasons. For better or worse, the modern orchestra has become an ensemble dedicated to the music of the long nineteenth century, with its core repertoire written, with very few exceptions, between about the 1780s and the 1930s. This strange bifurcation of the repertoire has had a particularly deleterious effect on Haydn, whose music stretches across the divide that separates “early music” from the repertoire of the modern orchestra; rather than being claimed by one camp or another, Haydn’s musical output is torn in half. Perhaps the most important justification for recording a cycle of all Haydn’s symphonies is that the project forces the performers to find an underlying unity behind all the stylistic dissimilarities in Haydn’s career, a biographical thread that links the ambitious young composer to the elderly master he would become.

Period-instrument ensembles have often had the most critical success in renditions of Haydn’s middle-period symphonies—the so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies, whose explorations of expressive extremes were thought to be inspired by the proto-Romantic angst of poets in the generation of Goethe and Schiller. In impassioned minor-key movements such as the two fast movements of Symphony No. 49 (La Passione), relentless speed and precision is of the essence; a smaller, leaner ensemble can create a much stronger sense of propulsive, accented rhythmic drive than a larger orchestra, and it can be disappointing to go back to a modern-orchestra rendition of these movements after hearing the sheer excitement of a period-instrument ensemble like Tafelmusik or the English Concert. More importantly, however, a well-trained Baroque player is trained to play rhetorically: to emphasize downbeats, to make large expressive gestures, to aim for striking contrasts of dynamics. This approach is obviously suited to the heightened emotionalism of Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period, and the effect it creates in this repertoire can be electrifying.

The difficulty faced by groups that specialize in the middle-period symphonies is that the Sturm und Drang of the early 1770s is only one part of the composer’s work. An approach that only stresses expressive extremes—fast tempos, accented downbeats, dramatic shifts in dynamics—can wear thin quickly, and it works against the quest for balance and synthesis in Haydn’s later symphonies. The task is not merely one of balancing rhythmic drive with lyricism; the ideal is to find a coherent aesthetic that still responds to the unique expressive features of each individual symphony. It is unfortunate that many of the period-instrument ensembles that recorded Haydn in the 1990s stopped their projects before reaching the late London symphonies, in which the minor-key emotional intensity of the middle period is integrated into a fundamentally sunny and optimistic character.

Today’s period-instrument performances are often praised (or criticized) for their fast tempos, and so one might expect an older recorded cycle like Doráti’s to be considerably slower than present-day performances. Doráti’s performances, however, are on the fast side by the standards of the time; in the dramatic middle-period symphonies, his tempos in fast movements are often almost identical even to those of historically informed conductors such as Trevor Pinnock. Where Doráti falls short, in perhaps the greatest expressive weakness of the cycle, is in the minuets, where his tempos often turn uncharacteristically slow and wooden. The minuet—a courtly triple-meter dance included by convention in almost all eighteenth-century symphonies—presents particular expressive difficulties to the listener today; here the convention-driven musical language of the eighteenth century is the most alien to modern sensibilities. Every minuet has the same form and general character as every other minuet, and so the performer needs to work hard to convey the musical interest behind the standardized structure. According to his producer, Doráti disliked conducting minuets and would save time in sessions by recording the minuets of several symphonies successively at a stretch. This approach is evident in the performance of certain movements: the minuet of Symphony No. 53 (L’Imperiale), for example. This movement not only drags in tempo but often seems to lack direction, as though the performers were not sure exactly where the music is going. Incredible as it may seem, during these recording sessions the players of the Philharmonia Hungarica were playing many of Haydn’s symphonies for the first time; there was no time to test the pieces in concert first. It is easy to forget the challenges of the recording process when listening to a result of such consistent fine quality, but in the occasional dragging movements one suddenly envisions a room full of overworked orchestral musicians who have temporarily lost the ability to distinguish one minuet from another.

Otherwise, though, what distinguishes Doráti’s cycle from modern period-instrument performances is not tempo but style and texture. A good example is the opening of the slow movement of Symphony No. 87, where we hear a chorale in the string section accompanied by two horns, joined in the second repetition by a solo flute. Comparing Doráti’s recording to a performance on historic instruments by Giovanni Antonini is a study of contrasts in tone quality. A modern orchestral flute is a piece of technology perfected by the Industrial Revolution, engineered for uniformity of tone and ease of speech; a historic wooden flute has a tone that is gentler but also more varied and nuanced, tending to create an organic give and take between each note that players are trained to accentuate. The same is true of the other instruments, especially the strings, which differ in numerous ways from a modern string section: the rich tone quality of the gut strings; the non-vibrato style of playing; and the Baroque bows, which create a more pointed, incisive style of attack. The overall result creates a sound that is strikingly different even when it is difficult to pinpoint any radical difference in tempo or interpretation. Doráti’s orchestra produces a sound that is polished and uniform; period-instrument groups come across as more heterogeneous ensembles, creating a distinctive sound from the combination of tone colors that are sharply individualized.

This is why the debate about modern and historic instruments has often been so acrimonious. What is at stake is not merely a matter of historical authenticity but the visceral materiality of musical sound. In the strange world of classical music criticism, one frequently encounters reviewers for whom the difference between period- and modern-instrument performance is not merely an aesthetic choice but a moral one, whose preferences are so strongly etched that the wrong kind of performance is actually offensive. Early critics of the historic performance music often wrote as though the use of period instruments were an intentional affront to the aesthetic sensibilities of listeners, offered as a deliberate act of disrespect to an audience that must naturally desire the full, plush sound of a modern orchestra. Thomas Beecham’s famous description of the sound of the harpsichord (“like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof”) was the most memorable line among many critical wisecracks about scratchy Baroque strings and out-of-tune wind instruments. What these critics failed to realize, and what is perhaps easier to see now that performing standards on historic instruments have reached a higher level, is that the distinctive sound of early instruments is precisely what turns listeners into early-music devotees. To a devoted advocate of historically informed performances, a modern-style performance of Haydn can sound colorless and homogenized, lacking the necessary variety of tone to bring the music to life.

As an organist who has spent much of his career studying early music on Baroque-inspired instruments, my approach to Haydn’s music today would probably be closer to Antonini’s than to Doráti’s. But I think that we would actually benefit from cultivating a greater variety of performance styles than we have today, and a wider performing repertoire. Modern instrumentalists should be playing early music; early-music ensembles should continue expanding into the historic performance of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music and should be creating new works for historic instruments. This should include the freedom to perform older musical works in styles that are frankly anachronistic, such as the Romantic orchestral arrangements of Bach that proliferated in the early years of the twentieth century. Many performers suffer from a kind of interpretive paralysis when they play early music: players who excel in Romantic music suddenly turn inhibited and afraid that they will do something wrong, producing drab performances that are neither genuinely historic nor convincingly modern. They would be better served by prioritizing stylistic coherence over historical verisimilitude.

To promote this unfettered stylistic eclecticism today could only benefit an unfettered, eclectic composer like Haydn, whose music has suffered from falling into the cracks between the realm of “early music” and the standard orchestral literature. Part of the historic significance of Doráti’s Haydn cycle at this moment, more than fifty years after it was first recorded, is that it comes from a time when Haydn was still performed with relative unselfconsciousness. For Doráti and his players, Haydn’s music was an older and relatively unexplored repertoire, but one that belonged to an Austro-Hungarian performance tradition which they thought of as their own possession. In North America in 2026, performers cannot recover that same sense of immediacy; at best, they can strive for a second naïveté, internalizing one musical language from among the many competing styles of performance. But on these recordings, we hear consistently musical and compelling renditions of Haydn’s symphonies, captured at a moment in history when all signs were most auspicious for this project. Despite the many competing recordings that have been released since then, Doráti’s rendition still remains the standard traversal of Haydn’s one hundred six symphonies. There is no better place to start exploring this endlessly rewarding repertoire.