What the Ink Remembers

I found the leaf not in the music cabinet but in a box of household accounts — a single bifolio, foxed at the edges, the ink gone the colour of winter tea. It had been slipped between two receipts from 1803 and a butcher's bill. The shelf-mark was wrong; the catalogue entry, blank. I held in my hands an autograph leaf from Haydn's Op. 76, No. 4 — the Sunrise — and it did not match any published edition in print.

The Corrections, Layer by Layer

Multispectral imaging at the Vienna laboratory in March confirmed what the naked eye suspected: four distinct campaigns of revision, each in a slightly different ink. The earliest layer — a flowing, confident hand in the dark brown of fresh iron-gall — sets down the theme we recognise from the first edition. But above it, scratched out in a thinner and more acidic ink, Haydn has rewritten the viola entry three times. The second violin part fares worse: an entire four-bar passage is crossed through with a single diagonal stroke, and above it, in the margin, a replacement scrawled at speed.

To watch Haydn change his mind — not once but four times in eight bars — is to witness composition as ordinary, stubborn labour.