Symphony No. 103, in E-flat Major, “Drumroll”

• Haydn composed this symphony for the 1795 concert season in London.
• During this season, Haydn collaborated with the Opera Concerts, a series led by Giovanni Battista Viotti, who conducted a large 60-piece orchestra. The symphony premiered in this series on March 2, 1795. 
• Listen for: Haydn’s Oxford Music Online article senses a religious or supernatural evocation in this symphony, suggested by the first movement’s opening drumroll and the theme in the bass, which (the article says) “resembles the Dies irae.” 
• Listen for: Haydn uses a folk tune as a theme in the Andante of this symphony. 

Haydn’s 1795 London symphonies were “such as were never heard before, of any mortal’s production; of what Apollo & the Muses compose or perform we can only judge by such productions as these.”

Late 18^th-C. English composer and music historian Charles Burney¹

1. Georg Feder and James Webster, “Haydn, (Franz) Joseph,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed July 21, 2021, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000044593.