In his charming little cottage near Vienna Haydn was the centre of a
brilliant society. Princes and nobles were proud to do honour to him;
and painters, poets, scholars, and musicians made a delightful
coterie, which was not even disturbed by the political convulsions of
the time. The baleful star of Napoleon shot its disturbing influences
throughout Europe, and the roar of his cannon shook the established
order of things with the echoes of what was to come. Haydn was
passionately attached to his country and his emperor, and regarded
anxiously the rumblings and quakings of the period; but he did not
intermit his labour, or allow his consecration to his divine art to be
in the least shaken. Like Archimedes of old, he toiled serenely at his
appointed work, while the political order of things was crumbling
before the genius and energy of the Corsican adventurer.
In 1798 he completed his great oratorio of "The Creation," on which he
had spent three years of toil, and which embodied his brightest
genius. Haydn was usually a very rapid composer, but he seems to have
laboured at the "Creation" with a sort of reverential humility, which
never permitted him to think his work worthy or complete. It soon went
the round of Germany, and passed to England and France, everywhere
awakening enthusiasm by its great symmetry and beauty. Without the
sublimity of Handel's "Messiah," it is marked by a richness of melody,
a serene elevation, a matchless variety in treatment, which make it
the most characteristic of Haydn's works. Napoleon, the first consul,
was hastening to the opera-house to hear this, 24th January 1801, when
he was stopped by an attempt at assassination.
Two years after "The Creation" appeared "The Seasons," founded on
Thomson's poem, also a great work, and one of his last; for the grand
old man was beginning to think of rest, and he only composed two or
three quartets after this. He was now seventy years old, and went but
little from his own home. His chief pleasure was to sit in his shady
garden, and see his friends, who loved to solace the musical patriarch
with cheerful talk and music. Haydn often fell into deep melancholy,
and he tells us that God revived him; for no more sweet, devout nature
ever lived. His art was ever a religion. A touching incident of his
old age occurred at a grand performance of "The Creation" in 1808.
Haydn was present, but he was so old and feeble that he had to be
wheeled in a chair into the theatre, where a princess of the house of
Esterhazy took her seat by his side. This was the last time that Haydn
appeared in public, and a very impressive sight it must have been to
see the aged father of music listening to "The Creation" of his
younger days, but too old to take any active share in the performance.
The presence of the old man roused intense enthusiasm among the
audience, which could no longer be suppressed as the chorus and
orchestra burst in full power upon the superb passage, "And there was
light."
Amid the tumult of the enraptured audience the old composer was seen
striving to raise himself. Once on his feet, he mustered up all his
strength, and, in reply to the applause of the audience, he cried out
as loud as he was able--"No, no! not from me, but," pointing to
heaven, "from thence--from heaven above--comes all!" saying which, he
fell back in his chair, faint and exhausted, and had to be carried out
of the room.
One year after this Vienna was bombarded by the French, and a shot
fell in Haydn's garden. He requested to be led to his piano, and
played the "Hymn to the Emperor" three times over with passionate
eloquence and pathos. This was his last performance. He died five days
afterwards, aged seventy-seven, and lies buried in the cemetery of
Gumpfenzdorf, in his own beloved Vienna.