HAYDN
In the early eighteenth century there lived in a small village called
Rohrau, situated near the Leitha River, which forms the boundary
between Lower Austria and Hungary, a certain wheelwright and parish
sexton, named Matthias Haydn, and his wife. They were simple peasant
people, a little more educated than was usual with their class.
Matthias Haydn, besides a smattering of general information, had a
talent for harp-playing, though he could not read music. Frau Haydn’s
accomplishments ran in the direction of domestic management and
religion; and as she eventually found herself the mother of twelve
children, she may be supposed to have stood in need of both. Franz
Joseph Haydn, born either on March 31 or April 1, 1732, was the second
of these children. He was destined to create an epoch in the art of
music.
How, in spite of his rather commonplace parentage and his heavy
burden of poverty, he managed to develop so remarkable an artistic
genius, has been a problem most puzzling to students; but much light
has been thrown upon the whole matter by the recent investigations
of a Croatian scholar, Dr. František Š. Kuhač, made accessible to
readers of English by Mr. W. H. Hadow’s “A Croatian Composer.” These
researches have shown that the whole region about Rohrau was inhabited
by a largely Croatian or South Slavonic population; that Haydn himself
was probably of Croatian heredity; and that at the very least his
youth was spent among one of the most naturally musical of all races.
“One in every three of the Croats,” says Dr. Kuhač, “either sings,
plays, or composes.” “The men sing at their plows,” says Mr. Hadow,
“the girls sing as they fill their water-pots at the fountain; by
every village inn you may hear the jingle of the tambura, and watch
the dancers footing it on the green.” Here, then, was an environment
precisely suited to develop the qualities we shall observe in the
mature Haydn; and it helps to an understanding of almost every phase
of his genius if we remember that as a boy he was surrounded, not by
stolid German peasants, amiable but inexpressive, nor by a cultivated
but unspontaneous aristocracy, but by a race of natural musicians, in
whom dance and song were native and necessary modes of expression.
His formal musical education was less propitious. At the age of six
he began the study of the violin, the harpsichord, and singing,
under one Frankh, a distant relative, in the town of Hamburg; but
was so neglected and abused that in later years he was wont to say:
“From Frankh I got more cuffs than gingerbread.” He was probably
glad enough when, two years later, he was able to go to Vienna as
a choirboy in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Here he stayed ten years,
half-starved, insufficiently clothed, and carelessly taught. Only his
own indomitable energy enabled him to learn anything at all. He worked
while the other choir-boys were at play; he practiced indefatigably on
his little clavier, which was so small and light that he could take
it under his arm to a quiet place; he covered reams of music paper
with his compositions, thinking that “it must be all right if the
paper was nice and full;” he expended six of his father’s hard-earned
florins on ponderous text books of counterpoint and thoroughbass,
and spent wakeful nights poring over them. Meanwhile his relations
with the musical director in authority became more and more strained,
until finally, in November, 1749, there was open rupture, and Haydn,
seventeen years old, friendless, and without money, was turned into the
street.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the hardships he now had to endure.
By playing his violin at balls and weddings, by making arrangements of
the compositions of amateurs for a pittance, by teaching--in a word, by
any drudgery that anyone would pay for, he managed to keep himself from
starving. And through it all, in his dimly-lighted, unheated attic,
with roof so out of repair that snow and rain fell on the bed, and the
water, of a winter morning, froze in the pitcher, he continued, as best
he could, his own studies in composition. Years afterward he wrote of
this period of his life, with his usual quaint piety: “I was forced
for eight whole years to gain a scanty livelihood by giving lessons;
many a genius is ruined by this miserable mode of earning daily bread,
as it leaves no time for study. I could never have accomplished even
what I did if, in my zeal for composition, I had not pursued my studies
through the night.... I offer up to Almighty God all eulogiums, for to
Him alone do I owe them. My sole wish is neither to offend against my
neighbor nor my gracious Prince, but above all our merciful God.”
Although Haydn had at this time to endure humiliations and slights as
well as actual want, his situation was gradually ameliorated by the
patronage of some wealthy music-lovers with whom his growing reputation
as a composer brought him acquainted. His first fixed post was that of
music-director to a Bohemian nobleman, Count Morzin, for whose band he
wrote, in 1759, his first symphony. In the next year, however, Count
Morzin married and discontinued his musical establishment, and Haydn
was left for a short time without definite work, until in 1761 he was
installed in the post he held uninterruptedly for thirty years. His own
marriage, meanwhile, took place in 1760.
How Haydn, who was quite as prudent as he was amiable, could have been
so rash as to marry at just this moment, it is difficult to explain;
especially as he married, not the woman he had fallen in love with,
but her elder sister. The whole affair is almost farcically perverse.
A young composer of twenty-eight, just pulling himself up at length
on the shelving bank of patronage, out of the slough of miscellaneous
drudgery in which he has been weltering for years, offers to encumber
himself at the critical moment with the daughter of one Keller, a
barber. The lady, for unknown reasons, among which may or may not have
been a dread of the quagmire, betakes herself to a nunnery. Whereupon
the barber persuades the composer to marry the older daughter, Anna
Maria. The outcome of this marriage, which took place in November,
1760, proved, as might have been expected, unfortunate. The wife began
almost immediately to treat her husband with indifference and petty
malignity, which rapidly increased. She seemed not to care whether he
composed or cobbled, so long as he supplied her with money; she used
his manuscripts for curling-papers; when he was in London in 1791
she wrote him appeals for money wherewith to buy “a widow’s home.”
Altogether the uncongeniality was intolerable, and the pair lived
together but a few years, although Frau Haydn did not die until 1800.
The thirty years from 1761 to 1791, a period of the utmost importance
in the development of Haydn’s genius, was of the greatest monotony so
far as events are concerned. His post was that of musical director or
Kapellmeister (at first Vice-Kapellmeister), to the great, princely
family of Esterhazy, one of the most wealthy and influential of the
noble families of Hungary. He served them both at Eisenstadt, at the
foot of the Leitha mountains, in Hungary, where Prince Paul Anton
Esterhazy was the reigning prince in 1761, and at Esterhaz, the
magnificent palace, with groves, grottoes, hot-houses, deer-parks,
and flower gardens, which Prince Nicholas erected in 1766. Of the
musician’s duties and social status in this princely house, an idea may
be gathered from the following sentences from the contract entered into
at the beginning of his term of service as Vice-Kapellmeister:
“The said Joseph Hayden shall be considered and treated as a member of
the household. Therefore his Serene Highness is graciously pleased to
place confidence in his conducting himself as becomes an honourable
official of a princely house. He must be temperate, not showing
himself overbearing towards his musicians, but mild and lenient,
straightforward and composed. It is especially to be observed that when
the orchestra shall be summoned to perform before company, the said
Joseph Hayden shall take care that he and all members of his orchestra
do follow the instructions given, and appear in white stockings, white
linen, powdered, and either with a pig-tail or a tie-wig.
“Seeing that the other musicians are referred for directions to the
said Vice-Kapellmeister, therefore he should take the more care
to conduct himself in an exemplary manner, abstaining from undue
familiarity, and from vulgarity in eating, drinking and conversation,
not dispensing with the respect due to him, but acting uprightly and
influencing his subordinates to preserve such harmony as is becoming in
them, remembering how displeasing the consequences of any discord or
dispute would be to his Serene Highness.
“The said Vice-Kapellmeister shall be under an obligation to compose
such music as his Serene Highness may command, and to retain it for the
absolute use of his Highness, and not to compose anything for any other
person without the knowledge and permission of his Highness.
“The said Vice-Kapellmeister shall take careful charge of all music and
musical instruments, and shall be responsible for any injury that may
occur to them from carelessness or neglect.”
The demands made upon “the said Joseph Hayden” were obviously severe;
but he had in return many advantages. He was secure from want, a great
consideration to one who had starved in garrets and sung in the streets
and the cafés for his supper. He came in contact with many interesting
people, both among the social and the professional guests of Esterhaz.
Above all, he had a good orchestra at his command, and he was not only
privileged, but obliged, to compose for it incessantly. Thus he was
incited to constant study and experiment; so that before many years
had elapsed he had become a thorough master of his medium, with the
requisite technical skill to express any idea that his genius might
suggest. It was largely during these years that he poured out his
endless series of masterpieces of chamber and orchestral music.
One result of all the work thus accomplished was that when, late in
1790, Prince Anton Esterhazy dismissed his entire corps of musicians,
Haydn’s reputation was so widespread that he was immediately solicited
by one Salomon, a violinist and conductor, to make a trip to London.
Hard as it must have been for him, at his age of nearly sixty, to
exchange his studious habits for the fatigues and excitement of travel,
the opportunity was too good to be lost; and late in 1790 he set out
with Salomon, reaching London early in the next year.
In reading of this visit to England, as well as of the second one
which Haydn made three years later, one hardly knows whether to be
more impressed by the fame and prosperity which came to him from all
sides, or by the homely simplicity with which he received them. This
quiet, precise, pious old kapellmeister was the object of the most
flattering attentions from everyone in London; he was half worshipped
by the ladies, he was fêted by noble families, he was the guest of the
Prince of Wales. His works were awaited with impatience and received
with enthusiasm; he was honored with the Degree of Doctor of Music by
Oxford University; his pockets were filled with enough English gold
to buy him German soup for the rest of his life. Yet he was almost
as much overwhelmed as delighted with all this unwonted excitement.
With a characteristic mixture of homeliness and piety he wrote to his
friend Frau von Genzinger: “Oh! how often do I long to be beside you at
the piano, even for a quarter of an hour, and then to have some good
German soup. But we cannot have everything in this world. May God only
vouchsafe to grant me the health that I have hitherto enjoyed, and may
I preserve it by good conduct and out of gratitude to the Almighty!”
His English note-book reveals the same childlike attitude, mingled with
an interest in details and statistics curiously characteristic of his
matter-of-fact mind. Here are a few typical entries:
“The national debt of England is estimated to be over two hundred
millions. Once it was calculated that if it were desired to pay the
debt in silver, the wagons that would bring it, close together, would
reach from London to York (two hundred miles), each wagon carrying
£6,000.”
“The city of London consumes annually 800,000 cartloads of coal. Each
cart holds thirteen bags, each bag two Metzen. Most of the coal comes
from Newcastle. Often 200 vessels laden with coal arrive at the same
time. A cartload costs 2-1/2 pounds.”
“Beginning of May, 1792, Lord Barrymore gave a ball that cost 5,000
guineas. He paid 1,000 guineas for 1,000 peaches; 2,000 baskets of
gooseberries cost 5 shillings apiece.”
“On the 14th of December I dined at the house of Mr. Shaw. While I
was bowing all round I suddenly perceived that the lady of the house,
besides her daughters and the other ladies, wore on their head-dresses
a pearl-colored band, of three fingers breadth, embroidered in gold
with the name of Haydn, and Mr. Shaw wore the name on the two ends of
his collar in the finest steel beads. N. B.--Mr. Shaw wanted me to give
him a souvenir, and I gave him a tobacco-box which I had just bought
for a guinea. He gave me his in exchange.”
The last sentence is particularly delicious for its revelation of
Haydn’s usual canniness. Not even his enjoyment of fame could make him
forget that the tobacco-box given away had cost him a guinea; but he
is solaced by the thought that he had got another in return. One is
reminded of the same trait in reading his comment on the high prices of
race-horses:
“These horses are very dear. Prince Wallis a few years ago paid 8
thousand pounds for one, and sold it again for 6 thousand pounds. But
at the first race he won with it 50,000 pounds.”
The entire diary exhibits a similar thriftiness, shrewdness, and
practicality; by impressing the reader with the curiously prosaic and
matter-of-fact quality of Haydn’s mind, it throws as much light on the
essential character of his music as on that of his personality. Fancy
Beethoven, or any other speculative, imaginative mind, going to see Dr.
Herschel’s great telescope, looking through it at the stars, and then
carefully recording in his journal: “It is forty feet long and five
feet in diameter”!
One of the interesting revelations made by Haydn’s note-book is that
of his sentimental attachment to a certain Mistress Shroeter. It is
a charming and in a way a pathetic story; the beginning formal, the
continuation touchingly human in spite of the old-fashioned phrases
in which it reaches us, and the end mysterious. Mistress Shroeter, a
widow, relict of a German musician, begins it in the following note,
copied out carefully, together with all the subsequent ones, by Haydn:
“Mrs. Shroeter presents her compliments to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
she is just returned to town and will be very happy to see him whenever
it is convenient to him to give her a lesson. James St., Buckingham
Gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.”
The lessons thus begun continued all through the period of the
composer’s first London visit, and the correspondence soon begins to
reveal a growing attachment between the lonely, unhappily married
Haydn and, in his own simple words, “the English widow in London who
loved me.” The letters, quaint, formal, tender, are couched in the
vocabulary of “Evelina” and “Clarissa Harlowe;” their “fair author,”
as one feels impelled to call her, might have been, with her funny
little abbreviations, her odd admixture of grandiloquence and impulsive
feeling, and her constant underscoring of unimportant words, Clarissa
herself. A note of April 12, 1792, will perhaps sufficiently show her
way of writing:
“M. D. [My dear.] I am so _truly anxious_ about _you_. I must write to
beg to know _how you do_? I was very sorry I _had_ not the pleasure
of Seeing you this Evening, my thoughts have been _constantly_ with
you and indeed my D. L. [dear love], no words can express half the
tenderness and _affection I feel for you_. I thought you seemed out of
spirits this morning. I wish I could always remove every trouble from
your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the most perfect sympathy in
_all your sensations_ and my regard for you is _Stronger every day_.
My best wishes attend you and I am ever my D. H. [dear Haydn] most
sincerely your Faithful, etc.”
Thus tenderly and innocently the friendship progresses, with
constant protestations of regard, with continual solicitude to know
“_how you do_” and “whether you have _Slept well_,” with little
discreet panegyrics over “your sweet compositions and your excellent
performance,” and with many fears “lest you fatigue yourself with such
close application”; until, with Haydn’s departure for home, it suddenly
and abruptly closes, never to be resumed. Did these two meet again when
Haydn returned to London in 1794? Did the letters recommence? We do
not know. The story ends with a letter of Mistress Shroeter’s, written
just before Haydn’s departure in 1792, beginning with the hope that
he has “Slept well,” and ending with a protestation of “inviolable
attachment.”
After his second trip to London was over, Haydn returned to Austria,
dividing his time between Vienna and Esterhaz, where he was again made
music-director. Getting now to be an old man, he lived quietly, making
few public appearances. He composed at this time his famous Austrian
National Hymn, as well as his two oratorios, “The Creation” and “The
Seasons,” produced respectively in 1798 and in 1801. In 1803 he made
his final appearance as a conductor, and in 1808 he appeared in public
for the last time. The occasion was a performance of “The Creation.”
“All the great artists of Vienna were present,” says Mr. Hadden, “among
them Beethoven and Hummel. Prince Esterhazy had sent his carriage to
bring the veteran to the hall, and as he was being conveyed in an
arm-chair to a place among the princes and nobles, the whole audience
rose to their feet in testimony of their regard. It was a cold night,
and ladies sitting near swathed him in their costly wraps and lace
shawls. The concert began, and the audience was hushed to silence. When
that magnificent passage was reached, ‘And there was light,’ they burst
into loud applause, and Haydn, overcome with excitement, exclaimed:
‘Not I, but a Power from above created that.’ The performance went on,
but it proved too much for the old man, and friends arranged to take
him home at the end of the first part. As he was being carried out,
some of the highest in the land crowded round to take what was felt to
be a last farewell; and Beethoven bent down and fervently kissed his
hand and forehead. Having reached the door, Haydn asked his bearers to
pause and turn him towards the orchestra. Then, lifting his hand, as if
in the act of blessing, he was borne out into the night.”
Near the end of May, 1809, Haydn began to fail rapidly. On the
twenty-sixth, gathering his household and having himself carried to
the piano, he played over three times his “Emperor’s Hymn,” with
great emotion. Five days later he died. The curious admixture of
kindliness and practical good sense which give to Haydn’s character
such an individual charm appear even in his will, a long and detailed
document very precisely drawn up. He bequeaths “To poor blind Adam in
Eisenstadt, 24 florins”; “To my gracious Prince, my gold Parisian medal
and the letter that accompanied it, with a humble request to grant them
a place in the museum at Forchtenstein”; “To Fräulein Bucholz, 100
florins. Inasmuch as in my youth her grandfather lent me 150 florins
when I greatly needed them, which, however, I repaid fifty years ago.”
After many other bequests he concludes; “I commend my soul to my
all-merciful Creator; my body I wish to be interred, according to the
Roman Catholic forms, in consecrated ground.”
In personal appearance Haydn was an odd mixture of the ordinary and the
unusual, of commonplaceness and distinction. The complexion, marked
with small-pox, was so dark that he was sometimes called “The Moor”;
the nose was strong but heavy; the lower lip thick and projecting; the
jowl square and massive. Yet his dark gray eyes were said to “beam with
benevolence,” and Lavater, the great physiognomist, perceived in his
eyes and nose “something out of the common,” while dismissing the mouth
and chin as Philistine. Of himself Haydn said: “Anyone can see by the
look of me that I am a good-matured sort of fellow”; yet he confessed
that the ladies, who generally found him interesting, were “at any rate
not tempted by my beauty.”
The explanation of these apparent contradictions is to be found in the
peculiar make-up of that individuality of which the external appearance
was an index. That mixture of heavy jowl and penetrative eyes bespoke
the combination of a certain rudeness, primitiveness, commonplaceness
of emotional nature, with rare intellectual vivacity and acumen. We
have already remarked the prosaic attitude of Haydn towards men and
things, as well as the purely intellectual alertness with which he
observed them. His vision of the world was more that of an accountant
or statistician than that of a poet. He saw simply and clearly; for
him objects stood in the hard light of reason, not surrounded by any
haze of reverie or atmosphere of emotion. His mental efficiency is
especially striking when we consider the natural disadvantages under
which it labored. Haydn was distinctly an uneducated man. The son of
a wheelwright, in a petty Austrian village, he had little schooling,
little early contact with men and women, little commerce with all the
indefinable influences that make for cultivation of the rarer powers
of intellect and spirit. He knew Italian and a little French, but
never had any English until he went to London at nearly sixty. He read
little, and did not care to discuss politics, science, or any art but
music. He spoke always in the strong dialect of his native place. Yet
by force of sheer intelligence and ability he established the art of
music on a new basis. Those penetrating gray eyes saw much that was
hidden from men far more happily born, far more delicately nurtured.
On the other hand, the impressive peculiarity of his emotional nature
is its normality. Emotionally he was typical rather than personal,
centred in the common interests and instincts rather than eccentric to
them, conservative and conventional rather than radical and individual.
This is doubtless the meaning of that somewhat stolid jaw, that firm
and vigorous, but rather insensitive mouth, that sane but unimaginative
configuration of the whole lower face, the expressive seat of the
will and the feelings. Beethoven is interesting largely for his
departure from the average human norm, his highly developed selfhood,
his inexorable individuality; Haydn, on the contrary, compels our
study just because he is so like other men, so amply representative of
them within their own limitations. The traits that stand out in him
are traits “in widest commonalty spread”; a brisk and busy vivacity,
finding itself much at home in this world, with plenty to do and to
inquire into; connected with that, a half-childlike shrewdness in
affairs, a canny ability to take care of himself, practical talent,
worldly skill; on a higher plane, a sunny kindliness and good cheer
that make him one of the most genial of men, a kind of simple human
warmth and happiness and joy; finally, on the highest plane of all,
though but a projection of the human cheer, an ardent piety, a
wholehearted faith in God, an earnest and yet quite simple religious
devotion. These are traits not exclusively Haydnish, so to speak, as
mystical devotion and resolute idealism are Beethovenish, but common to
all humanity.
Now, these two fundamental qualities of Haydn’s nature as a man, his
emotional normality and his mental efficiency, deserve the especial
attention we have been giving them, not only on account of their
intrinsic human interest, but also because they determined the quality
of his work as a musician. His wide sympathy with ordinary men, his
practical sense and shrewdness, his brisk good cheer, his childlike
and wholly unmetaphysical piety--all these traits made his music, in
its expressive aspect, far more catholic, far more universal, than
the austere and ethereal music of mysticism. At the same time, his
practical and systematic mind took firm grasp upon these novel elements
of expression, and wrought them into a clear and easily comprehensible
scheme. He stamped the naïve and fragmentary utterances of folk-feeling
with the careful, purposeful orderliness of art; and by so doing,
launched music upon a new period of development.
In both his great tasks, the secularization of expression and the
systematization of form, Haydn’s personal faculties were reinforced
by the general musical conditions of his time. At the end of the
eighteenth century the mystical type of expression in music had not
only arrived at its acme in Palestrina’s work, after which it must
inevitably decline, but it had ceased to be an adequate reflection
of the general human attitude toward life. Men had turned away from
contemplating the mysteries of divinity, to interest themselves more
than ever before in the commonest feelings, the universal experiences,
of ordinary human beings. They had discovered the miraculousness
of the commonplace, and learned to respect themselves. And they
had consequently begun to prize as genuine self-expressions those
upwellings of naïve emotion, the songs and dances of the people,
which had been so long contemptuously ignored by academic musicians.
These folk-songs had none of the limitations of the more dignified,
recognized art, which paid the price of its dignity in a sacrifice of
fullness of expression. They voiced not only what was edifying, what
was devout and mystical and other-worldly. They palpitated with simple
human feeling, very much of this world; they were tender, animated,
melancholy, languorous, excited, merry, amorous, even trivial, dull, or
indecent at times, as human beings are. They were in fact the crude but
genuine expression of that full, simple, unrestricted humanity to which
idealism had begun to pin its faith.
The musicians of the seventeenth century, instinctively aware that
folk-music somehow succeeded in voicing a wider arc of the full
circle of feeling than the conventional ecclesiastical art, applied
themselves with enthusiasm to the endeavor to assimilate and idealize
it, to turn the current of its pulsing blood into the torpid veins of
academic music, at the same time refining its crudities and broadening
its proportions. The result of their effort was the suite, or series
of dances and songs, the most popular and prevalent authorized form
of that century. The suite was, indeed, in its degree a successful
embodiment of folk-types of expression in a form broad and dignified
enough to satisfy æsthetic demands. But it was not capable of extended
growth. The shortness of its movements, their over-obvious scheme of
phrase-balance, their uniformity of key, rendered impossible any great
increase in complexity of form. Composers therefore found themselves in
a dilemma: they were compelled to write either in the old polyphonic
style, which labored under insurmountable limitations of expression,
or in the new harmonic style, which was as yet capable only of a
rudimentary scheme of form, and therefore unsatisfactory to the sense
of plastic interest and beauty.
It was at this auspicious moment that Haydn, equipped, as we have
seen, with an affectionate and sympathetic heart, beating in unison
with that of common humanity, and with a lucid, practical, pedestrian
mind, well-fitted to disentangle and arrange in order the factors
of a complex problem, appeared in the arena. The adjustment between
his nature and his circumstances was thus peculiarly complete. He
found in the folk-music of his native place, to begin with, a type
of emotional expression with which he was, both as regards qualities
and limitations, in complete sympathy. “The Croatian melodies,” says
Mr. W. H. Hadow, “are bright, sensitive, piquant, but they seldom
rise to any high level of dignity or earnestness. They belong to a
temper which is marked rather by feeling and imagination than by any
sustained breadth of thought, and hence, while they enrich their own
field of art with great beauty, there are certain frontiers which they
rarely cross, and from which, if crossed, they soon return.” Could any
better short description be devised of Haydn’s own characteristic vein
of sentiment--“bright, sensitive, piquant, but seldom rising to any
high level of dignity or earnestness”? His music is, in fact, from the
point of view of expression, essentially an expansion, development, and
idealization of the characteristic utterance of his race.
On the other hand, he had the mental grasp necessary to organize all
this crude, inchoate, fragmentary material into the finished and
coherent forms of art. It is a long step from even the most eloquent
expressions of single aspects of feeling, in short songs and dances, to
an extended composition in which moods are coordinated and contrasted,
proportions fitly ordered, and unity combined with broad scope--a
step which only intelligence can make. The technical task which faced
the musicians of the day was to find a scheme of musical form that
should knit the accents of the popular speech, in themselves poignant
and thrilling but disjointed, fragmentary, halting, into a fluent
and rational utterance. Sir Hubert Parry explains the situation as
follows: “What Haydn had to build upon, and what was most congenial
to him through his origin and circumstances, was the native people’s
songs and dances, which belong to the same order of art in point of
structure as symphonies and sonatas; and what he wanted, and what all
men who aimed in the same direction wanted, was to know how to make
this kind of music on a grander scale. The older music of Handel and
Bach leaned too much towards the style of the choral music and organ
music of the church to serve him as a model. For the principle upon
which their art was mainly built was the treatment of the separate
parts. In the modern style the artistic principle upon which music is
mainly based is the treatment of harmonies and keys, and the way in
which those harmonies and keys are arranged. In national dances few
harmonies are used, but they are arranged on the same principles as
the harmonies of a sonata or a symphony; and what had to be found out
in order to make grand instrumental works was how to arrange many more
harmonies with the same effect of unity as is obtained on a small scale
in dances and national songs.” Here again, happily, the historic moment
was favorable to Haydn. Many tentative efforts toward a new method of
musical structure, based on an organized contrast of themes and keys,
had been made; and all that was needed to weld them into a style as
firm and clear as it was novel and interesting was systematization by
an orderly, responsible, and efficient mind. Haydn had such a mind; and
he established sonata-form on a permanent basis.
In this great task he was helped by study of the experiments in the
new or secular music already made by such men as Carl Philip Emanuel
Bach,[31] a son of the great Sebastian, who struck into paths very
different from the contrapuntal ones of his father; he was helped
by the intrinsic principles of structure of the songs and dances
themselves, which made up his musical material; but above all he was
helped by the bias of his own mind, practical and business-like. It
hardly needs demonstration that in the initiatory period of an art-form
the chief desideratum is clearness, simplicity, a clean, concise
treatment which subordinates all details to the salient features of
the construction, and foregoes variety rather than endanger unity.
Haydn’s temperamental make-up, the almost childlike directness of his
intellect, ensured his fitting treatment of an art itself just emerging
from infancy.
The procedure of Haydn, then, in his treatment of the problems of form,
or the shaping of his material, was chiefly notable for simplicity,
directness, shrewd adaptation of means to ends. He was not a lover of
the subtle, the recondite; he went straight to his mark, economized his
resources, prized ready intelligibility beyond all other qualities.
This appears, first, in his initial motifs or melodic germs; and second
in his methods of building them up into larger artistic organisms. Look
at the motifs of his “Surprise Symphony,” for example, noting their
metrical vigor and their harmonic simplicity, particularly in the two
middle movements. The meter of the Andante is the baldest combination
of eighth-notes and quarter-notes, like that of the tunes children
pick out on the piano; its harmony is tonic, sub-dominant, dominant,
tonic again, and the inevitable modulation to the dominant, and so on.
The Minuet is a rollicking, waltz-like tune, seesawing happily about
from tonic to dominant, with some simple modulations for variety’s
sake. Haydn wrote thousands of such motifs, all vigorous, incisive, and
utterly simple.
When we pass from considering the texture or molecular tissue of
the music to an examination of its structure, or composition, the
same qualities continue to impress us. There is a constant dearth of
contrast, a constant simplicity that to modern ears, it may be, seems
like over-simplicity. The motifs, for example, are generally expanded
into complete phrases by the addition of more or less homogeneous or
amorphous matter, rather than by the entrance of new motifs or figures,
such as Mozart often, and Beethoven generally, uses. The schemes of
balance between the phrases are generally obvious and mathematically
exact, four measures answering four, or eight, eight; whereas in
Beethoven, and even in Mozart, the phrase-balance is much more subtle
and various. The transitional passages leading from one theme to
another are so perfunctory, so conventional, that Wagner felicitously
compared them to “the clattering of dishes at a royal feast.” The
themes themselves, too, are often but slightly contrasted in character
and style; instead of setting a dreamy or emotional second theme over
against a sprightly or dashing first theme, Haydn is apt to make the
second hardly more than a variation of the first. In the development
portions of his first movements, again, where the logical power and
ingenuity of the composer is of course most sorely taxed, Haydn is apt
to resort to only the more obvious means of exploiting his subjects, to
represent them literally, with merely a new figure of accompaniment,
or to change a major theme to minor, or vice versa, instead of drawing
forth their latent but at first sight hidden possibilities. He avoids
radical transformations, either of harmony or rhythm. To put the matter
in the most general terms, he is more spontaneous than thoughtful, more
vivacious than logical, more bent on securing perfect transparency
for his tonal web than on filling it with iridescent colors, tempting
opacities, charming labyrinths of light and shade. We must remember,
however, that Haydn was writing for people to whom the whole scheme of
thematic form was unfamiliar. His ingenuity was taxed to be as regular
as possible, rather than to introduce attractive irregularities. He
was, in fact, laying down the first principles of a novel type of
art; and it is the supreme virtue of first principles to be simple,
fundamental, unmistakable.
Our interest in defining Haydn’s general artistic function as that
of a pioneer, a systematizer and law-giver, must not blind our eyes,
however, to his strokes of originality. In an occasional daring
modulation, happy irregularity, or nicely-calculated blurring of
outline, Haydn anticipates some of Beethoven’s most characteristic
effects. In the Minuet of his Ninth Symphony,[32] for example,
there are some charming instances of “shifted rhythm”; and in that
of the Eighth he revels in odd rhythmical surprises with a truly
Beethoven-like elfishness. As for the matter of harmonic ingenuity, the
instances are bewilderingly numerous. Two or three of the most striking
may, however, be mentioned, and the rest left to the reader’s own
research. In the introduction of the Third Symphony, in E-flat, Haydn
makes a most interesting enharmonic change from C-flat to B-natural,
quite in the Beethoven manner, plunging the hearer into a mystification
that clears up only with the return, after a few measures, to the key
of C-minor, the relative of the original key. The Introduction of the
Fifth Symphony contains similar ingenious modulations. But the most
Beethovenish trick of all is perhaps the modulation back to the last
entrance of the main theme of the Finale of this same symphony. The
key of the movement is D-major; Haydn, however, getting himself well
established in F-sharp minor, harps on C-sharp as the dominant of this
distant key; many C-sharps are heard, in a persistent rhythm of two
shorts and a long, until one has forgotten all about the original key
of the piece; the C-sharps fade away to piano, then to pianissimo,
then to silence; when suddenly, in the same rhythm, three loud D’s
bring the piece emphatically back to the home key, and forthwith it
proceeds merrily upon its way. This device is surprisingly unlike Haydn
in his usual jog-trot mood; it is amazingly like the daring strokes of
his great successor. The C-sharp is drummed into us until we take it
for granted, and conceive it wholly as the dominant of F-sharp-minor;
and then by his sudden blast of D’s the composer shows us that he had
after all decided to consider it the leading-note of the home key--and
therewith, home we are!
But in spite of some striking anticipations of later effects, Haydn is
for the most part, and in the long run, a true child of his own epoch,
writing with its concern for clearness of form, its somewhat gingerly
treatment of contrast, its quaint, old-fashioned, and yet awakened
spirit. He assimilated the best capacities of music as he found them,
and by dint of his skill and perseverance, moulded them until they
issued forth in what was to all intents and purposes a new art. But
the novelty in this art was not the novelty of a new vision, a new
character, a new personal ideal; it was the novelty of a more perfect
adjustment than had yet been achieved of expressive impulses and formal
principles already widely disseminated. Haydn’s great achievement was
the development of popular types of expression into a true art by the
application to them of schemes of design, or form, which in his day
had just become possible for the first time as a result of the pioneer
work in harmonic and rhythmic organization done by his immediate
predecessors. Lacking either of these two constituents, Haydn’s art
could not have existed; and coming into being as a resultant of both,
it had qualities of its own, different from those of either one of its
factors alone. It marked, indeed, the beginning of secular music as a
mature art.
The final emphasis in any definition of Haydn’s qualities, whether
of expression or of form, depends on the point of view from which it
is made, on whether he is considered as a follower of Palestrina or
as a forerunner of Beethoven. In comparison with Palestrina he is a
modern. In common with his immediate predecessors, but more fully and
definitely than any of them, he turns away from the ecclesiastical
inspiration and the contrapuntal forms of the sixteenth century, to
establish himself solidly on the untrammeled expression of universal
human feeling, through forms based on harmonic and rhythmic principles.
He sacrifices the dignity, the peace, the detachment, of Palestrina,
in order to voice the self-consciousness, the mobile vitality, the
turbulence and struggle and ebullient life of the modern man. For
this reason, as well as because of the forms he uses, he is “the
first of secular composers,” “the father of instrumental music.” Yet
he is not free as Beethoven is free, nor is his individualism the
fierce nonconformity of the great anarch of outworn conventions and
restricting formulæ. His methods, compared with Beethoven’s, are rigid,
narrow, inelastic; the music they shaped had something of the angular
outline of all childlike art. Had it not been for their regularity,
however, Beethoven’s felicitous daring would have miscarried; without
their order as a point of departure, his “splendid experiments” would
have led, not to freedom, but to chaos. Mozart’s playful nickname of
“Papa Haydn” is more than a term of endearment; it is a condensed
philosophy. Haydn was indeed the father of instrumental composers, in
this sense: that he laid the foundation for all their performance,
and that they made the advances, in the light of which he appears
old-fashioned, only by a wise use of resources inherited from him.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Haydn on C. P. E. Bach: “Those who know me well must be aware that
I owe very much to Emanuel Bach, whose works I understand and have
thoroughly studied.” C. P. E. Bach on Haydn: “He alone has thoroughly
comprehended my works, and made a proper use of them.”
[32] The numbering here refers only to the twelve great symphonies
written for Salomon.