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HAYDN
by
JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians
LONDON
1908
CONTENTS
I. JOSEPH HAYDN
II. 1732-1761
III. THE EARLY MUSIC
IV. 1761-1790
V. MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD
VI. 1790-1795
VII. THE GREAT SYMPHONIES
VIII. 1795-1809
IX. SUMMING UP
HAYDN'S PRINCIPAL COMPOSITIONS
BOOKS ABOUT HAYDN
CHAPTER I
JOSEPH HAYDN
It is, as a rule, inexpedient to begin a book with the peroration.
Children are spared the physic of the moral till they have sucked in the
sweetness of the tale. Adults may draw from a book what of good there is
in it, and close it before reaching the chapter usually devoted to fine
writing. But the case of Haydn is extraordinary. One can only sustain
interest in a biography of the man by an ever-present sense that he is
scarcely to be written about. All an author can do is, in few or many
words, to put a conundrum to the reader--a conundrum that cannot even be
stated in exciting terms. This apparition and wonder-worker of the
eighteenth century, Franz Joseph Haydn, is compact of paradoxes and
contradictions. Born a peasant, and remaining in thought and speech a
peasant all his days, he became the friend of princes, dukes, and,
generally speaking, very high society indeed--and this in days when
class distinctions had to be observed. He effected a revolution in
music, and revolutionists must have daring; and save in music he showed
no sign of unusual daring. His shaping and handling of new forms called
for high intellect, and he displayed no intellect whatever in any other
way--nothing beyond a canny, cunning shrewdness. Until he was sixty his
life was a plodding one of dull regularity and routine; only his later
adventures in England are in themselves of interest. The bare facts of
his existence might be given in a few pages. Look at him from any point
of view, and we see nothing but his simplicity; yet it is hard to
believe that a man who achieved such great things was in reality simple.
If only we had his inner spiritual biography! And even then one wonders
whether we would have much. If Haydn actually knew his own secret--which
I take leave to doubt--he certainly kept it. "The daemon of music," said
Wagner, "revealing itself through the mind of a child"--which tells us
nothing. In reading his Life we must perpetually bear in mind the mighty
changes he wrought in and for music, else we shall not read far.
Wherefore, first roughly to outline his achievement is the reason why I
open with a peroration of a sort.
Haydn found music in the eighteenth-century stage, and carried it on to
the nineteenth-century stage--in some respects a very advanced
nineteenth-century stage. The problem he had to solve was as easy as
that set by Columbus to the wiseacres, when once it was worked. It was
how to combine organic unity of form and continuity with dramatic
variety and the expressiveness of simple heartfelt song. From the date
of the invention of music written and sung in parts, a similar problem
had been set successive generations of musicians, and solved by each
according to its needs and lights. At first words were indispensable;
they were, if not the backbone of the music, at least the string on
which the pearls might be strung. The first veritable composers--in
setting, for instance, the words of the Mass--took for a beginning a
fragment of Church melody, or, to the great scandal of the
ecclesiastics, secular melody. Call this bit A, and say it was sung by
Voice I.; Voice II. took it up in a different key, Voice I. continuing
with something fresh; then Voice III. took it in turn, Voices I. and II.
continuing either with entirely fresh matter, or Voice II. following in
the steps of Voice I. And so on, either until the whole piece was
complete or a section ended; but the end of one section was the
jumping-off place for the commencement of another, which was spun out in
exactly the same way. This method of "imitation" was employed by all the
polyphonic composers. Continuity was assured; lovely or unlovely
harmonic dissonances were always arising, and being resolved through the
collisions and onward movement of parts; the music, both melodically
and harmonically, could be as expressive as the particular composer's
powers allowed. But the unity was the unity of a number of pieces of
wood of varying length laid so as to overlap and nailed together; the
superficial unity was due to the words; the real, essential unity
depended on all the music being the sincere expression of a steady
emotion--in those days religious emotion. Thus were attained the motet
forms and the Mass, and, when the method was applied to secular words,
the madrigal.
The earlier instrumental pieces were built after the same fashion--see
the "fancies" and organ compositions of the time; but in these there
were no words either to give the impulse or hold the bits together. With
the fugue, music, unaided by words, was held together by its own innate
strength; it became a self-sustaining One subject was generally taken;
others--oftenest one, sometimes more--were added; all the subjects were
passed about from part to part until the end of the composition, with
the interspersion of passages called "episodes" for the sake of
"variety." Here there was unity, continuity, with a vengeance. It was of
the very essence of the fugue that the motion should never be arrested;
if it seemed to halt for a moment, then, as in the older music, the
stopping-place was the jumping-off place for a fresh start. All the
severer men wrote in this form, most of them displaying marvellous
mathematical--and some of them, alas! mechanical--ingenuity; a few of
them, Bach towering high above the rest, attained a full and truthful
expression of deep feeling. Bach, for the organ alone, raised sublime
architectural structures, unapproachable, to use Schumann's word, in
their magnificence. But the underlying feeling was always the same
throughout; it might wax or wane in intensity: its character did not
change. The themes, once announced, were rigid and unalterable; the
music had always to be more or less like "a tune tied to a post."
Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So later, a voice had to be found
for shifting, complex, theatrically conflicting moods--states of mind
characteristic of the modern and not of the bewigged world. When Haydn
was still young the problem composers were more or less at random trying
to solve was the creation of a new form of music and a new kind of music
to fill the form. Neither the old form nor the old style would serve;
the naïve dance-forms were too short. The content had to be as
poignantly expressive, as direct in its appeal, as a folk-song; the
different passages uttering the different moods had somehow to be welded
together into a coherent whole--in one way or another dramatic climaxes
and changes had to be arranged in an unbroken, logical, apparently
inevitable sequence. I do not say the composers knew what they were
after; on the contrary, as in the beginnings of anything new in any art,
they simply were vaguely groping after something, they did not by any
means realise what.
During the period when the polyphonic writers were pouring out their
most glorious and living stuff, in the first lame, crude fugues the
medium was being prepared for the triumphs of Handel and Bach; and in
the same way, while Bach was writing the G minor and A minor fugues (I
am not speaking of vocal music) some smaller men were working at what
was destined to grow into the symphony, sonata and quartet. These terms
are used here in their present-day signification. In the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries such words as symphony and overture, and suite and
sonata, were interchangeable; but that does not at all concern us here.
The symphony or sonata or quartet form is what these early groups of
movements led up to. That these groups of movements originated in the
theatre is quite probable; this is indicated by the mere fact that the
word "overture" was frequently used to describe them. When the fugue was
in its fullest maturity composers were turning overtures out in vast
quantities. Our own Arne tried his hand at them, and no one looking at
_his_ would dream that the sonata form was so nearly ripe at the time.
Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach wrote them, and from these two Haydn
got the hint which he turned to such splendid account. Abel, Stamitz
and Wagenseil wrote them, and achieved nothing in particular. These
groups consisted of three or four movements, and we need not linger long
over them. It goes without saying that all the movements were short;
they consisted either of simple tunes or of series of harmonic
progressions broken up into figures or patterns. Of real development and
climax there is none; of such things as well-defined, characteristic
first and second subjects there is little sign. The themes were of the
formal mathematical type developed during the fugal period--a type that
"worked" easily, and in a way effectively, in the fugue itself, but was
unnecessary and, indeed, tiresome when contrapuntal working was not the
aim and object. The endless variants on this kind of thing, for
example--
[Illustration: some bars of music]
were simply a snare, and kept writers from seeing the importance of
singing and singable melody in the coming style. To show the difference
between the old and the new at once, let me here give two bits of themes
from Mozart and Haydn. They are in appearance not so far removed from
the contrapuntal type of theme, and while they sing themselves they yet
served their inventors capitally for contrapuntal treatment.
[Illustration: some bars of music]
Numberless sonatas were written about the same time. Either the subjects
were contrapuntal, formal, in build, or consisted of patterns made out
of broken chord-series. Domenico Scarlatti got some wonderful results;
but his music simply tickles the ear for a moment: meaning it has none.
Polyphonic music of every sort had now to go for a while; monodic music
was coming in. But before it could come in with any degree of security
something else had to come and something else to go. Up till now the old
idea of modes had remained strong, despite Sebastian Bach and his
marvellous use of chromatic harmonies. It had to yield to the modern
idea of key; a sense of key relationships had to be developed--much, at
first all, depended on that. The new idea, hinted at by Emanuel Bach,
and first seized upon by Haydn, was that a continuous stream of
melody--not necessarily always in the top or treble part--should run
through a movement, and, whatever the interest of the accompanying
parts, should always be of the first importance. For his inspiration, as
well as many of his actual themes, Haydn went to his native folk-dances
and folk-songs; he brought in the fresh air from the wilds, and the now
dusty contrapuntalism was blown out never again to return. We can see
above the difference between the full-bottomed wig theme and the newer
kind; to show, on the other hand, how near Haydn stood to Beethoven let
me give bits of themes from each composer.
[Illustration: some bars of music]
With the disappearance of the contrapuntal theme coincides the end of
purely contrapuntal "working" or development. The new kind I shall
describe later in its proper place. For the present all that need be
said is that here again key relationship was of the first importance, as
we shall see. Meantime, in this peroration I have sought to outline what
Haydn did. For, let there be no mistake, it was Haydn and no other who
brought about the change. If he was not the first to write in something
very like modern sonata or symphony form, he was the first to see its
full possibilities. Had he written no symphonies, but only quartets, his
achievement would have been none the less remarkable, and none the less
valuable to Mozart and Beethoven, for in many respects the quartet and
the symphony of the eighteenth century were the same thing, and Mozart
declared that it was from Haydn he learnt to write quartets.
This, then, is what Haydn did, and I shall now describe shortly what we
must call his career while he was working it out.