1732-1761
The first period of Haydn's life is marked by the two above dates--that
of his entry into this world and that of his entry into the service of
Prince Anton Esterhazy. He was born, then, in 1732, "between March 31
and April 1." As there is no "between" possible, either the Haydn family
had no clock or were averse to stating definitely that their son was
born on All Fool's Day. They need not have worried, for, however simple
Haydn might be, he was only once in his whole life a fool, which is more
than can be said for most men, great or small. But while he was about
it, there was no lack of completeness in Haydn's folly, and he felt the
consequences of it all his days. The place of his birth was originally
called Tristnik, translated into German, Rohrau, then (whatever it may
be now) a sleepy old-world village on the banks of the Leitha, in the
very heart of a Croatian settlement in Hungary. The Leitha at Rohrau
divides Hungary from Austria. Haydn's father, Mathias Haydn, said to
have been a master-wheelwright, came from Hainburg, near to the Danube,
and some little distance from Rohrau. More cannot be said of his
ancestors than that for some generations they had been hard-working,
honest folk of the peasant class, given to music, but by no means a
family of musicians like the Bachs. His mother was born Maria Koller,
and it has been suggested that the name is a variant or corruption of
the Croatian Kolar, meaning a wheelwright. Perhaps she thought that,
bearing such a name, she must marry Mathias, a wheelwright. The point is
that this fact, if fact it be, is another indication or proof of Haydn's
Croatian descent. It seems, indeed, to be established that by blood he
was pure Slav, the name being formerly spelt Hajdgn. It is just as well
for our tongues that it was changed. Franz Joseph (he dropped the Franz)
was the second of twelve children, the only other worth noting being
Michael (in full, Johann Michael), who became a famous musician in his
day, and a friend of the Mozarts in Salzburg. Maria, the mother, died in
1754, the father in 1763.
It has always seemed to me the great composers had fine luck in being
born so long ago, before the towns had grown big and dirty, before the
locomotive and motor-car had denied the beautiful earth, and stinking
factories floundered over all the lands. Carlyle rightly grows eloquent
on the value of the sweet country air and sights and sounds to young
Teufelsdröckh, and Haydn must have taken impressions of sunrises,
sunsets, midday splendours, and the ever-plashing river flowing to the
far-away sea, that afterwards went to the making of his most wonderful
music. He had to go out early to fight his way in the world; only six
years of peaceful village life, free from care and responsibility, were
allowed him. Those first years, I take it, were happy enough. Mathias
was only, it is true, a wheelwright, and in time there were a dozen
mouths to feed. But we hear of him and Maria making music only in the
evenings; his days were more profitably occupied. It goes very much
without saying that he was not rich--in what age or clime are working
wheelwrights rich?--but he cannot be called poor. Poverty is a
comparative term; even to-day peasants feel its biting teeth only when
they desert or are driven from their country-side, and make for the
overcrowded towns. Joseph, but for a few accidents, might have remained
a peasant all his days, and never faced what he would consider hardship.
The first accident was his voice, which was undoubtedly of singular
beauty; the second was an extraordinary musical aptitude, which led him
to sing expressively and perfectly in tune the airs he heard his father
and mother sing. Mathias, by the way, accompanied himself on the harp;
and Joseph, long before he had a fiddle of his own, imitated the
fiddling of his elders with two bits of wood, so the family orchestra
was complete. The last accident was the arrival of one Frankh, a distant
relative. This was long before the magical feats of the baby Mozart had
set every grasping parent staring for signs of musical precocity in his
children. But Mathias undoubtedly wanted to do his best for his boy, and
Joseph himself must have had ambition of a sort--witness his endeavours
to play the fiddle without a fiddle to play--and when Frankh undertook
to place the boy in a choir and teach him music, the offer was joyfully
accepted. So he went to Hainburg, never to return to Rohrau until he was
an old and celebrated man.
Nothing need be recorded of his life in Hainburg save that Frankh worked
him hard. Indeed, much later Haydn declared himself thankful to Frankh
for forming in him the habit of working hard. He sang, played the fiddle
and harpsichord, and went to school; and suddenly one George Reutter
came on the scene. He came, heard, and was conquered by Haydn's voice.
He was Hofcompositor and Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Church in
Vienna, and he took the boy on the same terms as those on which Frankh
had brought him away from Rohrau. To Vienna Haydn went, was entered in
the Cantorei of St. Stephen's, and there for some years he sang in the
choir. In return he was taught reading, writing and arithmetic, religion
and Latin. He had excellent masters for singing and for violin and
harpsichord; but he had no teaching in theory. Reutter gave him only
two lessons, and he was left without guidance to cover as much
music-paper as he could get hold of. But he stuck grimly to the task of
making himself an efficient composer, and worked out his own salvation.
Reutter, having secured him for his voice, took no interest in him, and
when the voice went Haydn had to go too. That happened in 1745. His
brother Michael came, with a voice superior to Joseph's; Joseph's broke,
and the Empress said his singing was like a cock's crowing. Michael sang
a solo so beautifully as to win a present of 24 ducats, and since it was
evident that the services of St. Stephen's could go on without Joseph,
Reutter waited for a chance of getting rid of Joseph. So Joseph, though
far from wishing to oblige, must needs play a practical joke, and was
ignominiously spanked and turned out into the streets.
With both Frankh and Reutter he had had a hard enough time--plenty of
work, not too much food, and no petting--but now he learnt what hard
times really meant. He faced them with plenty of courage. A chorister of
St. Michael's gave him shelter; some warmhearted person--to whom be all
praise--lent him the vast sum of 140 florins--say £7; he got a few
pupils who paid him two florins a month. He must have toiled like a
slave, in a wet, cold garret, and often without sufficient to eat. Yet,
as in everything he undertook, dogged did it. He never became a
splendid executant, like Bach and Handel before him, and Mozart and
Beethoven immediately after, but he must have been head and shoulders
above the ordinary musical practitioner.
His first opportunity came when he made the acquaintance of one Felix
Kurz, a well-known comic actor, for whom he wrote the comic opera, _Der
Neue Krumme Teufel_. This, judging from the places it was played at,
seems to have had quite a vogue. The music is lost; I have never seen
the words. But through this operetta or pantomime with songs he appears
to have been introduced to Metastasio, who was, of course, a mighty
great man at that epoch--a kind of Scribe. Anyhow, Metastasio was
superintending the education of the two daughters of a Spanish family,
the de Martines, and Haydn was engaged to teach the elder music.
Metastasio brought him to the notice of Porpora--then quite as important
a person as Metastasio himself--and Porpora made Haydn an offer. Haydn
was to clean the boots and do other household jobs, and he was to
accompany when Porpora gave lessons. In return, he was to have lessons
from Porpora and to be fed and clothed. He accepted, and went off with
his new master to Mannersdorf.
His service with Porpora brought him innumerable advantages. If he had
lowly duties to attend to, that amounted to nothing. He lived in the
eighteenth century, not in the nineteenth or twentieth. He was not
regarded as a clever musician forced to do lackey's work; he was a
lackey--or, at least, a peasant--given a chance of making himself a
clever musician. In those days birth and breeding counted for
much--everything. If a man could not boast of these, then he must have
money; and even money would not always fetch him everything. The Court
musicians were classed lower than domestic servants, and generally paid
less. Now and again a triumphant, assertive personality like Handel
would break through all the rules of etiquette; but even Handel could
have done little without his marvellous finger-skill--for he was
reckoned finest amongst the European players of his time--and with his
fingers Haydn--we have his own confession for it--was never
extraordinary. He could not extemporise as Handel, and Bach in more
restricted circles, had done, nor as Mozart and Beethoven were soon to
do. Beethoven won social status for the musician tribe, but Beethoven,
while as brilliant an executant as Handel, also had the advantage of
reaching manhood just when the upset of the French Revolution was
destroying all old-world notions. Even in old-fashioned Germany the
Rights of Man were asserting themselves. In England, for many a long day
afterwards, the musician had no higher standing than Haydn had. The few
who mixed with the Great were mainly charlatans of the type of Sir
George Smart, and they took mighty pains to be of humble behaviour in
the presence of their betters.
Haydn did remarkably well in the petty pigtail courts of Austria. He
probably considered himself lucky, and he was lucky--he was always
lucky. He got invaluable experience with Porpora, and was presented to
many personages in the gay world. He met Gluck, who a little later was
quite inaccessible to the most pushful of young men; also Dittersdorf
and Wagenseil, who, whatever we may think of them, were very high and
unapproachable musicians in their time. He worked with unflagging
diligence, and the natural instinct of his genius drove him to the works
of Emanuel Bach, which he now possessed. He also bought theoretical
books, prizing chiefly the Gradus of old Fux. So he mastered the
groundwork of his art. Gluck advised him to go to Italy, but it is hard
to imagine what he could have learnt there. He did not fail to profit by
an introduction to one Karl (etc.) von Fürnberg, one of the old stamp of
wealthy patrons of musicians. They loved to "discover" rising talent,
did these ancient, obsolete types of amateurs of art. They were as proud
of a brilliant protégé as a modern literary critic is when he
"discovers" a new minor poet. Von Fürnberg did his best for Haydn. He
enabled him to write the first eighteen quartets; he helped him to get
better terms for teaching--five florins a month instead of two. Through
von Fürnberg or some one else he got to know the Countess Thun, who
loved to play the friend to struggling genius. Finally, he was presented
to Count Morzin, who, in 1759, appointed him as his composer and
bandmaster. The band was small and the pay was small, but it placed
Haydn in an assured position. He had a band to practise on, and he soon
wrote his first symphony. Count Morzin's home was at Lukavec. Here
incessant concerts, vocal and instrumental, were given. Trios, quartets,
symphonies, concertos, divertimentos--all kinds of compositions, and
plenty of them, were required of Haydn, who must have had his hands
everlastingly full.
He now evidently thought the days of his apprenticeship over, and
proceeded at once to make a thorough fool of himself--as I have said,
for the only time in his life. He was friendly with the family of a
wig-maker named Keller, and gave lessons to his two daughters. He fell
in love with the younger. That might have been well enough. But the girl
elected to become a nun, and Haydn, either of his free and particularly
asinine will, or through persuasion, married the elder, Anne Marie, on
November 26, 1760. He was fully aware that his master, Count Morzin,
would keep no married man in his employ, so that his act was doubly
foolish. However, as it happened, that did not so much matter. Morzin
had to rid himself of such an expensive encumbrance as an orchestra,
and, marriage or no marriage, Haydn would have found himself without a
post. He quickly got another position, so that one bad consequence of
hasty marriage did not count. The other consequence remained--he still
had a wife. She was, from all accounts, a demon of a wife. He had to
separate from her, and long afterwards she wrote to him asking him to
buy her a certain house which would suit her admirably as soon as he was
good enough to leave her a happy widow. It is satisfactory to know that
Haydn bought the house for himself, and lived in it, and that the lady
died before him, though only eight years.
He had borne privation, hunger, cold, wet beds to sleep in, with the
inveterate cheeriness that never left him. He worked on steadily until
his old age in the service he now entered--that of Prince Anton
Esterhazy. Until the year 1791, when he adventured far away for the
first time to come to London, his outward life was as regular and
uneventful as that of a steady Somerset House clerk. There is next to
nothing to record, and I will spare the patient reader the usual stock
of fabulous anecdotes, the product of hearsay and loose imaginations.
Let us turn for a moment to what he had learnt and actually achieved
during the first thirty years of his life.