THE EARLY MUSIC
Save one quartet, I have heard none of the compositions of Haydn's first
period. Their interest is mainly historical, and the public cannot be
blamed for never evincing the slightest desire to hear them. Haydn had,
indeed, a glimmering of the new idea--perhaps more than a glimmering;
but, on the whole, he was still in leading strings, and dared not follow
the gleam. It is not surprising. He was not one of Nature's giant
eruptive forces, like Beethoven. His declared object always was to
please his patrons; and consider who his patrons were. We may be sure
that the "discords" of a Beethoven suddenly blared forth would have
scared Count Morzin and all his pigtail court. Haydn was supposed to
write the same kind of music as other musicians of the period were
writing, and, if possible, to do it better; Count Morzin did not pay him
to widen the horizons of an art. Consider his musical position also. He
was born twenty-seven years before the death of Handel, eighteen before
that of the greatest Bach; Bach was writing gigantic works in the
contrapuntal style and forms; Handel had not composed the chain of
oratorios on which his fame rests. It is conceivable that had Haydn been
born in less humble circumstances, that had he easily reached a high
position, he, too, might have commenced writing fugues, masses and
oratorios on a big scale--and be utterly forgotten to-day. His good luck
thrust him into a lowly post, and by developing the forms in which he
had to compose, and seeking out their possibilities, he became a great
and original man.
It is hard, of course, to say how much any given discoverer actually
discovers for himself, and how much is due to his predecessors and
contemporaries. The thing certain is that the great man, besides finding
and inventing for himself, sums up the others. All the master-works have
their ancestry, and owe something to contemporary works. The only piece
of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light suddenly
perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen in," and
almost as many authors have been found for it as there are historians.
The bones of John of Fornsete (or another) have long since mouldered,
and it need not disturb their dust to say that in all certainty there
were many canons--hundreds, perhaps thousands--before "Sumer is icumen
in" had the good fortune to be put in a safe place for posterity to
stare and wonder at. This is platitudinous, but it needs to be borne in
mind. And, bearing it in mind, we can see in Haydn's early attempts much
in a style that had been used before or was being used at the time, much
that is simply copied from the younger Bachs, from Domenico Scarlatti,
Dittersdorf, Wagenseil, perhaps even his Parisian contemporary Gossec.
But we see the character of the themes becoming more and more his own.
There are no--or few--contrapuntal formulas, hardly any mere chord
progressions broken into arpeggios and figurated designs. By going to
the native dances and folk-tunes of his childhood Haydn took one of the
most momentous, decisive steps in his own history and in the history of
music. That too much quoted opening of the first quartet (B-flat) really
marks the opening of an era. It was not a subject to be worked out
contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently striking harmonically to tempt
Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had constantly tempted Emanuel Bach,
to make music and gain effects by repeating it at intervals above or
below. It is an arpeggio of the chord of B-flat; it leaps up merrily,
and has a characteristic delightful little twist at the end, and in the
leap and in the twist lay possibilities of a kind that he made full use
of only in his maturer style. All composers up till then, if they
ventured to use bits of popular melody at all, gave them the scholastic
turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was strong.
The fact that Haydn gave it in its naïve form, invented themes which in
their deliberate naïveté suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his
later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well
as his raw material in folk-music.
The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has
the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes
it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost
from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his
folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped. Gradually the
second subject differentiates itself from the first while maintaining
the flow of the tide of music; and gradually we get the "working-out"
section, in which the unbroken flow is kept up by fragments of the two
subjects being woven into perpetually new melodic outlines, leading up
to the return of the first theme; and the second theme is repeated in
the key of the first, with a few bars of coda to make a wind-up
satisfactory to the ear.
Here let us observe the value of key relationships. The first subject
was given out in the key (say) of C. A momentary pause was made, and the
second subject introduced in the dominant key G, and in this key the
first section of a piece of music in symphony-form ends. That ending
could not satisfy the ear, which demanded something more in the first
key. Until recent times that desire was gratified with a repetition of
the whole first section. The repetition of the first theme in the first
key satisfied the ear for the moment, though at the end of the section
the want was again felt. So when the end of the first section was again
reached a modulation was made, gradually or suddenly, to another key;
and in the course of this, the development or "working-out" section,
many keys might be touched on, but without ever giving the ear the
satisfaction of feeling itself at rest in the first key again. That was
only done by the reintroduction of the first theme in the first key. The
first theme is played and leads on to the pause, after which the second
theme is given in the key of the first, so that after a few bars of
coda, always in the same key, the movement terminates in a perfectly
satisfactory manner. This is a crude description in which much is left
out, but it will serve to enable the reader to understand how passages
widely different in character are bound together into a coherent whole
by the composer continuously leading the ear to expect something--that
something being the original key-chord, and, while offering many things,
only finally satisfying the ear's craving when the movement is coming to
a finish. If the second theme, let us say, were in the same key as the
first, it would sound like the beginning of a new movement, and at once
we should have the continuity broken. As a passage between two passages
in the original key it sounds perfectly in its place, and, no matter how
contrasted in character, is a kind of continuation of the first passage.
At the same time it creates a strong desire, that must be restrained
till the time comes, for what follows. We listen to the second theme and
to the "working-out" section, knowing we are far from home, but
perfectly aware that we shall get there, and that a certain feeling of
suspense will be relieved. Thus the music is like a great arch that
supports itself. The unity got in the fugue by continuous motion is got
here by one key perpetually leading the ear to ask for another key. It
seems simplicity itself; its underlying idea--that of making the ear
always expect something, and gratifying it by bits, and only fully
towards the close of the movement--is that by which unity is combined
with variety in modern music, though we have long since got rid of the
"legitimate" series of keys.
The grouping of the movements need not detain us long. Many groupings
had been tried; but it seems natural to open with an allegro--preceded
or not preceded by a few bars of slow introduction--to follow this with
a slow movement of some sort; then to insert or not to insert a movement
of medium rapidity as a change from the bustle of the first and the
quiet of the second; and finally to end with a merry dancing movement.
This, again, is in the merest outline the plan adopted by Haydn.
Whether he used three or four movements, the principle was the same--a
quick beginning, a slow middle, and a quick ending; afterwards, each
movement grew longer, but the way in which he lengthened them can better
be treated later when we come to his bigger works.
From the first he used counterpoint, canon, imitation, and all the
devices of the contrapuntal style. But the difference between his newer
style and that of Wagenseil and the rest is that he neither uses
counterpoint of any sort nor chord figures to make up the true substance
of the music, but merely as devices to help him in maintaining a
continuous flow of melody. That melody, as has already been said, might
be in the top or bottom part, or one of the middle parts; but though it
may, and, indeed, always did pause at times, as the melody of a song
pauses at the end of each line, it is unbroken from beginning to end.
The first part of a movement might be compared to the first line of a
song: there is a pause, but we expect and get the second line; there is
another pause, and we get a line which is analogous to the "working-out"
section, and the last line, ending in the original key if not on the
same note, corresponds to the final section of the movement, after which
we expect nothing more, the ear being quite satisfied.
Werner, his musical chief in his next station, had the sense to see
that this continuous melody was the thing aimed at, and because Haydn
placed counterpoint in a subsidiary condition he called him a
"charlatan." Poor man, had his sense pierced a little deeper! For Haydn
was--after Bach and Handel and Mozart--one of the finest masters of
counterpoint who have lived. When the time came to write fugues he could
write them with a certain degree of power. But his aim was not writing
fugues any more than an architect's aim is painting in water-colours.
Water-colours are very useful to architects, and they make use of them;
but because they do not rival Turner or David Cox it does not follow
that they are not masters of the art of architecture. Haydn aimed at--or
rather, at this epoch, groped after--a kind of music in which continuous
melody expressive of genuine human feeling was the beginning and the
end, and his mastery of counterpoint, harmony, and all technical devices
were more than sufficient for the purpose.
To my mind he wrote as well for the strings at this time as ever he did.
He could play the violin himself, as the violin was then played, and all
his life, even in quartets, he had to write for players who would be
considered tenth-rate to-day. As for orchestration, that was an art
neither he nor Mozart was to hit upon for some time. The wind
instruments had one principal function, and that was to fill in the
music, enrich it, and make it louder, and another minor
one--occasionally to put in solos. In writing suitably for them, and, in
fact, in every other part of writing music for courts, Haydn was now the
equal, if not the superior, of every man living in 1761 (Gluck did not
write for the courts), and he was getting a better and better grip of
his new idea.