MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD
This must have occurred to every one whilst reading the biographies of
great artists: After all, is it the function of high genius to discover
means of expression only that they may be used afterwards by numberless
mediocrities who have nothing whatever to express? It is gravely set
down about Haydn, for instance, that he "stereotyped" the symphony form,
and "handed it on" to future generations. Now, I have observed that the
men who do this kind of work are always the second-rate men: first come
the inventors, the pioneers, and then the perfecters; it is always at
the close of a school that the tip-top men arise. They claw in their
material from everywhere around, and use it up so thoroughly as to leave
nothing for the later comers to do with it that was not done before, and
done better, done when the stuff was fresh and the impulse full of its
first vigour. Haydn did a lot of spade-work for Mozart and Beethoven,
especially Mozart; but that was early, more than twenty years before
his death, and it is significant that the portion of his life-work which
most influenced and directed Mozart and Beethoven is chiefly second-rate
music. When he was writing the music that forces us to place him near
the noblest composers, he obeyed the invariable rule, and was in turn
being influenced by Mozart. The case is remarkable, but it is only what
anyone with a seeing eye might have predicted, and to us to-day it is
quite plain.
It is the constructive part of his work--the work of his middle
period--we must now briefly examine. In the list of his principal
compositions for the period 1761-1790 are included nearly one hundred
symphonies and other orchestral works, innumerable trios, quartets,
operas, songs, and clavier or piano pieces, one oratorio, _The Seven
Words_, and other sacred pieces. How many of them are heard to-day? How
many could be heard with pleasure? Very, very few. If anyone who
happened to be familiar with the Salomon symphonies--belonging to his
last period, after he had known Mozart--and _The Creation_ heard some of
this older stuff for the first time, he would hardly believe that the
man who in his age wrote so much fresh, vital music, charged with colour
and energy, could in the prime of physical life have written music that
is now so old-fashioned and stale. To this general verdict exceptions
must be made in the cases of some of the quartets, the clavier pieces,
and _The Seven Words_, the last especially being, as I have already
said, in his most splendid manner. Haydn did not stereotype the
symphony, because it never was at any time stereotyped; but he made
endless experiments in the search for a general profound principle which
underlies all music composed since his time. Mozart helped to make his
own meaning clear to him, divined what he was groping after, and himself
seized it and made glorious use of it, and Haydn profited, so that we
have his master-works. But the experiments possess for us little more
than the interest of experiments. Yet they were new and inspiring at the
time. Had he continued to write in the pre-1761 manner, he would never
have by 1790 won his world-wide fame, and made London seek him and so
draw from him his finest work.
After, say, 1785, the old contrapuntal smack has gone out of his
writing, and his form has grown definite. Often, indeed, his outlines
are much too hard, as was natural at a time when he was with all his
might trying to take his principles in a firm grip. If we take a typical
symphony of this time, we find, first the adagio introduction. This
feature, as we all know, was turned to noble use by Beethoven, notably
in the seventh symphony; but it is not an essential. Mozart scarcely
used it, and even with Haydn I fancy the Prince must have liked it, or
we should not find it so often. The allegro is in what the text-books
call the "accepted" form, first and second subjects--often not clearly
differentiated, but more and more so as time passed--"working-out"
section and recapitulation with or without coda. Here we have complete
unity, and as much variety as the composer wanted. With all the richness
and variety, the intellectual structure is so firm and distinctly marked
that the mind grasps the whole thing at once. Then comes the slow
movement, sometimes with two distinct themes, sometimes with only one,
varied at each repetition, and with episodes composed of fresh matter
between the repetitions. The minuet and trio are little, if at all,
different from those of Emanuel Bach. The finale is generally a bit of a
romp; the structural plan is that of the first movement, or a rondo. So
much for the form. As for the music, it is, I say, free from
counterpoint, and is more and more filled with the spirit of folk-song.
The themes sing and the music takes its impulse and motion from them;
the web is no longer made up of contrapuntal workings: counterpoint is
never more than an accompaniment, a helpful device. What Wagner called
the melos, the melody, or melodic outline, that begins at the beginning
and ends only at the end--this is the thing. The influence of the
folk-song is certainly most marked in the slow movements, just as that
of the dance is shown in the finales. Haydn's adagios, at his best,
speak with the deepest yet the simplest feeling. A fairly close analogy
is that of Burns, who, with little natural inspiration, found
inspiration in his native ballads, and often worked up the merest
doggerel into artistic shapes of wondrous poignancy. Haydn's habitual
temper was cheerful, and his music rattles along with a certain gaiety
of gallop very far away from the mechanical grinding or pounding accents
of the contrapuntalists. (I don't mean the great men; I mean the
Wagenseils, Gossecs and the rest, who were trying to do the new thing
without shaking off the old contrapuntal fetters.) But the spirit of his
native songs was continually touching him and informed his melodies with
a degree of emotion that we find in none of the other strivers after
symphonic form.
We are far removed from Haydn now, and if often his second subjects seem
little different from his first, we must remember that when all was
fresh contrasts would be perceived that now have vanished out of the
music. Haydn, neither now nor in his final period, was excessively fond
of violent contrasts. Often the new start in the new key seems to have
afforded a sufficient feeling of variety, and it is worthy of note that
later, when Beethoven used violently contrasting kinds of themes to
express dramatically contrasting feelings, the question of key ceased to
have the same importance. Composers later than Mozart have never
troubled to mark their first key, so that the key of the second subject
might sound like a grateful change and continuation; the stuff of the
themes has been depended on for variety, while for unity the great art
of thematic development has served. So far as Haydn carried this art, we
may note a few of his devices. Double counterpoint, imitation, fugue, or
at least fughetta--these he returned to later. Bits of themes--mere
fragments marking definite rhythms--were used in spinning new melodies,
a rhythm, or perhaps a sufficiently distinctive harmonic progression,
connecting them with what had gone before. This use of a "germ" idea was
chiefly due to Beethoven, who, as in the first movement of the Fifth
Symphony, worked out a gigantic piece of music from four notes. But
Haydn knew well how the value of intervals in a melody might be changed
by the harmony, how a familiar bit of tune, with the simplest harmonies
arranged in a new way, resulted in practically a new melody. This device
he commonly used, sometimes with fine results. The incessant series of
climaxes, leading us on and keeping us in suspense until a certain point
is reached, then releasing the tension for a moment, and preparing to do
the same again--these he employed to an extent, but not as Beethoven
employed them.
All this Mozart perceived, and made instant use of. As for the
mediocrities for whose benefit Haydn is held to have "stereotyped" the
form, what could they learn from him? I will say what they did learn.
They learnt to take themes which did not sound exactly like the
subjects of a fugue; they laid out their first and their second, and
then they did not know what on earth to do, and footled and stumbled
till it was time for the recapitulation; so that Haydn himself said the
worst of the young men was that they could not stick long enough at
anything to work it out, and no sooner began one thing than they wanted
to be off to another. They were even worse off in their slow movements.
Unlike Mozart, they never discovered that the continuous melody, the
melos, was Haydn's grand secret; and if they had discovered it, they had
not the genius and the simple deep sincerity to make use of the
discovery. That natural sincerity of feeling kept Haydn on the right
path through all the weary Esterhazy years, when he was surrounded by
French influences and every influence that made for artificiality and
falsity.
The clavier music, with the exception of a few bits, is of no great
importance; still, I have played much of it with pleasure in Dr.
Riemann's edition, and found many charming things. His genius, however,
so far as anything less in scale than the symphony was concerned, was
all for the string quartet. Some of his slow movements, in their sudden
moments of unsuspected depths of feeling, prophesy of the coming of the
great human Beethoven rather than the ethereal, divinely beautiful
Mozart. Suavity, smoothness, piquancy, perfect balance between section
and section, and each movement and the other movements--these
characterize all the later quartets. They were intended for chamber use
only--to play them in a large hall is criminal--and it almost goes
without saying that, after the hot stuff of Beethoven and even Schubert,
more than a couple of them in an evening palls on one's palate. Haydn
was in many ways a great, a very great, composer; but no one can live
with his work as one can live with Bach or Beethoven. We are all of the
nineteenth or twentieth century; Haydn was of the eighteenth. Such
contradictions of godlike greatness and mere simple childishness were
surely never met together in one man, and we can worship the greatness
without any compulsion to tolerate the childishness.
For the operas a few words will suffice. In style they are far more
old-fashioned than Mozart's or Gluck's, and he had the dramatic--or,
rather, theatrical--instinct much less strongly developed than either of
these. He wrote strings of songs, duets, etc., for the theatre at
Esterház--many of them for the Marionette Theatre--and was content if
they pleased his patron. One or two were given elsewhere with some
success; but, with regard to _Armide_, he wrote stating his view that
his operatic works should not be given at all save in the conditions for
which they were composed. Those conditions have now for ever passed
away, and excepting as curiosities the operas will never be heard again.