It is a fact never to be forgotten, in hearing good papa Haydn's
music, that he lived in the fine old world when stately men and women
went through life in the grand manner with a languid pulse, when the
earth and the days were alike empty, and hurry to get finished and
proceed to the next thing was almost unknown, and elbowing of rivals
to get on almost unnecessary. For fifty years he worked away
contentedly as bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy, composing the due
amount of music, conducting the due number of concerts, taking his
salary of some seventy odd pounds per annum thankfully, and putting on
his uniform for special State occasions with as little grumbling as
possible, all as a good bandmaster should. He had gone through a short
period of roughing it in his youth, and he had made one or two
mistakes as he settled down. He married a woman who worked with
enthusiasm to render his early life intolerable, and begged him in his
old age to buy a certain cottage, as it would suit her admirably when
she became a widow. But he consoled himself as men do in the
circumstances, and did not allow his mistakes to poison all his life,
or cause him any special worry. His other troubles were not very
serious. A Music Society which he wished to join tried to trap him
into an agreement to write important compositions for it whenever they
were wanted. Once he offended his princely master by learning to play
the baryton, an instrument on which the prince was a performer
greatly esteemed by his retainers. Such teacup storms soon passed:
Prince Esterhazy doubtless forgave him; the Society was soon
forgotten; and Haydn worked on placidly. Every morning he rose with or
before the lark, dressed himself with a degree of neatness that
astonished even that neat dressing age, and sat down to compose music.
Later in each day he is reported to have eaten, to have rehearsed his
band or conducted concerts, and so to bed to prepare himself by
refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of
the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at
certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by
due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the
life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his
art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been
forced to become original. Whether it made him original or not, he
never thought of changing it until his prince died, and for a time his
services were not wanted at Esterhaz or Eisenstadt. Then he came to
England, and by his success here made a European reputation (for it
was then as it is now--an artist was only accepted on the musical
Continent after he had been stamped with the hall-mark of unmusical
England). Finally he settled in Vienna, was for a time the teacher of
Beethoven, declared his belief that the first chorus of the
"Creation" came direct from heaven, and died a world-famous man.
To the nineteenth century mind it seems rather an odd life for an
artist: at least it strikes one as a life, despite Haydn's own
opinion, not particularly conducive to originality. To use extreme
language, it might almost be called a monotonous and soporific mode of
existence. Probably its chief advantage was the opportunity it
afforded, or perhaps the necessity it enforced, of ceaseless industry.
Certainly that industry bore fruit in Haydn's steady increase of
inventive power as he went on composing. But he only took the
prodigious leap from the second to the first rank of composers after
he had been free for a time from his long slavery, and had been in
England and been aroused and stimulated by new scenes, unfamiliar
modes of life, and by contact with many and widely differing types of
mind. Some of his later music makes one think that if the leap--a leap
almost unparalleled in the history of art--had been possible twenty
years sooner, Haydn might have won a place by the side of Mozart and
Handel and Bach, instead of being the lowest of their great company.
On the other hand, one cannot think of the man--lively, genial,
kind-hearted, garrulous, broadly humorous, actively observant of
details, careful in small money matters--and assert with one's hand on
one's heart that he was cast in gigantic or heroic mould. That he had
a wonderful facility in expressing himself is obvious in every bar he
wrote: but it is less obvious that he had a great deal to express. He
had deep, but not the deepest, human feeling; he could think, but not
profoundly; he had a sense of beauty, delicate and acute out of all
comparison with yours or mine, reader, but far less keen than Mozart's
or Bach's. Hence his music is rarely comparable with theirs: his
matter is less weighty, his form never quite so enchantingly lovely;
and, whatever one may think of the possibilities of the man in his
most inspired moments, his average output drives one to the reluctant
conclusion that on the whole his life must have been favourable to him
and enabled him to do the best that was in him. Yet I hesitate as I
write the words. Remembering that he began as an untaught peasant, and
until the end of his long life was a mere bandmaster with a small
yearly salary, a uniform, and possibly (for I cannot recall the facts)
his board and lodging, remembering where he found the symphony and
quartet and where he left them, remembering, above all, that
astonishing leap, I find it hard to believe in barriers to his upward
path. It is in dignity and quality of poetic content rather than in
form that Haydn is lacking. Had the horizon of his thought been
widened in early or even in middle life by the education of mixing
with men who knew more and were more advanced than himself, had he
been jostled in the crowd of a great city and been made to feel
deeply about the tragi-comedy of human existence, his experiences
might have resulted in a deeper and more original note being sounded
in his music. But we must take him as he is, reflecting, when the
unbroken peacefulness of his music becomes a little tiresome, that he
belonged to the "old time before us" and was never quickened by the
newer modes of thought that unconsciously affected Mozart and
consciously moulded Beethoven; and that, after all, his very
smoothness and absence of passion give him an old-world charm,
grateful in this hot and dusty age. If he was not greatly original, he
was at least flawlessly consistent: there is scarce a trait in his
character that is not reflected somewhere in his music, and hardly a
characteristic of his music that one does not find quaintly echoed in
some recorded saying or doing of the man. His placid and even
vivacity, his sprightliness, his broad jocularity, his economy and
shrewd business perception of what could be done with the material to
hand, his fertility of device, even his commonplaceness, may all be
seen in the symphonies. At rare moments he moves you strongly, very
often he is trivial, but he generally pleases; and if some of the
strokes of humour--quoted in text-books of orchestration--are so broad
as to be indescribable in any respectable modern print, few of us
understand what they really mean, and no one is a penny the worse.
The "Creation" libretto was prepared for Handel, but he did not
attempt to set it; and this perhaps was just as well, for the effort
would certainly have killed him. Of course the opening offers some
fine opportunities for fine music; but the later parts with their
nonsense--Milton's nonsense, I believe--about "In native worth and
honour clad, With beauty, courage, strength, adorned, Erect with front
serene he stands, A MAN, the Lord and King of Nature all," and the
suburban love-making of our first parents, and the lengthy references
to the habits of the worm and the leviathan, and so on, are almost
more than modern flesh and blood can endure. It must be conceded that
Haydn evaded the difficulties of the subject with a degree of tact
that would be surprising in anyone else than Haydn. In the first part,
where Handel would have been sublime, he is frequently nearly sublime,
and this is our loss; but in the later portion, where Handel would
have been solemn, earnest, and intolerably dull, he is light,
skittish, good-natured, and sometimes jocular, and this is our gain,
even if the gain is not great. The Representation of Chaos is a
curious bit of music, less like chaos than an attempt to write music
of the Bruneau sort a century too soon; but it serves. The most
magnificent passage in the oratorio immediately follows, for there is
hardly a finer effect in music than that of the soft voices singing
the words, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,"
while the strings gently pulse; and the fortissimo C major chord on
the word "light," coming abruptly after the piano and mezzo-forte
minor chords, is as dazzling in its brilliancy to-day as when it was
first sung. The number of unisons, throwing into relief the two minor
chords on C and F, should be especially noted. The chorus in the next
number is poor, matched with this, though towards the end (see bars 11
and 12 from the finish) Haydn's splendid musicianship has enabled him
to redeem the trivial commonplace with an unexpected and powerful
harmonic progression. The work is singularly deficient in strong
sustained choruses. "Awake the harp" is certainly very much the best;
for "The heavens are telling" is little better than Gounod's "Unfold,
ye everlasting portals" until the end, where it is saved by the
tremendous climax; and "Achieved is the glorious work" is mostly
mechanical, with occasional moments of life. As for the finale, it is
of course light opera. On the whole the songs are the most delightful
feature of the "Creation," and the freshness of "With verdure clad,"
and the tender charm of the second section of "Roaming in foaming
billows," may possibly be remembered when Haydn is scarcely known
except as an instrumental composer. The setting of "Softly purling,
glides on, thro' silent vales, the limpid brook" is indeed perfect,
the phrase at the repetition of "Thro' silent vales" inevitably
calling up a vision, not of a valley sleeping in the sunlight, for of
sunlight the eighteenth century apparently took little heed, but of a
valley in the dark quiet night, filled with the scent of flowers, and
the far-off murmur of the brook vaguely heard. The humour of the
oratorio consists chiefly of practical jokes, such as sending Mr.
Andrew Black (or some other bass singer) down to the low F sharp and G
to depict the heavy beasts treading the ground, or making the
orchestra imitate the bellow of the said heavy beasts, or depicting
the sinuous motion of the worm or the graceful gamboling of the
leviathan. It has been objected that the leviathan is brought on in
sections. The truth, of course, is that the clumsy figure in the bass
is not meant to depict the leviathan himself, but his gambolings and
the gay flourishings of his tail. It is hard to sum up the "Creation,"
unless one is prepared to call it great and never go to hear it. It is
not a sublime oratorio, nor yet a frankly comic oratorio, nor entirely
a dull oratorio. After considering the songs, the recitatives, the
choruses, in detail, it really seems to contain very little. Perhaps
it may be described as a third-rate oratorio, whose interest is
largely historic and literary.