Daniel Gregory Mason

CHAPTER V
HAYDN

In the early eighteenth century there lived in a small village called Rohrau, situated near the Leitha River, which forms the boundary between Lower Austria and Hungary, a certain wheelwright and parish sexton, named Matthias Haydn, and his wife. They were simple peasant people, a little more educated than was usual with their class. Matthias Haydn, besides a smattering of general information, had a talent for harp-playing, though he could not read music. Frau Haydn’s accomplishments ran in the direction of domestic management and religion; and as she eventually found herself the mother of twelve children, she may be supposed to have stood in need of both. Franz Joseph Haydn, born either on March 31 or April 1, 1732, was the second of these children. He was destined to create an epoch in the art of music.

How, in spite of his rather commonplace parentage and his heavy burden of poverty, he managed to develop so remarkable an artistic genius, has been a problem most puzzling to students; but much light has been thrown upon the whole matter by the recent investigations of a Croatian scholar, Dr. Frantis?ek S?. Kuhac?, made accessible to readers of English by Mr. W. H. Hadow’s “A Croatian Composer.” These researches have shown that the whole region about Rohrau was inhabited by a largely Croatian or South Slavonic population; that Haydn himself was probably of Croatian heredity; and that at the very least his youth was spent among one of the most naturally musical of all races. “One in every three of the Croats,” says Dr. Kuhac?, “either sings, plays, or composes.” “The men sing at their plows,” says Mr. Hadow, “the girls sing as they fill their water-pots at the fountain; by every village inn you may hear the jingle of the tambura, and watch the dancers footing it on the green.” Here, then, was an environment precisely suited to develop the qualities we shall observe in the mature Haydn; and it helps to an understanding of almost every phase of his genius if we remember that as a boy he was surrounded, not by stolid German peasants, amiable but inexpressive, nor by a cultivated but unspontaneous aristocracy, but by a race of natural musicians, in whom dance and song were native and necessary modes of expression.

His formal musical education was less propitious. At the age of six he began the study of the violin, the harpsichord, and singing, under one Frankh, a distant relative, in the town of Hamburg; but was so neglected and abused that in later years he was wont to say: “From Frankh I got more cuffs than gingerbread.” He was probably glad enough when, two years later, he was able to go to Vienna as a choirboy in St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Here he stayed ten years, half-starved, insufficiently clothed, and carelessly taught. Only his own indomitable energy enabled him to learn anything at all. He worked while the other choir-boys were at play; he practiced indefatigably on his little clavier, which was so small and light that he could take it under his arm to a quiet place; he covered reams of music paper with his compositions, thinking that “it must be all right if the paper was nice and full;” he expended six of his father’s hard-earned florins on ponderous text books of counterpoint and thoroughbass, and spent wakeful nights poring over them. Meanwhile his relations with the musical director in authority became more and more strained, until finally, in November, 1749, there was open rupture, and Haydn, seventeen years old, friendless, and without money, was turned into the street.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the hardships he now had to endure. By playing his violin at balls and weddings, by making arrangements of the compositions of amateurs for a pittance, by teaching—in a word, by any drudgery that anyone would pay for, he managed to keep himself from starving. And through it all, in his dimly-lighted, unheated attic, with roof so out of repair that snow and rain fell on the bed, and the water, of a winter morning, froze in the pitcher, he continued, as best he could, his own studies in composition. Years afterward he wrote of this period of his life, with his usual quaint piety: “I was forced for eight whole years to gain a scanty livelihood by giving lessons; many a genius is ruined by this miserable mode of earning daily bread, as it leaves no time for study. I could never have accomplished even what I did if, in my zeal for composition, I had not pursued my studies through the night.... I offer up to Almighty God all eulogiums, for to Him alone do I owe them. My sole wish is neither to offend against my neighbor nor my gracious Prince, but above all our merciful God.”

Although Haydn had at this time to endure humiliations and slights as well as actual want, his situation was gradually ameliorated by the patronage of some wealthy music-lovers with whom his growing reputation as a composer brought him acquainted. His first fixed post was that of music-director to a Bohemian nobleman, Count Morzin, for whose band he wrote, in 1759, his first symphony. In the next year, however, Count Morzin married and discontinued his musical establishment, and Haydn was left for a short time without definite work, until in 1761 he was installed in the post he held uninterruptedly for thirty years. His own marriage, meanwhile, took place in 1760.

How Haydn, who was quite as prudent as he was amiable, could have been so rash as to marry at just this moment, it is difficult to explain; especially as he married, not the woman he had fallen in love with, but her elder sister. The whole affair is almost farcically perverse. A young composer of twenty-eight, just pulling himself up at length on the shelving bank of patronage, out of the slough of miscellaneous drudgery in which he has been weltering for years, offers to encumber himself at the critical moment with the daughter of one Keller, a barber. The lady, for unknown reasons, among which may or may not have been a dread of the quagmire, betakes herself to a nunnery. Whereupon the barber persuades the composer to marry the older daughter, Anna Maria. The outcome of this marriage, which took place in November, 1760, proved, as might have been expected, unfortunate. The wife began almost immediately to treat her husband with indifference and petty malignity, which rapidly increased. She seemed not to care whether he composed or cobbled, so long as he supplied her with money; she used his manuscripts for curling-papers; when he was in London in 1791 she wrote him appeals for money wherewith to buy “a widow’s home.” Altogether the uncongeniality was intolerable, and the pair lived together but a few years, although Frau Haydn did not die until 1800.

The thirty years from 1761 to 1791, a period of the utmost importance in the development of Haydn’s genius, was of the greatest monotony so far as events are concerned. His post was that of musical director or Kapellmeister (at first Vice-Kapellmeister), to the great, princely family of Esterhazy, one of the most wealthy and influential of the noble families of Hungary. He served them both at Eisenstadt, at the foot of the Leitha mountains, in Hungary, where Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy was the reigning prince in 1761, and at Esterhaz, the magnificent palace, with groves, grottoes, hot-houses, deer-parks, and flower gardens, which Prince Nicholas erected in 1766. Of the musician’s duties and social status in this princely house, an idea may be gathered from the following sentences from the contract entered into at the beginning of his term of service as Vice-Kapellmeister:

“The said Joseph Hayden shall be considered and treated as a member of the household. Therefore his Serene Highness is graciously pleased to place confidence in his conducting himself as becomes an honourable official of a princely house. He must be temperate, not showing himself overbearing towards his musicians, but mild and lenient, straightforward and composed. It is especially to be observed that when the orchestra shall be summoned to perform before company, the said Joseph Hayden shall take care that he and all members of his orchestra do follow the instructions given, and appear in white stockings, white linen, powdered, and either with a pig-tail or a tie-wig.

“Seeing that the other musicians are referred for directions to the said Vice-Kapellmeister, therefore he should take the more care to conduct himself in an exemplary manner, abstaining from undue familiarity, and from vulgarity in eating, drinking and conversation, not dispensing with the respect due to him, but acting uprightly and influencing his subordinates to preserve such harmony as is becoming in them, remembering how displeasing the consequences of any discord or dispute would be to his Serene Highness.

“The said Vice-Kapellmeister shall be under an obligation to compose such music as his Serene Highness may command, and to retain it for the absolute use of his Highness, and not to compose anything for any other person without the knowledge and permission of his Highness.

“The said Vice-Kapellmeister shall take careful charge of all music and musical instruments, and shall be responsible for any injury that may occur to them from carelessness or neglect.”

The demands made upon “the said Joseph Hayden” were obviously severe; but he had in return many advantages. He was secure from want, a great consideration to one who had starved in garrets and sung in the streets and the cafÉs for his supper. He came in contact with many interesting people, both among the social and the professional guests of Esterhaz. Above all, he had a good orchestra at his command, and he was not only privileged, but obliged, to compose for it incessantly. Thus he was incited to constant study and experiment; so that before many years had elapsed he had become a thorough master of his medium, with the requisite technical skill to express any idea that his genius might suggest. It was largely during these years that he poured out his endless series of masterpieces of chamber and orchestral music.

One result of all the work thus accomplished was that when, late in 1790, Prince Anton Esterhazy dismissed his entire corps of musicians, Haydn’s reputation was so widespread that he was immediately solicited by one Salomon, a violinist and conductor, to make a trip to London. Hard as it must have been for him, at his age of nearly sixty, to exchange his studious habits for the fatigues and excitement of travel, the opportunity was too good to be lost; and late in 1790 he set out with Salomon, reaching London early in the next year.

In reading of this visit to England, as well as of the second one which Haydn made three years later, one hardly knows whether to be more impressed by the fame and prosperity which came to him from all sides, or by the homely simplicity with which he received them. This quiet, precise, pious old kapellmeister was the object of the most flattering attentions from everyone in London; he was half worshipped by the ladies, he was fÊted by noble families, he was the guest of the Prince of Wales. His works were awaited with impatience and received with enthusiasm; he was honored with the Degree of Doctor of Music by Oxford University; his pockets were filled with enough English gold to buy him German soup for the rest of his life. Yet he was almost as much overwhelmed as delighted with all this unwonted excitement. With a characteristic mixture of homeliness and piety he wrote to his friend Frau von Genzinger: “Oh! how often do I long to be beside you at the piano, even for a quarter of an hour, and then to have some good German soup. But we cannot have everything in this world. May God only vouchsafe to grant me the health that I have hitherto enjoyed, and may I preserve it by good conduct and out of gratitude to the Almighty!”

His English note-book reveals the same childlike attitude, mingled with an interest in details and statistics curiously characteristic of his matter-of-fact mind. Here are a few typical entries:

“The national debt of England is estimated to be over two hundred millions. Once it was calculated that if it were desired to pay the debt in silver, the wagons that would bring it, close together, would reach from London to York (two hundred miles), each wagon carrying £6,000.”

“The city of London consumes annually 800,000 cartloads of coal. Each cart holds thirteen bags, each bag two Metzen. Most of the coal comes from Newcastle. Often 200 vessels laden with coal arrive at the same time. A cartload costs 2-1/2 pounds.”

“Beginning of May, 1792, Lord Barrymore gave a ball that cost 5,000 guineas. He paid 1,000 guineas for 1,000 peaches; 2,000 baskets of gooseberries cost 5 shillings apiece.”

“On the 14th of December I dined at the house of Mr. Shaw. While I was bowing all round I suddenly perceived that the lady of the house, besides her daughters and the other ladies, wore on their head-dresses a pearl-colored band, of three fingers breadth, embroidered in gold with the name of Haydn, and Mr. Shaw wore the name on the two ends of his collar in the finest steel beads. N. B.—Mr. Shaw wanted me to give him a souvenir, and I gave him a tobacco-box which I had just bought for a guinea. He gave me his in exchange.”

The last sentence is particularly delicious for its revelation of Haydn’s usual canniness. Not even his enjoyment of fame could make him forget that the tobacco-box given away had cost him a guinea; but he is solaced by the thought that he had got another in return. One is reminded of the same trait in reading his comment on the high prices of race-horses:

“These horses are very dear. Prince Wallis a few years ago paid 8 thousand pounds for one, and sold it again for 6 thousand pounds. But at the first race he won with it 50,000 pounds.”

The entire diary exhibits a similar thriftiness, shrewdness, and practicality; by impressing the reader with the curiously prosaic and matter-of-fact quality of Haydn’s mind, it throws as much light on the essential character of his music as on that of his personality. Fancy Beethoven, or any other speculative, imaginative mind, going to see Dr. Herschel’s great telescope, looking through it at the stars, and then carefully recording in his journal: “It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter”!

One of the interesting revelations made by Haydn’s note-book is that of his sentimental attachment to a certain Mistress Shroeter. It is a charming and in a way a pathetic story; the beginning formal, the continuation touchingly human in spite of the old-fashioned phrases in which it reaches us, and the end mysterious. Mistress Shroeter, a widow, relict of a German musician, begins it in the following note, copied out carefully, together with all the subsequent ones, by Haydn:

“Mrs. Shroeter presents her compliments to Mr. Haydn, and informs him she is just returned to town and will be very happy to see him whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson. James St., Buckingham Gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.”

The lessons thus begun continued all through the period of the composer’s first London visit, and the correspondence soon begins to reveal a growing attachment between the lonely, unhappily married Haydn and, in his own simple words, “the English widow in London who loved me.” The letters, quaint, formal, tender, are couched in the vocabulary of “Evelina” and “Clarissa Harlowe;” their “fair author,” as one feels impelled to call her, might have been, with her funny little abbreviations, her odd admixture of grandiloquence and impulsive feeling, and her constant underscoring of unimportant words, Clarissa herself. A note of April 12, 1792, will perhaps sufficiently show her way of writing:

“M. D. [My dear.] I am so truly anxious about you. I must write to beg to know how you do? I was very sorry I had not the pleasure of Seeing you this Evening, my thoughts have been constantly with you and indeed my D. L. [dear love], no words can express half the tenderness and affection I feel for you. I thought you seemed out of spirits this morning. I wish I could always remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the most perfect sympathy in all your sensations and my regard for you is Stronger every day. My best wishes attend you and I am ever my D. H. [dear Haydn] most sincerely your Faithful, etc.”

Thus tenderly and innocently the friendship progresses, with constant protestations of regard, with continual solicitude to know “how you do” and “whether you have Slept well,” with little discreet panegyrics over “your sweet compositions and your excellent performance,” and with many fears “lest you fatigue yourself with such close application”; until, with Haydn’s departure for home, it suddenly and abruptly closes, never to be resumed. Did these two meet again when Haydn returned to London in 1794? Did the letters recommence? We do not know. The story ends with a letter of Mistress Shroeter’s, written just before Haydn’s departure in 1792, beginning with the hope that he has “Slept well,” and ending with a protestation of “inviolable attachment.”

After his second trip to London was over, Haydn returned to Austria, dividing his time between Vienna and Esterhaz, where he was again made music-director. Getting now to be an old man, he lived quietly, making few public appearances. He composed at this time his famous Austrian National Hymn, as well as his two oratorios, “The Creation” and “The Seasons,” produced respectively in 1798 and in 1801. In 1803 he made his final appearance as a conductor, and in 1808 he appeared in public for the last time. The occasion was a performance of “The Creation.” “All the great artists of Vienna were present,” says Mr. Hadden, “among them Beethoven and Hummel. Prince Esterhazy had sent his carriage to bring the veteran to the hall, and as he was being conveyed in an arm-chair to a place among the princes and nobles, the whole audience rose to their feet in testimony of their regard. It was a cold night, and ladies sitting near swathed him in their costly wraps and lace shawls. The concert began, and the audience was hushed to silence. When that magnificent passage was reached, ‘And there was light,’ they burst into loud applause, and Haydn, overcome with excitement, exclaimed: ‘Not I, but a Power from above created that.’ The performance went on, but it proved too much for the old man, and friends arranged to take him home at the end of the first part. As he was being carried out, some of the highest in the land crowded round to take what was felt to be a last farewell; and Beethoven bent down and fervently kissed his hand and forehead. Having reached the door, Haydn asked his bearers to pause and turn him towards the orchestra. Then, lifting his hand, as if in the act of blessing, he was borne out into the night.”

Near the end of May, 1809, Haydn began to fail rapidly. On the twenty-sixth, gathering his household and having himself carried to the piano, he played over three times his “Emperor’s Hymn,” with great emotion. Five days later he died. The curious admixture of kindliness and practical good sense which give to Haydn’s character such an individual charm appear even in his will, a long and detailed document very precisely drawn up. He bequeaths “To poor blind Adam in Eisenstadt, 24 florins”; “To my gracious Prince, my gold Parisian medal and the letter that accompanied it, with a humble request to grant them a place in the museum at Forchtenstein”; “To FrÄulein Bucholz, 100 florins. Inasmuch as in my youth her grandfather lent me 150 florins when I greatly needed them, which, however, I repaid fifty years ago.” After many other bequests he concludes; “I commend my soul to my all-merciful Creator; my body I wish to be interred, according to the Roman Catholic forms, in consecrated ground.”

In personal appearance Haydn was an odd mixture of the ordinary and the unusual, of commonplaceness and distinction. The complexion, marked with small-pox, was so dark that he was sometimes called “The Moor”; the nose was strong but heavy; the lower lip thick and projecting; the jowl square and massive. Yet his dark gray eyes were said to “beam with benevolence,” and Lavater, the great physiognomist, perceived in his eyes and nose “something out of the common,” while dismissing the mouth and chin as Philistine. Of himself Haydn said: “Anyone can see by the look of me that I am a good-matured sort of fellow”; yet he confessed that the ladies, who generally found him interesting, were “at any rate not tempted by my beauty.”

The explanation of these apparent contradictions is to be found in the peculiar make-up of that individuality of which the external appearance was an index. That mixture of heavy jowl and penetrative eyes bespoke the combination of a certain rudeness, primitiveness, commonplaceness of emotional nature, with rare intellectual vivacity and acumen. We have already remarked the prosaic attitude of Haydn towards men and things, as well as the purely intellectual alertness with which he observed them. His vision of the world was more that of an accountant or statistician than that of a poet. He saw simply and clearly; for him objects stood in the hard light of reason, not surrounded by any haze of reverie or atmosphere of emotion. His mental efficiency is especially striking when we consider the natural disadvantages under which it labored. Haydn was distinctly an uneducated man. The son of a wheelwright, in a petty Austrian village, he had little schooling, little early contact with men and women, little commerce with all the indefinable influences that make for cultivation of the rarer powers of intellect and spirit. He knew Italian and a little French, but never had any English until he went to London at nearly sixty. He read little, and did not care to discuss politics, science, or any art but music. He spoke always in the strong dialect of his native place. Yet by force of sheer intelligence and ability he established the art of music on a new basis. Those penetrating gray eyes saw much that was hidden from men far more happily born, far more delicately nurtured.

On the other hand, the impressive peculiarity of his emotional nature is its normality. Emotionally he was typical rather than personal, centred in the common interests and instincts rather than eccentric to them, conservative and conventional rather than radical and individual. This is doubtless the meaning of that somewhat stolid jaw, that firm and vigorous, but rather insensitive mouth, that sane but unimaginative configuration of the whole lower face, the expressive seat of the will and the feelings. Beethoven is interesting largely for his departure from the average human norm, his highly developed selfhood, his inexorable individuality; Haydn, on the contrary, compels our study just because he is so like other men, so amply representative of them within their own limitations. The traits that stand out in him are traits “in widest commonalty spread”; a brisk and busy vivacity, finding itself much at home in this world, with plenty to do and to inquire into; connected with that, a half-childlike shrewdness in affairs, a canny ability to take care of himself, practical talent, worldly skill; on a higher plane, a sunny kindliness and good cheer that make him one of the most genial of men, a kind of simple human warmth and happiness and joy; finally, on the highest plane of all, though but a projection of the human cheer, an ardent piety, a wholehearted faith in God, an earnest and yet quite simple religious devotion. These are traits not exclusively Haydnish, so to speak, as mystical devotion and resolute idealism are Beethovenish, but common to all humanity.

Now, these two fundamental qualities of Haydn’s nature as a man, his emotional normality and his mental efficiency, deserve the especial attention we have been giving them, not only on account of their intrinsic human interest, but also because they determined the quality of his work as a musician. His wide sympathy with ordinary men, his practical sense and shrewdness, his brisk good cheer, his childlike and wholly unmetaphysical piety—all these traits made his music, in its expressive aspect, far more catholic, far more universal, than the austere and ethereal music of mysticism. At the same time, his practical and systematic mind took firm grasp upon these novel elements of expression, and wrought them into a clear and easily comprehensible scheme. He stamped the naÏve and fragmentary utterances of folk-feeling with the careful, purposeful orderliness of art; and by so doing, launched music upon a new period of development.

In both his great tasks, the secularization of expression and the systematization of form, Haydn’s personal faculties were reinforced by the general musical conditions of his time. At the end of the eighteenth century the mystical type of expression in music had not only arrived at its acme in Palestrina’s work, after which it must inevitably decline, but it had ceased to be an adequate reflection of the general human attitude toward life. Men had turned away from contemplating the mysteries of divinity, to interest themselves more than ever before in the commonest feelings, the universal experiences, of ordinary human beings. They had discovered the miraculousness of the commonplace, and learned to respect themselves. And they had consequently begun to prize as genuine self-expressions those upwellings of naÏve emotion, the songs and dances of the people, which had been so long contemptuously ignored by academic musicians. These folk-songs had none of the limitations of the more dignified, recognized art, which paid the price of its dignity in a sacrifice of fullness of expression. They voiced not only what was edifying, what was devout and mystical and other-worldly. They palpitated with simple human feeling, very much of this world; they were tender, animated, melancholy, languorous, excited, merry, amorous, even trivial, dull, or indecent at times, as human beings are. They were in fact the crude but genuine expression of that full, simple, unrestricted humanity to which idealism had begun to pin its faith.

The musicians of the seventeenth century, instinctively aware that folk-music somehow succeeded in voicing a wider arc of the full circle of feeling than the conventional ecclesiastical art, applied themselves with enthusiasm to the endeavor to assimilate and idealize it, to turn the current of its pulsing blood into the torpid veins of academic music, at the same time refining its crudities and broadening its proportions. The result of their effort was the suite, or series of dances and songs, the most popular and prevalent authorized form of that century. The suite was, indeed, in its degree a successful embodiment of folk-types of expression in a form broad and dignified enough to satisfy Æsthetic demands. But it was not capable of extended growth. The shortness of its movements, their over-obvious scheme of phrase-balance, their uniformity of key, rendered impossible any great increase in complexity of form. Composers therefore found themselves in a dilemma: they were compelled to write either in the old polyphonic style, which labored under insurmountable limitations of expression, or in the new harmonic style, which was as yet capable only of a rudimentary scheme of form, and therefore unsatisfactory to the sense of plastic interest and beauty.

It was at this auspicious moment that Haydn, equipped, as we have seen, with an affectionate and sympathetic heart, beating in unison with that of common humanity, and with a lucid, practical, pedestrian mind, well-fitted to disentangle and arrange in order the factors of a complex problem, appeared in the arena. The adjustment between his nature and his circumstances was thus peculiarly complete. He found in the folk-music of his native place, to begin with, a type of emotional expression with which he was, both as regards qualities and limitations, in complete sympathy. “The Croatian melodies,” says Mr. W. H. Hadow, “are bright, sensitive, piquant, but they seldom rise to any high level of dignity or earnestness. They belong to a temper which is marked rather by feeling and imagination than by any sustained breadth of thought, and hence, while they enrich their own field of art with great beauty, there are certain frontiers which they rarely cross, and from which, if crossed, they soon return.” Could any better short description be devised of Haydn’s own characteristic vein of sentiment—“bright, sensitive, piquant, but seldom rising to any high level of dignity or earnestness”? His music is, in fact, from the point of view of expression, essentially an expansion, development, and idealization of the characteristic utterance of his race.

On the other hand, he had the mental grasp necessary to organize all this crude, inchoate, fragmentary material into the finished and coherent forms of art. It is a long step from even the most eloquent expressions of single aspects of feeling, in short songs and dances, to an extended composition in which moods are coordinated and contrasted, proportions fitly ordered, and unity combined with broad scope—a step which only intelligence can make. The technical task which faced the musicians of the day was to find a scheme of musical form that should knit the accents of the popular speech, in themselves poignant and thrilling but disjointed, fragmentary, halting, into a fluent and rational utterance. Sir Hubert Parry explains the situation as follows: “What Haydn had to build upon, and what was most congenial to him through his origin and circumstances, was the native people’s songs and dances, which belong to the same order of art in point of structure as symphonies and sonatas; and what he wanted, and what all men who aimed in the same direction wanted, was to know how to make this kind of music on a grander scale. The older music of Handel and Bach leaned too much towards the style of the choral music and organ music of the church to serve him as a model. For the principle upon which their art was mainly built was the treatment of the separate parts. In the modern style the artistic principle upon which music is mainly based is the treatment of harmonies and keys, and the way in which those harmonies and keys are arranged. In national dances few harmonies are used, but they are arranged on the same principles as the harmonies of a sonata or a symphony; and what had to be found out in order to make grand instrumental works was how to arrange many more harmonies with the same effect of unity as is obtained on a small scale in dances and national songs.” Here again, happily, the historic moment was favorable to Haydn. Many tentative efforts toward a new method of musical structure, based on an organized contrast of themes and keys, had been made; and all that was needed to weld them into a style as firm and clear as it was novel and interesting was systematization by an orderly, responsible, and efficient mind. Haydn had such a mind; and he established sonata-form on a permanent basis.

In this great task he was helped by study of the experiments in the new or secular music already made by such men as Carl Philip Emanuel Bach,[31] a son of the great Sebastian, who struck into paths very different from the contrapuntal ones of his father; he was helped by the intrinsic principles of structure of the songs and dances themselves, which made up his musical material; but above all he was helped by the bias of his own mind, practical and business-like. It hardly needs demonstration that in the initiatory period of an art-form the chief desideratum is clearness, simplicity, a clean, concise treatment which subordinates all details to the salient features of the construction, and foregoes variety rather than endanger unity. Haydn’s temperamental make-up, the almost childlike directness of his intellect, ensured his fitting treatment of an art itself just emerging from infancy.

The procedure of Haydn, then, in his treatment of the problems of form, or the shaping of his material, was chiefly notable for simplicity, directness, shrewd adaptation of means to ends. He was not a lover of the subtle, the recondite; he went straight to his mark, economized his resources, prized ready intelligibility beyond all other qualities. This appears, first, in his initial motifs or melodic germs; and second in his methods of building them up into larger artistic organisms. Look at the motifs of his “Surprise Symphony,” for example, noting their metrical vigor and their harmonic simplicity, particularly in the two middle movements. The meter of the Andante is the baldest combination of eighth-notes and quarter-notes, like that of the tunes children pick out on the piano; its harmony is tonic, sub-dominant, dominant, tonic again, and the inevitable modulation to the dominant, and so on. The Minuet is a rollicking, waltz-like tune, seesawing happily about from tonic to dominant, with some simple modulations for variety’s sake. Haydn wrote thousands of such motifs, all vigorous, incisive, and utterly simple.

When we pass from considering the texture or molecular tissue of the music to an examination of its structure, or composition, the same qualities continue to impress us. There is a constant dearth of contrast, a constant simplicity that to modern ears, it may be, seems like over-simplicity. The motifs, for example, are generally expanded into complete phrases by the addition of more or less homogeneous or amorphous matter, rather than by the entrance of new motifs or figures, such as Mozart often, and Beethoven generally, uses. The schemes of balance between the phrases are generally obvious and mathematically exact, four measures answering four, or eight, eight; whereas in Beethoven, and even in Mozart, the phrase-balance is much more subtle and various. The transitional passages leading from one theme to another are so perfunctory, so conventional, that Wagner felicitously compared them to “the clattering of dishes at a royal feast.” The themes themselves, too, are often but slightly contrasted in character and style; instead of setting a dreamy or emotional second theme over against a sprightly or dashing first theme, Haydn is apt to make the second hardly more than a variation of the first. In the development portions of his first movements, again, where the logical power and ingenuity of the composer is of course most sorely taxed, Haydn is apt to resort to only the more obvious means of exploiting his subjects, to represent them literally, with merely a new figure of accompaniment, or to change a major theme to minor, or vice versa, instead of drawing forth their latent but at first sight hidden possibilities. He avoids radical transformations, either of harmony or rhythm. To put the matter in the most general terms, he is more spontaneous than thoughtful, more vivacious than logical, more bent on securing perfect transparency for his tonal web than on filling it with iridescent colors, tempting opacities, charming labyrinths of light and shade. We must remember, however, that Haydn was writing for people to whom the whole scheme of thematic form was unfamiliar. His ingenuity was taxed to be as regular as possible, rather than to introduce attractive irregularities. He was, in fact, laying down the first principles of a novel type of art; and it is the supreme virtue of first principles to be simple, fundamental, unmistakable.

Our interest in defining Haydn’s general artistic function as that of a pioneer, a systematizer and law-giver, must not blind our eyes, however, to his strokes of originality. In an occasional daring modulation, happy irregularity, or nicely-calculated blurring of outline, Haydn anticipates some of Beethoven’s most characteristic effects. In the Minuet of his Ninth Symphony,[32] for example, there are some charming instances of “shifted rhythm”; and in that of the Eighth he revels in odd rhythmical surprises with a truly Beethoven-like elfishness. As for the matter of harmonic ingenuity, the instances are bewilderingly numerous. Two or three of the most striking may, however, be mentioned, and the rest left to the reader’s own research. In the introduction of the Third Symphony, in E-flat, Haydn makes a most interesting enharmonic change from C-flat to B-natural, quite in the Beethoven manner, plunging the hearer into a mystification that clears up only with the return, after a few measures, to the key of C-minor, the relative of the original key. The Introduction of the Fifth Symphony contains similar ingenious modulations. But the most Beethovenish trick of all is perhaps the modulation back to the last entrance of the main theme of the Finale of this same symphony. The key of the movement is D-major; Haydn, however, getting himself well established in F-sharp minor, harps on C-sharp as the dominant of this distant key; many C-sharps are heard, in a persistent rhythm of two shorts and a long, until one has forgotten all about the original key of the piece; the C-sharps fade away to piano, then to pianissimo, then to silence; when suddenly, in the same rhythm, three loud D’s bring the piece emphatically back to the home key, and forthwith it proceeds merrily upon its way. This device is surprisingly unlike Haydn in his usual jog-trot mood; it is amazingly like the daring strokes of his great successor. The C-sharp is drummed into us until we take it for granted, and conceive it wholly as the dominant of F-sharp-minor; and then by his sudden blast of D’s the composer shows us that he had after all decided to consider it the leading-note of the home key—and therewith, home we are!

But in spite of some striking anticipations of later effects, Haydn is for the most part, and in the long run, a true child of his own epoch, writing with its concern for clearness of form, its somewhat gingerly treatment of contrast, its quaint, old-fashioned, and yet awakened spirit. He assimilated the best capacities of music as he found them, and by dint of his skill and perseverance, moulded them until they issued forth in what was to all intents and purposes a new art. But the novelty in this art was not the novelty of a new vision, a new character, a new personal ideal; it was the novelty of a more perfect adjustment than had yet been achieved of expressive impulses and formal principles already widely disseminated. Haydn’s great achievement was the development of popular types of expression into a true art by the application to them of schemes of design, or form, which in his day had just become possible for the first time as a result of the pioneer work in harmonic and rhythmic organization done by his immediate predecessors. Lacking either of these two constituents, Haydn’s art could not have existed; and coming into being as a resultant of both, it had qualities of its own, different from those of either one of its factors alone. It marked, indeed, the beginning of secular music as a mature art.

The final emphasis in any definition of Haydn’s qualities, whether of expression or of form, depends on the point of view from which it is made, on whether he is considered as a follower of Palestrina or as a forerunner of Beethoven. In comparison with Palestrina he is a modern. In common with his immediate predecessors, but more fully and definitely than any of them, he turns away from the ecclesiastical inspiration and the contrapuntal forms of the sixteenth century, to establish himself solidly on the untrammeled expression of universal human feeling, through forms based on harmonic and rhythmic principles. He sacrifices the dignity, the peace, the detachment, of Palestrina, in order to voice the self-consciousness, the mobile vitality, the turbulence and struggle and ebullient life of the modern man. For this reason, as well as because of the forms he uses, he is “the first of secular composers,” “the father of instrumental music.” Yet he is not free as Beethoven is free, nor is his individualism the fierce nonconformity of the great anarch of outworn conventions and restricting formulÆ. His methods, compared with Beethoven’s, are rigid, narrow, inelastic; the music they shaped had something of the angular outline of all childlike art. Had it not been for their regularity, however, Beethoven’s felicitous daring would have miscarried; without their order as a point of departure, his “splendid experiments” would have led, not to freedom, but to chaos. Mozart’s playful nickname of “Papa Haydn” is more than a term of endearment; it is a condensed philosophy. Haydn was indeed the father of instrumental composers, in this sense: that he laid the foundation for all their performance, and that they made the advances, in the light of which he appears old-fashioned, only by a wise use of resources inherited from him.