I
The prevalent mood in Haydn’s music is one of frank cheerfulness. His native happy disposition, his kindliness and his ever-ready, good-natured humor, won him friends on every hand. These qualities in his music recommended it to the public. For the public wanted light-hearted music. Italian melody had won the world. Haydn’s happy, almost jovial melodies and his lively, obvious rhythms spread over the world almost as soon as he began to write.
From the start, however, he treated his art seriously. He was never a careless writer, though he had the benefit of little regular instruction. Clavier sonatas he had composed for his pupils were so much copied and circulated in manuscript that a piratical publisher finally decided money could be made from them. He had written quartets for strings, which were received with favor at soirées given by Porpora and men of rank. He won the approval of men like Wagenseil, Gluck, and Dittersdorf. All his work, though simple, is beautifully and clearly done.
He was not, like Mozart and Beethoven, a great player on the harpsichord or piano. In this respect, and, indeed, in many others, he is a little like Schubert. Both men wrote extremely well for the keyboard. The music of both has an unusual stamp of spontaneous originality. In Haydn’s music as in Schubert’s the quality of folk-melodies and folk-rhythms is very distinct. In spite of most obvious differences in temperament and in circumstances, they speak of the same race unconsciously influenced by Slavic elements.
The collection of thirty-four sonatas for pianoforte published by Peters includes, with perhaps one exception, the best of his work for that instrument alone. On looking over them one cannot but be struck by the general similarity of any one to the others. Some are more frankly gay, more boyish, than others; some tempered by seriousness. It may be added, however, that those of a later period do not seem generally more profound than those of an earlier one. The later ones are more elaborate, sometimes musically more complicated, but a single mood is on the whole common to them all.
The same is in part true of Mozart’s sonatas. Except as these show distinct traces of the various influences under which he came from time to time, they do not differ strikingly from each other. There is over both Haydn’s and Mozart’s keyboard music a normal cast of thought, as there is over the music of Couperin. In this they suffer by comparison with Beethoven, as Couperin suffers by comparison with Bach. One would have no difficulty in choosing ten Beethoven sonatas, each one of which is entirely distinct from the others, not by reason of form or style or content, but by reason of a very special emotional significance. One could not choose ten Haydn sonatas of such varied character. One does not, in other words, sit down to the piano with a volume of Haydn sonatas, expecting to confront a wholly new problem in each one, to meet a wholly new range of thought and feeling, passing from one to the other. One looks for the same sort of thing in each one, and with few exceptions one finds it.
To what is this due? To the nature of the man or to the circumstances under which most of the sonatas were written? Or is it due to public taste of the day and the consequent attitude of the man towards the function of music? To answer these questions would lead us far afield. But it is doubtless in large measure owing to this fact that Haydn, and Mozart too, have been thought to concern themselves primarily with form in music. And Beethoven has again and again been described as the man who overthrew the supremacy of the formal element in music, to which his predecessors are imagined to have sworn prime allegiance.
It is a great injustice so to stigmatize Haydn and Mozart. The beauty of their music is far more one of spirit than one of form. In his own day Haydn was thought to be an innovator, not in the matter of form, but in the spirit with which he filled forms already familiar. This may be said to be the spirit of humor. Weitzmann[30] cites an interesting passage in the Musikalisches Handbuch for the year 1782 which speaks of Haydn as ‘A musical joke-maker, but like Yorick, not for pathos but for high comic; and this in music most exasperating (verzweifelt sehr). Even his adagios, where the man should properly weep, have the stamp of high comedy.’ And a most joyous humor fills the Haydn sonatas full to overflowing. That is the secret of the charm they will exert on any one who takes the time to study them today, a charm which has little to do with formal perfection.
Let us look into a few of the sonatas. Most of them were written between 1760 and 1790. The few written earlier than 1760 are so obviously teaching pieces that, though they won him fame, we need not trouble to study them. Take, however, a sonata from the set published in 1774, known as opus 13, in C major (Peters No. 15). The whole first movement is built upon two rhythmical phrases which by their lilt and flow cannot fail to delight the dullest ear. There is the dotted sixteenth figure of the first theme, a theme frankly melodious for all its rhythmical vivacity; and later the same opening notes, with playful triplets added. Nothing profound or serious about it, but yet a wealth of vitality; and nearly all accomplished with but two voices.
The adagio seems not at all conspicuous, yet compare it with an adagio of Clementi to see how much genuine life it has. Then the rapid little last movement, with its rocking, tilting figures, all as sparkling as sunlight. Here again, only two voices in most of the movement.
Another sonata in the same set in F major (Pet. 20) is a little more developed. The quick falling arpeggio figures following the first theme are a favorite, comical device of Haydn’s. The second theme, if so it may be called, is only a series of scampering notes, with a saucy octave skip at the end; the whole full of smiles and laughter. The fine harp-like runs in the development section are reminiscent of Emanuel Bach. Haydn is noticeably fond of sudden and abrupt changes of harmony. There is one in the first section of this movement. But often he is surprisingly chromatic, more subtle in harmony than the naïve character of his music would lead one to expect him.
In the opus 14, published in 1776 by Artaria, there are some joyous sonatas. The first theme of one in G major (Pet. 11) suggests Schubert by its sweetness. There is a minuet instead of a slow movement, and the final presto is a theme with lively variations. The Alberti bass on which the fourth variation floats is irresistibly naïve. Another sonata in E-flat seems richer. It is hardly less naïve and less humorous than the others in the set, but there is a warmer coloring. The overlapping imitations in the fourth, fifth, and sixth measures are strangely poignant, especially as they appear later in the restatement. There is a minuet instead of a slow movement, of which the trio is especially beautiful. The way in which the first phrase seems to be prolonged into five measures, once more suggests Schubert.
It is, of course, nearly impossible to characterize the sonatas in words, or to distinguish any striking feature in one which may not be found in another. There are two sonatas in E-flat (Pet. 1 and 3) among the last he wrote. These appear at first sight more profound than the earlier ones, but it is hard in studying them to find them so. They are more fully scored, more fully developed, perhaps more moderately gay. But it is still the Haydn which spoke in the earlier ones. Premonitions of Schubert are again evident in the second of these sonatas (Pet. 3), in the second section of the slow movement, and in the brief passage in E-flat minor in the minuet. There are very fine moments in the first movement, too. It will be observed that the second theme is very like the first. This is frequently the case with Haydn, a feature which points to his dependence on Emanuel Bach. Even in his symphonies it shows itself, conspicuously in the great symphony in D major, No. 7, in Breitkopf and Härtel’s edition. In the sonata in question, however, there is no lack of secondary material of varied and decided character; for example, the transitional section between the first and second themes; the broad closing theme of the first section, with its alternate deep phrases and high answers; and the carefully wrought measures which open the development section.
The effect of the measures which bring this section almost to a close and then lead on into the recapitulation is almost magical. We approach the romantic. The strange power of silence in music is nowhere better employed, a power which the old convention of constant movement had kept concealed, at least in instrumental music. Mention has been made of the pauses in Emanuel Bach’s music and in Clementi’s; but here in Haydn’s sonata is a passage of more than twenty measures in which silence seems to reign. Something calls on high and there is silence. Then from some deep down range there is a faint answer. And so the high calls across silence to the deep, again and again, as if one without the other might not prevail against some spirit of silence.
Such a passage as this, and many another in Haydn’s music, suggest Beethoven. One is quick to exclaim, ‘Ah! this foreshadows the great man to come!’ Almost as if the music had no merit but by comparison. Yet Haydn’s music should be taken at its own value. Only in that way may the charm of it, and the genuine beauty as well, be fully appreciated. Surely it has a life and a spirit all its own, without which music would be poorer.
Only one clavier work of special significance, apart from the sonatas, remains to be mentioned. This is a very beautiful series of variations on a theme in F minor. They present, of course, the familiar features of Haydn’s style, clear and ‘economic’ part-writing, perfect balance and lucidity in form, abrupt, unprepared chords, furnishing what Hadow has aptly called ‘points of color’; and still, smooth, chromatic progressions which are somehow naïve. The theme itself is in two sections, with a ‘trio’ section in F major, full of ascending and descending arpeggio figures which seem in Haydn’s music like the warble of a bird’s song, odd little darts and flurries of sound. There is over the whole a changing light of plaintive and gay which is rather different from the perpetual sunshine of the sonatas.
It is needless to say that the theme undergoes no such metamorphosis in the course of the variations as Bach’s theme in his Goldberg Variations. The accompaniment may be said to remain practically the same throughout the set. The first variation leads the melody through half-steps, in syncopation, and numerous trills are brought in to beautify the almost too ingenuous major section. In the second variation the melody is dissolved, so to speak, into a clear stream of rapid counterpoint which curves and frets above and below the familiar accompaniment. The final restatement of the theme leads by abrupt soft modulations into a long coda in which traces of the theme still linger. The whole set makes up a masterpiece in pianoforte literature, and may be ranked as one of the most beautiful pieces of music in the variation form.