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. František Š. Kuhač, 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. Kuhač, “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: