Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

“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.