Beethoven and His Forerunners

by Daniel Gregory Mason

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.