FOOTNOTES:
[31] Haydn on C. P. E. Bach: “Those who know me well must be aware that I owe very much to Emanuel Bach, whose works I understand and have thoroughly studied.” C. P. E. Bach on Haydn: “He alone has thoroughly comprehended my works, and made a proper use of them.”
[32] The numbering here refers only to the twelve great symphonies written for Salomon.
CHAPTER VI
MOZART
CHAPTER VI
MOZART
Although Mozart, born twenty-four years later than Haydn, and therefore belonging to another generation, was under heavy obligations to his forerunner for technical resources and models of style, his disadvantage in years was so much more than cancelled by the superior brightness of his genius that he in his turn was able to exert a potent influence upon the older man. The two great predecessors of Beethoven, accordingly, can be understood only when they are considered as subject to mutual influences, as supplementing each other through a delicate play of action and reaction. Haydn led the way into the terra incognita, did the rough work of clearing the ground, but it was Mozart who turned the wilderness into a garden. The chief dates of the two careers indicate concisely their interaction. Haydn was born in 1732, Mozart in 1756; yet Haydn, although he began writing symphonies as early as 1759, when Mozart was but four years old, wrote none that can compare with the younger man’s until 1791, or after Mozart had written his three great symphonies of 1788. As with the symphony, so it was with the string quartet. Haydn opened up the way, but Mozart, outrunning him, became eventually the leader. It was a sort of hare and tortoise race in which, to the confusion of morality, the hare won.