Haydn was the wrong teacher for Beethoven and Beethoven the wrong pupil for Haydn. The young man’s relations with the old master were kind and friendly (Beethoven, according to his diaries, treated Haydn to “chocolate twenty-two times” and to “coffee six times”). But there was a spiritual gulf between them of which they both became aware. Haydn, indeed, foreshadowed musical romanticism, yet he did not, like his new pupil, arrogantly identify himself with it. Beethoven had none of that soul of a servitor which Haydn had acquired through his long career; so it was not without reason that the teacher used to allude to the hot-headed pupil as “the Grand Mogul”. Moreover, Beethoven wanted to be instructed in counterpoint the hard way; and he was greatly irritated when Haydn did not carefully correct his technical exercises. Therefore, though the relationship remained outwardly amicable and the lessons went on, Beethoven changed teachers. He placed himself in the hands of the composer, Johann Schenk, and of the contrapuntist, Johann Albrechtsberger. As Schenk had told Beethoven in looking over some of his technical work, Haydn was now too busy composing great masterworks to be occupied by the needs of a particularly obstreperous student.
In 1794 Haydn started out a second time for London, but this time not in Salomon’s company. Yet as he did not wish to make the journey unattended he decided on one of his young friends for an escort—Polzelli, Beethoven or some other. His usual luck attended him when he picked Johann Elssler, whose father had copied music at Eszterháza. Johann was Haydn’s godson and in the fullness of time he became the father of the famous dancer, Fanny Elssler. He idolized Haydn, served him hand and foot, was secretary, copyist and the first to assist Haydn in cataloguing his works. On this English visit Haydn traveled rather more extensively than the first time. He went to the Isle of Wight, to Southampton, to Waverly Abbey, to Winchester. He went to Hampton Court, which reminded him of Eszterháza. He heard “miserable trash” at the Haymarket Theatre and even worse at Sadler’s Wells. In Bath he met a Miss Brown, “an amiable discreet person”, who had the additional advantage of “a beautiful mother”; he saw the grave of “Turk, a faithful dog and not a man”; and he composed music to a poem by the conductor of the Bath Harmonic Society, “What Art Expresses”.
In August, 1795, Haydn was back in Vienna, and although the heart-breaks of the previous return were spared him he found plenty of new organizational labor awaiting him at Eszterháza, where a new prince, Nicholas II, a grandson of “The Magnificent” now held sway. His artistic tastes, though pronounced, did not run primarily in the directions of music. He gave Cherubini a gorgeous and costly ring, he liked the music of Reutter and Michael Haydn more than that of the great Eszterházy Capellmeister, and then insulted Beethoven with a stupid remark about the latter’s C major Mass. He even criticised Haydn’s management of some detail at an orchestral rehearsal, whereupon the now thoroughly irascible master turned on his patron with a wrathy: “Your Highness, it is my job to decide this!” He felt now that a Doctor of Music at Oxford should be addressed more respectfully than simply as “Haydn”.
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In London the composer once said: “I want to write a work which will give permanent fame to my name in the world.” After his numberless symphonies, his masses, his clavier works, his vast store of chamber music, his concertos, his operatic miscellany, his songs and arias—after all these what could remain? England had given him one unrivaled experience from which he could nourish his genius—the mighty Handel Commemoration, in Westminster Abbey. Haydn had experimented in countless forms, but one. That was the oratorio and in this he could undertake new flights.
Where should he find a subject? Some say that a musical friend of Haydn’s answered the master by opening a Bible standing handy and exclaiming: “There! Take that and begin at the beginning!” Others maintain that Salomon gave him a libretto which one Lidley had pieced together from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for Handel. Dr. Geiringer believes that both accounts may be true. At all events, Haydn returned to Vienna with the text. It was, however, in English, which Haydn understood imperfectly. It was necessary, consequently, to find an accomplished translator. As usual, good fortune attended him. Gottfried van Swieten, a literatteur, prefect of the Vienna Royal Library, friend of Mozart, worshipper of Handel and Bach, who thought highly of Haydn, was wealthy even if despotic, yet still after a fashion musical—this man was able to furnish Haydn what he required. Nay, more, “he got together a group of twelve music-loving noblemen and each guaranteed a contribution to defray the expenses of performance and pay an honorarium to the composer.” And Haydn set jubilantly and, withal, reverently to work. He “spent much time over it, because he intended it to last a long time.”
The labor gave him extraordinary happiness. It answered his inmost wants. Here he could give the freest possible rein to all that inborn optimism of his nature. Always profoundly religious, as free from doubt and skepticism as a child, his reverence was as sincere as it was sunny. Here he walked, literally, “hand in hand with his God”. There came to the surface, moreover, all those springs of folk-song influence which were either remembered or subconsciously wrought into the fabric of his being. And he was now working on a newer and larger scale than hitherto. “Never was I so devout as when composing ‘The Creation’” he afterwards said. “I knelt down every day and prayed to God to strengthen me in my work.” If his inspiration ever threatened to grow sluggish “I rose from the pianoforte and began to say my rosary”. This cure, he insisted, never failed.
The curious aspect of “The Creation” is that, though composed to a German translation of the English text, it is one of those rare masterpieces which actually sound better in a translation than in the original. The answer to this springs probably from the circumstance that “The Creation” is, in point of fact, an Anglo-Saxon heritage. An examination of numerous details of its setting and declamation make it clear that, almost subconsciously, Haydn has set and accompanied the English words in more subtly revealing fashion than the German. Similarly, Haydn achieved in the whole work that effect at which he was aiming. Writing to her daughter, the Princess Eleanore Liechtenstein said of the oratorio, “One has to shed tears about the greatness, the majesty, the goodness of God. The soul is uplifted. One cannot but love and admire.”
The first performance of “The Creation” was given at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna on April 29, 1798. Only invited guests attended this and the second performance, though the mobs outside were so great that extra detachments of police had to be summoned. Haydn conducted, not from a keyboard, but in the modern way, with a baton. The rendering was superb, the audience enraptured. Haydn himself said later: “One moment I was as cold as ice, the next I seemed on fire. More than once I was afraid I should have a stroke.” “The Creation” promptly spread over the world. In England it “was to prove so unfailing an attraction that proceeds from it, mostly given to charitable institutions, by far surpassed even the receipts from the London benefit concerts that once had seemed so extraordinary to Haydn”. In Paris Bonaparte was on his way to hear a performance of it when a bomb exploded in the street through which he was passing, narrowly missing his carriage. In America it took root in short order.
The score deserves, in reality, a much more detailed scrutiny than can be given here. The introduction, the “Representation of Chaos”, does not receive the attention it actually merits. There is a warmth of color to the writing, particularly to the woodwind, which is something new in Haydn. And the closing bars of the amazing page are the more startling because they provide a foretaste of one of the most striking passages in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”. It may be mentioned, in passing, that this is by no means the only time when Haydn affords an amazing Wagnerian presage.