It would be too much to say that even Haydn fully realized the capacities of each of his four instruments. Indeed, his quartet writing is often bald and uninteresting. But at least he did write in four-part harmony, and it is certainly to him that we owe the installation of the quartet as a distinct species of chamber music. "It is not often," says Otto Jahn, the biographer of Mozart, "that a composer hits so exactly upon the form suited to his conceptions; the quartet was Haydn's natural mode of expressing his feelings." This is placing the Haydn quartet in a very high position among the products of its creator. But its artistic value and importance cannot well be over-estimated. Even Mozart, who set a noble seal upon the form, admitted that it was from Haydn he had first learned the true way to compose quartets; and there have been enthusiasts who regarded the Haydn quartet with even more veneration than the Haydn symphony. No fewer than seventy-seven quartets are ascribed to him. Needless to say, they differ considerably as regards their style and treatment, for the first was written so early as 1755, while the last belongs to his later years. But they are all characterized by the same combination of manly earnestness, rich invention and mirthful spirit. The form is concise and symmetrical, the part-writing is clear and well-balanced, and a "sunny sweetness" is the prevailing mood. As a discerning critic has remarked, there is nothing in the shape of instrumental music much pleasanter and easier to listen to than one of Haydn's quartets. The best of them hold their places in the concert-rooms of to-day, and they seem likely to live as long as there are people to appreciate clear and logical composition which attempts nothing beyond "organized simplicity." [See W. J. Henderson's How Music Developed, p. 191: London, 1899]. In this department, as Goethe said, he may be superseded, but he can never be surpassed.
The Symphony
For the symphony Haydn did no less than for the quartet. The symphony, in his young days, was not precisely the kind of work which now bears the name. It was generally written for a small band, and consisted of four parts for strings and four for wind instruments. It was meant to serve no higher purpose, as a rule, than to be played in the houses of nobles; and on that account it was neither elaborated as to length nor complicated as to development. So long as it was agreeable and likely to please the aristocratic ear, the end of the composer was thought to be attained.
Haydn, as we know, began his symphonic work under Count Morzin. The circumstances were not such as to encourage him to "rise to any pitch of real greatness or depth of meaning"; and although he was able to build on a somewhat grander scale when he went to Eisenstadt, it was still a little comfortable coterie that he understood himself to be writing for rather than for the musical world at large. Nevertheless, he aimed at constant improvement, and although he had no definite object in view, he "raised the standard of symphony—writing far beyond any point which had been attained before."
"His predecessors," to quote Sir Hubert Parry, "had always written rather carelessly and hastily for the band, and hardly ever tried to get refined and original effects from the use of their instruments, but he naturally applied his mind more earnestly to the matter in hand, and found out new ways of contrasting and combining the tones of different members of his orchestra, and getting a fuller and richer effect out of the mass of them when they were all playing. In the actual style of the music, too, he made great advances, and in his hands symphonies became by degrees more vigorous, and, at the same time, more really musical."
But the narrow limits of the Esterhazy audience and the numbing routine of the performances were against his rising to the top heights of his genius.
The Salomon Set
It was only when he came to write for the English public that he showed what he could really do with the matter of the symphony. In comparison with the twelve symphonies which he wrote for Salomon, the other, and especially the earlier works are of practically no account. They are interesting, of course, as marking stages in the growth of the symphony and in the development of the composer's genius. But regarded in themselves, as absolute and individual entities, they are not for a moment to be placed by the side of the later compositions. These, so far as his instrumental music is concerned, are the crowning glory of his life work. They are the ripe fruits of his long experience working upon the example of Mozart, and mark to the full all those qualities of natural geniality, humour, vigour and simple-heartedness, which are the leading characteristics of his style.
[figure: a musical score excerpt]
The Sonata