CHAPTER I
JOSEPH HAYDN
It is, as a rule, inexpedient to begin a book with the peroration. Children are spared the physic of the moral till they have sucked in the sweetness of the tale. Adults may draw from a book what of good there is in it, and close it before reaching the chapter usually devoted to fine writing. But the case of Haydn is extraordinary. One can only sustain interest in a biography of the man by an ever-present sense that he is scarcely to be written about. All an author can do is, in few or many words, to put a conundrum to the reader—a conundrum that cannot even be stated in exciting terms. This apparition and wonder-worker of the eighteenth century, Franz Joseph Haydn, is compact of paradoxes and contradictions. Born a peasant, and remaining in thought and speech a peasant all his days, he became the friend of princes, dukes, and, generally speaking, very high society indeed—and this in days when class distinctions had to be observed. He effected a revolution in music, and revolutionists must have daring; and save in music he showed no sign of unusual daring. His shaping and handling of new forms called for high intellect, and he displayed no intellect whatever in any other way—nothing beyond a canny, cunning shrewdness. Until he was sixty his life was a plodding one of dull regularity and routine; only his later adventures in England are in themselves of interest. The bare facts of his existence might be given in a few pages. Look at him from any point of view, and we see nothing but his simplicity; yet it is hard to believe that a man who achieved such great things was in reality simple. If only we had his inner spiritual biography! And even then one wonders whether we would have much. If Haydn actually knew his own secret—which I take leave to doubt—he certainly kept it. "The daemon of music," said Wagner, "revealing itself through the mind of a child"—which tells us nothing. In reading his Life we must perpetually bear in mind the mighty changes he wrought in and for music, else we shall not read far. Wherefore, first roughly to outline his achievement is the reason why I open with a peroration of a sort.
Haydn found music in the eighteenth-century stage, and carried it on to the nineteenth-century stage—in some respects a very advanced nineteenth-century stage. The problem he had to solve was as easy as that set by Columbus to the wiseacres, when once it was worked. It was how to combine organic unity of form and continuity with dramatic variety and the expressiveness of simple heartfelt song. From the date of the invention of music written and sung in parts, a similar problem had been set successive generations of musicians, and solved by each according to its needs and lights. At first words were indispensable; they were, if not the backbone of the music, at least the string on which the pearls might be strung. The first veritable composers—in setting, for instance, the words of the Mass—took for a beginning a fragment of Church melody, or, to the great scandal of the ecclesiastics, secular melody. Call this bit A, and say it was sung by Voice I.; Voice II. took it up in a different key, Voice I. continuing with something fresh; then Voice III. took it in turn, Voices I. and II. continuing either with entirely fresh matter, or Voice II. following in the steps of Voice I. And so on, either until the whole piece was complete or a section ended; but the end of one section was the jumping-off place for the commencement of another, which was spun out in exactly the same way. This method of "imitation" was employed by all the polyphonic composers. Continuity was assured; lovely or unlovely harmonic dissonances were always arising, and being resolved through the collisions and onward movement of parts; the music, both melodically and harmonically, could be as expressive as the particular composer's powers allowed. But the unity was the unity of a number of pieces of wood of varying length laid so as to overlap and nailed together; the superficial unity was due to the words; the real, essential unity depended on all the music being the sincere expression of a steady emotion—in those days religious emotion. Thus were attained the motet forms and the Mass, and, when the method was applied to secular words, the madrigal.
The earlier instrumental pieces were built after the same fashion—see the "fancies" and organ compositions of the time; but in these there were no words either to give the impulse or hold the bits together. With the fugue, music, unaided by words, was held together by its own innate strength; it became a self-sustaining One subject was generally taken; others—oftenest one, sometimes more—were added; all the subjects were passed about from part to part until the end of the composition, with the interspersion of passages called "episodes" for the sake of "variety." Here there was unity, continuity, with a vengeance. It was of the very essence of the fugue that the motion should never be arrested; if it seemed to halt for a moment, then, as in the older music, the stopping-place was the jumping-off place for a fresh start. All the severer men wrote in this form, most of them displaying marvellous mathematical—and some of them, alas! mechanical—ingenuity; a few of them, Bach towering high above the rest, attained a full and truthful expression of deep feeling. Bach, for the organ alone, raised sublime architectural structures, unapproachable, to use Schumann's word, in their magnificence. But the underlying feeling was always the same throughout; it might wax or wane in intensity: its character did not change. The themes, once announced, were rigid and unalterable; the music had always to be more or less like "a tune tied to a post." Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So later, a voice had to be found for shifting, complex, theatrically conflicting moods—states of mind characteristic of the modern and not of the bewigged world. When Haydn was still young the problem composers were more or less at random trying to solve was the creation of a new form of music and a new kind of music to fill the form. Neither the old form nor the old style would serve; the naïve dance-forms were too short. The content had to be as poignantly expressive, as direct in its appeal, as a folk-song; the different passages uttering the different moods had somehow to be welded together into a coherent whole—in one way or another dramatic climaxes and changes had to be arranged in an unbroken, logical, apparently inevitable sequence. I do not say the composers knew what they were after; on the contrary, as in the beginnings of anything new in any art, they simply were vaguely groping after something, they did not by any means realise what.
During the period when the polyphonic writers were pouring out their most glorious and living stuff, in the first lame, crude fugues the medium was being prepared for the triumphs of Handel and Bach; and in the same way, while Bach was writing the G minor and A minor fugues (I am not speaking of vocal music) some smaller men were working at what was destined to grow into the symphony, sonata and quartet. These terms are used here in their present-day signification. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such words as symphony and overture, and suite and sonata, were interchangeable; but that does not at all concern us here. The symphony or sonata or quartet form is what these early groups of movements led up to. That these groups of movements originated in the theatre is quite probable; this is indicated by the mere fact that the word "overture" was frequently used to describe them. When the fugue was in its fullest maturity composers were turning overtures out in vast quantities. Our own Arne tried his hand at them, and no one looking at his would dream that the sonata form was so nearly ripe at the time. Emanuel and Johann Christian Bach wrote them, and from these two Haydn got the hint which he turned to such splendid account. Abel, Stamitz and Wagenseil wrote them, and achieved nothing in particular. These groups consisted of three or four movements, and we need not linger long over them. It goes without saying that all the movements were short; they consisted either of simple tunes or of series of harmonic progressions broken up into figures or patterns. Of real development and climax there is none; of such things as well-defined, characteristic first and second subjects there is little sign. The themes were of the formal mathematical type developed during the fugal period—a type that "worked" easily, and in a way effectively, in the fugue itself, but was unnecessary and, indeed, tiresome when contrapuntal working was not the aim and object. The endless variants on this kind of thing, for example—
were simply a snare, and kept writers from seeing the importance of singing and singable melody in the coming style. To show the difference between the old and the new at once, let me here give two bits of themes from Mozart and Haydn. They are in appearance not so far removed from the contrapuntal type of theme, and while they sing themselves they yet served their inventors capitally for contrapuntal treatment.