CHAPTER III
THE EARLY MUSIC
Save one quartet, I have heard none of the compositions of Haydn's first period. Their interest is mainly historical, and the public cannot be blamed for never evincing the slightest desire to hear them. Haydn had, indeed, a glimmering of the new idea—perhaps more than a glimmering; but, on the whole, he was still in leading strings, and dared not follow the gleam. It is not surprising. He was not one of Nature's giant eruptive forces, like Beethoven. His declared object always was to please his patrons; and consider who his patrons were. We may be sure that the "discords" of a Beethoven suddenly blared forth would have scared Count Morzin and all his pigtail court. Haydn was supposed to write the same kind of music as other musicians of the period were writing, and, if possible, to do it better; Count Morzin did not pay him to widen the horizons of an art. Consider his musical position also. He was born twenty-seven years before the death of Handel, eighteen before that of the greatest Bach; Bach was writing gigantic works in the contrapuntal style and forms; Handel had not composed the chain of oratorios on which his fame rests. It is conceivable that had Haydn been born in less humble circumstances, that had he easily reached a high position, he, too, might have commenced writing fugues, masses and oratorios on a big scale—and be utterly forgotten to-day. His good luck thrust him into a lowly post, and by developing the forms in which he had to compose, and seeking out their possibilities, he became a great and original man.
It is hard, of course, to say how much any given discoverer actually discovers for himself, and how much is due to his predecessors and contemporaries. The thing certain is that the great man, besides finding and inventing for himself, sums up the others. All the master-works have their ancestry, and owe something to contemporary works. The only piece of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light suddenly perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen in," and almost as many authors have been found for it as there are historians. The bones of John of Fornsete (or another) have long since mouldered, and it need not disturb their dust to say that in all certainty there were many canons—hundreds, perhaps thousands—before "Sumer is icumen in" had the good fortune to be put in a safe place for posterity to stare and wonder at. This is platitudinous, but it needs to be borne in mind. And, bearing it in mind, we can see in Haydn's early attempts much in a style that had been used before or was being used at the time, much that is simply copied from the younger Bachs, from Domenico Scarlatti, Dittersdorf, Wagenseil, perhaps even his Parisian contemporary Gossec. But we see the character of the themes becoming more and more his own. There are no—or few—contrapuntal formulas, hardly any mere chord progressions broken into arpeggios and figurated designs. By going to the native dances and folk-tunes of his childhood Haydn took one of the most momentous, decisive steps in his own history and in the history of music. That too much quoted opening of the first quartet (B-flat) really marks the opening of an era. It was not a subject to be worked out contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently striking harmonically to tempt Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had constantly tempted Emanuel Bach, to make music and gain effects by repeating it at intervals above or below. It is an arpeggio of the chord of B-flat; it leaps up merrily, and has a characteristic delightful little twist at the end, and in the leap and in the twist lay possibilities of a kind that he made full use of only in his maturer style. All composers up till then, if they ventured to use bits of popular melody at all, gave them the scholastic turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was strong. The fact that Haydn gave it in its naïve form, invented themes which in their deliberate naïveté suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well as his raw material in folk-music.
The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped. Gradually the second subject differentiates itself from the first while maintaining the flow of the tide of music; and gradually we get the "working-out" section, in which the unbroken flow is kept up by fragments of the two subjects being woven into perpetually new melodic outlines, leading up to the return of the first theme; and the second theme is repeated in the key of the first, with a few bars of coda to make a wind-up satisfactory to the ear.
Here let us observe the value of key relationships. The first subject was given out in the key (say) of C. A momentary pause was made, and the second subject introduced in the dominant key G, and in this key the first section of a piece of music in symphony-form ends. That ending could not satisfy the ear, which demanded something more in the first key. Until recent times that desire was gratified with a repetition of the whole first section. The repetition of the first theme in the first key satisfied the ear for the moment, though at the end of the section the want was again felt. So when the end of the first section was again reached a modulation was made, gradually or suddenly, to another key; and in the course of this, the development or "working-out" section, many keys might be touched on, but without ever giving the ear the satisfaction of feeling itself at rest in the first key again. That was only done by the reintroduction of the first theme in the first key. The first theme is played and leads on to the pause, after which the second theme is given in the key of the first, so that after a few bars of coda, always in the same key, the movement terminates in a perfectly satisfactory manner. This is a crude description in which much is left out, but it will serve to enable the reader to understand how passages widely different in character are bound together into a coherent whole by the composer continuously leading the ear to expect something—that something being the original key-chord, and, while offering many things, only finally satisfying the ear's craving when the movement is coming to a finish. If the second theme, let us say, were in the same key as the first, it would sound like the beginning of a new movement, and at once we should have the continuity broken. As a passage between two passages in the original key it sounds perfectly in its place, and, no matter how contrasted in character, is a kind of continuation of the first passage. At the same time it creates a strong desire, that must be restrained till the time comes, for what follows. We listen to the second theme and to the "working-out" section, knowing we are far from home, but perfectly aware that we shall get there, and that a certain feeling of suspense will be relieved. Thus the music is like a great arch that supports itself. The unity got in the fugue by continuous motion is got here by one key perpetually leading the ear to ask for another key. It seems simplicity itself; its underlying idea—that of making the ear always expect something, and gratifying it by bits, and only fully towards the close of the movement—is that by which unity is combined with variety in modern music, though we have long since got rid of the "legitimate" series of keys.
The grouping of the movements need not detain us long. Many groupings had been tried; but it seems natural to open with an allegro—preceded or not preceded by a few bars of slow introduction—to follow this with a slow movement of some sort; then to insert or not to insert a movement of medium rapidity as a change from the bustle of the first and the quiet of the second; and finally to end with a merry dancing movement. This, again, is in the merest outline the plan adopted by Haydn. Whether he used three or four movements, the principle was the same—a quick beginning, a slow middle, and a quick ending; afterwards, each movement grew longer, but the way in which he lengthened them can better be treated later when we come to his bigger works.
From the first he used counterpoint, canon, imitation, and all the devices of the contrapuntal style. But the difference between his newer style and that of Wagenseil and the rest is that he neither uses counterpoint of any sort nor chord figures to make up the true substance of the music, but merely as devices to help him in maintaining a continuous flow of melody. That melody, as has already been said, might be in the top or bottom part, or one of the middle parts; but though it may, and, indeed, always did pause at times, as the melody of a song pauses at the end of each line, it is unbroken from beginning to end. The first part of a movement might be compared to the first line of a song: there is a pause, but we expect and get the second line; there is another pause, and we get a line which is analogous to the "working-out" section, and the last line, ending in the original key if not on the same note, corresponds to the final section of the movement, after which we expect nothing more, the ear being quite satisfied.