For some time he was not positively sure what course to pursue, and he projected a thousand plans, which were abandoned almost as soon as they were formed. For the most part hunger was the motive that urged him on to rash resolves, for instance, a pilgrimage to the Maria cloister in Styria. There he went at once to the choir-master, announced himself as a chapel-scholar, produced some of his musical sketches, and offered his services. The choir-master did not believe his story and dismissed him, as he became more importunate, saying: “There are too many ragamuffins coming here from Vienna, claiming to be chapel-boys, who can’t sing a note.” Another day, Haydn went to the choir, made the acquaintance of one of the singers and begged of him his music-book. The young man excused himself on the ground that it was against the rules. Haydn pressed a piece of money into his hand and stood by him until the music commenced. Suddenly he seized the book out of his hands and sang so beautifully that the chorus-master was amazed, and afterward apologized to him. The priests also inquired about him and invited him to their table. Haydn remained there eight days, and, as he said, filled his stomach for a long time to come, and afterward was presented with a little purse made up for him.
Among the bequests in Haydn’s will of 1802 is the following: “To the maiden, Anna Buchholz, one hundred florins, because her grandfather in my youth and at a time of urgent necessity lent me one hundred and fifty florins, without interest, which I repaid fifty years ago.” This, for him a considerable loan, enabled him for the first time to have a room of his own where he could work quietly. This was not far from the year 1750. Dies relates, in the year 1805: “Chance placed in Haydn’s hands, a short time before, one of his youthful compositions which he had utterly forgotten—a short four-voiced mass with two obligato soprano parts. The discovery of this lost child, after fifty-two years of absence, was the occasion of true joy to the parent. ‘What particularly pleases me in this little work,’ said he, ‘is its melody and positive youthful spirit,’ and he decided to give it a modern dress.” The mass was by this means preserved and may be regarded as his first large work. We are thus enabled to date it at the beginning of the year 1750.
At that time Haydn lived in the Michaeler house (which is still preserved), in the Kohlmarket, one of the choicest sections of the city, but was again under the roof and exposed to the inclemency of the weather. At one time the room had no stove, and winter mornings he had to bring water from the well, as that in his wash-basin was frozen. There were some distinguished occupants in the house; the princess Esterhazy, whose son, Paul Anton, became Haydn’s first patron, and the famous and talented poet Metastasio, who not long after confided to him his little friend Marianna Martines as a piano scholar, and paid his board as compensation. The child must have been well grounded in music, for thirty years later Mozart frequently played four-handed pieces with her. Her instruction, after the style of the time, obliged Haydn to write little compositions. These early pieces circulated freely but they have all been lost. He considered it a compliment for people to accept them, and did not know that the music-dealers were doing a flourishing business with them. Many a time he stopped with delight before the windows to gaze at one or another of the published copies. That this work, however, was very distasteful to him is evident from his own words: “After my voice was absolutely gone, I dragged myself through eight miserable years, teaching the young. It is this wretched struggle for bread which crushes so many men of genius, taking the time they should devote to study. It was my own bitter experience and I should have accomplished little or nothing if I had not zealously worked at night upon my compositions.” Urgent as his necessity was, he declined to take a permanent and good paying position in a Vienna band, and thereby sell his entire time. “Freedom! what more can one ask for?” said Beethoven. Haydn insisted upon having it at least for his genius. Many times in his life he gave expression to this feeling. In his old age he said to Griesinger: “When I sat at my old worm-eaten piano, I envied no king his happiness.” We shall see that he had more of real inward happiness as a composer, than as a pianist.
With such a disposition he easily retained his good humor and equanimity, and, many of his youthful traits clearly reflect the Haydn of the genial minuets and humorous finales. For the entertainment of his comrades, who were never lacking, he once tied a chestnut roaster’s hand-cart to the wheels of a fiacre, and then called to the driver of the latter to go on, while he quietly made off, followed by the curses of the two victims. At another time he conceived the idea of inviting several musicians at a specified hour to a pretended serenade. The rendezvous was in the Tiefengraben, where Beethoven lived for a few years after his arrival in Vienna. They were instructed to distribute themselves before different houses and at the street-corners. Even in the High Bridge street, where Mozart lived at a later period, stood a kettle-drummer. Very few of the musicians knew why they were there, and each had permission to play what he pleased. Dies concludes his description of this roguish trick as follows: “Scarcely had the horrible concert begun when the astonished occupants threw open their windows and commenced to curse the infernal music. In the meantime the watchmen approached. The players scampered off at the right time, except the drummer and one violinist, who were arrested. As they would not name the ringleader, they were discharged after a few days’ imprisonment.”
It was at this time of his early struggles that he went out one day to purchase some piano work suitable for study, and acting upon the advice of the music-dealer took a volume of the sonatas of Philip Emanuel Bach, the composer, who first placed piano music upon an independent and so to speak, poetical foundation. “It appears to me,” says this gifted son of the great Bach, in an autobiographical sketch, “that it is the special province of music to move the heart.” To such an one the genial and imaginative nature of our genuine Austrian musician did involuntary homage from the very first. “I never left my piano until I had played the sonatas through,” said Haydn, when old, with all the enthusiasm of youth, “and he who knows me thoroughly can not but find that I owe very much to Bach, for I understood and studied him profoundly. Indeed, upon one occasion he complimented me upon it.” Bach once said that he was the only one who completely understood him and could make good use of his knowledge. Rochlitz informs us that Haydn said: “I played these sonatas innumerable times, especially when I felt troubled, and I always left the instrument refreshed and in cheerful spirits.” A sketch of this same Bach, dated 1764, says: “Always rich in invention, attractive and spirited in melody, bold and stately in harmony, we know him already by a hundred masterpieces, but not as yet do we fully know him.”
In reality, instrumental music was now for the first time entering with self-confidence and strength upon the freer path of the opera. The end of that path, though far distant, was individual characterization. Bach himself once wrote a preface to a trio for strings. He says in it that he has sought to express something which otherwise would require voices and words. It may be regarded as a conversation between a sanguine and a melancholy person who dispute with one another through the first and second movements, until the melancholy man accepts the assertion of the other. At last, they are reconciled in the finale. The melancholy man commences the movement with a certain feeble cheerfulness, mixed with sadness, which at last threatens to become actual grief, but after a pause, is dissipated in a figure of lively triplets. The sanguine man follows steadily along, “out of courtesy,” and they strengthen their agreement, while the one imitates the other even to his identity. From such germs, in which the intellectual idea is more than its artistic expression, Haydn evolved that which made him the founder of modern instrumental music, the extreme limit of which is the representation of the world’s vital will.
Melody, in other words, the vital will illuminated by reason, also begins at this point to assert its sure mastery, as the song and the dance were then the essential type of this modern instrumental music. Key, accent, rhythm, even the rests, now became the conscious means of fixed color and tone, in which every emotion, every aspiration, every exertion of our powers has its full value. Harmonic modulations help to maintain and to deepen the given tone-color. Above all else, the dissonance is no longer a matter of mere chance or transient charm to the ear, but the road to an absolute effect, designed by the composer. Bach many a time sought for it, but Haydn gave it poetical effect. He does not hesitate, for example, in the finale of the great E flat major sonata, to introduce the augmented triad, which Richard Wagner uses in such a strikingly characteristic manner, bringing it in as a prepared dissonance, but at the same time allowing it to enter freely. And still more, they had before them the boundless treasures of Sebastian Bach, which Mozart and Beethoven at a later period opened so fully and which they emphasized with such heart-stirring power.
The difference of keys moreover became recognized as of greater value, and the ground-color of pieces is more individual. It does not follow, however, on this account that the marvelous gifts of native counterpoint were thrown aside. On the other hand, Haydn, in his treatment of the so-called thematic development in the second part of the first movement and in the finale of the sonata, brings them out according to their proper intellectual value, so that this music also must be “heard with the understanding.” Finally, the salient points of the whole style, which was called the “galante,” because it did not belong to the church or to the erudite but to the salon, is as, we may say, the grand architectural gradations and building up of the whole, which gives to it an arrangement of parts like the symmetry of the Renaissance art, and the same similarity modern music in general holds to the Gothic of the German counterpoint. Haydn by nature and every vital function, belonged to active life, with its manifold forms of thought and changing mental conditions, and, therefore, found the sonata-form the very best for the depositing of his musical wealth, and for the magnifying of his own inner powers and capacities by its further development. It was for this reason that he played the Bach “Sonatas for Students and Amateurs” with such delight and sat at his piano so gladly, for it aroused in him a freer activity of fancy and heartfelt emotions of similar form.
Philip Emanuel Bach’s instruction book, the “Versuch uber die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen,” published in Berlin in 1753, with which Haydn became acquainted shortly afterward, was, in his judgment, “the best, most thorough and useful work which had ever appeared as an instruction book,” and Mozart as well as Beethoven expressed the same opinion, and yet the ridiculous accusation was made after this that Haydn had copied and caricatured Bach, because Bach was not on good terms with him. The story may perhaps have arisen from the fact that Bach in his autobiography (1773) sought to attribute the decline of the music of his day to “the comedian so popular just now.” This, however, referred to something entirely different, and in 1783, Bach publicly wrote: “I am constrained by news I have received from Vienna to believe that this worthy man, whose works give me more and more pleasure, is as truly my friend as I am his. Work alone praises or condemns its masters, and I therefore measure every one by that standard.” Dies even declares that Haydn, in 1795, returned from London by way of Hamburg to make the personal acquaintance of Bach, but arrived too late, for he was dead. Bach died in 1788, and could it be possible that Haydn was not aware of it? The journey by way of Hamburg had another purpose.
Haydn still kept up his violin practice, and received further instruction from his countryman and friend, Dittersdorf, afterward the composer of “The Doctor and Apothecary.” Dies says: “Once they strolled through the streets at night and stopped before a common beer-house, in which some half drunk and sleepy musicians were wretchedly scraping away on a Haydn minuet. ‘Let us go in,’ said Haydn. They entered the drinking-room. Haydn stepped up to the first fiddler and very coolly asked: ‘Whose minuet is this?’ The fiddler replied still more coolly, and even fiercely: ‘Haydn’s.’ Haydn strode up to him, saying with feigned anger: ‘It is a worthless thing.’ ‘What! what! what!’ shrieked the interrupted fiddler, in his wrath, springing up from his seat. The rest of the players imitated their leader, and would have beaten Haydn over the head with their instruments, had not Dittersdorf, who was of larger stature, seized him in his arms and shoved him out of doors.”