How music grew, from prehistoric times to the present day

by Marion Bauer; Ethel R. Peyser

CHAPTER XX
“Papa” Haydn and Mozart—the Genius

Franz Joseph Haydn
1732–1809

About the time in history when Franz Joseph Haydn was born, the world was very much upset. No one knew what to think or how. It was a time of battle and struggle as he was born in the midst of the Seven Years’ War and lived during the French Revolution. Everyone except for a few great persons felt bitter and discontented and doubt was everywhere. This seems to be the way wars and conflicts affect all peoples and it is why wars are so damaging.

Yet out of this mixture of feeling and thinking, the great classic period of music was created by such men as Bach and Haydn and Mozart and the finishing touches were put on it by Beethoven, the colossus.

Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau (1732), a little town in Austria near Vienna. His father was a wheelwright and his mother was a very good cook. Beethoven’s mother, too, was a professional cook.

These simple parents, his brothers and sisters, measuring not a baker’s, but a wheelwright’s dozen, had an hour or two of music every evening after the hard day’s work, and Mathias, the father, played the harp and sang. It was during these evenings that little Joseph’s father noticed that at the age of six he was passionately fond of music.

One time at a festival the drummer failed to appear and there was no one who could play for the choristers who were to march through the town. His teacher, Frankh, called Joseph and showed him how to make the drum stroke and told him to practice it. When he was left by himself he found a meal tub, over which he stretched a cloth, put it on a stool and drummed with such vigor that the whole thing toppled over and he and his drum were covered with meal! But he learned to drum! And the people laughed when in this solemn church festival, the little six year old Joseph was seen drumming the big drum carried by a hunchback in front of him. The drums on which he played are still at Hainburg. But, we forget, we have not brought him from Rohrau!

Not long before J. M. Frankh, a relative, came to visit the Haydns, and it was decided that he should take Joseph to Hainburg to teach him. The excitement, of course, was great and little Joseph felt very important with all the hustle and bustle preparing for his departure. Little did Saperle (his nickname) realize what a hard master he was getting in Frankh, who only cared for the pay he received from Joseph’s father. Nevertheless he learned much and showed great talent while at Hainburg and one day a great thing happened. Reutter, the organist of St. Stephen’s in Vienna, visited Frankh and as they talked of music the conversation turned to the choir school which Reutter directed. Frankh sent for Joseph, a slight, dark haired, dark eyed little boy, and Reutter asked him to read a piece of music at sight. Joseph looked at it and said: “How can I, when my teacher couldn’t?” Yet, Joseph did sing it sweetly and he entered the choir school. Here his life was a misery, for Reutter was harsh and unsympathetic, but soon Joseph’s hard life in the choir school was over, for one very cold winter night, he felt a little frisky, as many a healthy lad does, and pulled off the wig of a man in the choir. Reutter, who had wanted an excuse to rid himself of Joseph, because his voice had begun to break, threw him out into the cold. Poor Saperle had no other place to go and wandered about all night, until he met his acquaintance Spangler, a tenor who was very poor and so had sympathy with Haydn. He took him home to live with him and his wife and child in his attic,—one small room with no comfort and no privacy. All this time young Haydn was forced to earn his daily bread by teaching as much as he could, playing for weddings, baptisms, funerals, festivals, dances and street serenadings. This street serenading was a sweet and pretty custom of the time.

One night Haydn and some other youths serenaded Kurz, a prominent comedian. Kurz, pleased by the music below his window, called to the lads: “Whose music is that?” “Joseph Haydn’s,” called back Haydn. “Who is he and where?” asked Kurz. “Down here, I am Haydn,” said Joseph. Kurz invited him upstairs and Haydn, at the age of seventeen, received a commission for a comic opera, which had two special performances.

All this time he mixed with the poor and laboring people, and their songs became his songs, and his heart was full of their frolics and their pains. He was of the people and was so filled with their humor that later he was called the father of humor in music.