The prevalent mood in Haydn’s music is one of frank cheerfulness. His native happy disposition, his kindliness and his ever-ready, good-natured humor, won him friends on every hand. These qualities in his music recommended it to the public. For the public wanted light-hearted music. Italian melody had won the world. Haydn’s happy, almost jovial melodies and his lively, obvious rhythms spread over the world almost as soon as he began to write.
From the start, however, he treated his art seriously. He was never a careless writer, though he had the benefit of little regular instruction. Clavier sonatas he had composed for his pupils were so much copied and circulated in manuscript that a piratical publisher finally decided money could be made from them. He had written quartets for strings, which were received with favor at soirées given by Porpora and men of rank. He won the approval of men like Wagenseil, Gluck, and Dittersdorf. All his work, though simple, is beautifully and clearly done.
He was not, like Mozart and Beethoven, a great player on the harpsichord or piano. In this respect, and, indeed, in many others, he is a little like Schubert. Both men wrote extremely well for the keyboard. The music of both has an unusual stamp of spontaneous originality. In Haydn’s music as in Schubert’s the quality of folk-melodies and folk-rhythms is very distinct. In spite of most obvious differences in temperament and in circumstances, they speak of the same race unconsciously influenced by Slavic elements.
The collection of thirty-four sonatas for pianoforte published by Peters includes, with perhaps one exception, the best of his work for that instrument alone. On looking over them one cannot but be struck by the general similarity of any one to the others. Some are more frankly gay, more boyish, than others; some tempered by seriousness. It may be added, however, that those of a later period do not seem generally more profound than those of an earlier one. The later ones are more elaborate, sometimes musically more complicated, but a single mood is on the whole common to them all.
The same is in part true of Mozart’s sonatas. Except as these show distinct traces of the various influences under which he came from time to time, they do not differ strikingly from each other. There is over both Haydn’s and Mozart’s keyboard music a normal cast of thought, as there is over the music of Couperin. In this they suffer by comparison with Beethoven, as Couperin suffers by comparison with Bach. One would have no difficulty in choosing ten Beethoven sonatas, each one of which is entirely distinct from the others, not by reason of form or style or content, but by reason of a very special emotional significance. One could not choose ten Haydn sonatas of such varied character. One does not, in other words, sit down to the piano with a volume of Haydn sonatas, expecting to confront a wholly new problem in each one, to meet a wholly new range of thought and feeling, passing from one to the other. One looks for the same sort of thing in each one, and with few exceptions one finds it.
To what is this due? To the nature of the man or to the circumstances under which most of the sonatas were written? Or is it due to public taste of the day and the consequent attitude of the man towards the function of music? To answer these questions would lead us far afield. But it is doubtless in large measure owing to this fact that Haydn, and Mozart too, have been thought to concern themselves primarily with form in music. And Beethoven has again and again been described as the man who overthrew the supremacy of the formal element in music, to which his predecessors are imagined to have sworn prime allegiance.
It is a great injustice so to stigmatize Haydn and Mozart. The beauty of their music is far more one of spirit than one of form. In his own day Haydn was thought to be an innovator, not in the matter of form, but in the spirit with which he filled forms already familiar. This may be said to be the spirit of humor. Weitzmann[30] cites an interesting passage in the Musikalisches Handbuch for the year 1782 which speaks of Haydn as ‘A musical joke-maker, but like Yorick, not for pathos but for high comic; and this in music most exasperating (verzweifelt sehr). Even his adagios, where the man should properly weep, have the stamp of high comedy.’ And a most joyous humor fills the Haydn sonatas full to overflowing. That is the secret of the charm they will exert on any one who takes the time to study them today, a charm which has little to do with formal perfection.
Let us look into a few of the sonatas. Most of them were written between 1760 and 1790. The few written earlier than 1760 are so obviously teaching pieces that, though they won him fame, we need not trouble to study them. Take, however, a sonata from the set published in 1774, known as opus 13, in C major (Peters No. 15). The whole first movement is built upon two rhythmical phrases which by their lilt and flow cannot fail to delight the dullest ear. There is the dotted sixteenth figure of the first theme, a theme frankly melodious for all its rhythmical vivacity; and later the same opening notes, with playful triplets added. Nothing profound or serious about it, but yet a wealth of vitality; and nearly all accomplished with but two voices.
The adagio seems not at all conspicuous, yet compare it with an adagio of Clementi to see how much genuine life it has. Then the rapid little last movement, with its rocking, tilting figures, all as sparkling as sunlight. Here again, only two voices in most of the movement.
Another sonata in the same set in F major (Pet. 20) is a little more developed. The quick falling arpeggio figures following the first theme are a favorite, comical device of Haydn’s. The second theme, if so it may be called, is only a series of scampering notes, with a saucy octave skip at the end; the whole full of smiles and laughter. The fine harp-like runs in the development section are reminiscent of Emanuel Bach. Haydn is noticeably fond of sudden and abrupt changes of harmony. There is one in the first section of this movement. But often he is surprisingly chromatic, more subtle in harmony than the naïve character of his music would lead one to expect him.