Haydn

Haydn

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Title: Haydn
Author: John F. Runciman
Release Date: September 20, 2004 [eBook #13504]
Language: English
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HAYDN
by
JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians
LONDON
1908

CONTENTS
I. JOSEPH HAYDN II. 1732-1761 III. THE EARLY MUSIC IV.
1761-1790 V. MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD VI. 1790-1795 VII.
THE GREAT SYMPHONIES VIII. 1795-1809 IX. SUMMING UP
HAYDN'S PRINCIPAL COMPOSITIONS BOOKS ABOUT HAYDN
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