Haydn | Page 2

of "imitation" was employed by all the polyphonic
composers. Continuity was assured; lovely or unlovely harmonic
dissonances were always arising, and being resolved through the
collisions and onward movement of parts; the music, both melodically
and harmonically, could be as expressive as the particular composer's
powers allowed. But the unity was the unity of a number of pieces of
wood of varying length laid so as to overlap and nailed together; the
superficial unity was due to the words; the real, essential unity
depended on all the music being the sincere expression of a steady
emotion--in those days religious emotion. Thus were attained the motet
forms and the Mass, and, when the method was applied to secular
words, the madrigal.
The earlier instrumental pieces were built after the same fashion--see
the "fancies" and organ compositions of the time; but in these there
were no words either to give the impulse or hold the bits together. With
the fugue, music, unaided by words, was held together by its own
innate strength; it became a self-sustaining One subject was generally
taken; others--oftenest one, sometimes more--were added; all the
subjects were passed about from part to part until the end of the
composition, with the interspersion of passages called "episodes" for
the sake of "variety." Here there was unity, continuity, with a
vengeance. It was of the very essence of the fugue that the motion
should never be arrested; if it seemed to halt for a moment, then, as in
the older music, the stopping-place was the jumping-off place for a
fresh start. All the severer men wrote in this form, most of them
displaying marvellous mathematical--and some of them, alas!
mechanical--ingenuity; a few of them, Bach towering high above the
rest, attained a full and truthful expression of deep feeling. Bach, for
the organ alone, raised sublime architectural structures, unapproachable,
to use Schumann's word, in their magnificence. But the underlying
feeling was always the same throughout; it might wax or wane in
intensity: its character did not change. The themes, once announced,
were rigid and unalterable; the music had always to be more or less like

"a tune tied to a post." Dramatic changes of mood had no place. So
later, a voice had to be found for shifting, complex, theatrically
conflicting moods--states of mind characteristic of the modern and not
of the bewigged world. When Haydn was still young the problem
composers were more or less at random trying to solve was the creation
of a new form of music and a new kind of music to fill the form.
Neither the old form nor the old style would serve; the naïve
dance-forms were too short. The content had to be as poignantly
expressive, as direct in its appeal, as a folk-song; the different passages
uttering the different moods had somehow to be welded together into a
coherent whole--in one way or another dramatic climaxes and changes
had to be arranged in an unbroken, logical, apparently inevitable
sequence. I do not say the composers knew what they were after; on the
contrary, as in the beginnings of anything new in any art, they simply
were vaguely groping after something, they did not by any means
realise what.
During the period when the polyphonic writers were pouring out their
most glorious and living stuff, in the first lame, crude fugues the
medium was being prepared for the triumphs of Handel and Bach; and
in the same way, while Bach was writing the G minor and A minor
fugues (I am not speaking of vocal music) some smaller men were
working at what was destined to grow into the symphony, sonata and
quartet. These terms are used here in their present-day signification. In
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such words as symphony and
overture, and suite and sonata, were interchangeable; but that does not
at all concern us here. The symphony or sonata or quartet form is what
these early groups of movements led up to. That these groups of
movements originated in the theatre is quite probable; this is indicated
by the mere fact that the word "overture" was frequently used to
describe them. When the fugue was in its fullest maturity composers
were turning overtures out in vast quantities. Our own Arne tried his
hand at them, and no one looking at his would dream that the sonata
form was so nearly ripe at the time. Emanuel and Johann Christian
Bach wrote them, and from these two Haydn got the hint which he
turned to such splendid account. Abel, Stamitz and Wagenseil wrote
them, and achieved nothing in particular. These groups consisted of

three or four movements, and we need not linger long over them. It
goes without saying that all the movements were short; they consisted
either of simple tunes or of