Haydn | Page 6

mastered the groundwork of his art. Gluck advised him to go to Italy,
but it is hard to imagine what he could have learnt there. He did not fail
to profit by an introduction to one Karl (etc.) von Fürnberg, one of the
old stamp of wealthy patrons of musicians. They loved to "discover"
rising talent, did these ancient, obsolete types of amateurs of art. They
were as proud of a brilliant protégé as a modern literary critic is when
he "discovers" a new minor poet. Von Fürnberg did his best for Haydn.
He enabled him to write the first eighteen quartets; he helped him to get
better terms for teaching--five florins a month instead of two. Through
von Fürnberg or some one else he got to know the Countess Thun, who
loved to play the friend to struggling genius. Finally, he was presented
to Count Morzin, who, in 1759, appointed him as his composer and
bandmaster. The band was small and the pay was small, but it placed
Haydn in an assured position. He had a band to practise on, and he soon
wrote his first symphony. Count Morzin's home was at Lukavec. Here
incessant concerts, vocal and instrumental, were given. Trios, quartets,
symphonies, concertos, divertimentos--all kinds of compositions, and
plenty of them, were required of Haydn, who must have had his hands
everlastingly full.
He now evidently thought the days of his apprenticeship over, and
proceeded at once to make a thorough fool of himself--as I have said,
for the only time in his life. He was friendly with the family of a
wig-maker named Keller, and gave lessons to his two daughters. He fell
in love with the younger. That might have been well enough. But the
girl elected to become a nun, and Haydn, either of his free and
particularly asinine will, or through persuasion, married the elder, Anne
Marie, on November 26, 1760. He was fully aware that his master,
Count Morzin, would keep no married man in his employ, so that his
act was doubly foolish. However, as it happened, that did not so much
matter. Morzin had to rid himself of such an expensive encumbrance as
an orchestra, and, marriage or no marriage, Haydn would have found
himself without a post. He quickly got another position, so that one bad
consequence of hasty marriage did not count. The other consequence

remained--he still had a wife. She was, from all accounts, a demon of a
wife. He had to separate from her, and long afterwards she wrote to him
asking him to buy her a certain house which would suit her admirably
as soon as he was good enough to leave her a happy widow. It is
satisfactory to know that Haydn bought the house for himself, and lived
in it, and that the lady died before him, though only eight years.
He had borne privation, hunger, cold, wet beds to sleep in, with the
inveterate cheeriness that never left him. He worked on steadily until
his old age in the service he now entered--that of Prince Anton
Esterhazy. Until the year 1791, when he adventured far away for the
first time to come to London, his outward life was as regular and
uneventful as that of a steady Somerset House clerk. There is next to
nothing to record, and I will spare the patient reader the usual stock of
fabulous anecdotes, the product of hearsay and loose imaginations. Let
us turn for a moment to what he had learnt and actually achieved during
the first thirty years of his life.
CHAPTER III
THE EARLY MUSIC
Save one quartet, I have heard none of the compositions of Haydn's
first period. Their interest is mainly historical, and the public cannot be
blamed for never evincing the slightest desire to hear them. Haydn had,
indeed, a glimmering of the new idea--perhaps more than a glimmering;
but, on the whole, he was still in leading strings, and dared not follow
the gleam. It is not surprising. He was not one of Nature's giant
eruptive forces, like Beethoven. His declared object always was to
please his patrons; and consider who his patrons were. We may be sure
that the "discords" of a Beethoven suddenly blared forth would have
scared Count Morzin and all his pigtail court. Haydn was supposed to
write the same kind of music as other musicians of the period were
writing, and, if possible, to do it better; Count Morzin did not pay him
to widen the horizons of an art. Consider his musical position also. He
was born twenty-seven years before the death of Handel, eighteen
before that of the greatest Bach; Bach was writing gigantic works in the

contrapuntal style and forms; Handel had not composed the chain of
oratorios on which his fame rests.