Haydn | Page 7

It is conceivable that had Haydn been
born in less humble circumstances, that had he easily reached a high
position, he, too, might have commenced writing fugues, masses and
oratorios on a big scale--and be utterly forgotten to-day. His good luck
thrust him into a lowly post, and by developing the forms in which he
had to compose, and seeking out their possibilities, he became a great
and original man.
It is hard, of course, to say how much any given discoverer actually
discovers for himself, and how much is due to his predecessors and
contemporaries. The thing certain is that the great man, besides finding
and inventing for himself, sums up the others. All the master-works
have their ancestry, and owe something to contemporary works. The
only piece of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light
suddenly perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen
in," and almost as many authors have been found for it as there are
historians. The bones of John of Fornsete (or another) have long since
mouldered, and it need not disturb their dust to say that in all certainty
there were many canons--hundreds, perhaps thousands--before "Sumer
is icumen in" had the good fortune to be put in a safe place for posterity
to stare and wonder at. This is platitudinous, but it needs to be borne in
mind. And, bearing it in mind, we can see in Haydn's early attempts
much in a style that had been used before or was being used at the time,
much that is simply copied from the younger Bachs, from Domenico
Scarlatti, Dittersdorf, Wagenseil, perhaps even his Parisian
contemporary Gossec. But we see the character of the themes becoming
more and more his own. There are no--or few--contrapuntal formulas,
hardly any mere chord progressions broken into arpeggios and
figurated designs. By going to the native dances and folk-tunes of his
childhood Haydn took one of the most momentous, decisive steps in his
own history and in the history of music. That too much quoted opening
of the first quartet (B-flat) really marks the opening of an era. It was not
a subject to be worked out contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently
striking harmonically to tempt Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had
constantly tempted Emanuel Bach, to make music and gain effects by
repeating it at intervals above or below. It is an arpeggio of the chord of

B-flat; it leaps up merrily, and has a characteristic delightful little twist
at the end, and in the leap and in the twist lay possibilities of a kind that
he made full use of only in his maturer style. All composers up till then,
if they ventured to use bits of popular melody at all, gave them the
scholastic turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was
strong. The fact that Haydn gave it in its naïve form, invented themes
which in their deliberate naïveté suggest folk-song and dance, hints at
what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration
as well as his raw material in folk-music.
The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has
the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes
it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost
from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his
folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped. Gradually the
second subject differentiates itself from the first while maintaining the
flow of the tide of music; and gradually we get the "working-out"
section, in which the unbroken flow is kept up by fragments of the two
subjects being woven into perpetually new melodic outlines, leading up
to the return of the first theme; and the second theme is repeated in the
key of the first, with a few bars of coda to make a wind-up satisfactory
to the ear.
Here let us observe the value of key relationships. The first subject was
given out in the key (say) of C. A momentary pause was made, and the
second subject introduced in the dominant key G, and in this key the
first section of a piece of music in symphony-form ends. That ending
could not satisfy the ear, which demanded something more in the first
key. Until recent times that desire was gratified with a repetition of the
whole first section. The repetition of the first theme in the first key
satisfied the ear for the moment, though at the end of the section the
want was again felt. So when the end of the first section was again
reached a modulation was made, gradually or suddenly, to another key;
and in the course of this, the development or "working-out" section,
many