Haydn | Page 7

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 na?ve form, invented themes which in their deliberate na?veté 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 keys might be touched on, but without ever giving the ear the satisfaction of feeling itself at rest in the first key again. That was only done by the reintroduction of the first theme in the first key.