Haydn | Page 2

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 na?ve 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 series of harmonic progressions broken up into figures or patterns. Of real development and climax there is none; of such things as well-defined,