Haydn | Page 6

introduction to one Karl (etc.) von F��rnberg, 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 prot��g�� as a modern literary critic is when he "discovers" a new minor poet. Von F��rnberg 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 F��rnberg 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. 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