Haydn | Page 7

of God" forms a feature of the Hainburg Wiener Thor, a
rock rising abruptly from the river, crowned with the ruined Castle of
Rottenstein. The town cannot be very different from what it was in
Haydn's time, except perhaps that there is now a tobacco manufactory,
which gives employment to some 2000 hands.
It is affecting to think of the little fellow of six dragged away from his
home and his mother's watchful care to be planted down here among
strange surroundings and a strange people. That he was not very happy
we might have assumed in any case. But there were, unfortunately,
some things to render him more unhappy than he need have been.
Frankh's intentions were no doubt excellent; but neither in temper nor

in character was he a fit guardian and instructor of youth. He got into
trouble with the authorities more than once for neglect of his duties,
and had to answer a charge of gambling with loaded dice. As a teacher
he was of that stern disciplinarian kind which believes in lashing
instruction into the pupil with the "tingling rod." Haydn says he owed
him more cuffs than gingerbread.
"A Regular Little Urchin"
What he owed to the schoolmaster's wife may be inferred from the fact
that she compelled him to wear a wig "for the sake of cleanliness." All
his life through Haydn was most particular about his personal
appearance, and when quite an old man it pained him greatly to recall
the way in which he was neglected by Frau Frankh. "I could not help
perceiving," he remarked to Dies, "much to my distress, that I was
gradually getting very dirty, and though I thought a good deal of my
little person, was not always able to avoid spots of dirt on my clothes,
of which I was dreadfully ashamed. In fact, I was a regular little
urchin." Perhaps we should not be wrong in surmising that the old man
was here reading into his childhood the habits and sentiments of his
later years. Young boys of his class are not usually deeply concerned
about grease spots or disheveled hair.
Attacks the Drum
At all events, if deplorably neglected in these personal matters, he was
really making progress with his art. Under Frankh's tuition he attained
to some proficiency on the violin and the harpsichord, and his voice
was so improved that, as an early biographer puts it, he was able to
"sing at the parish desk in a style which spread his reputation through
the canton." Haydn himself, going back upon these days in a letter of
1779, says: "Our Almighty Father (to whom above all I owe the most
profound gratitude) had endowed me with so much facility in music
that even in my sixth year I was bold enough to sing some masses in
the choir." He was bold enough to attempt something vastly more
ponderous. A drummer being wanted for a local procession, Haydn
undertook to play the part. Unluckily, he was so small of stature that
the instrument had to be carried before him on the back of a colleague!

That the colleague happened to be a hunchback only made the incident
more ludicrous. But Haydn had rather a partiality for the drum--a
satisfying instrument, as Mr George Meredith says, because of its
rotundity--and, as we shall learn when we come to his visits to London,
he could handle the instrument well enough to astonish the members of
Salomon's orchestra. According to Pohl, the particular instrument upon
which he performed on the occasion of the Hainburg procession is still
preserved in the choir of the church there.
Hard as these early years must have been, Haydn recognized in
after-life that good had mingled with the ill. His master's harshness had
taught him patience and self-reliance. "I shall be grateful to Frankh as
long as I live," he said to Griesinger, "for keeping me so hard at work."
He always referred to Frankh as "my first instructor," and, like Handel
with Zachau, he acknowledged his indebtedness in a practical way by
bequeathing to Frankh's daughter, then married, 100 florins and a
portrait of her father--a bequest which she missed by dying four years
before the composer himself.
A Piece of Good Fortune
Haydn had been two years with Frankh when an important piece of
good fortune befell him. At the time of which we are writing the Court
Capellmeister at Vienna was George Reutter, an inexhaustible
composer of church music, whose works, now completely forgotten,
once had a great vogue in all the choirs of the Imperial States. Even in
1823 Beethoven, who was to write a mass for the Emperor Francis, was
recommended to adopt the style of this frilled and periwigged pedant!
Reutter's father had been for many years