Books: Haydn

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HAYDN

by J. Cuthbert Hadden

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

DEDICATION
PREFACE
TEXT OF "HAYDN," FROM THE MASTER MUSICIANS SERIES

Chapter I: Birth--Ancestry--Early Years
Chapter II: Vienna--1750-1760
Chapter III: Eisenstadt--1761-1766
Chapter IV: Esterhaz--1766-1790
Chapter V: First London Visit--1791-1972
Chapter VI: Second London Visit--1794-1795
Chapter VII: "The Creation" and "The Seasons"
Chapter VIII: Last Years
Chapter IX: Haydn, the Man
Chapter X: Haydn, the Composer
Appendix A: Haydn's Last Will and Testament
Appendix B: Catalogue of Works
Appendix C: Bibliography
Appendix D: Haydn's Brothers
Appendix E: A Selection of Haydn's Letters

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION

DEDICATION

To
The Rev. Robert Blair, D.D.
In Grateful Acknowledgment of
Many Kindnesses and Much
Pleasant Intercourse

PREFACE

The authority for Haydn's life is the biography begun by the late
Dr. Pohl, and completed after his death by E.V. Mandyczewski. To
this work, as yet untranslated, every subsequent writer is
necessarily indebted, and the present volume, which I may fairly
claim to be the fullest life of Haydn that has so far appeared in
English, is largely based upon Pohl. I am also under obligations
to Miss Pauline D. Townsend, the author of the monograph in the
"Great Musicians" series. For the rest, I trust I have acquainted
myself with all the more important references made to Haydn in
contemporary records and in the writings of those who knew him.
Finally, I have endeavoured to tell the story of his career
simply and directly, to give a clear picture of the man, and to
discuss the composer without trenching on the ground of the
formalist.

J.C.H.

EDINBURGH, September 1902.

HAYDN

CHAPTER I

BIRTH--ANCESTRY--EARLY YEARS

Introductory--Rohran--A Poor Home--Genealogy--Haydn's Parents--
His Birth--His Precocity--Informal Music-making--His First
Teacher--Hainburg--"A Regular Little Urchin"--Attacks the Drum--A
Piece of Good Luck--A Musical Examination--Goes to Vienna--Choir
School of St Stephen's--A House of Suffering--Lessons at the
Cathedral--A Sixteen-Part Mass--Juvenile Escapades--"Sang like a
Crow"--Dismissed from the Choir.

Haydn's position, alike in music and in musical biography, is
almost unique. With the doubtful exception of Sebastian Bach, no
composer of the first rank ever enjoyed a more tranquil career.
Bach was not once outside his native Germany; Haydn left Austria
only to make those visits to England which had so important an
influence on the later manifestations of his genius: His was a
long, sane, sound, and on the whole, fortunate existence. For
many years he was poor and obscure, but if he had his time of
trial, he never experienced a time of failure. With practical
wisdom he conquered the Fates and became eminent. A hard,
struggling youth merged into an easy middle-age, and late years
found him in comfortable circumstances, with a solid reputation
as an artist, and a solid retiring-allowance from a princely
patron, whose house he had served for the better part of his
working career. Like Goethe and Wordsworth, he lived out all his
life. He was no Marcellus, shown for one brief moment and
"withdrawn before his springtime had brought forth the fruits of
summer." His great contemporary, Mozart, cut off while yet his
light was crescent, is known to posterity only by the products of
his early manhood. Haydn's sun set at the end of a long day,
crowning his career with a golden splendour whose effulgence
still brightens the ever-widening realm of music.

Voltaire once said of Dante that his reputation was becoming
greater and greater because no one ever read him. Haydn's
reputation is not of that kind. It is true that he may not appeal
to what has been called the "fevered modern soul," but there is
an old-world charm about him which is specially grateful in our
bustling, nerve-destroying, bilious age. He is still known as
"Papa Haydn," and the name, to use Carlyle's phrase, is
"significant of much." In the history of the art his position is
of the first importance. He was the father of instrumental music.
He laid the foundations of the modern symphony and sonata, and
established the basis of the modern orchestra. Without him,
artistically speaking, Beethoven would have been impossible. He
seems to us now a figure of a very remote past, so great have
been the changes in the world of music since he lived. But his
name will always be read in the golden book of classical music;
and whatever the evolutionary processes of the art may bring, the
time can hardly come when he will be forgotten, his works
unheard.

Rohrau

Franz Joseph Haydn was born at the little market-town of Rohrau,
near Prugg, on the confines of Austria and Hungary, some two-and-
a-half hours' railway journey from Vienna. The Leitha, which
flows along the frontier of Lower Austria and Hungary on its way
to the Danube, runs near, and the district

[Figure: Haydn's birth-house at Rohrau]

is flat and marshy. The house in which the composer was born had
been built by his father. Situated at the end of the market-
place, it was in frequent danger from inundation; and although it
stood in Haydn's time with nothing worse befalling it than a
flooding now and again, it has twice since been swept away, first
in 1813, fours years after Haydn's death, and again in 1833. It
was carefully rebuilt on each occasion, and still stands for the
curious to see--a low-roofed cottage, very much as it was when
the composer of "The Creation" first began to be "that various
thing called man." A fire unhappily did some damage to the
building in 1899. But excepting that the picturesque thatched
roof has given place to a covering of less inflammable material,
the "Zum Haydn" presents its extensive frontage to the road, just
as it did of yore. Our illustration shows it exactly as it is
today. [See an interesting account of a visit to the cottage
after the fire, in The Musical Times for July 1899.] Schindler
relates that when Beethoven, shortly before his death, was shown
a print of the cottage, sent to him by Diabelli, he remarked:
"Strange that so great a man should have been born in so poor a
home!" Beethoven's relations with Haydn, as we shall see later
on, were at one time somewhat strained; but the years had
softened his asperity, and this indirect tribute to his brother
composer may readily be accepted as a set-off to some things that
the biographer of the greater genius would willingly forget.

A Poor Home

It was indeed a poor home into which Haydn had been born; but
tenderness, piety, thrift and orderliness were there, and
probably the happiest part of his career was that which he spent
in the tiny, dim-lighted rooms within sound of Leitha's waters.

In later life, when his name had been inscribed on the roll of
fame, he looked back to the cottage at Rohrau, "sweet through
strange years," with a kind of mingled pride and pathetic regret.
Flattered by the great and acclaimed by the devotees of his art,
he never felt ashamed of his lowly origin. On the contrary, he
boasted of it. He was proud, as he said, of having "made
something out of nothing." He does not seem to have been often at
Rohrau after he was launched into the world, a stripling not yet
in his teens. But he retained a fond memory of his birthplace.
When in 1795 he was invited to inspect a monument erected to his
honour in the grounds of Castle Rohrau, he knelt down on the
threshold of the old home by the market-place and kissed the
ground his feet had trod in the far-away days of youth. When he
came to make his will, his thoughts went back to Rohrau, and one
of his bequests provided for two of its poorest orphans.

Genealogy

Modern theories of heredity and the origin of genius find but
scanty illustration in the case of Haydn. Unlike the ancestors of
Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the
pedigrees show, had as little of genius, musical or other, in
their composition, as the families of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
In the male line they were hard-working, honest tradesmen,
totally undistinguished even in their sober walk in life. They
came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's great-grandfather,
Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre when the town
was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's father,
Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright,
combining with his trade the office of parish sexton. He belonged
to the better peasant class, and, though ignorant as we should
now regard him, was yet not without a tincture of artistic taste.
He had been to Frankfort during his "traveling years," and had
there picked up some little information of a miscellaneous kind.
"He was a great lover of music by nature," says his famous son,
"and played the harp without knowing a note of music." He had a
fine tenor voice, and when the day's toil was over he would
gather his household around him and set them singing to his well-
meant accompaniment.

Haydn's Mother

It is rather a pretty picture that the imagination here conjures
up, but it does not help us very much in trying to account for
the musical genius of the composer. Even the popular idea that
genius is derived from the mother does not hold in Haydn's case.
If Frau Haydn had a genius for anything it was merely for moral
excellence and religion and the good management of her household.
Like Leigh Hunt's mother, however, she was "fond of music, and a
gentle singer in her way"; and more than one intimate of Haydn in
his old age declared that he still knew by heart all the simple
airs which she had been wont to lilt about the house. The maiden
name of this estimable woman was Marie Koller. She was a daughter
of the Marktrichter (market judge), and had been a cook in the
family of Count Harrach, one of the local magnates. Eight years
younger than her husband, she was just twenty-one at her
marriage, and bore him twelve children. Haydn's regard for her
was deep and sincere; and it was one of the tricks of destiny
that she was not spared to witness more of his rising fame, being
cut off in 1754, when she was only forty-six. Matthias Haydn
promptly married again, and had a second family of five children,
all of whom died in infancy. The stepmother survived her husband-
-who died, as the result of an accident, in 1763--and then she
too entered a second time into the wedded state. Haydn can never
have been very intimate with her, and he appears to have lost
sight of her entirely in her later years. But he bequeathed a
small sum to her in his will, "to be transferred to her children
should she be no longer alive."

Birth

Joseph Haydn, to give the composer the name which he now usually
bears, was the second of the twelve children born to the Rohrau
wheelwright. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but it was
either the 31st of March or the 1st of April 1732. Haydn himself
gave the latter as the correct date, alleging that his brother
Michael had fixed upon the previous day to save him from being
called an April fool! Probably we shall not be far off the mark
if we assume with Pohl that Haydn was born in the night between
the 31st of March and the 1st of April.

His Precocity

Very few details have come down to us in regard to his earlier
years; and such details as we have refer almost wholly to his
musical precocity. It was not such a precocity as that of Mozart,
who was playing minuets at the age of four, and writing concertos
when he was five; but just on that account it is all the more
credible. One's sympathies are with the frank Philistine who
pooh-poohs the tales told of baby composers, and hints that they
must have been a trial to their friends. Precocious they no doubt
were; but precocity often evaporates before it can become genius,
leaving a sediment of disappointed hopes and vain ambitions. In
literature, as Mr. Andrew Lang has well observed, genius may show
itself chiefly in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott, who, as a
boy, was packing all sorts of lore into a singularly capacious
mind, while doing next to nothing that was noticeable. In music
it is different. Various learning is not so important as a keenly
sensitive organism. The principal thing is emotion, duly ordered
by the intellect, not intellect touched by emotion. Haydn's
precocity at any rate was of this sort. It proclaimed itself in a
quick impressionableness to sound, a delicately-strung ear, and
an acute perception of rhythm.

Informal Music-Making

We have seen how the father had his musical evenings with his
harp and the voices of wife and children. These informal
rehearsals were young Haydn's delight. We hear more particularly
of his attempts at music-making by sawing away upon a piece of
stick at his father's side, pretending to play the violin like
the village schoolmaster under whom he was now learning his
rudiments. The parent was hugely pleased at these manifestations
of musical talent in his son. He had none of the absurd, old-
world ideas of Surgeon Handel as to the degrading character of
the divine art, but encouraged the youngster in every possible
way. Already he dreamt--what father of a clever boy has not done
the same?--that Joseph would in some way or other make the family
name famous; and although it is said that like his wife, he had
notions of the boy becoming a priest, he took the view that his
progress towards holy orders would be helped rather than hindered
by the judicious cultivation of his undoubted taste for music.

His First Teacher

While these thoughts were passing through his head, the chance
visit of a relation practically decided young Haydn's future. His
grandmother, being left a widow, had married a journeyman
wheelwright, Matthias Seefranz, and one of their children married
a schoolmaster, Johann Matthias Frankh. Frankh combined with the
post of pedagogue that of choir-regent at Hainburg, the ancestral
home of the Haydns, some four leagues from Rohrau. He came
occasionally to Rohrau to see his relatives, and one day he
surprised Haydn keeping strict time to the family music on his
improvised fiddle. Some discussion following about the boy's
unmistakable talent, the schoolmaster generously offered to take
him to Hainburg that he might learn "the first elements of music
and other juvenile acquirements." The father was pleased; the
mother, hesitating at first, gave her reluctant approval, and
Haydn left the family home never to return, except on a flying
visit. This was in 1738, when he was six years of age.

Hainburg

The town of Hainburg lies close to the Danube, and looks very
picturesque with its old walls and towers. According to the
Nibelungen Lied, King Attila once spent a night in the place, and
a stone figure of that "scourge 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 Capellmeister at St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna,
and on his death, in 1738, the son succeeded to the post. He had
not been long established in the office when he started on a tour
of search for choristers. Arriving at Hainburg, he heard from the
local pastor of Haydn's "weak but pleasing voice," and
immediately had the young singer before him.

A Musical Examination

The story of the examination is rather amusing. Reutter gave the
little fellow a canon to sing at first sight. The boy went though
the thing triumphantly, and the delighted Reutter cried "Bravo!"
as he flung a handful of cherries into Haydn's cap. But there was
one point on which Reutter was not quite satisfied. "How is it,
my little man," he said, "that you cannot shake?" "How can you
expect me to shake," replied the enfant terrible, "when Herr
Frankh himself cannot shake?" The great man was immensely tickled
by the ready retort, and, drawing the child towards him, he
taught him how to make the vibrations in his throat required to
produce the ornament. The boy picked up the trick at once. It was
the final decision of his fate. Reutter saw that here was a
recruit worth having, and he lost no time in getting the parents'
sanction to carry him off to Vienna. In the father's case this
was easily managed, but the mother only yielded when it was
pointed out that her son's singing in the cathedral choir did not
necessarily mean the frustration of her hopes of seeing him made
a priest.

Goes to Vienna

Thus, some time in the year 1740, Reutter marched away from
Hainburg with the little Joseph, and Hainburg knew the little
Joseph no more. Vienna was now to be his home for ten long years
of dreary pupilage and genteel starvation. In those days, and for
long after, St Stephen's Cathedral was described as "the first
church in the empire," and it is still, with its magnificent
spire, the most important edifice in Vienna. Erected in 1258 and
1276 on the site of a church dating from 1144, it was not finally
completed until 1446. It is in the form of a Latin cross, and is
355 feet long. The roof is covered with coloured tiles, and the
rich groined vaulting is borne by eighteen massive pillars,
adorned with more than a hundred statuettes. Since 1852 the
building has been thoroughly restored, but in all essentials it
remains as it was when Haydn sang in it as a choir-boy. Many
interesting details have been printed regarding the Choir School
of St Stephen's and its routine in Haydn's time. They have been
well summarized by one of his biographers [See Miss Townsend's
Haydn, p. 9].

The Choir School of St. Steven's

The Cantorei was of very ancient foundation. Mention is made of
it as early as 1441, and its constitution may be gathered from
directions given regarding it about the period 1558-1571. It was
newly constituted in 1663, and many alterations were made then
and afterwards, but in Haydn's day it was still practically what
it had been for nearly a century before. The school consisted of
a cantor (made Capellmeister in 1663), a sub-cantor, two ushers
and six scholars. They all resided together, and had meals in
common; and although ample allowance had originally been made for
the board, lodging and clothing of the scholars, the increased
cost of living resulted in the boys of Haydn's time being poorly
fed and scantily clad. They were instructed in "religion and
Latin, together with the ordinary subjects of school education,
and in music, the violin, clavier, and singing." The younger
scholars were taken in hand by those more advanced. The routine
would seem to us now to be somewhat severe. There were two full
choral services daily in the cathedral. Special Te Deums were
constantly sung, and the boys had to take part in the numerous
solemn processions of religious brotherhoods through the city, as
well as in the services for royal birthdays and other such
occasions. During Holy Week the labours of the choir were
continuous. Children's processions were very frequent, and
Haydn's delight in after years at the performance of the charity
children in St Paul's may have been partly owing to the
reminiscences of early days which it awakened.

A House of Suffering

But these details are aside from our main theme. The chapel-house
of St Stephen's was now the home of our little Joseph. It ought
to have been a happy home of instruction, but it was, alas! s
house of suffering. Reutter did not devote even ordinary care to
his pupil, and from casual lessons in musical theory he drifted
into complete neglect. Haydn afterwards declared that he had
never had more than two lessons in composition from Reutter, who
was, moreover, harsh and cruel and unfeeling, laughing at his
pupil's groping attempts, and chastising him on the slightest
pretext. It has been hinted that the Capellmeister was jealous of
his young charge--that he was "afraid of finding a rival in the
pupil." But this is highly improbable. Haydn had not as yet shown
any unusual gifts likely to excite the envy of his superior.
There is more probability in the other suggestion that Reutter
was piqued at not having been allowed by Haydn's father to
perpetuate the boy's fine voice by the ancient method of
emasculation. The point, in any case, is not of very much
importance. It is sufficient to observe that Reutter's name
survives mainly in virtue of the fact that he tempted Haydn to
Vienna with the promise of special instruction, and gave him
practically nothing of that, but a great deal of ill-usage.

Haydn was supposed to have lessons from two undistinguished
professors named Gegenbauer and Finsterbusch.

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