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TITLE: HAYDN
AUTHOR: J. CUTHBERT HADDEN
EBOOK: E02433 (O'Briens Book Cellar)

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--1791-1792
     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--Rohrau--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
to-day. [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 "travelling 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


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