ONE WARM EVENING IN VIENNA, a band of young musicians roamed the streets, stopping wherever they thought they saw a likely spot to unsling their instruments and play a serenade or two. If they were lucky, their melodies reached the ears of one of the city’s fast-growing population of music lovers, who might toss out a few coins. At one point in its wandering, the band halted before the house of a famous clown and ran through its repertoire. The comedian poked his head from the window and asked who had written the music. “I did,” shouted a stubby, pockmarked youth. “And what is your name?” asked the clown. “Josef Haydn,” answered the youth. With that, he was ushered up the stairs, and when he returned to his companions, he carried the libretto of a skit for which he had agreed to write the score — for the clown thought his music was very good listening indeed and wanted to hear more of it.
When that incident occurred, Haydn was in his early 20s, living in a sixth-story garret and beginning to make his way around the world of music. By coincidence, for example, one of his cotenants was the famous Italian poet Metastasio, who helped him find a few paying pupils. These were usually young ladies whose parents reasoned that they should learn to accompany themselves on the clavier while they sang if they expected to make advantageous marriages.
Such good luck would have meant little had Haydn been less energetic. During a typical day, he would rush from one musical meeting to another, first playing fiddle in an early morning church service, then the organ in a nobleman’s chapel, then singing tenor in a cathedral service, finally trudging homeward to spend his evening composing and practicing at his harpsichord. This fairly rugged pace was to be characteristic of Haydn’s life for the next 55 years, during which he became his world’s most renowned composer, and eventually, with Mozart, a synonym for the classical style.
FRANZ JOSEF HAYDN was born on March 31, 1732, and inherited much of his dogged determination and ambition from his father, a master wheelwright in the Austrian town of Roshau on the Hungarian border. This good man was a fair performer on the lap harp, and he spent many an hour accompanying his own singing and that of his son, Josef. A cousin noticed that the boy had exceptional musical talent and persuaded the father to pack him off for formal studies before he was six. Josef worked at the violin, the clavier, and at singing. He also played kettledrums in processionals, so legend says, having the bulky instruments strapped to the back of a tiny hunchback so that he could reach them. He paid for his lessons by being a handy boy around his teacher’s house. His life was so full of chores, both musical and household, that he had little time to himself.
When Haydn was eight, a musician from Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral heard him sing and took the boy along to the city of Empress Maria Theresa and of dozens of musical salons. In return for his keep in the choir school and a musical education, Josef sang soprano in the cathedral. The music lessons, unfortunately, were few and far between; Haydn’s new benefactor was more interested in furthering his own career than in teaching musical theory to any dirty little choirboy, no matter how beautiful his voice. As a result, Josef learned most of his music by ear.
Fortunately, there was plenty to be heard. Vienna in those days was fairly bursting with late-blooming nobility, composed of sharp-witted merchants who had bought their titles or secured them by cunning, rather than by inheritance. As today’s newly rich tycoon might fill his living room with music from a costly high-fidelity phonograph because it is fashionable (and costly), so Vienna’s new nobility populated their salons with live musicians. The boys from St. Stephen’s were invited to perform often, and Josef managed to station himself close to the tables and feast himself in preparation for the famine he faced back at the cathedral.
Although his profession was, for the moment, singing, the music that fascinated young Haydn was pure or “abstract” music. This music was in the so-called “gallant style” — courtly, decorative, mostly superficial, often high-minded. Vienna’s musical heroes at that time were such great composers of the previous generation as the Italian-Spaniard, DOMENICO SCARLATTI (1685-1757), and the Frenchmen FRANÇOIS COUPERIN LE GRAND (1668-1733) and JEAN-PHILIPPE RAMEAU (1685-1764). These men filled their scores with frothy decorations in the fashionable manner, but they also experimented with the new methods of evoking emotion in music — methods that included dramatic contrast of light and heavy, loud and soft, major and minor, fast and slow. One of their most important discoveries was the changeable theme that started out gaily, only to change mood midway and end with a sorrowful cadence. This may seem like a simple enough business today, but in a society accustomed to even-tempered counterpoint, which rarely seemed to express any feelings at all, it had a startling impact.
In the 1740s, Haydn probably heard little of Scarlatti’s music, but he certainly heard plenty of music by one of the great man’s great disciples, CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH (1714-1788). This was Johann Sebastian Bach’s second and most famous son, whose position as court harpsichordist to King Frederick earned his music a wide audience. Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven all spoke of their debt to this imaginative composer. He wrote more than 200 brilliant solo clavier pieces, 52 clavier concertos, and 17 “symphonies.” History credits him with many important advances in clarifying the formal problems that beset composers of that unsettled period, but he was equally interested in stirring his listeners’ feelings. He filled his scores with sighing echoes, tearful effusions, and sudden, surprising twists. Haydn, at least during his youth, imitated C.P.E. Bach shamelessly.
At the choir school, Haydn suffered from comparison with his brother Michael, five years his junior and possessor of an especially beautiful voice. When Haydn’s own voice changed, he was evicted from the school. He was 17, poorly trained, and penniless. He was also stubborn; he refused to hire himself out as a footman or lackey who could also make a fourth in a string quartet, although such servants were much in demand. He was, he later recalled, forced to “wander around sorrowfully” until he could find friends and learn his trade. Wherever he settled, he composed furiously in every form he could imagine or remember.
Haydn’s early keyboard sonatas, which he sometimes called “partitas,” closely reflect the fashionable music he heard in the salons. His melodies are so lyrical and direct they might have been written first for violin and then transferred to the keyboard; his accompaniments are typically the “Alberti bass,” a kind of rudimentary boogie-woogie of broken chords;
his music often sounds as if it were meant for dancing, but its concert intentions are indicated by the fact that the minuets contain extra “trio” sections, too calm and too slow for dancing.
At the same time, Haydn was experimenting with keyboard sonatas; he got started on a medium that fascinated him for the rest of his life: the string quartet. It was a strange hybrid form at that time, derived directly from old-time trio sonatas, which were trios in name only, since the two high voices (usually two violins) and the low cello were spread so far apart that they required the services of a fourth instrument — a clavier — to fill in the gap. Haydn’s first string quartets had no keyboard; their primitive filler material was allocated to the viola.
When Haydn was 27 and beginning to whirl in the better musical circles, he had the good fortune to be employed as court composer to a certain Bohemian count. Early in his employment, he composed a little instrumental piece with a resounding title: Symphony No. 1. In the noble audience at its first performance was a Hungarian prince named Paul Anton Esterhazy, whose approval was to affect Haydn’s career for the next 30 years. One year after the premiere (and after Haydn’s Bohemian patron decided a personal composer was too great a financial burden), Prince Paul remembered that pleasing symphony and signed the composer up for his own court. Haydn became assistant conductor of the court orchestra at Eisenstadt. The contract was signed on May 1, 1761, and its conditions were many:
(1) The aging, incumbent capellmeister would retain his rank so far as the choir was concerned, but Haydn would preside over the orchestra and “everything else relating to musical performances.” (2) As a privileged official of the princely household, “Heyden” agreed to be “temperate, not overbearing toward his musicians but mild and lenient, straightforward and dignified.” His uniform in company was to be “white stockings, white linen, and either a powdered queue or a tie-wig.” (3) He was to refrain from “undue familiarity” with his musicians and to try to preserve harmony in their ranks. (4) He was to compose on His Serene Highness’s command, preserve the resulting music for the princely court exclusively, and not compose for anyone else without the prince’s permission. He was to arrange performances, daily if necessary, see that they started punctually, and that the band was all present and rehearsed. Also, he was to settle its disputes, take charge of its instruments, practice on his own, and coach singers. In return, Haydn was to receive a respectable 400 Hrins a year for three years (the nominal duration of many a modern conductor’s contract) plus board at the “officers’ table.”
Only a man of prodigious energy and human understanding could have carried such a load, and sometimes even Haydn staggered under it. (Once, copying out a new score in the small hours, he mixed the staves. When he reached the end, he apologized wryly to himself with the words “written while asleep.”) His first job was to improve the orchestra, which had wheezed along for years under the old conductor. Haydn replaced men wherever necessary and drafted the finest talents, starting with the famous violinist Tomasini — whom the prince had hired as a valet — for concertmaster. When he was through, he had a band of between 16 and 20 players, trained into a competent, homogeneous ensemble.
Once he had the orchestra in hand, Haydn found himself in a position few composers have ever equaled: he was not only paid to compose but had at his service the instrument on which to test every musical experiment as soon as he wrote it down. Today, a 30-year-old composer who hears his latest orchestral music played even once a year considers himself incredibly fortunate.
In the fastness of Eisenstadt, Haydn found himself fairly cut off from the mainstream of music, but in the end, the effect was beneficial. “I was forced,” he said later, “to become original.” He made early discoveries about the way to write a true string quartet: in his Op.3, No.1, he began to free the viola, daringly let it take the melody an octave below the first violin. Elsewhere, feeling the need for closer integration in his scores, he discovered ways to relate secondary themes with the main ones: e.g., by including harmonic or thematic reminiscences and echoes, rather than taking the easy way and simply setting down brand-new ideas one after another. Writing for woodwinds, he began to perceive that each instrument had its own personality and found that those crisp-sounding and unemotional instruments could be made to sing sweetly in slow movements. After experimenting with various numbers of movements for his symphonies and sonatas, he settled on four, and the number became standard for all classical composers.
Prince Paul died just a year after installing his new capellmeister. He was succeeded by his brother Nicholas who was, with good reason, nicknamed “the magnificent.” Nicholas was one of the wealthiest men in Europe and liked to wear a diamond-studded coat on state occasions. He traveled far, read widely, and was an admirer of – and participant in – the fine arts. For his grand entry into the family castle, he required Haydn to compose no less than five Italian operettas and saw to it that his composer’s music graced every other important occasion for the rest of his life.
Prince Nicholas’s major plaything was a “castle,” designed to rival Versailles, which he built at a cost of more than five million dollars, in the middle of a fever swamp in Hungary. It was named Esterhaza. The climate was foul and the location remote, but the prince was determined to make it a center of culture where he would entertain the world’s royalty. Here are excerpts from the prince’s own brochure describing Esterhaza:
“In an alley of wild chestnut trees stands the magnificent opera house. The boxes open into charming rooms, each luxuriously furnished with fireplaces, divans, mirrors, and clocks. The theater easily holds 400 people. Every day at 6 p.m., there is a performance of an Italian opera seria or buffa, or of a German comedy, which is always attended by the Prince… Herr Haydn himself conducts… Opposite the opera house is the marionette theater… The puppets are beautifully formed and magnificently dressed. In addition to farces and comedies, they also play opera seria. The performances in both theaters are open to everyone.” The other indoor and outdoor attractions had less to do with the daily routine of Herr Haydn, who was just one of the ranking servants, a peer of the two full-time painters, the librarian, the director of the picture gallery, and the landscape gardeners.
Haydn’s lack of physical charm was a source of irritation and doubt to him, and so, when the girl of his heart, a pretty young thing named Therese Keller, rejected him in favor of the convent, he wrote an organ concerto for her and married her sister. His mistake was soon apparent, for Anna Maria Haydn was homely, unmusical, and barren. Haydn was a middle-aged man of 47 before he encountered the first of his known extramarital loves, an olive-skinned, 19-year-old soprano named Luigia Polzelli. She was inept enough as a singer to require the music master’s special attentions and willing enough to deceive her own husband to become Haydn’s mistress. Since this relationship began when Haydn was on the threshold of great productivity and inspiration (around 1780), the more generous of Haydn’s biographers give her credit for awakening his dormant emotions and opening for him new vistas of musical expression.
There were times when, despite its comforts, the seclusion of Esterhaza was galling to Haydn and even more to his orchestra musicians, who were not allowed to bring their families with them. The prince, entranced with his fabulous toy, was not concerned with their personal welfare; but Haydn was. To bring the matter discreetly to the attention of his Serene Highness, Haydn staged one of his subtler practical jokes. It was called the Farewell Symphony (1772), and it made its point in the last movement. As the piece neared its end, the players finished their parts one by one, snuffed out the candles on their music racks, picked up their music sheets, and walked quietly off the stage. Finally, only the concertmaster remained in the gloom, plaintively fiddling the dying tune. The prince got the point.
Whether or not Luigia was responsible for his romantic crisis, Haydn began to write music that rejected the glimmering past and reached toward the future. He discovered ways to relate separate movements of his works until whole piano sonatas became emotional entities; even the finales became strong, dramatic movements instead of the carefree romps of earlier days. In his Quartet Op.17, No. 5, he dared to write instrumental recitatives and arias into the slow movements, confident that his musical language was as coherent as if it had words. He filled his scores with interpretive directions such as affettuoso (with feeling), mancando (dying away), and scherzando (sprightly), but even these words were too vague to describe the precise way in which he felt his music should be performed. Once, when he was unable to rehearse a cantata for its première, he wrote out a detailed sheet of instructions for the conductor. Among them: (1) his tempo marks were to be carefully observed, except for the cheerful allegros, which were to be speeded up a bit to add brightness, in deference to the festive occasion; (2) the instrumentalists were on no account to begin their tuttis before the singers had finished their solos; (3) dynamic signs were to be followed right down to the small differences between loud (f) and very loud (ff), soft (p) and very soft (pp); (4) the conductor was requested to obtain more than one viola, since Haydn now attached greater importance to the inner parts; (5) the works should have at least three or four rehearsals; and (6) he suggested that a bassoon be used to play along with the strong basses, since he had discovered that adding the woodwind gave the part more distinctness.
In 1781, when Haydn was 49 years old, he made an acquaintance that was to have a powerful influence on his future creative life – and indeed, on all European music: he met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The two men were at opposite poles of temperament and experience. Haydn was countrified, clumsy, and conscious of his homely, pockmarked appearance; Mozart was only 25, half Haydn’s age, a city dandy by comparison, a brilliant success as a clavier player, and a man of nervous, high-strung temperament. Nevertheless, the two great men were devoted friends from the time they met, and they saw each other at every opportunity. One of their favorite pastimes was playing each other’s music together at the keyboard. By some miraculous creative give-and-take, they supplemented each other, and both of them took huge musical steps. Mozart insisted that Haydn taught him how to compose string quartets and dedicated six of his finest to Haydn in 1785. When he heard another composer scoffing at a particularly daring passage in a Haydn movement, with the words: “I would never have written that,” Mozart replied, “Neither would I, and do you know why? Because neither you nor I would have had such a fine idea.” As for Haydn, he once took Mozart’s father aside and told him, “I say before God as an honest man that your son is the greatest composer I have ever known either in person or by reputation.”
By this time, Haydn, Mozart, and a score of other composers around Vienna were thoroughly aware that they were facing an aesthetic problem. Back of it all was the brand-new aural experience, tonality, the sense of key feeling that
Bach had limned in his Well-Tempered Clavier. Tonality was both a challenge and a promise to those men – a challenge to write purely instrumental music that could be as big and important as the majestic vocal works of the past; a promise of a method that could be as comprehensible as written language. To liberate and make use of the unguessed potentialities of tonality, these composers evolved a method of composing, a pattern that we call, confusingly enough, “sonata form.” This in its simplest aspect is the thematic outline for the first movements of all classical symphonies, sonatas, and string quartets.
On the most obvious level, the sonata form movement is divided into three parts. The divisions are so clearly marked that even the inexperienced listener can spot them with little trouble, for each division starts with the same (or almost the same) musical idea. The divisions have acquired names that are well-known to students of music appreciation. The exposition contains the first theme, then a transitional bridge passage and a contrasting second theme that is often quieter and more lyrical than the first; the exposition in the works of Haydn and Mozart is generally repeated verbatim. The development follows without pause, usually picking up one or more fragments or sections of the exposition, turning them over, savoring them under different harmonic and rhythmical circumstances, and seeing how far they will go – ideally to the point where the material seems to be used up. The recapitulation, as its name implies, is thematically almost exactly the same as the exposition, and the movement ends with a thorough affirmation of the home key. As this rough outline indicates, the thematic aspects of sonata form are only general; in practice, they vary widely.
The harmonic structure of the sonata form was something far more subtle and gripping than the thematic – it was actually the language of tonality. To Haydn and Mozart, the whole idea of tonality was a fresh and urgent matter; the purpose of their sonata form movements was to express tonality.
The foundation of tonality is the overtone series, that amorphous halo of tones that sounds over any musical note in a mathematical pattern. The first few overtones are literally the notes of a major triad, and thus that basic harmony is implied in every single note of the scale. (It is also literally, if faintly, heard above low notes, and there is a simple experiment to prove it: play a low C on the piano, Hold the key down as the tone fades away, and listen carefully for fainter notes above. You will distinctly hear a G, an octave and a half higher, and an E, a sixth above that. Even musicians of the mid-20th century, who no longer feel the grip of tonality so powerfully, are impressed by this demonstration; it certainly shows the acoustical basis for the triad and for the key-feeling it symbolizes.)
All classical symphonies, string quartets, and sonatas were written in and for the thing called tonality. Harmonically, the sonata form expressed tonality in this manner: its first theme was ordinarily in the tonic or home key, often stating the three notes of the triad as an integral part of its theme. The answering theme contrasted not only in mood but in key: it was usually built on the fifth note of the scale (the dominant), and was designed to express the dominant harmony almost as fully as the first theme expressed the tonic. To sensitive 18th-century listeners, this contrast of keys was highly dramatic; for within a scale, five notes is as far away as one can go. On the other hand, the dominant harmony naturally gravitates toward the tonic.
The tonic and dominant are sometimes called the two poles of a tonality, but it may be more descriptive to call the tonic the equator, toward which all other notes tend to slide in the centrifugal course of the music; and the dominant, the north pole. The south pole, then, is the subdominant; its fundamental note is the fourth in the scale; it gets its name from the fact that it is five notes from the tonic, counting downward. It is the third gravitational center in any key. The subdominant harmony is the first chord of the “Amen” in congregational singing, and its peculiarity is that the tonic leads toward it, while it continues to lead away from the home feeling. Sometimes it has to be forcefully brought back by the composer’s strength of character. The subdominant in classical sonata form did not ordinarily rate a theme of its own but made its appearance whenever the composer felt the need for a powerful emotional contrast.
Haydn, having outlined the fundamental structure of a key in his opening statements (the exposition), would begin to explore the tonal implications of his thematic material (in the development).
He might, in a daring move, concentrate on a section of his melody that was not even a part of the triad, a section whose melodic tensions led the harmony to distant points. He would allow the music to modulate and actually arrive at a new key – perhaps a key that had very few notes in common with the original tonic scale. The fewer notes the new key had in common with the old, the more “distant” it was and the more daring his explorations. Eventually, he concluded his harmonic adventures and returned to a point where he could restate his original themes (in the recapitulation) and wind up safely in the home key, leaving no listeners feeling lost in the harmonic byways of his imagination. Just in case some might not have the home-feeling fixed in mind, Haydn would usually hammer out the last chords at full volume, over and over, until it was clear to everyone that the end was secure.
During the 1780s, Haydn wrote his six quartets, Op.33, called “Russian” because they were dedicated to Russia’s Grand Duke Paul, with the comment that they were “composed in an entirely new and particular manner.” By this, Haydn meant that he was able to give all four strings equal importance, even the benighted viola playing music that took its shape from some aspect of the main themes. This was, in a sense, a return to polyphonic methods, for Haydn was well aware that horizontally flowing counterpoint could never be replaced as a method of urging music through time. Sometimes, in the 18 quartets that he was still to write, Haydn built whole new movements out of single subjects, reverting to “horizontal thought” in the highest polyphonic tradition.
By the mid-1780s, Haydn had written some 75 of his 104 symphonies. Some of them reveal their charms today only after familiarity and an effort of study; like oriental faces to occidental eyes, works written in a preclassical or even an early classical idiom tend to seem indistinguishable to postromantic listeners. Many of Haydn’s symphonies, however, sing with ineffable beauty in any age. Among them are the six Paris symphonies (Nos.82-87), written at the request of French publishers, one symphony improbably nicknamed “The Bear” because of its bagpipe dance finale, another “The Chicken” for its clucking second theme.
One of the many personages who commissioned Haydn was the Canon of Cadiz. His was a special request. Each Lent, from the pulpit of the great cathedral, the Bishop pronounced Christ’s seven dying sentences, descending after each to prostrate himself before the altar. The Canon asked Haydn to supply the music for the interludes. With characteristic energy, the composer not only wrote orchestral interludes but set the words as well for a baritone solo. “It was no easy matter,” he wrote later, “to compose seven adagios lasting ten minutes apiece, one after the other, without tiring the listeners.” Nevertheless, the Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross turned out to be a huge success. Haydn later arranged it for string quartet. It was played across Europe soon after its première, and even in the fledgling United States, as early as 1793.
The benevolent Prince Nicholas died in 1790 and, although his successor asked Haydn to stay on, the composer no longer felt obliged to seclude himself. He was well aware that he belonged, by then, to the whole world. As soon as he could decently leave, he fled to his beloved Vienna. In that city one day, he received a visitor who introduced himself as Johann Peter Salomon, a leading concert manager from London, who offered to take Haydn to London for a series of public appearances.
Haydn happily spent most of his trip across the channel on the pitching deck but admitted that he was “seized with slight alarm” and “a little indisposition” when the wind and waves became very strong. He gazed at sprawling London with awed eyes and wrote in his diary the astonishing fact that in 31 years, 38,000 houses had been built there, and that the city annually consumed 800,000 cartloads of coal. He found the din of the street hawkers unbearable. When he received a British “hip-hip-hurrah!” at a fashionable dinner party, another guest reported, Haydn put his hands over his face and was disconcerted for several minutes.
No matter how trying its social life, London’s musical life was anything but disconcerting. Haydn found himself the center of attraction. Salomon had scheduled a series of gala concerts in which the master was to preside at the keyboard (the days when a conductor stood alone and directed the players by waving a baton was yet to come), but Londoners were much more experienced concert-goers than continentals and were not to be conquered by advance publicity alone. Among
the competing attractions of a busy season, including performances in two opera houses and a series of “ancient” concerts, Haydn was faced with a rival orchestral series. Feeling ran high between Haydn’s camp and the opposition. Some newspapers, no less prone to partisan reporting than they are today, pointed out unkindly that Haydn was an old man and probably well past the crest of his powers.
Nevertheless, Haydn’s debut at the Salomon concerts was a spectacular success. Dr. Burney, an omnivorous dilettante who documented an incredible amount of 18th-century music, was there and reported that Haydn’s “electrical” effects aroused the crowd “almost…to frenzy.” Another reporter called him the “first musical genius of the age” and expressed the hope he would follow Handel’s example of 75 years before and settle in England for good. The orchestra that Salomon had engaged for the series was a powerful body compared to Haydn’s relatively small ensemble at Esterhaza. It had 16 violins, four violas, three cellos and four basses, in addition to woodwinds and brass. The volume and perfection of its performance impressed the composer strongly and undoubtedly left him with a more ambitious approach to his future compositions.
Another new influence on Haydn was Handel’s music, which he first heard, appropriately enough, in Westminster Abbey, where an ensemble of 1,000 performed The Messiah. Haydn listened and marveled. When the climactic “Halleluia Chorus” rang out, he burst into tears, exclaiming, “He is the master of us all.”
Honors kept coming his way, among them a rarely offered doctorate at Oxford University. He accepted gratefully; his “thesis” was not, however, the misnamed Oxford Symphony, but another (No.92) of the twelve he composed for his two visits to London.
These stirring experiences combined to work a change in old Haydn. All his life he had been turning out music to order, and doubtless he thought of it primarily as a commodity: once performed, its usefulness was over, or at least seriously diminished. But now he began to think in terms of writing for posterity. After all, the English still listened to Handel and they were calling Haydn, too, a “great” composer.
Strangely enough, this realization, which might have made a lesser man turn back on himself to become repetitive and conservative, made Haydn more radical than ever. He composed carefully, but he felt free to make more and more daring musical experiments.
He abandoned the practice of literal repetition in his recapitulation and continued to compose new music right down to his climactic codas. His finales contained as much dramatic excitement and thematic development as his first movements, foreshadowing the massive symphonies of Beethoven himself. Harmonically, he ventured into more distant keys and playfully interjected strange harmonies here and there.
Still not above playing jokes on his fashionable audience, Haydn wrote a prankish experiment in the slow movement of his Symphony No. 94. After the fairly stringent opening movement, at a moment when the audience could be expected to be relaxing to the accompaniment of a pretty melody, the full orchestra lashed into a fortissimo chord that must have startled the last nodding listener. Naturally, everybody stayed awake to see if it would happen again, but with sure artistic judgment, Haydn never repeated the blast. Inevitably, the work was called the Surprise Symphony.
The improvements Haydn made in his symphonies after that were all in the direction of added compactness and coherence. By now fully capable of carrying out any innovation that occurred to him, he began to tie all his movements together by interlocking references to early themes. Hearing a fragment of the allegro during the adagio, the listener seems to recognize an old friend, and the work becomes more unified.
Haydn constantly created new effects. In the minuet of No.100 (the Military), he dared to let two flutes and an oboe carry the trio without any accompaniment whatsoever. The symphony’s nickname comes from Haydn’s use of extra percussion instruments (triangle, cymbals, bass drum) and from the solo trumpet call at the end of the slow movement. In the slow movement of the Clock Symphony (No.101), he created a ticking accompaniment of bassoons and pizzicato strings. In No.102, he scored for muted trumpets and timpani. He opened No.103 (the Drumroll) with a roll on the timpani.
All of these works are rich in the kind of warmth that is sometimes thought to be Mozart’s private property. It is true that Haydn liked to compose with bland good humor, but more and more he turned to musical introspection and melancholy. One of his most somber symphonies is his No.97, which he wrote after news reached him of Mozart’s premature death.
Increasingly convinced that his music had elements of immortality, Haydn began to feel the stirrings of a masterpiece. But before he was ready for it, he had a lot of living to do. Remote as ever from “that infernal beast,” his wife, and separated physically from Luigia, he found a new attraction in the person of a Mrs. Schroeter. She was the widow of the “Queen’s Music Master,” and Haydn was so devoted to her, he declared he would have married her if he had been single. As it was, he saw her often and between times wrote letters that, if not actually passionate, were certainly indiscreet. In addition to constant composition and public appearances, Haydn found time to travel about the countryside and be incredibly social, despite his sketchy understanding of English. He remained in England for 18 months and when he left, it was with the promise to return.
Back in Vienna, Haydn found everything changed. Mozart was dead, and Marianne von Gensinger, a very dear lady friend, died not long after his return. He continued a nominal relationship with Esterhaza, but there was little pleasure in it for him. He also continued to teach a little. Among his pupils in 1794 was an arrogant young man, Ludwig van Beethoven, who had traveled to Vienna to study with Mozart and accepted old Haydn as second choice (he did have the grace to keep the fact from Haydn). Haydn endured Beethoven’s stormy temperament as best he could, although he called him “that great mogul” behind his back.
Back in London in 1794, Haydn led a fine, big orchestra of 60 players with tremendous success. In the fall of that year, tardily enough, his triumph was confirmed when he was officially introduced to King George III. But Haydn’s earlier enthusiasm for London began to fade. The music he heard sounded terribly flawed. “One young fellow sang an aria so dreadfully that I began to perspire all over my body,” he wrote in his diary. Finally, when still another Prince Esterhazy (a second Prince Nicholas) asked him to return to his court, the composer prepared to make his last channel crossing. He returned to Eisenstadt in the summer of 1795, determined, he said, to write a work that would give permanent fame to his name.
The work was a full-scale cantata, The Creation. Its text, from the book of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost, was translated and arranged by the same irascible but talented Baron von Swieten who had advised Mozart’s widow to bury him in a pauper’s grave to save money. When the words were arranged to Haydn’s satisfaction, he sat down and for three years labored over his score. They were years of great happiness for the master. Although he had always written laus deo at the end of a composition, he had never before been able to sing the praises of God so specifically and at such length. When he felt his inspiration waning he left his piano and his composing desk to say his rosary, with, he reported, consistent success.
The Creation was first presented at a concert in 1799, with such public excitement that mounted police were called in to control the crowds. To tell the story of the world’s beginning, Haydn used three narrators: soprano, tenor, and bass. The music has much of the majestic simplicity of Handel’s oratorios. At times it sounds naïve, sometimes it froths with earthy humor, sometimes it is as reverent as Bach. The Creation could hardly have failed. Actually, it was soon repeated and continued to be performed before enraptured crowds. Haydn himself was handsomely paid in cash.
Although he had thought of The Creation as his last big work, Haydn continued to compose on the grandest scale. Two years later, at great cost in health and energy, he finished another large-scale oratorio, The Seasons, which bubbled even more with the joy of creation. During that period, one of fervent nationalism, Haydn was inspired to compose the song “Gott erhalte,” that was immediately adopted as Austria’s national anthem.
In the year 1801, tired and arthritic, Haydn was convinced that his creative life was over. He made occasional appearances as conductor of his own works when his swollen legs permitted him, but spent most of his time talking with biographers and preparing an exhaustive, if not quite accurate, catalogue of his compositions. In 1805, a rumor circulated that he was dead. His friend Cherubin and the violinist Kreutzer composed memorial music, and Mozart’s Requiem was being rehearsed for a funeral service in Paris when word arrived that the old man was still very much alive.
By the time the Napoleonic armies bombarded Vienna in 1809, Haydn had already read his generous will to his household. As explosions
shook the area, he gathered his friends and servants around him and told them, “Don’t be frightened, children. Where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you.” Nothing did, as it turned out, and Napoleon saw to it that a guard of honor was placed around the composer’s door. A few weeks later Haydn died, and a warring continent took time off to mourn him.
His body was not to rest in peace. Shortly after his burial, outside the Esterhazy estate, his grave was opened by a pair of students of phrenology, who decapitated him because they wished to caliper his skull and take the measure of genius. The loss was not discovered for many years, not, in fact, until the Esterhazy family was finally convinced their erstwhile servant was indeed a great man and decided to move his grave to a more honored spot. The headless skeleton was discovered, and there followed a comic opera plot of intrigue: the Esterhazys trying to reunite skull and skeleton in their grave, the possessors of the skull refusing to relinquish their treasure. For nearly a century, the skull reposed in a glass box in a Vienna museum while negotiations and threats raged. In 1954, the Communists who controlled the Esterhazy grounds in Hungary concluded an agreement with the possessors of the head, and Haydn’s skull and bones were at last reunited in their crypt.