John F. Runciman

“ On paper, on canvas, on wooden panels, it is very picturesque in its queer stately way, if very artificial. The sunlight seems always to bask on it. It reminds one of a perpetual summer Sunday afternoon in a small provincial town. But its voice speaks in its music, often bitterly sad and sweetly regretful, and there is little hint of sunshine or careless merrymaking there. Bach is steeped in cloister gloom, with frequent moments of religious ecstasy. Haydn is generally cheerful in a humdrum sort of way, but when his real feelings begin to speak, not even Mozart is sadder. ”

“ A century ago Haydn was as fresh and novel as Tschaikowsky is now, and as overwhelming a personality in the world of music as the mighty Wagner. But time equalizes and evens things, and in another hundred years all that is merely up-to-date in musical speech and phraseology will have lost its flavour and seductiveness; but the voice that is sincere, whether the word is spoken to-day or was spoken a century ago, will sound as clear as ever, and the one voice shall not be clearer nor more convincing than the other. ”

“ If anyone who happened to be familiar with the Salomon symphonies—belonging to his last period, after he had known Mozart—and The Creation heard some of this older stuff for the first time, he would hardly believe that the man who in his age wrote so much fresh, vital music, charged with colour and energy, could in the prime of physical life have written music that is now so old-fashioned and stale. ”

“ In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the formulas of his predecessors. When we talk of classical music we mean Haydn's. He created the thing, and it ended with him. He has sanity lucidity, pointedness, sometimes epigrammatic piquancy, of expression, dignity without pompousness or grandiloquence, feeling without hysteria. His variety seems endless, his energy never flags, and often he has more than a touch of the divine quality. ”

“ At the same time it creates a strong desire, that must be restrained till the time comes, for what follows. We listen to the second theme and to the "working-out" section, knowing we are far from home, but perfectly aware that we shall get there, and that a certain feeling of suspense will be relieved. Thus the music is like a great arch that supports itself. The unity got in the fugue by continuous motion is got here by one key perpetually leading the ear to ask for another key. ”

“ Haydn was in many ways a great, a very great, composer; but no one can live with his work as one can live with Bach or Beethoven. We are all of the nineteenth or twentieth century; Haydn was of the eighteenth. Such contradictions of godlike greatness and mere simple childishness were surely never met together in one man, and we can worship the greatness without any compulsion to tolerate the childishness. ”

“ Michael's gave him shelter; some warmhearted person—to whom be all praise—lent him the vast sum of 140 florins—say £7; he got a few pupils who paid him two florins a month. He must have toiled like a slave, in a wet, cold garret, and often without sufficient to eat. Yet, as in everything he undertook, dogged did it. He never became a splendid executant, like Bach and Handel before him, and Mozart and Beethoven immediately after, but he must have been head and shoulders above the ordinary musical practitioner. ”

“ The fact that the Princes of Esterhazy did not like to be made to feel uncomfortable in church had perhaps something to do with Haydn always feeling elated when he was going to write a mass—use is second nature. Not that there are no fine things in his sacred music; only they are rare, and the spirit of the whole is utterly undevotional. After all, being the man he was, having the mission he had in life to carry out, it may be questioned whether he could have done anything nobler, in which case it is a pity he touched church music. ”

“ The themes sing and the music takes its impulse and motion from them; the web is no longer made up of contrapuntal workings: counterpoint is never more than an accompaniment, a helpful device. What Wagner called the melos, the melody, or melodic outline, that begins at the beginning and ends only at the end—this is the thing. The influence of the folk-song is certainly most marked in the slow movements, just as that of the dance is shown in the finales. Haydn's adagios, at his best, speak with the deepest yet the simplest feeling. ”

“ Water-colours are very useful to architects, and they make use of them; but because they do not rival Turner or David Cox it does not follow that they are not masters of the art of architecture. Haydn aimed at—or rather, at this epoch, groped after—a kind of music in which continuous melody expressive of genuine human feeling was the beginning and the end, and his mastery of counterpoint, harmony, and all technical devices were more than sufficient for the purpose. ”

“ Perhaps, on the whole—and it may be wrong to indicate a choice at all—the slow movement of the symphony in C is fullest of sustained loveliness. That phrase beginning
is, in its sheer beauty, reminiscent of Mozart, though the way the balance of feeling is recovered at the end is pure Haydn; there is the deepest human feeling, but perfect sanity is never lost. Towards the end the development is carried on in quite the Beethoven way, quite a long passage growing out of the simple phrase:
Nearly all Haydn's art, and a good deal of the art of Beethoven, may be found in the B flat symphony. ”

“ Look at him from any point of view, and we see nothing but his simplicity; yet it is hard to believe that a man who achieved such great things was in reality simple. If only we had his inner spiritual biography! And even then one wonders whether we would have much. If Haydn actually knew his own secret—which I take leave to doubt—he certainly kept it. "The daemon of music," said Wagner, "revealing itself through the mind of a child"—which tells us nothing. In reading his Life we must perpetually bear in mind the mighty changes he wrought in and for music, else we shall not read far. ”

“ By going to the native dances and folk-tunes of his childhood Haydn took one of the most momentous, decisive steps in his own history and in the history of music. That too much quoted opening of the first quartet (B-flat) really marks the opening of an era. It was not a subject to be worked out contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently striking harmonically to tempt Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had constantly tempted Emanuel Bach, to make music and gain effects by repeating it at intervals above or below. It is an arpeggio of the chord of B-flat ”

“ Haydn did not stereotype the symphony, because it never was at any time stereotyped; but he made endless experiments in the search for a general profound principle which underlies all music composed since his time. Mozart helped to make his own meaning clear to him, divined what he was groping after, and himself seized it and made glorious use of it, and Haydn profited, so that we have his master-works. But the experiments possess for us little more than the interest of experiments. ”

“ The fact that Haydn gave it in its naïve form, invented themes which in their deliberate naïveté suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well as his raw material in folk-music.
The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped. ”

“ Haydn spoke naturally through the string quartet, and many of the slow movements of his symphonies, beautiful and profoundly moving though they are, are quartet movements, only requiring a larger number of instruments because greater fullness and force were needed to make the music satisfying in a large hall. Mozart's music was entirely different in texture. One cannot imagine the slow movement of the G Minor Symphony without wood wind. Haydn knew what his music was, and what orchestration it wanted, and he never dreamed of over-orchestrating. ”

“ Mathias was only, it is true, a wheelwright, and in time there were a dozen mouths to feed. But we hear of him and Maria making music only in the evenings; his days were more profitably occupied. It goes very much without saying that he was not rich—in what age or clime are working wheelwrights rich?—but he cannot be called poor. Poverty is a comparative term; even to-day peasants feel its biting teeth only when they desert or are driven from their country-side, and make for the overcrowded towns. ”

“ During the period when the polyphonic writers were pouring out their most glorious and living stuff, in the first lame, crude fugues the medium was being prepared for the triumphs of Handel and Bach; and in the same way, while Bach was writing the G minor and A minor fugues (I am not speaking of vocal music) some smaller men were working at what was destined to grow into the symphony, sonata and quartet. These terms are used here in their present-day signification. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such words as symphony and overture, and suite and sonata, were interchangeable ”

“ The thing certain is that the great man, besides finding and inventing for himself, sums up the others. All the master-works have their ancestry, and owe something to contemporary works. The only piece of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light suddenly perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen in," and almost as many authors have been found for it as there are historians. ”