BI-CENTENARY OF HAYDN.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20564, 4 June 1932, Page 16

81-CENTENARY OF HAYDN.

HIS LIFE AND HIS MUSIC. GENIUS AND TALENT. (By A. H. Fox Strangways in the "Observer.") Music has no history in the ordinary sense: it starts afresh with each composer whom the world has any reason to call great. Each of these makes a cameo, and the cameos can be strung together by anyone so minded; but no one can foresee what the next one will be. The question before the world in 1760 was what was to happen about the wigs—about den alten Zopf. The i'ull-bottoined-Bach and Handel — were gone; both were shelved in their native land, Handel remained only in conservative England; Bach's sons honoured their tather, but turned round 4 and went another way. Tho periwig remained, but who was to wear it, and how ? About twelve years before, an Austrian, or rather a Croatian boy, had suggested tho solution, by cutting off his schoolfellow's pigtail. He cut olf simultaneously his own prospects in life, since he was promptly caned and dismissed the choir school, but his act hinted to an unwitting world that there would nob be another "Hallelujah Chorus" or "Et liesurrexit," and that in the light-hearted, frothy Vienna tho days of tho mountainous fugue, complete with organ and kapellmeister, were numbered.

Franz Joseph Haydn (March 31st. 1732-May 31st, 1809) was tho son of honest plebeian parents. They taught him industry ("as leaked out in the noblo chorus "0 Fleiss" in "Tho Seasons," his last work), method (and his belief in "form" is emphasised by tho ■deliberate formlessness of his Chaos in ' Tho Creation','), and religion (which may be read in the prayer and thanksgiving with which he approached and knitted every work ho wrote, even a comic opera). Cast on the world ;ifc seventeen,he liad the usual struggles, .which his biographers estimato iii florins; wo know a florin was two shillings, hut iis wo do not know how much two shillings would buv them and then, we may pass all that and land him in Esterhnz at twenty-nine, .bsternaz was a marsh, wliich tho Count ksterhassy who matters, Haydn's "my prince," "Nicholas the magnificent," turned at a cost of 11,000,000 somethings into a .second Versailles. Nicholas was strict and kind; Haydn was his lackeyj a good thing ' for both, and for us, too. ' For- Nicholas, because Haydn's art kept him from treasons, stratagems, mid spoils; for liaydn because, though tho chains clanked at times, the durance forced him, as ho said, to bo original; for us, because "a talent is bred in still waters, a character in tho stream, of tho world/'

Haydn's Genius. Talent is commonly opposed in thought to geijius. that up-wellin r quintessence of personality, but Schiller is not so opposing it here. He piccures talent as that slow, unceasing growth that neither thrives on opposition nor languishes from the Jack of it, here a httJo and thero a litth\ li'om the uncankered bud to the orbed rondure; and character, as tho windswept mountain pine, its sap-rings all awry, but sound at heart. Havdn's " ofc 1,1 lightning decisions wi Jivinstions, Jiko Mozart's,- but n i. £ h °. cumulative power of work «men distinguished him'from his feckjess,, unequal brother, Michael. Like .Rodney, who "J,ad to " (beat tho J-'rench and de G'rasse), his business iu \ l r *}. as , out how to say worthily ho light things the Viennese wished to near. He forwent the learned cliches of Graun, and built his stylo on the solid knowledge of Fux and tho technical aptitude of C P E Moo • 'i nd J h i s as pelhtcidly clear in the Weinziri as in the Erdtidy quartets, was the lever by which he produced a revolution in- the art. there is nothing striking about it. A Harmonic invention or two has been pointed out, but we do not feel that that was what he was aiming at. His running counterpoints have been combut they are no more tluvn his ordinary parlance made a little more fluid. As we go through a work we are mado aware that we are not iu 11 j battle but in a manoeuvre: at the edge of this wood or at that bridge-* head there is a signpost, "Out of bounds."

Its clarity is the thing: one thing at a time, and that done thoroughly. He never lacks ideas, and he never wastes them. His melodies are as much alike as first cousins, but by the time he has given us the life history of each they are quite distinct. Ho plays with them, laughs at them, teases them, sobs over them a little, perhaps, and then, for fear he should be getting too serious, passes o'n to the next. Ihe minuet is his darling. He started, life with two of them to a quartet. Separated by an-adagio; the hundred and more he wrote are all different, and all distinctive. As in the sonata movements for piano the distinction generally lies in the barring; there is no one who so convinces you, not even Mozart, that his odd bar-groups are reallv even. It was this facility which lay behind his mastery of form; form is, in fact, barring-writ large. It is not because he wrote 84 and 104 symphonies that he is the inventor of sonata form, but because, by everything he wrote, he established in music an articulated orderliness which was not there before.

TJnhappy Marriage. * The question before Haydn in 1760 ■ was, a different one. He Was in love with a wig-maker's daughter.' .When he approached her father, J. P. Eeller, he found sho was destined for the veil: should-he now, on the father's request, ■ engfige himself to the elder sister, Anna. Maria, three years his senior? He married her on November 26th. fche bore him no children. She used his works for curlpapers and pastrycases, or occasionally badgered him into writing a motet, as an acceptable gift—from her, of course—to some Kapellmeister whom she had reasons for keeping well with. Perhaps because his wife—the "infernal creature," he called her—maltreated him, Haydn grew fond of Loigia Polzelli who, for her' part, had grievances against, her husband. Both Joseph and Loigia were waiting for two deaths. Polzelli died in 1790. Loigia, reflecting that Joseph was sixty-eight 'and she only forty (though she looked more), secured in writing a promise from him that he would marry none other, and that if he did not marry he would leave her a substantial annuity. She gave him no promise in return, but, on Anna Maria's death in 1800, immediately married someone else. His gay spirit and equable temper survived these buffets of fortune.

Visit to England,

Haydn paid two visits to England (January Ist, 1791, to end of June. 1792, and.. February . . 4th, J. 794, to August loth, 1795) at the -instigation of the concert' agent, Saloman, whose enterprise enabled him just to intercept an intended visit to .Naples. We seem to have worked him hard—he wrote 768 sheets of music here; to have paid him well enough to secure him ail easy competence for his old age; and to. have lionised him in our usual way, till at last ho could accept no invitations except to titled houses. He wrote his best symphonies here, the twelve Salomans, and the "Crea-

tion" and "The Seasons" after his sojourn. Thus it was only at the end of his life—for his operas had had no real* chance of success—that his melody was called upon to characterise. Quite broadly, though with exceptions, he succeeds with nature and fails with man. Few can miss.in Gabriel's "With Verdure Clad" the joyous acceptance of the eternally unbelievable splendour of spring. And there is another piece of gfentle eloquence in Luke's Cavatina, "Dem Druck ,erlieget die Natur," the very voice of the swooning heat which precedes the thunderstorm. In a year or two more he wrote, with , a pen dipped in the same impotence, that plaintive little phrase which he sent to friends .who enquired after his health—"Gone is all my strength : s old and weak am I"—and which is usually printed at the end of his quartets, his life work.