Haydn

The Great Composers

Michael Steen

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781848318076
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.Haydn's long life spanned the transition between the baroque and the classical. Though sometimes called the 'father of the symphony', in reality he elevated the genre to an unprecedented degree of sophistication; his 104 symphonies still enchant today. His contribution to the quartet was similarly immense; he transformed it into what was to become the most expressive form of Western instrumental composition. Of the 90 still extant, the great musicologist Hans Keller deemed 45 of them 'absolutely flawless, consistently original master quartets'.Haydn's vast output included opera (not much heard today), keyboard and chamber music, masses and two oratorios. Yet this amazing inventiveness was achieved, for the most part, in the 30 years he spent closeted away in the fabulously rich Esterhazy palace 30 miles outside Vienna. 'There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original, ' he said later.Michael Steen shows the young Haydn from his village beginnings becoming a chorister in Vienna, and his struggles when thrown on to the streets at seventeen, all played out against the backdrop of the glittering reign of Maria Theresa and the later upheavals of her son's reforms. From the relative security of the Esterházys' patronage, Haydn went on to become internationally famous, travelling twice to England. Friend to Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, Haydn died as Napoleon's troops rained down shells on Vienna.

HAYDN

TO BERNARD SHAW, the Irish playwright and critic, the Inferno will be like a performance of an oratorio in a vast Royal Albert Hall: in the galleries, choristers will sing ‘All that hath life and breath, sing to the Lord’; in the arena below, the condemned will sit in their evening dress, while demons force them to stay awake.¹

Yet surely we could do worse than to be obliged to hear a continuous loop of Haydn’s The Creation? We would get such pleasure from the chorus ‘The Heavens are Telling the Glory of God’ and from the air ‘With Verdure Clad the Fields Appear’! We would enjoy the horn chorus from The Seasons. We could happily listen to ‘Heyday, the liquor flows, raise your cups and let us merry be’, provided of course that the bar would open and we had the cash to pay. Eternal tedium would be relieved by Haydn’s delightful sense of humour as, in The Creation, he imitates the roaring lion and observes how ‘in long dimension, creeps with sinuous trace the worm’. Haydn’s contemporaries appreciated his light touch: one, an Englishman, thought that listening to his music was like hearing a conversation at afternoon tea; listening to Handel’s music was, by contrast, more like hearing a sermon delivered from the pulpit. Doubtless, the Englishman had not heard of Johann Sebastian Bach.²

Haydn was born when Bach was working on the B minor Mass; he died when Beethoven had written his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. He lived at a time when Vienna had become the centre for music in Europe.³ Composers were pouring out sonatas, quartets and symphonies* to meet the demand created by an increasing number of public concerts. The earliest symphonies listened to by most of us are those by Haydn. His genius was to bring together several styles and to compose something entirely personal and individual. He blended the light galant style of Couperin le Grand and Sammartini with the heavier textures of Bach’s son, Emanuel.**

We shall follow Haydn from his birthplace on the Hungarian border to Vienna, only 25 miles to the west. Although on a war footing and with an empty treasury, Vienna was about to be uplifted by Empress Maria Theresa’s glittering reign. The middle 30 years of Haydn’s life were spent, however, away from the centre, secluded and constrained in the service of the fabulously rich Prince Esterházy. While Haydn was there, momentous changes were taking place outside: Western civilisation was being transformed by the Enlightenment. We shall look at two developments which were part of this: the wide-ranging reforms of Emperor Joseph II, and the transformation of opera by Gluck and his colleagues. Then we shall travel with Haydn to London, where he was tempted to settle among friends. However, he returned to Vienna for his old age, and died while Napoleon’s troops rained down shells upon that most beautiful and cultured city.

EARLY DAYS IN ROHRAU

Franz Joseph Haydn, the second of twelve children, was born on 31 March 1732 in a small thatched cottage in Rohrau, a few hundred yards from the Leitha, the small river which marked the border between Lower Austria and Hungary. The countryside is rather flat, although on a clear day a snow-capped mountain is visible in the far distance. The cottage was on the estate of the Harrach family, who lived in a castle a stone’s throw away. The Harrachs combined the thuggery and taste so typical of the aristo-cracy: a forebear had been Lord Chamberlain to Wallenstein, the sinister and ferocious general of the Thirty Years War; others, more cultured, had been in the foreign service of the Habsburgs in Madrid, Naples and Brussels. This had enabled the family to assemble the magnificent art works now on display in Rohrau.⁵

Matthias, Haydn’s father, made wagons for the horses and bullocks to pull. He was also responsible for the upkeep of the roads. A pillar of the traditional and conservative serf establishment, he dispensed justice in the village court, and handled cases of adultery, excessive gambling or failure to attend church. Haydn’s mother Anna had been a cook with the Harrachs, whose moated castle, although not large, would have been a comfort and means of defence in times of trouble: her father had lost all his possessions when a Hungarian peasant army had plundered Rohrau some 30 years earlier.⁶

Life was hard. Serfdom varied throughout the Habsburg Empire, in some parts being indistinguishable from slavery. Two, if not three, days’ compulsory labour were required per week; children, on reaching the age of fourteen, were required to work full-time for three to seven years.⁷ This work was called ‘robot’, and the mechanical, unenthusiastic way in which the serfs toiled is at the root of the modern word with which we are familiar. In Rohrau, the Haydns might have commuted the required services with a cash payment;⁸ but almost certainly they could not leave the estate, marry or choose their occupation without Harrach consent. They seem to have leased their own land, had their own cattle and wine cellar. Times were relatively good: the price of agricultural produce was rising, and Anna, a good Hausfrau, insisted that everything was neat and tidy. Matthias played his harp in the evenings. No doubt the domestic scene was comfortable and cosy.⁹

The standard of living of the Haydn family was considerably higher than that of the peasant whose main diet was rye bread washed down with water.¹⁰ However, Anna’s domestic economy could not sustain twelve children, so Joseph, or Sepperl as he was then known, had to be pushed out of the nest. His uncle suggested that he should join him in Hainburg, the local big town about eight miles away where he was headmaster and precentor at the church of St Philip and St James. Aged just five and a half, the boy was sent away, never to return to his family home except for rare and brief visits.

He was surely too small even to notice the gate and walls of Hainburg, or to appreciate its beauty with the Danube flowing below and the hill above. Had he, he would have learnt that this tranquil setting was illusory: less than 50 years earlier, at the time of the siege of Vienna, the Turks had massacred the inhabitants, including his great-grandfather. There was now yet another war with the Turks, with the Habsburgs supporting their Russian allies in a dispute over territory in the far-away Caspian region.¹¹ The ‘Türkenglocken’ bells rang out each morning, calling people to pray and reminding them of the horrors of a Turkish invasion.

Haydn learnt the clavier, violin and kettledrum, and played in the church orchestra. ‘I was a regular little ragamuffin’, he said many years later. There were lots of floggings and little food. He was soon to move on.¹²

THE CHORISTER

St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna was described by the musical historian Dr Burney as ‘a dark, dirty and dismal old Gothic building … In it are hung all the trophies of war, taken from the Turks and other enemies.’ This gave it ‘the appearance of an old wardrobe’.¹³ Be that as it may, the cathedral needed a regular flow of new choristers, and George Reutter, who had recently succeeded his father as choirmaster, included nearby Hainburg in his search for suitable talent. This recruitment drive must have been a distasteful and undignified experience for someone so obsequious and vain.

In his time, Reutter was successful and thus important, or at least self-important. He reduced the court musical establishment by implementing the economies requested. He married the daughter of a court functionary; he held many appointments; he was knighted. His 80 Masses were very popular: one was even used during a visit of the Pope. For all this, however, Burney described his work as ‘great noise – little meaning’,¹⁴ and today we are spared the noise.

Reutter’s signal achievement, in later years, was to destroy the farsighted Count Durazzo, the director of theatres who was working with Gluck to raise the standards in the opera. Reutter complained that the Count was poaching some of his church musicians, and carrying out rehearsals in unsuitable places; he objected when the Count invited Gluck to be composer of court and chamber music. A master of the turf dispute, he got Durazzo dismissed.¹⁵

But Reutter’s successes are forgotten. Posterity just remembers his poor treatment of Haydn, who, aged only eight, moved into his house next to the cathedral, where he joined the other five choristers, the sub-cantor and two preceptors. Whether his treatment was worse than that of any similar choirboy one does not know: Reutter’s cardinal error was not to recognise genius, something history never forgives. We can imagine that, rather than looking after choirboys, Reutter must have found it more congenial to trot along to give little Archduke Joseph his music lessons at 6.30 pm on Mondays and Wednesdays.¹⁶

Haydn received virtually no formal education from Reutter. But he did get a considerable amount of practical experience. The choristers had to perform High Mass and Vespers each day, besides performing on great feast days when the cathedral was visited by the Imperial Court. These occasions were frequent: the court had 78 ceremonial attendances at church service every year.¹⁷ A particularly solemn annual occasion was the equivalent of the British Remembrance Sunday, the commemoration of the lifting of the Turkish siege of 1683.

VIENNA AND THE COURT

Like Venice, Vienna was smelly, with the added disadvantage that the 16,000 carriages and their horses stirred up the dust, which irritated the eyes and chest. It had some fine new buildings, including Prince Eugene’s Belvedere and the St Charles’ Church, designed by Lukas von Hildebrandt and Fischer von Erlach. The magnificent palace at Schönbrunn was still being built. Haydn apparently climbed the scaffolding and was ticked off by the empress.¹⁸

Vienna was in some ways the Manhattan of the 18th century: its buildings were unusually high, most being five or six storeys, and the streets were narrow. It was considerably more crowded than London. According to an English traveller, almost 50,000 inhabitants were compressed into 1,233 houses.¹⁹ The dusty ground floor was kept empty for the billeting of court servants, but, on the mezzanine and first floors, the rich and successful lived in considerable splendour.²⁰ Above this, there were further floors and the garret at the top: ‘the apartments of the greatest ladies and even of the ministers of state are divided but by a partition from that of a taylor or shoemaker’, it was said.²¹

The real purpose of the city was to support the Habsburg Court.²² An English visitor drily observed that ‘no sooner is a man a master of a moderate fortune, but his head is turned with the thoughts of a patent of nobility; and none sets out lower than with the title of a baron’.²³ The importance of the Crown was exemplified in the dying words of Prince Schwarzenberg when shot by the emperor in a hunting accident: ‘It was always my duty to give my life for my sovereign’, he gasped.²⁴

The Court employed hundreds of master artists, including 243 goldsmiths. 25 There were few shops: traders sold their wares from building to building. Burney observed that ‘a stranger is teased to death by these chapmen, who offer to sell wretched goods, ill-manufactured and ill-fashioned. In old England, it is true, things are very dear, but if their goodness be compared with these, they are cheap as dirt.’²⁶ He also criticised the Viennese penchant for cruel sports: he describes dogs being set upon a wild ox which had crackers festooned to its head and body and fire secured under its tail. There were lots of dogs.²⁷

The city was noticeably international,* as evidenced by the colourful costumes of Hungarians, Poles, Serbs, and the Croats ‘with black tubs balanced on their heads’.²⁹ The considerable presence of the Church was on display, with many religious processions at which a foreigner would be well-advised to genuflect if he did not want to be roughed up.³⁰

The ‘monstrous’ fashions of the aristocracy were observed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,** and must have amused little Haydn. ‘They build certain fabrics of gauze on their heads about a yard high, consisting of three or four stories, fortified with numberless yards of heavy riband. The foundation of this structure is a thing they call a Bourle … This machine they cover with their own hair, which they mix with a great deal of false.’ She added: ‘their hair is prodigiously powdered to conceal the mixture, and set out with three or four rows of bodkins, wonderfully large.’ The dresses were monstrous too. ‘Their whale bone petticoats out do ours by several yards’ circumference, and cover some acres of ground.’ Yet, in spite of this physical disadvantage, the normal routines of life prevailed: ‘’Tis the established custom for every lady to have two husbands, one that bears the name and another that performs the duties’, Lady Mary wrote. In the customary English style, she observed that the Austrians were ‘not commonly the most polite people in the world or the most agreeable’.³¹

THE WAR OF AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION

Haydn arrived in Vienna in 1740, around the same time as Vivaldi died there in obscurity. The court was in turmoil. The Habsburg family suddenly faced a most serious crisis with the death of Charles VI. Like other members of his family, he indulged in blood sports on an enormous scale, heron-baiting being his favourite pastime.* In October 1740, he caught a chill after a day’s shooting. He then consumed a large pot of mushrooms stewed in his favourite Catalan oil, and died. He had no male heir. His only son had died in infancy, and his repugnance at his empress’ obesity, together with his preference for a combination of his Spanish mistress and young men, precluded any resolution of this difficulty.³³

To succeed him, he left only a daughter, the Archduchess Maria Theresa, thus breaking the direct line of male succession which could be traced back at least 23 generations. Women rulers were unknown in Central Europe. The young Archduchess of Austria, then aged only 23, could in theory be elected Queen of Hungary, but not to the throne of the Holy Roman Emperor. Charles’ predecessor, his elder brother, Joseph I, had sired two daughters before he had managed to give his wife a recurring venereal infection.³⁴ These two girls, properly excluded from succeeding their father when he had died, were now married to the powerful Electors of Saxony...

Table of contents

• INTRODUCTION
• EARLY DAYS IN ROHRAU
• Notes
• Other Books in the Series