Part 4

On March 11, 1791, occurred Haydn’s first concert in the Hanover Square Rooms. The function in every respect exceeded the composer’s fondest hopes. Its outstanding feature was the D major Symphony (No. 93). The orchestra surpassed both numerically and otherwise the one Haydn had commanded at Eszterháza. The master conducted from a harpsichord, as had always been his custom. The concertmaster was the worthy Salomon, who played on a superb Stradivarius. Dr. Burney spoke of “a degree of enthusiasm such as almost amounted to frenzy.” The Adagio of the symphony had to be repeated. The _Morning Chronicle_ wrote: “We cannot suppress our very anxious hope that the first musical genius of the age may be induced by our liberal welcome to take up his residence in England.” It was a wish which speedily spread. Even the King pressed the composer to make his home there and when, with the best grace in the world Haydn assured him his Continental obligations would not permit him to do so, the monarch was more or less offended. One reason the master gave for his refusal was that “he could not leave his wife”—though the “Infernal Beast” was probably farthest from his thoughts! What really stood in the way of a permanent English residence was the fear of the tremendous drain on his creative powers his popularity might entail. He was, indeed, on the threshold of his greatest achievements and he was strong and healthy. All the same he was not growing younger. And he knew what the strain of being incessantly lionized would do in the long run.

For the time being, however, British adulation only had the effect of making Haydn more splendidly productive than ever. The twelve Salomon symphonies (six composed for Haydn’s first visit to London, the remaining set written for his second a few years later) are indisputably Haydn’s greatest symphonic creations. Let us mention a few of them: There is the so-called “Military” Symphony (Haydn’s symphonies are more easily distinguished by their sometimes fanciful titles, than by keys or opus numbers); the “Clock”, with its Andante, marked by a persistent tick-tock rhythm; the symphony “With the Kettledrum Roll”; the “Surprise”, with its folk-like melody and its title derived from a wholly unexpected fortissimo (which Haydn believed would “wake up the old ladies”) following a placid folk-like phase—yet actually more of a “surprise” from the astonishing harmonies heard just before the close of the variation movement.

The London Symphonies, together with “The Creation” and “The Seasons” as well as certain of the great string quartets, parts of which so astoundingly foreshadow the idiom of the Romantic period, are, in reality, the summits of Haydn’s inspiration. It is a question if his genius would have unfolded itself so magnificently without the stimulus which came to the master from his two visits to England. In July, 1791, he was invited to the Oxford Commemoration to receive from the University the honorary degree of Doctor of Music. The occasion proved to be a love feast. Three concerts were given in Haydn’s honor, at one of which he conducted his G major Symphony (No. 92), written several years earlier, but henceforth called the “Oxford” Symphony. As his “exercise” he wrote for the University a three part crab canon, “Thy Voice, O Harmony is Divine”. For three days he went about in “cherry and cream-colored silk”. “I wish my friends in Vienna could have seen me”, he wrote, remarking in his diary “I had to pay one and a half guineas for the bell peals at Oxford when I received the Doctor’s degree, and half a guinea for hiring the gown. The journey cost six guineas.” By no means a cheap honor! At the same time it is worth-while mentioning a statement of his to Dies, his biographer: “I owe much, I might say everything in England to the Doctor’s degree; for thanks to it I met the first men and was admitted to the most important houses.”

One of Haydn’s greatest and most fruitful experiences in London was his attendance in 1791 at a huge Handel Commemoration in Westminster Abbey. It was a prodigious affair with more than a thousand participants. Handel’s masterpieces may not have been intimately familiar to Haydn, though the Baron Van Swieten in Vienna made a cult both of Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach. In Westminster Abbey, however, with such a gigantic array of performers and a public brought up in the reverence of Handel’s masterpieces the effect of a creation like “Messiah” was no less than shattering on Haydn. When he heard the “Hallelujah” chorus he burst into tears with the exclamation “Handel is the master of us all!” And it seems to have been the impact of Handel which moved him to contemplate an oratorio of his own. The outcome of this Handelian experience and of the great British tradition of massive choruses became, in due time, “The Creation” and “The Seasons.”

Haydn was immensely busy in England but he was thoroughly enjoying himself. He was entertained for five entire weeks at the home of a rich banker who lived in the country and who asked Haydn to give music lessons to his daughters, yet tactfully left the composer as much alone as he wished to be. So he was able to rest a little from the noise of London. Another time he went by boat from Westminster Bridge to Richmond and had dinner on a lovely island in the Thames; or he went to a dance at the home of the Lord Mayor of London, leaving when he found the room too hot and the music too bad; then he remained for three days at a castle where the Duke of York and his bride were spending their honeymoon. “Oh, my dear good lady”, he exclaimed in a letter to Marianne von Genzinger, “how sweet is some degree of liberty! I had a kind prince, but was obliged at times to be dependent on base souls. I often sighed for release and now I have it in some measure. I am quite sensible of this benefit, though my mind is burdened with more work. The consciousness of being no longer a servant sweetens all my toil.”

At a concert given in York House, where Haydn played, Salomon led an orchestra and the King and Queen were present, the composer was formally presented by the Prince of Wales to George III. The monarch talked for some time to the former “servant” of the Eszterházys and said, among other things, “Dr. Haydn, you have written a good deal.” Whereupon Haydn answered: “Yes, Sire, a great deal more than is good.” The King had the last word, however, and replied: “Oh, no; the world contradicts you.” There can be no question, however, that on both his visits to England Haydn was called upon to subject his creative powers to a terrific strain. The strangest part of it was that the artist, whose years were now accumulating, seemed actually to be making up for the slow development of his genius in his young manhood. Not only were the works he produced greater and greater, but his assimilation of great and new musical influences was progressing steadily.

Apart from his other English activities there was no end of sight-seeing to be done, complicated with a considerable amount of teaching. At the end of the music season the “worn out” master, went to Vauxhall Gardens, was delighted with the place where, among other things the music was “fairly good” and where “coffee and milk cost nothing”. However, he did have a few twinges of the “English rheumatism” and almost submitted to an operation for his nose polypus—though when they tied him to a chair and prepared to operate he “kicked and screamed so vigorously”, that the surgeon and his assistants had to give it up.

Not even a Haydn escaped intrigues and baseless slander. A rival concert organization, unable to win him away from Salomon launched rumors that the composer was showing signs of exhaustion and then sought to play off against Haydn the aging master’s devoted pupil, Ignaz Pleyel. Another thing he seems not to have managed avoiding was a love affair. “There were certainly quite a few innocent friendships with beautiful women”, relates Dr. Geiringer, “but they did not prevent the inflammable master from enjoying a more significant romance as well”. Strangely enough, we know about it only from the letters of the lady in question, which Haydn carefully copied because, presumably, she wanted her correspondence back! So far as we have this interchange it is quite one-sided and none of Haydn’s letters to her remain. The lady in the case was a widow, a Mrs. Schroeter. Dr. Burney referred to her as “a young lady of considerable fortune”. Later, Haydn spoke of her to Dies, as “an English widow in London who loved me. Though 60 years old, she was still lovely and amiable, and in all likelihood I should have married her if I had been single.” Like Marianne von Genzinger, Mrs. Schroeter was musical and did copyist work for the composer. Actually, she seems to have been much younger than Haydn’s estimate. Here are a few extracts from the letters he received from her in London: “... Pray inform me how you do, and let me know my Dear Love: When will you dine with me? I shall be truly happy to see you to dinner, either tomorrow or Tuesday.... I am truly anxious and impatient to see you and I wish to have as much of your company as possible; indeed my dear Haydn I feel for you the fondest and tenderest affection the human heart is capable of, and I ever am with the firmest attachment my Dear Love, most Sincerely, Faithfully and most affectionately Yours...”. Another time, the devoted Mrs. Schroeter is concerned about his health: “I am told you was (sic!) at your Study’s yesterday; indeed, my D.L., I am afraid it will hurt you.... I almost tremble for your health. Let me prevail on you my much loved Haydn not to keep to your study’s so long at one time. My dear love if you could know how precious your welfare is to me, I flatter myself you wou’d endeavor to preserve it, for my sake as well as your own.” Another time: “... I hope to hear you are quite well, shall be happy to see you at dinner and if you can come at three o’clock it would give me great pleasure, as I should be particularly glad to see you my Dear before the rest of our friends come.”

All the same, Haydn amid his numberless duties, found time to write to Luigia Polzelli, who was now in Italy. She was not a little jealous and the composer found it wise to placate her with extravagantly ardent letters and money. He would have been happy to see her son, Pietro, in London but he was much less anxious to have Luigia. Meantime, the “Infernal Beast” again stirred up trouble by sending notes to her detested rival hinting at Haydn’s infidelities!

Let us herewith end the story of Luigia. Haydn had once promised to marry her when he should be free. When, at long last Maria Anna Apollonia died in 1800, the Polzelli chose to remind him of his promise. But he solved the difficulty by giving her black on white, his solemn word to marry “no one else” and he also promised her a substantial pension for the rest of her life. Having pocketed that “promise” Luigia promptly married an Italian singer! Her son, Pietro, died in 1796. Haydn sincerely mourned him but turned his attention to another pupil of his, Sigismund Neukomm.

The wanderer came back to Vienna in midsummer, 1792. After the exhilaration of the first English trip the return to Vienna, for all his honors and distinctions, was chilling. No one seemed to care greatly. Moreover, there was one irreplaceable loss; Mozart was no more; and early in 1793 another blow struck Haydn—Marianne von Genzinger died at 38. Here was a calamity in its way rivaling the tragedy of Mozart. Haydn’s resilient nature recovered even from the death of Marianne. But a certain sweetness departed with her and never returned. Singularly enough, there entered into his musical life about this time a force one might assume would have fortified him to bear the burden of his poignant losses. Beethoven arrived in Vienna from Bonn bearing the following message from Count Waldstein: “Dear Beethoven, you are traveling to Vienna in fulfillment of your long-cherished wish. The tutelary genius of Mozart is still weeping and bewailing the death of her favorite. With the inexhaustible Haydn she has found refuge, but no occupation, and now she is waiting to leave him and associate herself with someone else. Labor assiduously and receive Mozart’s spirit from the hands of Haydn.”

* * *

Haydn was the wrong teacher for Beethoven and Beethoven the wrong pupil for Haydn. The young man’s relations with the old master were kind and friendly (Beethoven, according to his diaries, treated Haydn to “chocolate twenty-two times” and to “coffee six times”). But there was a spiritual gulf between them of which they both became aware. Haydn, indeed, foreshadowed musical romanticism, yet he did not, like his new pupil, arrogantly identify himself with it. Beethoven had none of that soul of a servitor which Haydn had acquired through his long career; so it was not without reason that the teacher used to allude to the hot-headed pupil as “the Grand Mogul”. Moreover, Beethoven wanted to be instructed in counterpoint the hard way; and he was greatly irritated when Haydn did not carefully correct his technical exercises. Therefore, though the relationship remained outwardly amicable and the lessons went on, Beethoven changed teachers. He placed himself in the hands of the composer, Johann Schenk, and of the contrapuntist, Johann Albrechtsberger. As Schenk had told Beethoven in looking over some of his technical work, Haydn was now too busy composing great masterworks to be occupied by the needs of a particularly obstreperous student.

In 1794 Haydn started out a second time for London, but this time not in Salomon’s company. Yet as he did not wish to make the journey unattended he decided on one of his young friends for an escort—Polzelli, Beethoven or some other. His usual luck attended him when he picked Johann Elssler, whose father had copied music at Eszterháza. Johann was Haydn’s godson and in the fullness of time he became the father of the famous dancer, Fanny Elssler. He idolized Haydn, served him hand and foot, was secretary, copyist and the first to assist Haydn in cataloguing his works. On this English visit Haydn traveled rather more extensively than the first time. He went to the Isle of Wight, to Southampton, to Waverly Abbey, to Winchester. He went to Hampton Court, which reminded him of Eszterháza. He heard “miserable trash” at the Haymarket Theatre and even worse at Sadler’s Wells. In Bath he met a Miss Brown, “an amiable discreet person”, who had the additional advantage of “a beautiful mother”; he saw the grave of “Turk, a faithful dog and not a man”; and he composed music to a poem by the conductor of the Bath Harmonic Society, “What Art Expresses”.

In August, 1795, Haydn was back in Vienna, and although the heart-breaks of the previous return were spared him he found plenty of new organizational labor awaiting him at Eszterháza, where a new prince, Nicholas II, a grandson of “The Magnificent” now held sway. His artistic tastes, though pronounced, did not run primarily in the directions of music. He gave Cherubini a gorgeous and costly ring, he liked the music of Reutter and Michael Haydn more than that of the great Eszterházy Capellmeister, and then insulted Beethoven with a stupid remark about the latter’s C major Mass. He even criticised Haydn’s management of some detail at an orchestral rehearsal, whereupon the now thoroughly irascible master turned on his patron with a wrathy: “Your Highness, it is my job to decide this!” He felt now that a Doctor of Music at Oxford should be addressed more respectfully than simply as “Haydn”.

* * *

In London the composer once said: “I want to write a work which will give permanent fame to my name in the world.” After his numberless symphonies, his masses, his clavier works, his vast store of chamber music, his concertos, his operatic miscellany, his songs and arias—after all these what could remain? England had given him one unrivaled experience from which he could nourish his genius—the mighty Handel Commemoration, in Westminster Abbey. Haydn had experimented in countless forms, but one. That was the oratorio and in this he could undertake new flights.

Where should he find a subject? Some say that a musical friend of Haydn’s answered the master by opening a Bible standing handy and exclaiming: “There! Take that and begin at the beginning!” Others maintain that Salomon gave him a libretto which one Lidley had pieced together from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” for Handel. Dr. Geiringer believes that both accounts may be true. At all events, Haydn returned to Vienna with the text. It was, however, in English, which Haydn understood imperfectly. It was necessary, consequently, to find an accomplished translator. As usual, good fortune attended him. Gottfried van Swieten, a literatteur, prefect of the Vienna Royal Library, friend of Mozart, worshipper of Handel and Bach, who thought highly of Haydn, was wealthy even if despotic, yet still after a fashion musical—this man was able to furnish Haydn what he required. Nay, more, “he got together a group of twelve music-loving noblemen and each guaranteed a contribution to defray the expenses of performance and pay an honorarium to the composer.” And Haydn set jubilantly and, withal, reverently to work. He “spent much time over it, because he intended it to last a long time.”

The labor gave him extraordinary happiness. It answered his inmost wants. Here he could give the freest possible rein to all that inborn optimism of his nature. Always profoundly religious, as free from doubt and skepticism as a child, his reverence was as sincere as it was sunny. Here he walked, literally, “hand in hand with his God”. There came to the surface, moreover, all those springs of folk-song influence which were either remembered or subconsciously wrought into the fabric of his being. And he was now working on a newer and larger scale than hitherto. “Never was I so devout as when composing ‘The Creation’” he afterwards said. “I knelt down every day and prayed to God to strengthen me in my work.” If his inspiration ever threatened to grow sluggish “I rose from the pianoforte and began to say my rosary”. This cure, he insisted, never failed.

The curious aspect of “The Creation” is that, though composed to a German translation of the English text, it is one of those rare masterpieces which actually sound better in a translation than in the original. The answer to this springs probably from the circumstance that “The Creation” is, in point of fact, an Anglo-Saxon heritage. An examination of numerous details of its setting and declamation make it clear that, almost subconsciously, Haydn has set and accompanied the English words in more subtly revealing fashion than the German. Similarly, Haydn achieved in the whole work that effect at which he was aiming. Writing to her daughter, the Princess Eleanore Liechtenstein said of the oratorio, “One has to shed tears about the greatness, the majesty, the goodness of God. The soul is uplifted. One cannot but love and admire.”

The first performance of “The Creation” was given at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg in Vienna on April 29, 1798. Only invited guests attended this and the second performance, though the mobs outside were so great that extra detachments of police had to be summoned. Haydn conducted, not from a keyboard, but in the modern way, with a baton. The rendering was superb, the audience enraptured. Haydn himself said later: “One moment I was as cold as ice, the next I seemed on fire. More than once I was afraid I should have a stroke.” “The Creation” promptly spread over the world. In England it “was to prove so unfailing an attraction that proceeds from it, mostly given to charitable institutions, by far surpassed even the receipts from the London benefit concerts that once had seemed so extraordinary to Haydn”. In Paris Bonaparte was on his way to hear a performance of it when a bomb exploded in the street through which he was passing, narrowly missing his carriage. In America it took root in short order.

The score deserves, in reality, a much more detailed scrutiny than can be given here. The introduction, the “Representation of Chaos”, does not receive the attention it actually merits. There is a warmth of color to the writing, particularly to the woodwind, which is something new in Haydn. And the closing bars of the amazing page are the more startling because they provide a foretaste of one of the most striking passages in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”. It may be mentioned, in passing, that this is by no means the only time when Haydn affords an amazing Wagnerian presage.

The great and even more celebrated moment in the opening choral number of the oratorio is the passage “Let there be Light and there was Light”. From a thin, gray C minor we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sudden and mighty C major chord—an unmistakable sunburst in tone. In all music this tremendous moment has not its like unless it be a similar episode—also a sunrise and by curiously related means—at the opening of Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”. From the very first this moment in “The Creation” overpowered the listeners and after a century and a half it has lost not a vestige of its glory. At his last appearance in a concert hall, Haydn, only a few weeks from his end, was taken to a performance of his work. At this episode the old master pointed upwards with the words “Not from me—from there, above, comes everything!”

The strain of unending toil was beginning to tell on Haydn, though the amazing aspect of it is that these latest works of his do not betray the slightest diminution of freshness or inventive powers. Yet on June 12, 1799, he wrote to Breitkopf und Härtel a letter which deserves attention: “My business unhappily expands with my advancing years, and it almost seems as if, with the decrease of my mental powers, my inclination and impulse to work increase. Oh God! how much yet remains to be done in this splendid art, even by a man like myself! The world, indeed, daily pays me many compliments, even on the fervor of my latest works; but no one can believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them, inasmuch as time after time my feeble memory and the unstrung state of my nerves so completely crush me to earth, that I fall into the most melancholy condition. For days afterwards I am incapable of formulating one single idea, till at length my heart is revived by providence, and I seat myself at the piano and begin once more to hammer away at it. Then all goes well again, God be praised. I only wish and hope that the critics may not handle my ‘Creation’ with too great severity and be too hard on it. They may possibly find the musical orthography faulty in various passages, and perhaps other things also, which for so many years I have been accustomed to consider as minor points, but the genuine connoisseur will see the real cause as readily as I do, and willingly ignore such stumbling blocks. This, however, is entirely _entre nous_; or I might be accused of conceit and arrogance, from which, however, my Heavenly Father has preserved me all my life long.”