Joseph Haydn; Servant And Master — Part 1

_By_ HERBERT F.

PEYSER

When Mendelssohn first heard Haydn’s “Grand Organ Mass” he found it “scandalously merry.

” Now, this work, composed at Eszterháza in 1766, was by no means a mature effort and it might have been reasonable to ascribe its exuberance to the high spirits of a young man of uncommonly slow artistic development.

But the fact is that, virtually to the end of his days, Haydn did not outgrow a joyfulness rooted in an unfaltering optimism of soul.

This is not to say that his creative inspiration and originality did not enormously deepen and ramify and, particularly in his later years, foreshadow in startling fashion some of the most influential romantic devices of the nineteenth century.

Yet his heart preserved unchanged that serene geniality of his youth.

As much as anything else his churchly compositions disclose this trait, and even his later masses are distinguished by a good deal of that “merriment” which shocked Mendelssohn and not a few others.

“I don’t know how to do it otherwise,” he once told his friend, the poet Carpani, when the question of his treatment of the mass came up.

“I have to give what is in me!

When I think of God, my heart is so full of joy that the notes fly from me as from a spindle.

And as God has given me a joyful heart He will surely pardon me if I serve Him cheerfully!

” With these words he set about revising that selfsame “scandalously jolly” Mass of 1766, making it even more “scandalous” by the addition of some cheery wind instrument parts.

Having finished a work and signed it, he would almost unfailingly add a pious inscription, such as “Soli Deo Gloria”, “Laus Deo” or “In Nomine Domini”.

One of the outstanding authorities on Haydn today, Dr. Karl Geiringer, alludes to the “deep religious sense, stubborn tenacity of purpose and a passionate desire to rise in the world” as qualities which could be found in all Haydn’s ancestors, “combined with a great pride in good craftsmanship, a warm love of the soil and a healthy streak of sensuality.

” Certainly, his boyhood was not calculated to make of him an incorrigible optimist had not this quality been bred in his bones.

Rohrau, the little town in which he was born, is an unattractive place in a flat and marshy country, where the frequently overflowing Leitha River forms a border between Austria and Hungary.

The houses are low, built of clay and roofed with thatch, which often catches fire in the hot, dry summers.

Dr. Geiringer tells that Haydn’s house was burned in 1813, 1833 and 1899, but always restored so carefully that few but specialists could tell the difference.

The place was probably no worse than other neighboring cottages and farms; yet we are told that Beethoven, in his last illness, being shown a picture of it, exclaimed: “To think that such a great man should have been born in so poor a home!

” while some years later, Liszt, on catching sight of it, burst into tears.

[Illustration: Haydn’s birthplace at Rohrau-on-the-Leitha, on the Austro-Hungarian border.

] Haydn’s father, Mathias Haydn, was born in the nearby town of Hainburg;

his antecedents were hard-working, honest men, farmers, vinegrowers, millers, wheel-wrights.

Of musicians or artists there was not one among them.

Mathias was a wheel-wright and wagon-builder, like his forebears.

When he finished his apprenticeship he set out on a trip, after the tradition of a journeyman, and went, we are told, as far as Frankfurt-on-the-Main.

On his wanderings he bought himself a harp.

Someone taught him to play it (he could not read a note of music) sufficiently to accompany himself in his favorite folk-tunes, which he sang “in a pleasant tenor voice”.

In 1727 he settled in Rohrau, though he remained a member of the Hainburg guild of wheel-wrights.

It is possible that he chose the unattractive market town in place of the more imposing and picturesque Hainburg because Maria Koller lived in Rohrau.

Maria was a cook in the employ of the Counts of Harrach, the lords of Rohrau.

She appears to have been a clever culinary artist (Dr. Geiringer says she “had to handle such delicacies as turtles and crayfish and had an abundance of material at her disposal.

” We are told for example, that something like 8000 eggs, 200 capons and 300 chickens were delivered annually to the castle by the inhabitants of Rohrau as part of their duties to their patron.

) At any rate, in 1728, she married the wagon-maker, Mathias Haydn, and brought her husband a dowry of 120 florins and an “honest outfit.

” The couple was by no means what could be called “poor” (in spite of Beethoven’s pathetic exclamation and Liszt’s tears!

), but Maria Haydn saw to it that ends met, as they had to, considering there were twelve children (of whom half died in infancy).

Moreover she was a model housewife and had inherited a deeply religious strain.

It was her fondest wish to see her great son become a Catholic priest rather than prefer “the irresponsible life of a musician.

” She, alas, did not live to witness his first artistic successes.

As for Mathias, who was very adequately paid for doing all sorts of odd jobs for the Counts of Harrach, his wife had the satisfaction of seeing him succeed her father in the judicial office of “Marktrichter.

” He was “responsible for the good conduct of the population, kept a sharp look-out for adultery and gambling; saw that people went to church and did not break the Sunday rest ...

while every Sunday morning at 6 he had to report to the steward of Count Harrach” (Geiringer).

He had a wine cellar, farmland and cattle.

He and his wife were of Austro-German origin, not Hungarians or Croats.

Franz Joseph Haydn (his family called their children by their second names—hence the famous brother, Johann Michael, has come down into history as Michael Haydn) was born on March 31, 1732, the second child of the Haydn couple.

In only one respect did he show himself different from his paternal and maternal ancestors—at an astonishingly early age “Sepperl” (Austrian diminutive for Joseph) manifested musical talent.

This talent took the form of a gift for singing, a lovely voice and an amazingly correct intonation, not to mention a sense of rhythm which disclosed itself in various ways.

If he had no skill in playing any kind of instrument (though he greatly wished to imitate his father’s performances on the harp) he would find himself a couple of sticks and by means of these try to “play” the violin, as he had seen the Rohrau schoolmaster do.

The wonder of the neighbors became aroused, and the more “Sepperl” gave signs of other than simply manual abilities the more ardently his mother prayed that heaven might make him a teacher or, better still, a priest.

For the last, the boy actually displayed a predisposition.

The child had a streak of piety in him which remained with the man to the end.

* * * One day a cousin of Mathias, a certain Johann Mathias Franck, came over from Hainburg.

Franck seemed a person sent by Providence to further Maria Haydn’s wishes.

He was a school official, as well as precentor of the Church of St. Philip and St. James.

At once he noticed “Sepperl’s” musical inclinations and told the parents they would be wise to allow him to take the boy to Hainburg, where he could be more thoroughly schooled than in Rohrau.

Naturally, he was ready to supply the youngster’s bed and board (for which, he assumed, his cousin Mathias would be willing to pay).

The good Maria hesitated.

“Sepperl” was not yet six and though he would not be far away she felt uncertain how soon or how often she might see her boy.

And what of those holy orders?

Franck brushed the objections aside; the boy should have care and understanding, not to forget an education unobtainable in a village.

Moreover, if “Sepperl” were eventually to take holy orders his musical training would be most helpful.

The die was cast!

The barely six year old lad left his father’s roof, never to return, save for a most brief and infrequent visit.

“Sepperl’s” mother was right.

To all intents, the boy had left his family forever.

Yet throughout his life Haydn harbored the tenderest feelings for his mother and never reproached her for permitting him to leave her.

“She had always given the most tender care to his welfare”, he told his intimates when he was an old man.

And Karl Geiringer, in his beautiful Haydn biography, recounts how, in 1795, “when the then world-famous composer visited Rohrau to see the monument erected in his honor by Count Harrach, he knelt down and kissed the threshold of the humble cottage he had shared with his parents for less than six years.

” Impressions crowded on “Sepperl” in Hainburg.

He had numerous opportunities to assist Franck in his miscellaneous and seemingly unending tasks in the school house, on the organ bench, in conducting the singers and instrumentalists at church services.

One of the duties of Franck (and to some extent, no doubt, of the boy Haydn) was to keep the church register, look after the church clock and ring the bells for services “and for special occasions, such as thunderstorms”.

In an autobiographical sketch which Haydn wrote in 1778 he said, among other things: “Our Almighty Father had endowed me with so much facility in music that even in my sixth year I stood up like a man and sang Masses in the church choir and I could play a little on the clavier and violin.

” And his biographer, Georg August Griesinger, tells that Haydn studied “the kettledrum as well as other instruments.

” “Sepperl” was kept at work without respite, but he apparently throve on all this learning, all this musical practice and all the household chores which Franck’s wife heaped upon him.

Juliana Franck was not at all like his mother.

If she expected the boy to help in the household she did not worry about his increasing untidiness.

“I could not help perceiving”, said Haydn in his old age when he talked of his Hainburg experiences “that I was gradually getting very dirty, and though I thought rather highly of my little person, I was not always able to avoid stains on my clothes—of which I was dreadfully ashamed; in fact I was a regular little ragamuffin!

” Like Schubert at the “Konvikt” he was grossly “undernourished”.

He wore a wig “for cleanliness’ sake”.

Yet his education, both musical and otherwise, was greatly furthered by his sojourn in Hainburg.

Even if he was hungry and dirty, nothing embittered him.

And in after years he said of Franck: “I shall be grateful to that man as long as I live, for keeping me so hard at work.

” And he had a picture of his early master wherever he lived, besides remembering Franck’s daughter in his will.

* * * Now, however, occurred another of those strokes of good fortune which punctuated Haydn’s life from his cradle to his grave.

Just as Franck turned up in Rohrau to take him to Hainburg, so now there appeared in Hainburg a young man from Vienna who set “Sepperl’s” feet squarely on his further path.

Karl Georg Reutter, composer and choirmaster at St. Stephen’s in the capital, was on a trip looking for good choristers.

At Hainburg Reutter stayed at the home of the pastor, Anton Palmb, who immediately called his guest’s attention to a boy from Rohrau who had “a weak but sweet voice.

” Haydn’s friend, the Italian Carpani, has left us the story of the meeting in some detail: “Reutter gave him a tune to sing at sight.

The precision, the purity of tone, the spirit with which the boy executed it surprised him; but he was especially charmed with the beauty of the young voice.

He remarked that the lad did not trill, and smilingly asked him the reason.

The boy replied promptly: ‘How can you expect me to trill when my cousin does not know how to himself?

’ ‘I will teach you’, said Reutter; ‘mark me, I will trill’; and taking the boy between his knees, he showed him how he should produce the notes in rapid succession, control his breath, and agitate the palate.

The boy immediately made a good shake.

Reutter, enchanted with the success of his pupil, took a plate of fine cherries and emptied them into the boy’s pocket.

His delight may be readily conceived.

Haydn often mentioned this anecdote to me and added, laughing, that whenever he happened to trill he still thought he saw those beautiful cherries.

” Reutter offered to take “Sepperl” to Vienna to be a choirboy at St. Stephens as well as to give him a much more thorough musical education than he had received so far.

The matter having been put up to his father and mother, they agreed instantly and with delight, the more so as Reutter promised “to look after their boy.

” It was agreed that the lad should start for Vienna when he was eight.

His new master gave him some exercises in scale-singing and sight-reading to work at in the meanwhile and, while waiting for the great day to arrive, the youngster diligently worked by himself to develop his voice.

Installed at the Cantor’s house, next to St. Stephen’s, in Vienna, “Sepperl’s” illusions presently suffered a chill.

Reutter suddenly turned into a hard taskmaster and an unsympathetic disciplinarian.

He was responsible for the education, feeding and clothing of his choirboys, but the meals were wholly insufficient, indeed skimpier than what he had in Hainburg.

A.

C.

Dies writes: “Joseph’s stomach had to get accustomed to continuous fasting.

He tried to make up for it with the musical ‘academies’ (concerts given by the choir in the houses of the Viennese nobility), where refreshments were offered to the choristers.

As soon as Joseph made this discovery, so important for his stomach, he was seized with an incredible love for ‘academies’.

He endeavored to sing as beautifully as possible so as to be known and invited as a skilled performer, and thus find occasions to appease his ravenous hunger.

” Moreover Joseph’s musical education was rather one-sided and apart from singing and a little violin and clavier playing Reutter did not bother about his young charge’s training in musical theory.

Dr. Geiringer relates that when, on one occasion, Reutter found Joseph working on a twelve-part “Salve Regina” he asked with a sneer: “Oh, you silly child, aren’t two parts enough for you?

” But that was about as much as the instruction amounted to.

Reutter was actually a composer of no inconsiderable distinction, whose teaching could have been of great help to the aspiring youngster.

But in after years Haydn said that he had only two lessons from this master.

All the same, he had priceless chances to hear much of the best contemporary sacred music.

To Johann Friedrich Rochlitz he once confided: “Proper teachers I have never had.

I always started right away with the practical side, first in singing and playing instruments, later in composition.

I listened more than I studied but I heard the finest music in all forms that was to be heard in my time, and of this there was much in Vienna.

Oh, so much!

I

listened attentively and tried to turn to good account what most impressed me.

Thus little by little my knowledge and my ability were developed.

” The boys from St. Stephen’s sometimes had a chance to perform at the Empress Maria Theresia’s newly built palace of Schönbrunn.

When the choir was on one occasion commanded to sing there Joseph, in a burst of boyish exuberance, climbed some scaffolding and appeared suddenly before the Empress’s window.

Unawed by the imperial threats the boy repeated the exploit a little later until Maria Theresia ordered the choirmaster to give this “fair-haired blockhead” a proper thrashing.

However, being extremely musical herself, and a singer of uncommon merits in the bargain, the Empress could appreciate Joseph’s execution of various church solos.

And he was happier than ever when Michael Haydn joined the St. Stephen’s choir and added his exceptionally beautiful soprano voice, of three octaves range, to the ensemble.

Joseph was given the duty of instructing his younger brother in a number of matters.

Before long Michael’s talents were such as to make him outshine Joseph’s. The latter does not appear to have openly displayed any feelings of jealousy.

Yet it might be inquiring too closely to ask if the older boy was wholly pleased when his solos were taken away from him and given to his brother, whose singing so delighted the Emperor and Empress that they once accorded him a special audience, congratulated him and gave him a substantial money present.

The good Michael promptly sent half of the money to his father, who had lately lost a cow, and gave the rest to Reutter to save for him.

Reutter took such care of it that poor Michael never saw a penny of it!

* * * Suddenly Joseph’s luck seemed to turn against him.

His voice cracked.

Maria Theresia began to complain, about 1745, that the boy was “crowing like a cock.

” Joseph was keenly distressed, a fact which was not lost on Reutter.

He summoned Joseph and intimated that there was a means of doing something about it.

_Castrati_ had well-paid positions in the imperial chapel.

Joseph seems to have been wise enough to notify his father.

Mathias Haydn went post-haste to Vienna and the scheme was dropped.

Reutter now waited for his next chance to be rid of a useless chorister.

He soon found it, for some imp of mischief provoked Joseph to cut off the pig-tail of another boy.

“You will be caned on the hand”, shouted Reutter to the seventeen-year-old Joseph; “of course, you will be expelled after you have been caned”, he went on.

And on a chilly November morning in 1749, Haydn found himself on the street, penniless, with exactly three torn shirts and a threadbare coat!

If he still remembered his mother’s wish that he should take holy orders he might presently have had a roof over his head.

But he had a deep assurance that his destiny lay elsewhere; neither did he appeal to his father for help, because he knew the little household at Rohrau was at the moment passing through a financially difficult time.

As he wandered irresolutely, uncertain where he could spend the night and where his next meal would come from, he met a certain Joseph Michael Spangler, a singer from St. Michael’s Church, near the Hofburg.

Haydn knew Spangler very slightly but he poured his tale of woe into sympathetic ears.

Spangler was himself all but a pauper.

He lived in a garret with his wife and a nine-months-old baby.

Nevertheless he instantly begged his distressed young friend to follow him home.

Joseph might sleep in the garret, which was a trifle better than the cold street.

About food Spangler could not guarantee, since he and his little family had themselves barely enough to subsist on.

Little by little Haydn set about making connections.

He played the violin at dances, he found a few pupils (at absurdly low rates, it is true), he arranged for sundry instruments some trifling compositions by musically illiterate amateurs; or he participated in street serenades, which were vastly popular in Vienna.

Such “Nachtmusiken” were more elaborate affairs than the love songs with guitar accompaniment customary in Italy.

Here trios, quartets and even ensembles of wind-instruments performed compositions of some length and diversity.

Crowds gathered, windows were filled with listeners and the players earned money and applause.

Haydn not only played in these street performances, he wrote pieces for use at them.

The folk music of Vienna served him well for this purpose, as did the melodies from those border regions where he was born and which were tinged with foreign strains and even exotic influences.

In some incredible way he made enough for several months to keep body and soul together.

Then a new problem developed.

The Spanglers expected a new baby and now the wretched garret was definitely too small to house Haydn any longer.

The young musician got around his difficulties temporarily by joining a party of pilgrims traveling to the wonder-working shrine of the Virgin at Mariazell, in one of the loveliest recesses of the Austrian Alps.

His voice having returned to him Haydn made an effort to secure a position in the Mariazell church and appealed to the choirmaster.

That worthy was not impressed by the newcomer’s appearance and suspected a swindler masquerading as an itinerant musician.

Thereupon, the story goes, Haydn resorted to a bold stratagem.

He returned to the church, made his way to the choir, suddenly snatched a piece of music from an astonished singer and sang it so beautifully that, as Geiringer relates, “all the choir held their breath to listen”.

As a result Haydn was invited to stay a week as the choirmaster’s guest and actually earned a sum of money from the delighted musicians of Mariazell.

And luck, as he found, begets luck.

For soon afterwards, a certain Viennese tradesman, Anton Buchholz, resolved to help the young man carry on his studies and loaned him “unconditionally” a sum of money which may well have seemed extraordinary at this stage.

Haydn came back from his pilgrimage to Mariazell rich enough to look for a garret of his own.

He found one, partitioned off from a larger room, on the sixth floor of the old Michaelerhaus, adjoining St. Michael’s Church, at the south end of the Kohlmarkt.

Both house and church are still standing, looking to all intents as they did in 1750. Haydn had plenty of neighbors in his attic.

Among them were a cook, a journeyman, a printer, a footman, and a man who tended the fires in the house of some rich man.

Haydn had six hard flights to climb, besides which there was no window, no stove, no conveniences of any sort.

If he wanted to wash in the morning he had to get water from a nearby spring and by the time he brought it up it had often turned to ice.

But he had a slight degree of privacy, enough quiet to study and even to play on a ratty old clavier which, somehow or other, he had managed to drag upstairs.

He got hold of a number of theoretical books—Johann Joseph Fux’s “Gradus ad Parnassum,” Mattheson’s “Vollkommener Capellmeister,” Kellner’s “Unterricht im Generalbass”—and figuratively devoured them.

And on his clavier he played the first six piano sonatas of Philipp Emanuel Bach.

“Innumerable times”, he afterwards related, “I played them for my own delight, especially when I felt oppressed and discouraged by worries;

and always I left the instrument gay and in high spirits.

” At that time, however, he established two important ties.

One was the famous harlequin, Kurz-Bernardon, who enjoyed an immense popular vogue by his clever clowning and who managed the Kärntnertor Theatre.

Kurz-Bernardon had an unusually beautiful wife, whose blandishments justified numerous serenades.

On one occasion, when Haydn performed in one of these, the comedian, struck by the music he heard, appeared at his door to ask who had composed it.

“I did”, answered Joseph; whereupon the actor bade him “Come upstairs!

” Not only was he rewarded with an introduction to the lady but, according to Carpani, Joseph left with an opera libretto in his pocket and a commission to compose it at once.

The opera was called “Der krumme Teufel” (“The Limping Devil”).

Haydn wrote the music in a couple of days, but as some nobleman imagined the piece a lampoon on himself, the work was forbidden before it was ever presented.

One effect in the score the composer admitted had given him more trouble than “writing a fugue with a double subject.

” This was a musical description of a storm at sea which the play called for.

Now, neither Haydn nor Kurz-Bernardon had ever seen the sea, let alone a storm on it!

Carpani’s tale is most amusing: “How can a man describe what he knows nothing about?

Bernardon, all agitation, paced up and down, while the composer was seated at the harpsichord.

‘Imagine’, said the actor, ‘a mountain rising and then a valley sinking, and then another mountain and another valley....

’ This fine description was of no avail and in vain did the comedian add thunder and lightning.

At last, young Haydn, out of patience, extended his hands to the two ends of the harpsichord and bringing them in a _glissando_ rapidly together, he exclaimed: ‘The devil take the tempest!

’ ‘That’s it, that’s it’, cried the harlequin, springing upon his neck and almost stifling him.

” The second acquaintance proved vastly more influential than Kurz-Bernardon.

In the same house—though considerably further downstairs lived the great Pietro Metastasio, author of innumerable opera librettos and poet laureate to the Habsburgs.

Metastasio, who may have heard Haydn’s improvisings from afar, was apparently struck by them.

He was interested in the musical training of a friend and suggested the young pianist up in the garret as a suitable teacher.

Haydn was not paid for his teaching in cash, but he enjoyed free board and a cultured atmosphere.

He became acquainted with Metastasio, whose courtliness and sensibility could hardly have failed to exercise a most advantageous effect upon a youth so predisposed to benefit by genteel contacts.

Moreover, Haydn was equally fortunate in meeting his pupil’s singing master, the great voice teacher and famous composer, Niccolo Porpora, who spent some years in Vienna.

Haydn acted as accompanist in these lessons and soon begged to be taken into Porpora’s employ as pianist and pupil in singing and composition, in exchange offering to do the now old and testy Italian every kind of menial service.

Surely it was worth an occasional cuff and kick, he figured, even seasoned with a few “blockheads”, if the great Porpora would take the trouble to correct his musical exercises, give him an insight into the deep secrets of singing and show him how best to write for the voice.

So he cheerfully brushed the old gentleman’s clothes, cleaned his shoes and saw that his wig was on straight.

For three months Haydn served his peppery master.

And in that time the young man made inestimable progress of all sorts—one of which was to acquire a fluent command of Italian.