1795-1809
IX. SUMMING UP
HAYDN'S PRINCIPAL COMPOSITIONS
BOOKS ABOUT HAYDN
CHAPTER I
JOSEPH HAYDN
It is, as a rule, inexpedient to begin a book with the peroration.
Children are spared the physic of the moral till they have sucked in the
sweetness of the tale. Adults may draw from a book what of good there is
in it, and close it before reaching the chapter usually devoted to fine
writing. But the case of Haydn is extraordinary. One can only sustain
interest in a biography of the man by an ever-present sense that he is
scarcely to be written about. All an author can do is, in few or many
words, to put a conundrum to the reader--a conundrum that cannot even be
stated in exciting terms. This apparition and wonder-worker of the
eighteenth century, Franz Joseph Haydn, is compact of paradoxes and
contradictions. Born a peasant, and remaining in thought and speech a
peasant all his days, he became the friend of princes, dukes, and,
generally speaking, very high society indeed--and this in days when
class distinctions had to be observed. He effected a revolution in
music, and revolutionists must have daring; and save in music he showed
no sign of unusual daring. His shaping and handling of new forms called
for high intellect, and he displayed no intellect whatever in any other
way--nothing beyond a canny, cunning shrewdness.
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