Until the year 1791, when he adventured far away for the
first time to come to London, his outward life was as regular and
uneventful as that of a steady Somerset House clerk. There is next to
nothing to record, and I will spare the patient reader the usual stock
of fabulous anecdotes, the product of hearsay and loose imaginations.
Let us turn for a moment to what he had learnt and actually achieved
during the first thirty years of his life.
CHAPTER III
THE EARLY MUSIC
Save one quartet, I have heard none of the compositions of Haydn's first
period. Their interest is mainly historical, and the public cannot be
blamed for never evincing the slightest desire to hear them. Haydn had,
indeed, a glimmering of the new idea--perhaps more than a glimmering;
but, on the whole, he was still in leading strings, and dared not follow
the gleam. It is not surprising. He was not one of Nature's giant
eruptive forces, like Beethoven. His declared object always was to
please his patrons; and consider who his patrons were. We may be sure
that the "discords" of a Beethoven suddenly blared forth would have
scared Count Morzin and all his pigtail court. Haydn was supposed to
write the same kind of music as other musicians of the period were
writing, and, if possible, to do it better; Count Morzin did not pay him
to widen the horizons of an art.
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