I suppose nine hundred and ninety-nine listeners in a thousand find
Haydn's music a trifle tame. Now, I myself--in all humility let me say
it--would not stand being bored for ten minutes by any composer, not
though he were ten times as great as the greatest man who has ever
lived. There is not a note of Haydn's I would not wish to hear, but
there is a very great deal I would refuse to listen to twice, and much
that I would only listen to in small bits at a time. Having willingly
conceded this, let me warn anyone who takes up Haydn against expecting
and wasting time in looking for the wrong thing, for qualities that are
not in Haydn, and are not claimed for him. Especially have we to discard
the text-book rubbish about his "service to art," the "tradition he
established," about the "form stereotyped by him." I have just said that
in his Esterhazy time he was of great service to artists, but the music
he then wrote was mainly second-rate, and I am now speaking of his best.
Here his form is clear enough, but one does not listen to music merely
for that. His form, indeed, became formalism and formality. It was
natural to a man who had spent his life in looking for a principle that
he should to a degree mistake the accident for the essence.
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