In fact, in music Haydn stands for classicism, and this is no
contradiction of what I have written about his throwing away the
formulas of his predecessors. When we talk of classical music we mean
Haydn's. He created the thing, and it ended with him. He has sanity
lucidity, pointedness, sometimes epigrammatic piquancy, of expression,
dignity without pompousness or grandiloquence, feeling without
hysteria. His variety seems endless, his energy never flags, and often
he has more than a touch of the divine quality. He did not attempt to
compose tragedies of life, for his temperament forbade it; but in his
finest music he is never commonplace, because he had a strongly marked
temperament and was poetically inspired. By dint of a sincerity that was
perfect he made music which, though it is shaped in outline by the
classical spirit, will be for ever interesting. To listen to him
immediately after Tschaikowsky is hard, sometimes impossible, yet to me
it seems anything but impossible that our descendants will be listening
to him when students are turning to the biographical dictionaries to
find out who Tschaikowsky was. A century ago Haydn was as fresh and
novel as Tschaikowsky is now, and as overwhelming a personality in the
world of music as the mighty Wagner.
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