E-text prepared by Steven Gibbs
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
HAYDN
BY
JOHN F. RUNCIMAN
Bell's Miniature Series of Musicians
LONDON
1908
CONTENTS
CHAPTER V. MUSIC OF THE MIDDLE PERIOD
CHAPTER VII. THE GREAT SYMPHONIES
HAYDN'S PRINCIPAL COMPOSITIONS
BELL'S MINIATURE SERIES OF MUSICIANS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
JOSEPH HAYDN. (From a print)
FACSIMILE OF A LETTER FROM HAYDN
MONUMENT TO HAYDN AT BERLIN
JOSEPH HAYDN. (From an engraving after Hoppner.)
MONUMENT TO HAYDN AT VIENNA
PORTION OF AN ORIGINAL MS. BY HAYDN, IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
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, a