10 - Haydn: the musicians' musician

Summary

One is rather embarrassed at having to call him original; it is like saying that a Cheshire cat smiles.

Randall Jarrell on William Carlos Williams

Natural utterance did not come naturally: it was a quiet triumph of sustained artifice.

Clive James on Kenneth Slessor

The current picture of Haydn is something like this: a great inventor, intelligence, humanist, wit, who works with juvenile diligence to master every available old technique while simultaneously eager to embrace and advance every new, forced by the isolation of his employment ‘to be original’, quivering for a time to strains of emotional turbulence which immeasurably deepened his art, then learning to wear it lightly with tropes and timing from opera buffa, before broadening with maturity and age into the expression of social, ethical, religious values with genuinely popular appeal – all held together in a balanced synthesis that embodies to its fullest in music and perhaps in all the arts the concept of Enlightenment. The musical character is perceived as sunny, energetic, impersonal, normative, unbowed with Angst, cheerfully pious, a life-enhancer: Laus Deo.

Such a ‘Haydn the Accessible’ is certainly not wrong. It is the basis of the affection in which he is held, especially in the country which took so immediately to him and his music in the 1790s. Yet he is not, and probably never will be, a wholly popular composer like Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and now Mahler and Shostakovich.