Part 2
It is something more than a coincidence that among all districts of Austria this area of Croatian settlement has been the most fruitful in great musicians. Veit Bach, the grandfather of John Sebastian, was born at Pressburg; so was Chopin’s great hero, Johann Nepomuk Hummel. The Haydns came from a neighbouring village, the proper name of which—Trstnik—was despairingly translated by the Germans into Rohrau. Joseph Weigl was a native of Eisenstadt, so was Ivan Fuchs, who succeeded Hummel as Prince Esterházy’s Kapellmeister. Liszt was born at Rustnik, near Oedenburg, Joachim at Kitsee, Ludwig Strauss at Pressburg, Carl Goldmark at Keszthely. And round this constellation there gathers a whole nebula of lesser stars[11] names unfamiliar, it may be, to English readers, but in their own country accepted and recognised. Of course it is not claimed that all these artists are of Croatian blood. Some unquestionably are not; but there is at least an _a priori_ likelihood that some of them belonged to the race which was numerically dominant, especially as that race was Slavonic and therefore musical, and on this general point a word may perhaps be said before we proceed to particularise in the case of Haydn.
[11] See Appendix E.
Now, apart from his, it should be noted that none of the names given above are distinctively Slavonic in character. For this fact a simple reason suffices. There had long been spreading through the world of music a practice, originated in Europe by scholars and divines, of taking a _nom de guerre_ which should either represent the sound or translate the meaning of the family name. Erasmus, Melanchthon, Stephanus are familiar instances in the world of letters, and following these august models Grobstimm became Baryphonus; Schneider, Sartorius; Glareau, Loritius; and the like. Musicians for the most part seem to have avoided Latin and taken in its place whatever language lay ready to hand for display or convenience. Thus two famous Bohemians called themselves Dussek and Gyrowetz; Beethoven’s father occasionally appeared as Bethoff; and the list may be extended even to such grotesques as Gionesi and Coperario. This device was specially necessary to the Croatian who was aiming at a career. We know with what diligence poor Abel, fresh from the German vowel sounds, endeavoured to adapt his name to the requirements of a British public.[12] The need of adaptation is still greater when the language is one which hardly any foreigner can hope to pronounce. Thus it was that the Croatian words tended to drop out altogether, and to be replaced by some rough German or Italian equivalent; and so complete was the transformation that we have to look twice before recognising Beethoven’s first violin in Župančić, or finding in Trtić the composer of the “Trillo del diavolo.”[13] In like manner the words “Bach” and “Hummel” may very possibly have been translations of Croatian names, names which are known to have existed in Pressburg and which bear the same meaning; while the family of Liszt, also claimed by Dr. Kuhač,[14] may have been Slavonic in origin, though by the time of the great pianist the Magyar element had predominated for about a century. At any rate there can be no reasonable doubt as to the Slavonic origin of Tartini, Dragonetti, Giornovichi, Zingarelli, and many other of Haydn’s contemporaries. There may have been in them some intermixture of race, but the parent stock was Croatian.
[12] He called himself successively Abel, Ebel, Ibel, and Eibel. But his patrons always moved a stage in advance, even completing the circle by pronouncing the diphthong as it is pronounced in the word “eight.”
[13] For a list of such adaptations see Appendix F.
[14] Josip Haydn, p. 16. See note to Appendix E.
We cannot, then, assert that there is any antecedent improbability in assigning Haydn to the Croats. They are a musical people, they formed the chief population of the district where he was born, they have a fair claim to other great musicians of his time. It follows that we should discuss the biographical evidence, and see what is to be made out of the record of Haydn’s family.
And here attention should be called to three points. First, that the name Hajden or Hajdin (with its derivative Hajdenić, Hajdinović, &c.) is of common occurrence throughout Croatia, and, in days when spelling was roughly phonetic, may easily have appeared in Austrian official documents as Haiden or Hayden, forms by which its pronunciation is exactly represented. Now among all the variants assumed by the name of the composer’s family,[15] these two are the most frequent and the most authoritative. His great-grandfather—the first member of the house who can be traced—appears in the Hainburg register as Caspar Haiden; his grandfather, once by obvious error called Thomas Hayrn, is usually Hayden elsewhere, the contemporary monuments at Rohrau give Mathias Haiden as the name of his father and Josephus Hayden as his own. He himself seems to have used the dissyllabic form up to January, 1762, when he signs for salary at Eisenstadt “Giuseppe Hayden”; in the February of the same year he changes to the signature “Joseph Haydn” which he afterwards habitually adopted. Even then the majority of documents relating to him are conservative enough to retain the earlier orthography, and the monument in Count Harrach’s park, which bears the name Josephus Hayden, was erected as late as 1794. Indeed, there can be little doubt that Haiden or Hayden was the family name, shortened to suit the Viennese convention, as for the same reason Händel used to be shortened to Händl.[16] Secondly, the name, in one or other of its variants, is widely spread over the whole district from Wiener-Neustadt to Oedenburg. Dr. Pohl found it in some ten or a dozen villages, many of which are claimed by Dr. Kuhač as Croatian, and in the country towns like Hainburg or Eisenstadt it is of course more frequent still. There is no need to remind the reader that this is precisely the region occupied, since the sixteenth century, by the Slavonic immigrants. Thirdly, the home of the entire Haydn family is situated at the centre of the district in question. Caspar was born within sight of the Hainburg walls, Thomas lived and died as a burgher of that town, Mathias, after a brief period of travel, settled at Rohrau some ten miles away, and the most adventurous of his brothers wandered no further afield than Frankenmarkt or Ungarisch-Altenburg. It fits well enough with this home-keeping temper that Joseph Haydn should have spent more than threescore and ten years of his life inside a thirty mile radius from his native place.
[15] Dr. Pohl gives fourteen variants, and even his list is not exhaustive. There are at least six in documents relating to the composer himself. See Appendix G.
[16] See the announcement of “Alexander’s Feast” (Vienna, 1812) preserved in the Gesellschaft library. Carpani spells the name Hendl.
On the father’s side, then, Haydn would seem to belong to the Slavonic race among whom he lived and worked.[17] Again, his mother was a native of Rohrau, in her day a distinctively Croatian village,[18] and her maiden name of Koller—a _vox nihili_ in German—is plausibly regarded by Dr. Kuhač as a phonetic variant of the Croatian Kolar “wheelwright.”[19] Everything that we know about his look and character favour the supposition of Slavonic descent. The lean ugly kindly face with high cheek-bones, long nose, and broad prominent under lip, the keen grey eyes softened by a twinkle of humour, the thin wiry figure, the strong nervous hands; all these and their analogues may be seen to-day in any village where Slavonic blood is still pure; and though of course they afford no argument in themselves, they add a touch of corroborative evidence which is worth noting. To the same cause may be traced that intense love of sport which has left his name as a proverb at Eisenstadt[20]; and something, too, of the conviviality which made him say that his best evenings were those spent with his comrades at the “Engel.” His talk, like his music, was full of that obvious fun which raises a laugh by a sudden touch of the unexpected; so are hundreds of Croatian ballads and aphorisms.[21] The humour is sometimes primitive, as when a Croat will tell you, “It is as true as that two and two make seven”; sometimes it reaches a more respectable level, as the gibe at the Bosnian Brethren, “who were ordered to abstain from something in Lent, and therefore took no water in their wine.” But good, bad, or indifferent, it marks a distinctive type of peasant character; and in remembering that Haydn was a genius we need not forget that he was a peasant. The same holds good, too, of his religious feeling. It is not without significance that we may turn from one of his scores, with its “In Nomine Domini” at the beginning, and its “Laus Deo” at the end, to read in our newspaper that another Croatian village has risen in revolt upon the bare report of an ecclesiastical change. His temper, it may be, had grown more equable than that of his uneducated countrymen; it had not lost anything of their loyalty.
[17] It is fair to state that some etymologists derive the name Haiden from the district “Auf der Haid” near Hainburg. But this is very unlikely. The district is a narrow stretch of moorland, and could not account for the prevalence of the name through the whole country-side, to say nothing of the frequent occurrence in Croatia proper.
[18] Its second title, “Trstnik,” is significant enough. And at the present day it contain a good many Croats, especially among the poorer inhabitants.
[19] In like manner Pìlar has been Germanised into Piller, Solar into Soller, Kresar into Kresser, and so on. See a list of such changes in Kuhač’s Josip Haydn, pp. 17, 18.
[20] To je lovac i ribar kao Haydn; _i.e._, as good a shot and fisherman as Haydn.
[21] See instances quoted by Dr. Kuhač, Josip Haydn, pp. 27-29.
The reasons which have led to this indication of detail may easily be misunderstood. It is not, of course, contended that any race has the monopoly of these characteristics, or that it differs ethically from its neighbours except by the very important fact of the proportion in which they are blended. But when it appears that the more we study Haydn, and the more we study the Slavonic character, the closer becomes the accord between them, when every feature of the one finds its parallel in the prevailing qualities of the other, then we may surely infer that to the antecedent probability some weight is added by this estimate of internal evidence. And probability will strengthen to certitude if we realise that Haydn’s music is saturated with Croatian melody, that the resemblances are beyond question, beyond attribution of coincidence, beyond any explanation but that of natural growth. Some of his tunes are folksongs in their simplest form, some are folksongs altered and improved, the vast majority are original, but display the same general characteristics. He would stand wholly outside the practice of the great composers if he wrote, by habitual preference, in an idiom that was not his own.
His acquaintance with these folk-tunes must have begun from his earliest years. His father, we know, was a good musician who used, of an evening, to sit by the cottage door at Rohrau, singing to the children until they plucked up their courage and joined in. And when Frankh carried off the boy for his first experience of schooling, it was only to Hainburg, the earlier home of the family, where he may well have heard the same ballads breaking the quiet of the market-place, or echoing under the great arch of the Wiener Thor. Then, no doubt, came a change; the splendid apparition of George Reutter, the halo of Imperial patronage, the ten years in the choir at St. Stephen’s, the sharp struggle for existence when the boy’s voice broke, and he was turned into the streets of Vienna to shift for himself. It is in every way natural that his first composition should show little direct trace of national influence. He was in his student period; like all students he was dominated by the authority of his models, and for a time his chief ambition was to master the form of Emanuel Bach, and emulate the counterpoint of the Gradus ad Parnassum. But from the days when he began to speak in his own voice the Slavonic qualities unmistakably appear. There is the same general shape of melody, the same repetition of phrases, the same oddity of rhythm and metre, the same fineness and sensitiveness of feeling; and that not once or twice in a composition, but throughout its entire length. The common employment of folksongs dates from the Symphony in D major (1762) to the Salomon Symphonies of 1795; they find their way into everything—hymns, quartets, divertimenti; not, of course, because Haydn had any need to take them, but because he loved them too well to leave them out. It will be remembered that for thirty years, from 1761 to 1790, he worked as Prince Esterházy’s Kapellmeister in the very centre of the Croatian colony. He must have heard these songs every day, he must have set his life to their lilt and cadence; they were the melodies of his own people, the echoes of his own thought. No one is surprised that Burns should have gathered the Ayrshire peasant songs and transmuted them into gold by the fire of his genius; it is not more wonderful that Haydn should have enriched the treasures of Eisenstadt with metal from his native mines, and as Heine pertinently puts it, the Temple is built by the Architect, not by the stone-cutters who supply him with his materials.
Among the numerous illustrations collected by Dr. Kuhač, the following deserve special attention.
(1) The Cassation in G major (1765)[22] begins as follows:—
[Music]
[22] Dr. Kuhač gives 1754 as the date of this work. If so, it is the earliest known instance. The above date, which is more probably correct, is that given by Dr. Pohl.
a melody noticeable for the breaking of the four-quaver rhythm by alternate bars of six. It can hardly be doubted that when Haydn wrote this he had in his mind the old Slavonic drinking song, “Nikaj na svetu”—
[Music]
variants of which may still be heard in Croatia, and in the Carinthian Zillerthal. Similar instances of slight adaptation may be traced from the spring song, “Proljeće”—
[Music]
which appears at the beginning of the D major Quartet (Op. 17, No. 6) as—
[Music]
and from the dance-song “Hajde malo dere”—
[Music]
which is thus altered by Haydn—
[Music]
(2) The curious and characteristic finale of the D major Symphony (Salomon, No. 7) is founded on the following theme:—
[Music]
This is simply an amended version of the popular ballad, “Oj Jelena,” which belongs to the district of Kolnov, near Oedenburg, and is specially noted by Dr. Kuhač as being commonly sung in Eisenstadt. Its tune, essentially Slavonic in rhythm and cadence, runs thus:—
[Music]
Variants of this melody are found in Croatia proper, Servia, and Carniola.[23]
[23] See Kuhač, “South Slavonic Popular Songs,” vol. iii. pp. 98-100.
It is probable that the other movements of this symphony are equally influenced by folksongs; in any case, no doubt can exist as to the Symphony in E♭, “Mit dem Paukenwirbel.” The opening theme of the Allegro—
[Music]
is noted by Dr. Kuhač as Croatian.[24] The Andante is founded on two themes, the first minor—
[Music]
[24] See Kuhač, “South Slavonic Popular Songs,” vol. iii. p. 92.
the second major—
[Music]
both of which are taken, and considerably improved, from two folksongs of the Oedenburg district, (_a_) “Na Travniku”—
[Music]
and (_b_) “Jur Postaje”—
[Music]
while the principal tune of the Finale—
[Music]
is that of the song “Divojčica potok gazi”—
[Music]
which is common among the Croats, especially those of Haydn’s district.[25] Again, the Trio of the A major Symphony (No. 11 in Haydn’s Catalogue) contains a Slavonic melody—
[Music]
[25] See Kuhač, “South Slavonic Popular Songs,” vol. iii. p. 82.
and the first movement of its successor (D major, No. 12) suggests another—
[Music]
(3) There are several cases in which, without direct adaptation, Haydn has shown the same tendency of thought or phrase as the Slavonic folksongs. A favourite “curve” of his may be illustrated by the opening of the B♭ Symphony (Salomon, No. 9)—
[Music]
as well as by the Dalmatian Overture of Franz von Suppé and the tunes (from Zara and Borištov) on which it was founded—_e.g._, the ballad “Na placi sem stal”—
[Music]
Another, even more beautiful, ends the opening strain in the Adagio of the G major Quartet (Op. 77, No. 1)—
[Music]
and appears also in the Croatian “Čuješ doro dobro moje”—
[Music]
while the use of the unprepared dominant ninth, constructed out of a dominant seventh by shifting the melody a third higher, was not so common in Haydn’s day that we can afford to neglect the resemblance of—
[Music]
quoted by Dr. Kuhač from a Quartet in B♭,[26] to—
[Music]
from a popular folksong of Carniola.
[26] Dr. Kuhač calls it the Sixth Quartet (“u Allegru šestoga četverogudja”), but it is not the sixth in the Paris and London edition, or in the Dresden, or in that of Peters.
(4) These latter examples do not imply reminiscences, but at most a general sympathy of temper. A good deal more, however, is involved in the treatment of Slavonic dance tunes. It is hardly too much to say that what the Csardas was to Liszt the Kolo was to Haydn; with this difference—that the earlier and greater musician has throughout made a finer use of his materials. The Kolo is a Slavonic measure, which I have seen the children dance at Agram and the men at Sarajevo, bright and cheery of movement, its tune in two-four time ingeniously varied by patterns of quaver and semiquaver figures. Here, for instance, is an example well known in Bosnia and Dalmatia:—
[Music]
and used with an amended cadence in the Finale of the C major Quartet (Op. 33, No. 3):—
[Music]
Here, again, is a similar dance-tune from Servia, which opens the Symphony in D major (Haydn’s Catalogue, No. 4):—
[Music]
and here another in the Finale of the G major Quartet (Op. 77, No. 1):—
[Music]
in which so wonderful an effect is produced by the alternation of cold unison and glowing harmonies.
Many of Haydn’s characteristic melodies follow one or other of these types: _e.g._, this from the Finale of the F major Quartet (Op. 74, No. 2)—
[Music]
or this from the “Bear” Symphony:—
[Music]
or this from the Finale of the Quartet in D (Op. 76, No. 5):—
[Music]
while the metrical peculiarities of the Eastern or Servian Slav may be illustrated by the following, from the Symphony in F major (No. 1 in the Viennese edition):—
[Music]
as they may, apart from the Kolo measure, in a hundred of his minuets and finales. Again, the early Pianoforte Concerto in D major ends with an oddly named “Rondo à l’Hongrie”, the principal subject of which is as follows:—
[Music]
This melody, which contains no Magyar characteristics, either of figure, scale, or stanza, is compressed from that of the Siri Kolo, as commonly danced in Bosnia and Dalmatia. The complete tune runs:—
[Music]
[Music]
a typical rustic dance, which in Haydn’s hands has gained not only by compression, but by a more artistic accompaniment.
(5) In addition to the dance measure, Haydn has adopted other instrumental forms, _e.g._, marches, bag-pipe melodies, and the like. Here is one, with a strange rhythm, from the Pianoforte Scherzando in F major:—
[Music]
and here, from the Finale of the B♭ Symphony (Salomon, No. 9), is the march which is commonly played in Turopol at rustic weddings:—
[Music]
Another Croatian march beginning—
[Music]
has been identified by Dr. Kuhač from an unpublished Symphony in A major, and there is a further example from the Allegro of the B♭ Quartet (Op. 71, No. 1)—
[Music]
(6) The two most remarkable instances are yet to come. According to a well-known story, Prince Esterházy once discussed with his Kapellmeister the question whether Church music could not be made “at the same time religious and popular.” It is hard to realise that Haydn’s Masses were ever regarded as too severe; in any case, the Prince felt dissatisfied, and wanted a change. He had recently returned from his annual pilgrimage to Maria Zell. He had heard there music which pleased him, and he seems to have suggested that in the Eisenstadt chapel there was too much counterpoint and too little melody. Haydn listened, sent to Maria Zell for information, bided his time, and, when next year the day of the pilgrimage was approaching, wrote a “Mass” or Service to German words,[27] despatched it to the famous church, had it secretly practised, and finally found an excuse for slipping off on a holiday. The Prince came back more dissatisfied than ever. “I have heard,” he said, “a service of Church music composed and played in a style which you will never equal.” “Your Highness,” answered Haydn, “the composition was mine, and I was the organist.”
[27] This story is sometimes told of the Mariazeller Mass in C major (Novello, No. 15). But first, the Mariazeller Mass was written by commission for Anton Liebe von Kreutzner; second, it is set to the usual Latin text; and third, it does not contain any of the popular melodies in question.
From this “Mass,” of which at present no other trace seems to be discoverable, Dr. Kuhač quotes seven melodies on the authority of the Dominican Alois Russwurm, who was a personal friend of Haydn, and by whom the story was originally recorded.
The first, “Hier liegt vor Deiner Majestät,” is the opening theme of the first number—
[Music]
and comes from the Croatian tune—
[Music]
The second, “Gott soll gepriesen werden”—
[Music]
is the song “Ti jabuka,” as sung in Velik-Borištov—
[Music]
The third, “Allmächtiger, vor Dir im Staube,”—
[Music]
begins remarkably like the Slavonian drinking song, “Draga moja gospodo.”[28]
[Music]
[28] The three-bar phrase is a common feature of early Slavonic melodies, especially when conjoined with a second phrase of four bars in irregular balance.
The fourth, “O Vater, sieh vor Deinem Throne”—
[Music]
may fairly be regarded as a variant of the Dalmatian song, “Jedna Ciganka”—
[Music]
The fifth, “Betrachtet ihn in Schmerzen”—
[Music]
is almost identical in both parts with the following Croatian melody:—
[Music]
The sixth—“Nun ist das Lamm geschlachtet”—
[Music]
is derived partly from two separate strains in the Croatian and Slavonian versions of a convivial chorus—“Vivla compagnija”—
[Music]
[Music]
partly from a Croatian sacred song—“Stani gori gospodar.”
[Music]
The seventh—“Dich wahres Oesterlamm”—which is the concluding phrase of the canticle for the Celebration,—
[Music]
borrows its exact sequence and its curious halting rhythm from the Croatian “Miši prave svatove”—
[Music]
Clearly, in Haydn’s vocabulary “popular” meant Slavonic.