Haydn’s joyful inventions

By Harry Eyres

Published: February 21 2009 00:18 | Last updated: February 21 2009 01:59

Haydn’s death in May 1809 was anything but peaceful. The old man who had worked for so long in the quiet backwaters of rural Hungary, as Kapellmeister at the princely palace of Esterhaza, found himself at the end surrounded by the alarums of war. Napoleon’s troops were bombarding Vienna, but the emperor set a guard of honour around the house of Europe’s most celebrated composer. A cannon ball landed in Haydn’s garden in Gumpendorf on May 19; a week later Haydn had himself carried to the piano to play, for the last time, his anthem Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, with an emotion that apparently overwhelmed both himself and the members of his household.

Two hundred years later we have an image of Haydn as the embodiment of 18th-century cheerfulness – a powdered wig framing what Kenneth Clark called “the smile of reason”. Haydn does not accord with our notions of tormented genius; he disproved the old Greek saw that “those whom the gods love die young”. Romantics such as Schumann and Wagner saw him as a servile lackey of the ancien regime. Among the great quartet of Viennese classical and early romantic composers, he lags far behind Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert in popularity – with the general public, that is: among musicians Haydn is loved and revered. Last Sunday in a talk at the Royal College of Music I tried to address the question of how the composer who achieved unparalleled fame in his own lifetime has come to be seriously underrated.

The key to Haydn, I decided, lies in his invention – or the way that word has changed in meaning over the last 200 years. When we hear the word invention, we tend to think of a scientific or technological invention, an amazingly clever new device, something you wouldn’t discover very often. You could argue Haydn was an inventor, in this later, more heroic sense: he more or less single-handedly developed the classical template of sonata form, in his great series of symphonies and string quartets, which would serve as the model for countless others throughout the 19th century. Haydn once wrote that living in such isolation at Esterhaza had forced him to be original; there was no one else around to make him conform to prevailing taste and ideas.

But the word invention as used in the 18th century for artistic and especially musical creation means something rather different. Invention in this sense is not something that happens rarely but something you get down to every day. Invention is sitting down at the piano, or the fortepiano, or the manuscript paper, and coming up with something new. All 18th-century composers, working under pressure and to order, had to come up with the goods, had to fill the staves with notes. What marks out Haydn as one of the all-time musical greats is the astonishing and unceasing freshness of his invention.

Writing about the set of six string quartets opus 76, completed in 1797, the English musicologist Charles Burney wrote that the works were “full of invention, fire, good taste and new effects, and seem the production not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well recently, but one of the highly cultivated talents, who has expended none of his fire before”. Or more simply, not of an old man (Haydn was 65), but a young one. It would be many years before Beethoven, whom Haydn taught in the 1790s, could write string quartets as radically youthful as these.

Listening to these marvellous works, and especially the great sequence of slow movements that lies at their heart, you get the impression of a composer constantly breaking new ground, never ceasing from exploration. In the case of these slow movements, the adagios from numbers 3, 4 and 6, and above all the Largo Mesto e Cantabile of number 5, the direction of the exploration is inward. They enact a process of going more deeply into being, slowly and gravely unfolding layers of beauty and radiance. This is a journey not into the heart of darkness, as we sometimes feel with Romantic music, but into what TS Eliot in “Burnt Norton”, the first of his Four Quartets, calls “heart of light”.

But although this is sublime music (“there is no greater composer than Joseph Haydn”, announced Sir Simon Rattle at last year’s Proms, to some people’s surprise but not mine), it does not set itself above this world, or try to go beyond it. Instead, it achieves a kind of everyday sublimity. Haydn would probably have demurred from talk of the sublime. He was a man of genuine humility and simplicity in the best sense, who rose early to work, to begin again the joyful task of invention.

This is an invention that finds itself in finding something new to say, every day. Haydn’s joyful invention is both one of the lasting wonders of the world and a wonderful example to us as humans that being human means being inventive, being an inventor. We are all inventors, if we let ourselves be; we can all invent something new every morning, our own new word.