Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. Haydn's long life spanned the transition between the baroque and the classical. Though sometimes called the 'father of the symphony', in reality he elevated the genre to an unprecedented degree of sophistication; his 104 symphonies still enchant today. His contribution to the quartet was similarly immense; he transformed it into what was to become the most expressive form of Western instrumental composition. Of the 90 still extant, the great musicologist Hans Keller deemed 45 of them 'absolutely flawless, consistently original master quartets'. Haydn's vast output included opera (not much heard today), keyboard and chamber music, masses and two oratorios. Yet this amazing inventiveness was achieved, for the most part, in the 30 years he spent closeted away in the fabulously rich Esterhazy palace 30 miles outside Vienna. 'There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original,' he said later. Michael Steen shows the young Haydn from his village beginnings becoming a chorister in Vienna, and his struggles when thrown on to the streets at seventeen, all played out against the backdrop of the glittering reign of Maria Theresa and the later upheavals of her son's reforms. From the relative security of the Esterházys' patronage, Haydn went on to become internationally famous, travelling twice to England. Friend to Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, Haydn died as Napoleon's troops rained down shells on Vienna.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 90
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-807-6
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
Haydn's long life spanned the transition between the baroque and the classical. Though sometimes called the ‘father of the symphony’, in reality he elevated the genre to an unprecedented degree of sophistication; his 104 symphonies still enchant today. His contribution to the quartet was similarly immense; he transformed it into what was to become the most expressive form of Western instrumental composition. Of the 90 still extant, the great musicologist Hans Keller deemed 45 of them ‘absolutely flawless, consistently original master quartets’.
Haydn's vast output included opera (not much heard today), keyboard and chamber music, masses and two oratorios. Yet this amazing inventiveness was achieved, for the most part, in the 30 years he spent closeted away in the fabulously rich Esterhazy palace 30 miles outside Vienna. ‘There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original,’ he said later.
Michael Steen shows the young Haydn from his village beginnings becoming a chorister in Vienna, and his struggles when thrown on to the streets at seventeen, all played out against the backdrop of the glittering reign of Maria Theresa and the later upheavals of her son's reforms. From the relative security of the Esterházys' patronage, Haydn went on to become internationally famous, travelling twice to England. Friend to Mozart, teacher of Beethoven, Haydn died as Napoleon's troops rained down shells on Vienna.
HAYDN
TO BERNARD SHAW, the Irish playwright and critic, the Inferno will be like a performance of an oratorio in a vast Royal Albert Hall: in the galleries, choristers will sing ‘All that hath life and breath, sing to the Lord’; in the arena below, the condemned will sit in their evening dress, while demons force them to stay awake.1
Yet surely we could do worse than to be obliged to hear a continuous loop of Haydn’s The Creation? We would get such pleasure from the chorus ‘The Heavens are Telling the Glory of God’ and from the air ‘With Verdure Clad the Fields Appear’! We would enjoy the horn chorus from The Seasons. We could happily listen to ‘Heyday, the liquor flows, raise your cups and let us merry be’, provided of course that the bar would open and we had the cash to pay. Eternal tedium would be relieved by Haydn’s delightful sense of humour as, in The Creation, he imitates the roaring lion and observes how ‘in long dimension, creeps with sinuous trace the worm’. Haydn’s contemporaries appreciated his light touch: one, an Englishman, thought that listening to his music was like hearing a conversation at afternoon tea; listening to Handel’s music was, by contrast, more like hearing a sermon delivered from the pulpit. Doubtless, the Englishman had not heard of Johann Sebastian Bach.2
Haydn was born when Bach was working on the B minor Mass; he died when Beethoven had written his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. He lived at a time when Vienna had become the centre for music in Europe.3 Composers were pouring out sonatas, quartets and symphonies* to meet the demand created by an increasing number of public concerts. The earliest symphonies listened to by most of us are those by Haydn. His genius was to bring together several styles and to compose something entirely personal and individual. He blended the light galant style of Couperin le Grand and Sammartini with the heavier textures of Bach’s son, Emanuel.**
We shall follow Haydn from his birthplace on the Hungarian border to Vienna, only 25 miles to the west. Although on a war footing and with an empty treasury, Vienna was about to be uplifted by Empress Maria Theresa’s glittering reign. The middle 30 years of Haydn’s life were spent, however, away from the centre, secluded and constrained in the service of the fabulously rich Prince Esterházy. While Haydn was there, momentous changes were taking place outside: Western civilisation was being transformed by the Enlightenment. We shall look at two developments which were part of this: the wide-ranging reforms of Emperor Joseph II, and the transformation of opera by Gluck and his colleagues. Then we shall travel with Haydn to London, where he was tempted to settle among friends. However, he returned to Vienna for his old age, and died while Napoleon’s troops rained down shells upon that most beautiful and cultured city.
EARLY DAYS IN ROHRAU
Franz Joseph Haydn, the second of twelve children, was born on 31 March 1732 in a small thatched cottage in Rohrau, a few hundred yards from the Leitha, the small river which marked the border between Lower Austria and Hungary. The countryside is rather flat, although on a clear day a snow-capped mountain is visible in the far distance. The cottage was on the estate of the Harrach family, who lived in a castle a stone’s throw away. The Harrachs combined the thuggery and taste so typical of the aristo-cracy: a forebear had been Lord Chamberlain to Wallenstein, the sinister and ferocious general of the Thirty Years War; others, more cultured, had been in the foreign service of the Habsburgs in Madrid, Naples and Brussels. This had enabled the family to assemble the magnificent art works now on display in Rohrau.5
Matthias, Haydn’s father, made wagons for the horses and bullocks to pull. He was also responsible for the upkeep of the roads. A pillar of the traditional and conservative serf establishment, he dispensed justice in the village court, and handled cases of adultery, excessive gambling or failure to attend church. Haydn’s mother Anna had been a cook with the Harrachs, whose moated castle, although not large, would have been a comfort and means of defence in times of trouble: her father had lost all his possessions when a Hungarian peasant army had plundered Rohrau some 30 years earlier.6
Life was hard. Serfdom varied throughout the Habsburg Empire, in some parts being indistinguishable from slavery. Two, if not three, days’ compulsory labour were required per week; children, on reaching the age of fourteen, were required to work full-time for three to seven years.7 This work was called ‘robot’, and the mechanical, unenthusiastic way in which the serfs toiled is at the root of the modern word with which we are familiar. In Rohrau, the Haydns might have commuted the required services with a cash payment;8 but almost certainly they could not leave the estate, marry or choose their occupation without Harrach consent. They seem to have leased their own land, had their own cattle and wine cellar. Times were relatively good: the price of agricultural produce was rising, and Anna, a good Hausfrau, insisted that everything was neat and tidy. Matthias played his harp in the evenings. No doubt the domestic scene was comfortable and cosy.9
The standard of living of the Haydn family was considerably higher than that of the peasant whose main diet was rye bread washed down with water.10 However, Anna’s domestic economy could not sustain twelve children, so Joseph, or Sepperl as he was then known, had to be pushed out of the nest. His uncle suggested that he should join him in Hainburg, the local big town about eight miles away where he was headmaster and precentor at the church of St Philip and St James. Aged just five and a half, the boy was sent away, never to return to his family home except for rare and brief visits.
He was surely too small even to notice the gate and walls of Hainburg, or to appreciate its beauty with the Danube flowing below and the hill above. Had he, he would have learnt that this tranquil setting was illusory: less than 50 years earlier, at the time of the siege of Vienna, the Turks had massacred the inhabitants, including his great-grandfather. There was now yet another war with the Turks, with the Habsburgs supporting their Russian allies in a dispute over territory in the far-away Caspian region.11 The ‘Türkenglocken’ bells rang out each morning, calling people to pray and reminding them of the horrors of a Turkish invasion.
Haydn learnt the clavier, violin and kettledrum, and played in the church orchestra. ‘I was a regular little ragamuffin’, he said many years later. There were lots of floggings and little food. He was soon to move on.12
THE CHORISTER
St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna was described by the musical historian Dr Burney as ‘a dark, dirty and dismal old Gothic building … In it are hung all the trophies of war, taken from the Turks and other enemies.’ This gave it ‘the appearance of an old wardrobe’.13 Be that as it may, the cathedral needed a regular flow of new choristers, and George Reutter, who had recently succeeded his father as choirmaster, included nearby Hainburg in his search for suitable talent. This recruitment drive must have been a distasteful and undignified experience for someone so obsequious and vain.
