Haydn is the perfect composer to get us through coronavirus
Ivan Hewett explains why the Austrian’s humour and common touch make his music ideal for a crisis
Who is the classical composer who can best help us through this crisis? Step forward, Joseph Haydn. In the two centuries since his death, Haydn has more often been belittled than praised. Wagner thought he was born senile, John Keats said Haydn was basically a child because “you never know what he will do next”. For most people, he’s an also-ran to Mozart, sharing the same language, without the erotic passion.
But now is the time when Haydn’s special qualities come into their own – which isn’t to say other composers can’t be helpful in weathering this crisis. There are very few composers people should actually avoid, though the sweet smell of corruption that hangs over Alban Berg’s music could well bring on an attack of cabin fever, and Schoenberg’s anxious modernism will give you the jitters, if you don’t already have them. All the others have something helpful to offer us.
If you have a spiritual cast of mind Bach’s cantatas and the radiant purity of Arvo Pärt will console you. If you want heroic defiance, Beethoven is your man. If you want to “get away from it all” for a while to some fantasy land, the exotic sultriness of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé or Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un Faune will do the job.
Haydn does not have the strong emotional tint of these composers, but that’s exactly the point. Ordinariness is Haydn’s preferred territory. He expresses what you might call the sane middle ground of human life. It’s no good looking to him for extremes of anger or heroism or sadness. We prefer our creative artists to be enticingly odd and suffer mightily, and then tell us about it in tormented works of art and “my sex/ drugs/depression hell” interviews.
Haydn would have found this sort of self-revelation indecent. He did have unruly passions – his marriage was unhappy, and in a letter to a countess who was infatuated with him, he wrote, “I hope your Grace will not be discouraged from comforting me from time to time with your pleasing correspondence, which is so essential to me, in my solitude, to cheer my heart, often so deeply hurt’’.
But the hurt doesn’t come out in the music. Instead what we hear are the virtues that help us to face hurt. Cheerful good humour is the chief one. This may seem unpromising as a spur to great music, but listen to the way Haydn makes it seem radiant at the beginning of his G major string quartet Opus 54. Keep listening and you’ll come to the slow movement which is a beautiful example of Haydn’s rapt tender mode.
The music seems to float, but not at an intimidating spiritual altitude where we can’t follow. Its feet are still close to the ground, so the feeling is gently tender rather than overtly ecstatic. That may seem like damning with faint praise, but Haydn makes this feeling so radiant that it actually becomes ecstatic, without losing its essential modesty.
Conversely, when Haydn is genuinely earthy (which he often was, as befitted a man who lived on a country estate and saw the round of sowing and harvesting, birth and death, from up close), his music is tinged with radiance. Listen to the last movement of his Symphony No 104 and you’ll hear how peasant stomping can become a gateway to something transcendent.
Another thing that makes Haydn special is his fondness for a good joke, and like all his other qualities his jokiness traverses the gamut of human expression. Sometimes it has mud on its boots, as in the numerous dances which spoil their own elegance with a buffoonish “wrong” accent, or the beginning of the aptly named Surprise Symphony where a quiet introduction lulls everyone into a false sense of security, before making them jump out of their skins with a loud bang.
At the opposite pole of witty sophistication is the ending of the “Joke” quartet, where the music makes all the signals that mean “OK, this is the end now”. But then it keeps going, so when it really does end, we don’t know whether Haydn is fooling us for a second time. The laughter in his music is more than laughter; it’s an ironic, wise tenderness towards the everyday feelings that unite us. In these distracted times, that makes him indispensable.