A Croatian composer — Context and Discussion

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NOTES TOWARD THE STUDY OF JOSEPH HAYDN

_Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford Author of “Studies in Modern Music”_

LONDON SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 1897

_A small return for much assistance and encouragement_

The materials for this essay have been almost entirely gathered from two works by Dr. František Š. Kuhač, the one his collection of South Slavonic Folksongs, the other a pamphlet upon Joseph Haydn. Indeed, so greatly am I indebted to them that the essay would not have been written had it been possible to present them to the reader more directly. All that has been added is a certain rearrangement of the data, a certain amount of commentary and exposition, and a few supplementary facts which happen to have come within my reach. I should state that during a recent visit to Croatia, I saw Dr. Kuhač, who most kindly gave me full permission to make use of his results, and augmented the gift with much valuable information.

It is not for me to determine how far the subject will be of interest to English readers. We have somewhat forgotten Haydn: we do not always attach great importance to abstract problems. But I venture to think that the practical issue is not insignificant, and that in any case the question of historical truth is one which demands some consideration and regard. There is little need to say that I am myself convinced of the point which I have endeavoured to make: if the facts have been misinterpreted, at least the endeavour may invite discussion.

No doubt it will have to take its chance with those critics who would censure it at the outset for prying too curiously behind the veil. From such antagonists I beg, for two reasons, courteously to differ. In the first place, this is not a question of irrelevant detail, but an inquiry into the methods of a great artist, and into the character of his work. Grant that it deals with a single aspect alone, it does not therefore disregard or undervalue the others. And to suppose that Haydn is depreciated by the acknowledgment of his debt to his age and country is, I think, somewhat to misunderstand the conditions under which all true “creative” art is produced. In the second place, if we accept the historical statement as true, we do something to rescue a musical nation from undeserved neglect. The race which has given to a master not only birth but inspiration may surely claim from us something better than the oblivion into which we have allowed its name to fall.

I wish to offer all due acknowledgment to Mr. L. Finkenstein for his translation of Dr. Kuhač’s pamphlet.

OXFORD, _October 12, 1897_.

The study of Human Nature contains few problems more difficult or more important than those which deal with distinctions of national character. In most countries the original race, itself not always pure, has been affected and modified by a hundred causes; by conquest, by immigration, by intermarriage with neighbours, by all the circumstances and conditions of historical development; and the result is commonly a web of many diverse threads; in which we are fortunate if we can explain the prevailing colour and the prevailing pattern. Sometimes, as in our Indian Empire, the threads lie comparatively free, and puzzle us more by their number and variety than by actual closeness of texture. Sometimes, as in the Kingdom of Hungary, the interplay is so thorough and so complex as almost to baffle analysis at the outset. And when to this is added the influence of climate, of government, of religion, of all that is implied in past record and traditional usage, it will be seen that the question of causality is one which may well tax to their utmost limit the skill and patience of the ethnologist.

But if the reasons are hard to trace, the fact is no longer open to intelligible doubt. Physiology tells us that it manifests itself at birth; history, that it has formed a channel for the whole course and current of events. There is no crisis so great, there is no occurrence so trivial, as not to exhibit in some degree its presence and efficacy in the life of man. Nations at peace do not follow the same policy; nations in conflict do not fight with the same weapons; the contrast of laws and customs is so vivid that it has led some impatient philosophers to consider all morality relative. And what is true of the life as a whole is equally true of its specialisation in art and literature. For these are pre-eminently the expression of the national voice, as intimate as its language, as vital as the breath that it draws, and every artist who has compelled the attention of the world at large has done so by addressing it as the spokesman of his own people.

No doubt there are other factors in the case, the personal idiosyncrasy that separates a man from his fellows, and again the general principles, fewer perhaps than is commonly supposed, that underlie all sense of rhythm and all appreciation of style. But to say this is only to say that the artist is himself, and that he belongs to our common humanity. In everything, from the conception of a poem to the structure of a sentence, the national element bears its part with the other two; it colours the personal temperament, it gives a standpoint from which principles of style are approached, and wherever its influence is faint or inconsiderable the work of the artist will be found to suffer in proportion. It is hardly necessary to add that the law holds equally good whether the race in question be pure or mixed. If the former, it will move along a single line: if the latter, it will mark the converging point of many; but in either case its operation is a sure test of genuineness both in feeling and expression. Occasionally, it may be, a careless public has been deceived by some trick of imitation—by the Spanish comedies of Clara Gazul or the Persian Lyrics of Mirza Schaffy; but such instances of deception no more traverse the law than the Ireland forgeries or the pictures of Cariani. Some men are born with a talent of mimicry: none have ever by its means attained to greatness.

It may at once be admitted that this rule of national influence is at present less firmly established in music than in poetry or painting. In the two latter arts we have certain obvious externals to aid investigation—broad and salient contrasts of language, wide differences of scene and subject—with which music as such has little or nothing to do. Her subject is usually vague and indeterminate, her vocabulary is made up of a few scales, and for the rest we are told that her genius is limited to the common emotions of mankind and the common inheritance of pure form. But it is wholly false to infer that music is independent of nationality. The composer bears the mark of his race not less surely than the poet or the painter, and there is no music with true blood in its veins and true passion in its heart that has not drawn inspiration from the breast of the mother country.

Two main causes have retarded the acceptance of this truth. First, the belief that national melody is entirely an affair of artifices and mannerisms, that it is constituted by special turns of phrase and figure—as though you could make a rose tree by tying roses to a Scotch fir, or turn “Rule Britannia” into a Hungarian tune by ending it with a Hungarian cadence. This, it may be said, simply misunderstands the nature of the law which it criticises. No doubt a certain range of expression belongs to each type of folksong. No doubt these accidents of figure and phrase appear upon the surface, and are often useful as indications, but it makes all the difference whether they grow naturally in their place or lie there as mere lifeless appendages. Even the foreign idioms which a great composer may occasionally employ are only a graft let into the parent stock; the new growth is at once modified by the influence of the old, and alters its character to match its change of condition. And apart from these rare grafts the phrase of a true master will always be found conformable to the spirit that animates it, not because it constitutes the spirit, but because it emanates as property from essence. The second error springs from our loose and inaccurate methods of classification. That Mozart was an Italian composer seems now to be taken as an accredited jest; but it is more serious when we show our gratitude for the splendid work that Germany has done by scoring to her account all that has been accomplished by her neighbours. Schumann claims Chopin as a fellow-countryman; we are so far from protesting that we add Liszt, for whom “the great German master” was long a newspaper synonym, and even hesitate about Smetana and Dvořák. It is true that classification is often extremely difficult—records are imperfect, names are misleading, histories are marred by want of ethnological knowledge; but the admission of ignorance is not a very strong basis for dogmatic denial. Critics who traverse a law, because they cannot see its applicability to the facts, would do well to make sure at the outset that the facts have been correctly observed.

The subject of the present essay is one of the most remarkable instances of such misattribution. From the time of Carpani to that of Dr. Nohl, Haydn’s biographers have been unanimous in describing him as a German, born, as everybody knows, in Lower Austria, speaking German as his native language, Teutonic in race, in character, in surroundings. Yet the more we study him the more impossible it becomes to regard his music as the work of a Teuton. It is undoubtedly affected by his education and circumstances, by the early study of Emanuel Bach, and the subsequent intercourse with Mozart, but when we penetrate to the essential spirit of the man himself we find that its inherent characteristics are no more German than they are Italian or French. Haydn’s sentiment is of a kind without analogue among German Composers—mobile, nervous, sensitive, a little shallow it may be, but as pure and transparent as a mountain stream. His humour is a quality in which he stands almost alone; it differs totally from the wit of Mozart, or the grim jesting of Beethoven; it is quaint and playful, rippling over the whole surface of the page, and equally removed from satire and epigram. Again, he has less breadth and stateliness than belong to the German temper, but he has far more versatility. He was the most daring of pioneers, the most hazardous of experimentalists, and, what is more noticeable, his experiments are rather the natural outcome of a restless and vivid imagination than the efforts of a deliberate and conscious reform. From the external side, too, the same contrast is apparent. The shapes of his melodic phrases are not those of the German folksong; his rhythms are far more numerous and varied; his metres are often strange and unfamiliar. Throughout Western Europe the four-bar line has almost uniformly been taken as the unit of measurement, carrying with it the corresponding stanza of eight or sixteen or thirty-two. In a hundred German or English folksongs it will be strange if a single exception can be found: in a hundred melodies from Haydn’s quartets it will be strange if the exceptions are not as frequent as the instances. In a word, his range of stanza is far wider than that known to the Germany of his day, and many of his most characteristic tunes belong to another language and another scheme of versification.

The evidence here briefly epitomised can only point to one of two conclusions: either that the law of nationality is inapplicable to Haydn, or that his assignment to the German race is an ethnological error. The former alternative is unsatisfactory enough; the latter was for many years put out of court by our inability to sustain the _onus probandi_. But in 1878 Dr. Kuhač began to publish his great collection of South Slavonic melodies,[1] and in 1880 he supplemented it by a special pamphlet on Haydn’s relation to them.[2] The main points of the thesis are three in number: first, that the Croatian folk-tunes possess all the characteristics which have been noted as distinctive in the melodies of Haydn; second, that many of them are actually employed by him; and third, that the facts of his birth and parentage afford strong presumptive proof that he was a Croatian by race.[3] If this contention can be established it strengthens an important law with valuable and unexpected support, and it remains therefore that we should bring forward a critical statement of the case, beginning, for clearness’ sake, with the historical and biographical testimony, and so bringing into prominence the special character of the compositions themselves.

[1] Južno-slovjenske Narodne Popievke: Zagreb, 1878-1881.

[2] Josip Haydn i Hrvatske Narodne Popievke; reprinted from the Vienac, Zagreb, 1880.

[3] As early as 1862 the Lumír put in a claim for Bohemia. This was a step in the right direction, since it represented Haydn as a Slav, but the evidence preponderates in favour of a more Southern origin.

First, then, we must consider whether the character of the Croatian people is such as to render its claim to Haydn reasonable and intelligible. It would be poor logic to illustrate our law by deriving a great artist from an inartistic nation. And the question becomes more pressing when we remember that Haydn’s whole family was musical, that he learned his first lessons from his father and mother, that his brother Michael long enjoyed a repute little inferior to his own. But to answer it in the affirmative is to run counter to an established belief. From Mrs. Western in “Tom Jones” to Barto Rizzo in “Vittoria” everybody has had a fling at the Croats. We have come to regard them at best as savages, and at worst as mercenary assassins. The associations that we connect with their name are those of war and pillage, of fierce onslaught and misused victory, of lives bartered for gain or spilled in mere wantonness. Their art is a matter into which we have never dreamed of inquiring, and we should as soon think of learning their language as of accrediting them with a literature. To dispel this superstition it is only needful that we should study the country. Few towns are more charming than Agram, few regions more delightful than the long fertile valley of the Save in which it lies. In the remoter districts there is still much ignorance and much poverty, but civilisation is spreading from the centre, and eliciting, not creating, the signs of progress. The strongest impulse of the national life is loyalty to race and Church. Recent events have shown us that outbreaks may readily be provoked in religious and patriotic causes, but the temper that will fight for them is not ignoble, and is not infrequently conjoined with the inspiration that will make songs in their honour. And throughout the country the love of music prevails.[4] The men sing at their plough, the girls sing as they fill their water-pots at the fountain; by every village inn you may hear the jingle of the tambura, and watch the dancers footing it on the green. Grant that the music is not always of a high order, that the tunes are often primitive and the voices rude and uncouth, still the impetus is there, and it only needs guidance and direction. Certainly the present condition of the race does not disqualify it to be the parent of a great composer.

[4] Dr. Kuhač (Josip Haydn, p. 5) declares that one in every three of the population “either sings, plays, or composes.” And there is a significant Croatian proverb to the effect that “an age is known by its music.”

It will be objected that this is only a present impression, and that it tells us nothing of those days when, apparently, the whole _raison d’être_ of the population was to furnish fighting-men for the army of Maria Theresa. In answer to this, two points must be made clear: first, the state of Croatia proper during the past two centuries; second, the position occupied at the same period by other members of the Croatian race.[5] The argument “e nihilo nihil” need hardly be stated here, though it will be seen later that nothing has been added to the Croats except opportunity.

[5] For the sake of clearness, it may be well to say that Croatia proper means that district across the Save of which Agram (_i.e._ Zagreb) is the capital; and that the same race occupies the entire territory from the Drave to the Lake of Scutari; and from the Roumanian frontier to the Adriatic. There is some Italian population in the extreme west, _e.g._, at Zara; but most of this region is exclusively Slavonic, and the Servo-Croatian language prevails with certain modifications over the whole of it. There is also a considerable Croat population in Istria, Carniola, Lower Austria, and the adjoining parts of Hungary.

Throughout the eighteenth century the policy of the Austrian Government was to repress as far as possible the Slavonic peoples that lay under its rule. Bohemia, which had lost its independence at the Thirty Years’ War, was intellectually the “desert” which the Emperor Ferdinand had wished to make it; and the same drastic measures, though for somewhat different reasons, were applied to the subject races that fringed the southern border. Croatia in particular was used merely as an outpost against Turkish invasion: “purchased,” as Dr. Kuhač says, “with a few empty political concessions,” but kept in reality under the close discipline of a barrack-state. “We were not allowed,” he continues, “to provide for our people the advantages of a real city, we had no centre of intellectual life and progress, and it was considered a sufficient privilege if the name of capital was bestowed upon one or other of our towns.”[6]

[6] Josip Haydn, p. 3.

Naturally, the Croatian nobles spent as little time as possible in their own country. It was much more amusing to stay at Pressburg or Vienna, where there were balls and theatres and pageants, and a man could see life. And so it happened that even the chance of patronage was denied, and the people sank to a state of apathy, their gifts forgotten, their voice starved into silence. But about 1835, the poet Ljudevit Gaj began, as Tyl was doing in Bohemia, to restore from its suspended animation the intellectual life of his countrymen. He settled their alphabet. He made their grammar. He collected the folksongs from every village and hamlet, and enriched them with lyrics of his own. He sowed dragon’s teeth over the length and breadth of the country, and there sprang up as if by magic a crop of artists. Of course they were not of any great European importance. Lisinski and Franz von Suppé are the most famous among their musicians—but the whole lesson had to be learned anew, and these men were the first pupils.[7] And when the revolutions of 1848 gave fresh impulse to national life, a second chapter opened in the Croatian renascence, and, under the patronage of Bishop Strossmayer, there rose into being a new artistic generation.[8] Here, again, the musicians rather lag behind the poets and the men of letters; there was no conservatorium, there was no satisfactory method of training, and the young talent was generally too poor to embrace the opportunities which foreign lands afforded. But, if as yet the quality of the work is slight and trivial, something at least should be said about its extraordinary volume and facility. And it should be added that the leaders of the present generation—Zajc, Vilhar, Faller, Dr. Kuhač himself—are all making large use of the national melodies as material.