younger Bachs, from Domenico Scarlatti,
Dittersdorf, Wagenseil, perhaps even his Parisian contemporary Gossec.
But we see the character of the themes becoming more and more his own.
There are no--or few--contrapuntal formulas, hardly any mere chord
progressions broken into arpeggios and figurated designs. By going to
the native dances and folk-tunes of his childhood Haydn took one of the
most momentous, decisive steps in his own history and in the history of
music. That too much quoted opening of the first quartet (B-flat) really
marks the opening of an era. It was not a subject to be worked out
contrapuntally; it was not sufficiently striking harmonically to tempt
Haydn, as themes of an allied sort had constantly tempted Emanuel Bach,
to make music and gain effects by repeating it at intervals above or
below. It is an arpeggio of the chord of B-flat; it leaps up merrily,
and has a characteristic delightful little twist at the end, and in the
leap and in the twist lay possibilities of a kind that he made full use
of only in his maturer style. All composers up till then, if they
ventured to use bits of popular melody at all, gave them the scholastic
turn, either because they liked it, or because the habit was strong.
The fact that Haydn gave it in its naive form, invented themes which in
their deliberate naivete suggest folk-song and dance, hints at what his
later music proves conclusively, that he found his inspiration as well
as his raw material in folk-music.

The business of the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has
the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes
it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost
from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his
folk-music into definite forms easily to be grasped. Gradually the
second subject differentiates itself from the first while maintaining
the flow of the tide of music; and gradually we get the "working-out"
section, in which the unbroken flow is kept up by fragments of the two
subjects being woven into perpetually new melodic outlines, leading up
to the return of the first theme; and the second theme is repeated in
the key of the first, with a few bars of coda to make a wind-up
satisfactory to the ear.

Here let us observe the value of key relationships. The first subject
was given out in the key (say) of C. A momentary pause was made, and the
second subject introduced in the dom