inting in water-colours.
Water-colours are very useful to architects, and they make use of them;
but because they do not rival Turner or David Cox it does not follow
that they are not masters of the art of architecture. Haydn aimed at--or
rather, at this epoch, groped after--a kind of music in which continuous
melody expressive of genuine human feeling was the beginning and the
end, and his mastery of counterpoint, harmony, and all technical devices
were more than sufficient for the purpose.

To my mind he wrote as well for the strings at this time as ever he did.
He could play the violin himself, as the violin was then played, and all
his life, even in quartets, he had to write for players who would be
considered tenth-rate to-day. As for orchestration, that was an art
neither he nor Mozart was to hit upon for some time. The wind
instruments had one principal function, and that was to fill in the
music, enrich it, and make it louder, and another minor
one--occasionally to put in solos. In writing suitably for them, and, in
fact, in every other part of writing music for courts, Haydn was now the
equal, if not the superior, of every man living in 1761 (Gluck did not
write for the courts), and he was getting a better and better grip of
his new idea.

CHAPTER IV

1761-1790

Haydn went to Eisenstadt, in Hungary, in 1761 to take up the duties of
his new post--that of second Kapellmeister to Prince Anton of Esterhazy.
In that year feudal Europe had not been shaken to the foundations by the
French Revolution; few in Europe, indeed, and none in sleeping German
Austria, dreamed that such a shaking was at hand, and that royal and
ducal and lesser aristocratic heads, before the century was out, would
be dear at two a penny. Those drowsy old courts--how charming they seem
on paper, how fascinating as depicted by Watteau! Yet one wonders how in
such an atmosphere any new plants of art managed to shoot at all. The
punctilious etiquette, the wigs, the powder, the patches, the
grandiloquent speechifyings, the stately bows and graceful curtsies, the
prevalence--nay, the domination--of taste, what a business it all was!
The small electors, seigneurs, dukes and what not imitated the archducal
courts; the archdukes mimicked the imperial courts: all was stiff,
stilted, unnatural to a degree that seems to us nowadays positively
soul-killing, devilish. But some surprising plants grew up, some
wondrous fruits ripened in them. A pe