Modern music and musicians : [Encyclopedic] . chorister, Joseph Haydn en-tered the school of Saint-Etienne, and enjoyedthere much more liberty than at his cousin in the Vienna cathedral. At thirteen he wasseized by the fever of production, and, at therisk of repenting it, wrote a mass whichhe took to Reutter. The kapellmeister re-ceived it roughly and jeered at his scribbling:It is necessary to learn before to school; listen to the masters in orderto become a master in thy turn. Until thenthou art only a child in the chorus; thy placeis upon the bench. A brutal lesson, but it does
Modern music and musicians : [Encyclopedic] . chorister, Joseph Haydn en-tered the school of Saint-Etienne, and enjoyedthere much more liberty than at his cousin in the Vienna cathedral. At thirteen he wasseized by the fever of production, and, at therisk of repenting it, wrote a mass whichhe took to Reutter. The kapellmeister re-ceived it roughly and jeered at his scribbling:It is necessary to learn before to school; listen to the masters in orderto become a master in thy turn. Until thenthou art only a child in the chorus; thy placeis upon the bench. A brutal lesson, but it does not seem tohave left a scar in Haydns ingenuous the contrary, he heeded the essential andtruly useful part of it, and understood thenecessity of professional instruction. Butwhere was he to find it 1 Reutter was nothingbut an exploiteur. After the fashion of manychoir-masters of his time, he considered onlythe beautiful soprano voice of his chorister,and, believing that he had done his full dutyby him in providing him with his daily. A PORTRAIT OF the Royal Library, Berlin. bread, did not trouble himself about his edu-cation in harmony and as a could not dream of paying for lessonsfrom other professors. He had recourse tomore economical methods, aud, thanks to somepaternal subsidies obtained under the pretextof repairing his modest wardrobe, boughttwo treatises then in vogue: theGradus adParnassian by Fux, and Der VollkommeneKapellmeister by Mattheson. These werehis helpers; but he studied them with a lib-erty of spirit, an independence, and a clear-sightedness truly admirable in so young alad. He discarded the scholastic trash, didnot stop except for incontestable principles, and applied thus early to his personal use therule of all profitable instruction : Traditionis a mighty river; the strong may cross it byswimming, the weak drown therein. This purely theoretical education, of whichthe biographies of great musicians, notablythat of
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