er of Instrumental Music--The Quartets--The
Symphonies--The Salomon Set--The Sonatas--Church
Music--Songs--Operas--Orchestration--General Style--Conclusion.

The Father of Instrumental Music

Haydn has been called "the father of instrumental music," and although
rigid critics may dispute his full right to that title, on broad grounds
he must be allowed to have sufficiently earned it. He was practically
the creator of more than one of our modern forms, and there was hardly a
department of instrumental music in which he did not make his influence
felt. This was emphatically the case with the sonata, the symphony
and the string quartet. The latter he brought to its first perfection.
Before his time this particular form of chamber music was long
neglected, and for a very simple reason. Composers looked upon it as
being too slight in texture for the display of their genius. That, as
has often been demonstrated, was because they had not mastered the art
of "writing a four-part harmony with occasional transitions into the
pure polyphonic style--a method of writing which is indispensable to
quartet composition--and also because they did not yet understand the
scope and value of each individual instrument."

The Quartet

It would be too much to say that even Haydn fully realized the
capacities of each of his four instruments. Indeed, his quartet writing
is often bald and uninteresting. But at least he did write in four-part
harmony, and it is certainly to him that we owe the installation of the
quartet as a distinct species of chamber music. "It is not often," says
Otto Jahn, the biographer of Mozart, "that a composer hits so exactly
upon the form suited to his conceptions; the quartet was Haydn's natural
mode of expressing his feelings." This is placing the Haydn quartet in
a very high position among the products of its creator. But its artistic
value and importance cannot well be over-estimated. Even Mozart, who set
a noble seal upon the form, admitted that it was from Haydn he had
first learned the true way to compose quartets; and there have been
enthusiasts who regarded the Haydn quartet with even more veneration
than the Haydn symphony. No fewer than seventy-seven quartets are
ascribed to him. Needless to say, they differ considerably as regards
their style and treatment, for the first was written so early as
1755, while the last belongs to his later years. But they are all
characterized by the same combination of manl