Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 8.djvu/170

 S16, ARTISTS AND AUTHORS tracting those marvellously sweet sounds from his wooden instrument, until, with the child's spirit of imitation, as his parents sang their " Volkslieder," the little fellow, perched on a stone bench, gravely handled two pieces of wood of his own as if they were bow and fiddle, keeping exact time, and flourishing the bow in the approved fashion of the schoolmaster. From this very little incident came an important change in his life ; for a relation, Johann Mathias Frankh, of Hain- burg, happened to be present on one occasion, and, thinking he saw an aptitude for music in the boy, offered to take him into his own school at Hamburg, where accordingly young Haydn went at the age of six years. There he remained for two years, making rapid progress in singing and in playing all sorts of instruments, among others the clavier, violin, organ, and drum. He said afterward, with the unaffected piety, far removed from cant, that was characteristic of him : " Almighty God, to whom I render thanks for all his unnumbered mercies, gave me such facility in music that, by the time I was six years old, I stood up like a man and sang masses in the church choir, and could play a little on the clavier and violin." Of Frankh, a very strict, but thor- ough and most painstaking teacher, he also said afterward : " I shall be grateful to that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard at work, though I used to get more flogging than food;" and in Haydn's will he remembered Frankh's family, leaving his daughter a sum of money and a portrait of Frankh himself, "my first instructor in music." For some years he seems to have lived a miserable, struggling life, giving les- sons, playing the organ in churches, and studying when and where he could. He had a few pupils at the moderate remuneration of two florins a month, and he had contrived to obtain possession of an old worm-eaten clavier, on which he used diligently to practise in the garret in the Kohlmarkt, where he lived. A pitiable description is given of the lodging he then occupied. It was on the sixth story, in a room without stove or window. In winter his breath froze on his thin coverlet, and the water, that in the morning he had to fetch himself from the spring for washing, was frequently changed into a lump of ice before his arrival in that elevated region. Life was indeed hard ; but he was constantly at work, and, having made a precious " find " on an old bookstall one day of Fux's " Gradus ad Parnassum," in a very dilapidated condition, but very cheap, he was ardently preparing himself for the life — he now vowed should be his — of a com- poser. About this time Haydn received a commission from Felix Kurz, a comic actor of the Stadt-Theatre, to put a farce of his, " Der neue krumme Teufel," to music. This farce, of which the words still remain, though the music has been lost, was very successful, and was played in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and a num- ber of other towns. The well-known story of Haydn's " Tempest Music " is con- nected with this. In one part of this piece a terrible storm was supposed to be raging, and the accompanying music must of course be suitably descriptive ; but the difficulty was that Haydn had never seen the sea : therefore had not the slightest notion of what a storm at sea was like. Kurz tries to describe the