had to compose, and seeking out their possibilities, he became a great
and original man.

It is hard, of course, to say how much any given discoverer actually
discovers for himself, and how much is due to his predecessors and
contemporaries. The thing certain is that the great man, besides finding
and inventing for himself, sums up the others. All the master-works have
their ancestry, and owe something to contemporary works. The only piece
of music I know for which it is claimed that it leaped to light suddenly
perfect, like Minerva from Jupiter's skull, is "Sumer is icumen in," and
almost as many authors have been found for it as there are historians.
The bones of John of Fornsete (or another) have long since mouldered,
and it need not disturb their dust to say that in all certainty there
were many canons--hundreds, perhaps thousands--before "Sumer is icumen
in" had the good fortune to be put in a safe place for posterity to
stare and wonder at. This is platitudinous, but it needs to be borne in
mind. And, bearing it in mind, we can see in Haydn's early attempts much
in a style that had been used before or was being used at the time, much
that is simply copied from the 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