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In what follows I make no attempt to suggest a direct link between the poet and the composer, rather I explore the sometimes-surprising ways in which their worlds overlap.
Willoughby Bertie, the fourth Earl of Abingdon, had originally invited Haydn to London in 1783, but it was not until New Year’s Day 1791 that the composer, after much hesitation and prevarication, finally set foot on British soil, or as the Morning Herald (January 1786) had once claimed, “the country for which his music seems to be made”. Within a few days he had taken lodgings at 18 Great Pulteney Street, which remained his main London residence during his stay, although in spring 1791 he lived for a while in Lisson Grove.
Haydn gave a series of subscription concerts at the “Queen’s Ancient Concert Rooms” in Hanover Square from March until June. They were hugely successful and attended by all fashionable London. A journal reviewer remarked that “At the Concerts in Hanover Square, where He [Haydn] has presided, his presence seems to have awakened such a degree of enthusiasm in the audience as almost amounts to frenzy!”
After a summer in the country Haydn returned to London, where he was again much lionised and had an affair with a widow, Mrs Rebecca Schroeter. Another concert series followed early in 1792 when he also started working on arrangements of Scottish and Welsh folksongs.
A serpent player in full British military uniform.—1828.
Fairchild suggests that Blake had a keen ear for the sounds of musical instruments and for expressing those sounds verbally, as in these lines from Milton:
Thousands & thousands labour. thousands play on instrumentsStringed or flute to ameliorate the sorrows of slaveryLoud sport the dances in the dance of death, rejoicing in carnageThe hard dentant Hammers are lulld by the flutes lula lulaThe bellowing Furnaces blare by the long sounding clarionThe double drum drowns howls & groans. The shrill fife, shrieks & criesThe crooked horn mellows the hoarse raving serpent, terrible but harmoniousBowlahoola is the Stomach in every individual man.
(E 121)
Haydn’s marches written for the Derbyshire yeomanry were scored for trumpet, two horns, two clarinets, two bassoons, and serpent. The instruments in Milton too are clearly those of a military band, such as Blake would have heard supporting the militia at Felpham. So of course it’s a “dance of death”. Military bands commonly played at recruiting sessions, seducing young men into military service (effective slavery). And once enlisted, the marching bands “ameliorate the sorrows of slavery”.
The Earl of Abingdon, Haydn’s patron, is briefly mentioned by Erdman in his discussion of Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion. A Bill against the slave trade of April 1792 was defeated in Parliament following attacks from Burke in the Commons and Lord Abingdon in the Lords. Curiously, for one often regarded as a radical, Abingdon saw efforts to limit the slave trade as dangerous concessions to Jacobinism and voted against all such attempts.
Lord Abingdon accused the “abettors” of abolition of promoting the new philosophy of levelling: “Look at the state of the colony of St. Domingo, and see what liberty and equality, are what the rights of man have done there”. They have dried up the rivers of commerce and replaced them with “fountains of human blood”. Moreover, the levellers are prophesying that “all being equal, blacks and whites, French and English, wolves and lambs, shall, ‘merry companions every one’, promiscuously pig together; engendering . . . a new species of man as the product of this new philosophy”. For, as Abingdon sarcastically put it, “what does the abolition of the slave trade mean more or less in effect, than liberty and equality?”
In 1784, Blake’s friend John Flaxman had become a member of a small Swedenborg study group which was called rather grandly “The Theosophical Society, instituted for the purpose of promoting the Heavenly Doctrines of the New Jerusalem, by translating, printing and publishing the Theological Writings of Emanuel Swedenborg”. Other members were the printer Robert Hindmarsh, later one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Swedenborgian New Church; John Augustus Tulk, another founder of the New Church; the engraver William Sharpe; the painter Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg; and another Frenchman, the composer and violinist François-Hippolyte Barthélemon. William and Catherine Blake would have met Barthélemon at the 1789 East Cheap conference that led to the setting-up of the New Church as a distinct and separate religious denomination. Barthélemon was organist of the New Jerusalem Church, and helped develop a distinctive Swedenborgian liturgy and hymnody.
Haydn visited the Barthélemons when he was in England in 1791 and 1794, and a warm friendship sprang up between the two men, who continued to correspond after Haydn's return to Vienna. It may have been Barthélemon who suggested to Haydn the subject for The Creation (Die Schöpfung).
Barthélemon was married twice. His first wife Maria or Mary (“Polly”) Young was the niece of Thomas Arne. The Barthélemons lived in Kennington Lane, Vauxhall, not far from the Blakes at Lambeth and attended the Chapel at the Asylum for Female Orphans, where they came under the influence of the Swedenborgian preacher, the Revd Jacob Duché. A visitor to the Asylum in 1793 was Blake’s future patron William Hayley, who composed on the spot “A Hymn, Sung by the Orphans of the Asylum”. Mrs Barthélemon herself composed three hymns and three anthems for use at the Asylum and Magdalen Chapels, also “The Weaver’s Prayer” for a concert in aid of unemployed weavers, and an “Ode on the Preservation of the King”, with words by another Swedenborgian, Baroness Nolcken. At a concert in May 1792 Haydn accompanied Polly, Mrs Barthélemon, in airs by Handel and Sacchini.
Haydn gave compopsition lessons to Cecilia Maria, the daughter of Barthélemon’s first marriage, and a singer, pianist and composer, who treasured memories of Haydn’s visits during his London years. She dedicated her keyboard sonata op.3 to Haydn and after her marriage to Edward Henslowe was a subscriber (listed as “Mrs Ed. Henslow”) to Haydn’s Creation.
In 1760, the Scottish writer James Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland and Translated from the Gaelic or Erse Language. Later that year, he claimed to have obtained further manuscripts and in 1761, published an epic of the hero Fingal, written by the legendary poet Ossian. (“Oithona: a Poem” is one of a number of shorter works included.) This was followed in 1763 by another epic, Temora, and culminated in a collected edition, The Works of Ossian, in 1765.
A string of operas, songs, and other musical works appeared soon after the publication of Macpherson’s books, including F.-H. Barthélemon’s Oithona. A three-act opera after Macpherson's Ossianic epic, and described as a dramatic poem, Oithona was performed at the Little Theatre Haymarket, on 3 March 1768. For some reason, only two acts were performed and there were no further performances.
The verbal resemblance between the Ossianic Oithona and Blake’s Oothoon in his Visions of the Daughters of Albion is obvious. Indeed Erdman describes Macpherson’s (or Ossian’s) Oithona as Blake’s plot-source, where the heroine is similarly raped in her lover’s absence.
The blunt and impatient Jack Hunter was a surgeon, an anatomist, a print collector, and a friend of Blake’s rival, Woollett. He makes an appearance in Blake’s fragmentary comedy An Island in the Moon, but with the name Jack Hunter crossed out and appropriately replaced with Jack Tearguts.
John and Anne Hunter lived not far from Blake at No. 28 Leicester Square, with their Hunterian Museum of anatomical specimens; next door was the widow of Hogarth; across the square, Reynolds.
Hunter had first refusal of the animals dying in the Royal menagerie at the Tower of London. The Hunterian collection with the Royal College of Surgeons still includes a tiger’s brain preserved in fluid. He acquired a small country estate at Earls Court beyond the western edge of the city, where he kept a variety of exotic specimens. With the live animals at Earls Court and from his varied and expanding collection of dried and wet specimens, he was creating the laboratory of comparative anatomy and physiology that, for the rest of his life, was the focus of his professional activity.
J.T. Smith, in A Book for a Rainy Day (1845), mentions Blake’s earliest patrons, the Rev. Anthony Stephen Mathew and his wife Harriet:
At Mrs. Mathew’s most agreeable conversaziones I first met the late William Blake, the artist, to whom she and Mr. Flaxman had been truly kind. There I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.
Smith also recalls their son William Henry Mathew whom he asserts was “the late John Hunter’s favourite pupil”. Though Bentley suggests that young Mathew may have provoked the apoplectic fit that killed the irascible John Hunter.
Haydn made two visits to 28 Leicester Square during his first period in England. These visits had nothing to do with music; in the first he consulted the man whom he described as “the greatest and most celebrated chyrurgus in London”. Hunter inspected Haydn’s nasal polyps and offered to remove them, but the operation was put off. Then in June 1792, or just before, he came again; the visit is best described in his own words
Shortly before my departure Mr H. asked me to come and see him about some urgent matters. I went there. After the first exchange of greetings a few brawny fellows entered the room, grabbed me, and wanted to force me into a chair. I yelled, kicked until I had freed myself, and made it clear to Mr H., who already had his instruments ready for the operation, that I did not want to undergo the operation. He was very astonished at my obstinacy, and it seemed to me that he pitied me for not wanting to undergo the happy experience of enjoying his skill. I excused myself saying there was not time, due to my forthcoming departure, and took my leave of him. [Robbins Landon’s translation]
Hunter notoriously had stolen the corpse of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, for his anatomical museum. When Haydn died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Gumpendorf, Vienna, on 31 May 1809, he was buried in the cemetery in Gumpendorf. Most of his remains were transferred to the crypt in the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt in 1820; Haydn's head, however, was missing, having been stolen from his grave by the Viennese phrenologist, Franz Joseph Gall. Only in 1954 was it finally reunited with the rest of his remains. Charles Byrne’s skeleton remains with the Royal College of Surgeons, though his bones are no longer on display.
"In memory of General Stanwix's daughter who was lost in her passage from Ireland".—Angelica Kauffman Pinxt., W.W.Ryland (Engraver to his Majesty) Sculpt.—Sold at No. 159 near Somerset House Strand May 10th 1774.—Stipple and etching printed in red-brown ink.—Verses by Anne Hunter.
In 1766 or 1767 Anne Hume (later Hunter) sat to Angelica Kauffman for a romantic painting, Female figure weeping over a monumental urn (in memory of General Stanwick's daughter). She wrote a poetic lament on the same occasion. Kauffman made an etching of her painting, and copies were engraved by several artists, the first being Bartolozzi in 1772, as The Pensive Muse.Haydn’s first visit to London lasted from January 1791 until June 1792; after a period in Vienna, he returned to London in February 1794, to fulfil his arrangement with the concert promoter Salomon, taking up residence at 1 Bury Street, St James's, near Rebecca Schroeter's house, and beginning a third season at Hanover Square, remaining until August 1795.
Among the music composed by Haydn in this second visit were a dozen “canzonets”, or serious songs with piano accompaniment. Haydn’s songs are the fruits of his friendship with Anne Hunter, widow of the surgeon, whom he had befriended during his first London visit. Mrs. Hunter wrote or selected texts for him, and though not entirely fluent in English, Haydn responded with brilliantly varied and entertaining songs that were an immediate and enduring success.
Site of the Hunterian Establishment, 28 Leicester Square.—Watercolour by B.W. Hanhart c.1850, by which time it had been converted into a bathhouse.
Anne had begun her married life in Jermyn Street, in an establishment large enough to house her husband's growing anatomical collection and a succession of student surgeons. In 1783 they moved to 28 Leicester Fields (later Leicester Square), where their property included three buildings: a large, elegant house on the east side of the square, a smaller one on the other side of its garden, in the then Castle Street, which was used for laboratories, and a new building joining the two, which housed the collection and a lecture hall.
Haydn published in London in the mid-1790s two sets of VI Original Canzonettas, the first set to texts by Anne Hunter and the second to texts chosen by her from various poets, including one each by Metastasio and Shakespeare. Haydn’s intention was to compose songs that could by sung and played by any competent amateur, and the canzonets had an immediate and lasting success. It is clear that he himself enjoyed singing them to his own accompaniment, particularly in the homes of his English friends, among whom were the Barthélemon family of Kennington Place, Vauxhall. Cecilia Maria Barthlemon preserved many relics of Haydn and the inscription in her copy of “Dr Haydn’s Second Set of VI Original Canzonettas” begins, “I had the great pleasure to hear the famous Doct Haydn play and sing his beautiful Canzonetts, (in my youth) in my Dear Father’s House at Vauxhall. Oh! What a treat it was.”
At different times, Blake and Haydn both witnessed the annual service of the London charity-school children in St. Paul’s, recorded in Blake’s two “Holy Thursday” poems:
Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces cleanThe children walking two & two in red & blue & greenGrey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snowTill into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flowO what a multitude they seemd these flowers of London town…Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of songOr like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among…
(E13)
Christian Ignatius Latrobe, Moravian clergyman and composer, had made friends with Haydn during the latter’s visits to England and dedicated three sonatas to him. Latrobe comments on the charity-school singing:
… nothing can well exceed the effect, produced by a multitude of voices singing in unison, the melody of a fine chorale, with the accompaniment of a well-played organ, of sufficient power to supply the middle parts and sustain the harmony. To the impressiveness and even sublimity of such a performance, the celebrated Haydn has borne testimony in his journal, when describing the singing of the 6000 charity children at the annual festival in St. Paul’s Cathedral. No musical person can be present at that well-known anniversary, without being made to feel, how greatly the beauty and majesty of a chorale are increased by its simplicity, especially when associated with a sufficient breadth and volume of sound.
Haydn, in his notebook for 1792, wrote that “no music ever moved me so deeply in my whole life as this, devotional and innocent. All the children are newly clad, and enter in procession. The organist first played the melody very nicely and simply, and then they all began to sing at once.”
The year 1791 saw the beginning of work that was to occupy Haydn for many years: the arrangement of Scottish folksongs, initially with violin and piano accompaniments, later with cello as well. The first collection, issued early in 1792, was done to help the publisher William Napier, who was in financial trouble. The immediate success of the songs resulted in a series of further collections, most of them published by George Thomson in Edinburgh. Napier and Thomson supplied Haydn with melodies and (frequently bowdlerized) texts, and a glossary of the more abstruse words. Although Haydn’s settings followed the same general lines as those of his predecessors, Arnold, Shield, Carter and Barthélemon, his musical thinking was apparently more complex than theirs, and Napier was slightly worried that Haydn’s accompaniments might prove too difficult for amateurs. Haydn’s later publisher, George Thomson, too, was continually forcing Haydn to make everything simpler and to rewrite even slightly difficult passages: “Allow me to mention”, writes Thomson to Haydn, “that if you find any of the airs fit for an accomp similar to that in your 1st Canzonet in C, … I am particularly fond of that kind of easy motion in accomp”—as if this were the ideal kind of accompaniment for a robust Scottish song. But the “Scots songs” were sufficiently successful to warrant a second volume in 1795. This collection of one hundred songs was undertaken by Haydn alone: “the Editor considers himself as peculiarly fortunate in having engaged the superior talents of the celebrated Haydn”.
Music is important to Blake, yet the only record we have of his taste in music is an anecdote in Gilchrist’s biography. Drawing on conversations with Blake’s friend and patron, John Linnell, Gilchrist records the poet’s visits to the Linnell’s at Hampstead.
He was very fond of hearing Mrs. Linnell sing Scottish songs, and would sit by the pianoforte, tears falling from his eyes, while he listened to the Border Melody to which the song is set, commencing—
O Nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd,And her een as the lift are blue.To simple national melodies Blake was very impressionable, though not so to music of more complicated structure. He himself still sang, in a voice tremulous with age, sometimes old ballads, sometimes his own songs, to melodies of his own.
Fairchild attempts to link the anecdote to the wider culture of eighteenth-century interest in folksong but ignores the very specific information that Gilchrist provides. Fairchild suggests that “Mrs Linnell was probably performing one of Haydn’s arrangements commissioned and published by George Thomson”. No such arrangement is listed in Hoboken’s thematic index of Haydn’s works. Even if one were to exist, we should still reject the idea that Mrs Linnell performed a Haydn arrangement; it is implicit in Gilchrist’s story that Mrs Linnell is accompanying herself at the piano. A striking feature of Haydn’s folk-song settings is the richness of their piano writing. Haydn’s piano parts are by no means easy, and well beyond the capabilities of the average amateur singer accompanying herself at the keyboard.
As I have demonstrated, the “Border Melody” appears anonymously in The Scotish [sic] Minstrel, A Selection from the Vocal Melodies of Scotland Ancient & Modern, Arranged for the Piano Forte by R.A. Smith. Vols. I-VI. Edinburgh, 1824. Not Haydn at all.
And finally, a precursor to Camila Oliveira’s discoveries: a Blake image providing the engraved title-page to the second volume of The Seraph in 1818, with music by Haydn and other composers in four-part harmonisations of hymns and anthems with piano, often with introductions and interludes:
The seraph : a collection of sacred music suitable to public or private devotion : consisting of the most celebrated psalm and hymn tunes ; with selections from the works of Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Pleyel, and favourite English and Italian composers: adapted to words from Milton, Young, Watts, Wesley, Merrick, Cowper, Henry Kirke White, Dr. Collyer, &c. To which are added many original pieces, composed and the whole arranged for four voices with an accompaniment for the pianoforte or organ and violoncello by John Whitaker.—London : printed for Jones, [1818?].
The image from Blair’s Grave is rather oddly described as “Drawn by the late [sic] W. Blake Esqr. R.A. [sic]”.
Sources and further reading
G.E. Bentley, Jr.—The Stranger from Paradise : a Biography of william Blake.—New Haven & London : Yale University Press, 2001.
Caroline Grigson.—The life and poems of Anne Hunter : Haydn’s tuneful voice. Written and edited by Caroline Grigson; with an introduction by Isobel Armstrong.—Liverpool : Liverpool University Press, 2009.
Franz Joseph Haydn.—The-collected correspondence and London notebooks of Joseph Haydn; edited by H.C. Robbins Landon.—London : Barrie and Rockliff, 1959.
H.C. Robbins Landon.—Haydn : chronicle and works. By H.C. Robbins Landon.—London : Thames and Hudson, 1976-1980.—5 vols.
Christian Ignatius LaTrobe.—Hymn-tunes, doxologies and chants sung in the Church of the United Brethren. First collected by Chr. Ign. La Trobe. A new edition ... by P. La Trobe.—London : Mallalieu, 1854.
Simon McVeigh.—Concert Life in London from Mozart to Haydn.—Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993.
W. H. Stevenson.—Minute Particular : The Sound of “Holy Thursday”.—Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 36, Issue 4 (Spring 2003), pp. 137-140.
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