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Haydn was supposed to have lessons from two undistinguished
professors named Gegenbauer and Finsterbusch. But it all
amounted to very little. There was the regular drilling for
the church services, to be sure: solfeggi and psalms, psalms
and solfeggi--always apt to degenerate, under a pedant, into the
dreariest of mechanical routine. How many a sweet-voiced chorister,
even in our own days, reaches manhood with a love for music?
It needs music in his soul. Haydn's soul withstood the numbing
influence of pedantry. He realized that it lay with himself to
develop and nurture the powers within his breast of which he was
conscious. "The talent was in me," he remarked, "and by dint of
hard work I managed to get on." Shortly before his death, when
he happened to be in Vienna for some church festival, he had an
opportunity of speaking to the choir-boys of that time. "I was
once a singing boy," he said. "Reutter brought me from Hainburg
to Vienna. I was industrious when my companions were at play.
I used to take my little clavier under my arm, and go off to
practice undisturbed. When I sang a solo, the baker near St
Stephen's yonder always gave me a cake as a present. Be good
and industrious, and serve God continually."
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