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Haydn came to England in 1791. It may occur to the reader to ask
what England was doing in music at that time, and who were the
foremost representatives of the art. The first question may be
partially answered from the literature of the period. Thus
Jackson, in his Present State of Music in London, published the
year after Haydn's arrival, remarks that "instrumental music has
been of late carried to such perfection in London by the
consummate skill of the performers that any attempt to beat the
time would be justly considered as entirely needless." Burney,
again, in his last volume, published in 1789, says that the great
improvement in taste during the previous twenty years was "as
different as civilized people from savages"; while Stafford
Smith, writing in 1779, tells that music was then "thought to be
in greater perfection than among even the Italians themselves."
There is a characteristic John Bull complacency about these
statements which is hardly borne out by a study of the lives
of the leading contemporary musicians. Even Mr Henry Davey,
the applauding historian of English music, has to admit the
evanescent character of the larger works which came from
the composers of that "bankrupt century." Not one of these
composers--not even Arne--is a real personality to us like Handel,
or Bach, or Haydn, or Mozart. The great merit of English music
was melody, which seems to have been a common gift, but "the only
strong feeling was patriotic enthusiasm, and the compositions that
survive are almost all short ballads expressing this sentiment
or connected with it by their nautical subjects." When Haydn
arrived, there was, in short, no native composer of real genius,
and our "tardy, apish nation" was ready to welcome with special
cordiality an artist whose gifts were of a higher order.
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