known by special names.) His vocal works include 14 masses and over 30 motets and other church pieces, the largest of which is The Seven Words (1785), written for the Cathedral of Cadiz, at first as an orchestral work, 3 oratorios, chief of which are The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), several cantatas, 13 operas in Italian (from 1769), including L'isola disabitata (1779) and Orlando paladino (1782), several operettas, etc., and a large number of songs, part-songs, etc.
Haydn's entire style proceeds from the homophonic and harmonic
point of view rather than the contrapuntal. Here he
followed Emanuel Bach instead of the elder Bach. This was
due partly to his nationality and early circumstances, and partly
to his instinct as to the trend of musical progress. He was by
no means lacking in contrapuntal power, as his choral works
and the details of many other works attest, but his artistic
interest lay in other directions. He was conspicuously a
melodist, and his mind was saturated with the forms and
spirit of folk-music. His gifts on this side involved not only
a keen appreciation of beautiful tone-figures, but a strong sense
of the sweeping harmonic drifts and balanced form that underlie
them. His harmony is not so much the consequent of voice-part
texture as a dominating plan or scheme from which the part-writing
is developed. And his clarity and precision of form are
so conspicuous as to seem to-day almost excessive. His works
have a crystalline sharpness, every melodic outline, every harmonic
mass or progression and every element of internal structure
being presented with absolute distinctness. But his love of
exactitude and perspicuity is kept from mechanicalness by the
pervading healthiness, animation and humor of his imagination,
and by his fine sense of large total effects and of the color-contrasts
essential to them. His method emphasized the objective side
of composition, but it could not conceal the warmth and elevation
of his personality. Technically, his works marked an epoch in
instrumental style, but they never would have done so if they
had not been the vehicle through which a really artistic nature
expressed itself.
The conspicuous achievements of Haydn were two—the full definition
of 'sonata-form' as the basis for a variety of extended works for keyboard,
chamber groups and orchestra, and the settling of instrumentation
upon better principles than had hitherto obtained. Each of these
requires separate treatment, because they became characteristic of the
half-century as a whole (see secs. 146-147).
