J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

Haydn’s first teacher was the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, who hired him
to accompany the singing lessons he was giving in Vienna. Haydn had reason to be
doubly grateful to Porpora, both for what he learned musically, and for the fact that
this job was his first step up out of the poverty which had afflicted him since he left St
Stephen’s. It is not clear whether Porpora actually sat down with Haydn and gave him
anything resembling what we would call lessons in theory or composition. Carpani
may have been guessing (or fabricating), but he was probably correct when he said:
‘That he was not Porpora’s pupil can be seen from Haydn’s recitatives, much inferior
to those of the father of recitative. But he learned the good Italian school of singing
and accompanying on the harpsichord from Porpora, and this is much more difficult
that one would think….Porpora boxed his ears but also gave him good advice, not
least on how to play P’s difficult works with their learned modulations and bass lines
difficult to follow…’ 9 From this school of hard knocks, Haydn no doubt had the wit to
pick up a good deal of musical grammar.
We know also that he was also familiar with the writings of Mattheson,
Kirnberger, and David Kellner upon thoroughbass; but according to Dies, his first
textbook, arrived at after some deliberation, was C. P. E. Bach’s Versuch über die
wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. After this he acquired Mattheson’s Vollkommene
Capellmeister, and only then (according to Dies) Fux’s Gradus, which there is no
doubt he esteemed highly for the rest of his life. 10 With a rich accumulation of
circumstantial detail, Dies situates Haydn’s exposure to C. P. E. Bach at the time he
was with Porpora—around 1753, that is—but this can’t be true. To be sure, the first
part of Bach’s Versuch was published in that year; but this only contains information
on embellishment and fingering. The material on thoroughbass—the only part which
9 Ibid., I, p.70.
10 See A. Mann, ‘Haydn as student and critic of Fux’, in Studies in eighteenth-century music: a tribute
to Karl Geiringer on his seventieth birthday, ed. H. C. Robbins Landon with R. E. Chapman
(London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 323–32.
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