The greatest thing that happened to my life was learning from Eli Siegel and Aesthetic Realism that wanting to be just makes a man sure of himself. I am grateful I no longer have to go through life desperately trying to impress people while inwardly feeling I am a fraud. I learned the way to be just to the world and other people is to see them as they truly are--as a oneness of opposites.  

This is what happens in art, and it is what every man, and every woman, needs in order to be really sure of ourselves. 

Eli Siegel described for the first time in history the largest debate in every person: it is between justice and contempt. When a person wants to be just, he asks: "What do objects, ideas, other people deserve from me?" When a person goes after contempt, he asks: "How can I use people, objects, and ideas to glorify myself and feel superior?" Contempt, I learned, inevitably makes for deep unsureness. 

In Self and World, Mr. Siegel explains writes: 

The self does not want to be strong by the weakness of others. It wants to be strong by what it is, rather than by what others are not. Wrongfully to be contemptuous of other human beings is inviting mental unhealth for oneself.

In l796 Haydn wrote his String Quartet in C major, Op. 76, #3, known as the "Emperor" Quartet. I believe the way its sounds are organized shows Haydn was impelled by a musical desire to be just to the variety, the surprising possibilities, of the world. 

Here is how the quartet begins: 

Here is how the music continues, with sounds that growl and are sweet, that are rough and also delicate, that are neat and precise--yet tumble over each other: 

This describes what went on in me, even as I cared for music and wanted to study it seriously. In High School, though I barely had begun my study of traditional harmony, I sought out a composer who wrote in a complex, dissonant style, and asked him to teach me.  

I had a picture of myself writing music most people wouldn't understand, and I liked that. It made me feel superior. I also thought I could exploit this man to rise in the music world. 

This way of seeing people and music would have ruined my life had I not had the great good fortune to meet Aesthetic Realism. In a General Lesson in the summer of l975, Eli Siegel taught me the reason I was unsure of myself both as a person and in my work as a composer. He asked: 

When you want to solve compositional problems, do you think the purpose is knowledge, or to show off your ability? We have two desires--to know and to show off. 

Do you think it hurts you? What do you want to do--to say something useful, or to show people how well you can say it? 

EG:  I think it is more the second. 

ES:  Well that is unfortunate. There is a conflict of purposes. What are you interested in music for--for the glory of Ed Green or for the glory of the possibilities of reality? The question still is, what do you want to praise: your own ability, or do you want to find something in the world to praise?

All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.

It happens some of the most surprising music by Haydn deals directly with the question: what should we do with our unsureness? In his Symphony #60, from 1775, Haydn shows unsureness can be presented with gusto, and it results not in the humiliation I once thought would come from showing doubt of myself, but in music that has verve, assurance, and good cheer. 

The symphony is subtitled "The Distracted Man"--"Il Distrato"--and was inspired by a comedy of the same name. Haydn, as you'll hear, gets the feeling of absent-mindedness into the music. The orchestra seems constantly to lose its direction, and then, with a lurch, to find it again. Writing music that is so irregular, and yet making it coherent, takes great sureness on the part of the composer. 

Here is the "Finale" of this symphony--beginning with the transition into it. This transition is a technical oneness of sureness and unsureness. It is an accelerando: you hear the same phrase eight times in a row. And yet each time you hear it, there is something un predictable in the tempo--usually a little spurt forward: 

The only time a self can be trusted to judge things fairly--which here is the same as to feel about them fairly--is when the self is sure that in thinking well of something else, it is good to itself.

It seems Haydn never took kindness for granted. Once, a merchant gave him a small loan with which to find lodging. Haydn not only repaid promptly, but 60 years later, in his will, left money for the man's granddaughter, in memory of the good will once shown him. And though his poverty prevented him from owning many books of music, he studied what he did have deeply and critically, and when he found beautiful work, he loved it. 

Years later, when he was the most famous musician in Europe, Haydn proudly told his biographer of the joy he felt as a young man coming across the sonatas of Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach. And Griesinger adds: 

No one...was more inclined to do justice to the merits of others than Haydn...He always spoke of Gluck, of Handel, and of his earlier teachers with the most grateful respect.

...whenever we like something, we approve of both ourselves and the world.

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer whose name or person I know; he has taste and, more, the greatest musical genius.

Haydn Saw the Goodness 
by Eli Siegel 

Haydn saw beauty in himself 
When he saw beauty in himself 
And when he saw it in another-- 
Say in Mozart. 
Right now, these are more the same than ever.  
For, when you see beauty in another, 
You see beauty in yourself seeing it: 
And the world is at its best  
      when this is clearer than usual.

Every person has this problem: in what way should I think well of myself? As soon as we decide to think well of ourselves because we think we are better than someone else, we are headed for disaster.

When the Prague opera house invited him to compose a work for them, he declined--telling them: Mozart could do it better! 

If I could only impress on the soul of every lover of music...what I know and feel about the inimitable works of Mozart, the nations would compete for the possession of such a joy within their borders. 

Humility is the willingness to see things other than oneself as having meaning for oneself...In art, creation and competition are as much at war as blood and bad germs...[Art] is the triumph of humility, when we can see it as it truly is.

For over 30 years Haydn worked as music director for Prince Esterhazy at his country estate in Hungary. Because of this, Haydn was largely isolated from other composers. In fact, he never went on a concert tour until he was nearly 60. 

Haydn worked in quiet modesty, but he worked with tremendous boldness. Every one of his compositions has something surprising, something new--and he wrote 104 symphonies, 83 string quartets, 52 piano sonatas, approximately 20 operas, and much, much more! 

Haydn tried to fulfill the prince's orders, even when they were strange--such as: to write over 150 pieces for a rare and awkward string instrument, the baryton, which few people in all of Europe, besides Esterhazy, wanted to play. Yet Haydn's modesty was not unctuousness or cowardice. he once risked his job in order to have justice come to other people. 

Esterhazy, in l772, decided to separate his musicians from their families--forbidding visits on pain of dismissal. The musicians asked Haydn to intervene, and he did. He wrote a symphony known as the "Farewell" Symphony, in which, during the last movement, one by one the musicians rise, blow out their candles on the music stands, and leave the stage. By the end of the symphony only two solo violins remain. 

To give an idea of the effect Haydn had in mind, listen to the contrast between the start of the movement, and the conclusion some seven minutes later. It is a contrast between agitation and serenity, brusque assertiveness and sweet modesty. Yet when one hears the entire movement, the two grow naturally out of each other. Here is the opening: 
 

Haydn in his music shows we don't have to go back and forth painfully between arrogance and despair; we can express ourselves with both confidence and modesty. He shows that it is possible to be both restrained and abandoned at once.  

Every man hopes to say: the world from which I come, and of which I am a part, looks beautiful to me; makes sense; is worthy of praise. This hope is what gives us confidence. 

In the same copy of Rosemary Hughes' biography in which he wrote his poem on the friendship of Haydn and Mozart, Eli Siegel also wrote these lines, which he titled:  

Still No Fear 

Let's see 
Said Prince Esterhazy 
And Haydn had no fear. 
And now we, 
Not Prince Esterhazy, 
Say, let's see. 
And Haydn has no fear. 
Confidence lasts more than a lifetime.