Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn was born on 31 March 1732 at Rohrau, a village in Lower Austria near the Hungarian border. His father, a wheelwright, played the harp by ear, and the whole family loved to sing. Noticed for his voice, little Joseph was sent at six to a relative, a schoolmaster in Hainburg, who taught him the rudiments of music. In 1740 the choirmaster of St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, Georg Reutter, heard him sing and engaged him as a choirboy.

Haydn spent nine years in the cathedral choir school, singing at great court ceremonies but receiving little teaching in composition. When his voice broke in 1749 he was dismissed — according to the anecdote, after cutting off a classmate’s pigtail. He found himself on the street, penniless. For several years he lived on lessons, serenades played in the streets and odd jobs. He taught himself from counterpoint treatises and the sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, and became valet and accompanist to the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, who taught him a great deal.

Around 1757 he became music director to Count Morzin, for whom he wrote his first symphonies. In 1760 he married Maria Anna Keller; the marriage was unhappy and childless. In 1761 he entered the service of the princely Esterházy family, one of the richest in Hungary. He stayed nearly thirty years, first as deputy Kapellmeister and from 1766 as Kapellmeister. Prince Nikolaus, known as “the Magnificent”, built the palace of Eszterháza, a “Hungarian Versailles”, with an opera house and a puppet theatre.

At Eszterháza Haydn directed an orchestra of about twenty musicians and an opera company, composing constantly: symphonies, operas, chamber music and nearly two hundred pieces for the baryton, a string instrument the prince played. Cut off from the world, he was, as he said, “forced to become original”. In 1772, to let the prince know his musicians wanted to go home, he wrote the “Farewell” Symphony: at the end the musicians snuff out their candles and leave the stage one by one. The prince understood and gave everyone leave the next day.

Haydn invented or perfected the great forms of classical music: the symphony, of which he wrote 104, and the string quartet, of which he composed nearly seventy. His Op. 33 Quartets (1781), written “in a completely new manner”, impressed Mozart, with whom he formed a deep friendship. He told Mozart’s father that his son was the greatest composer he knew. Mozart dedicated six quartets to him in return.

When Prince Nikolaus died in 1790, Haydn, now free, accepted the invitation of the impresario Johann Peter Salomon and went to London. His two visits (1791–92 and 1794–95) were triumphs. He composed his twelve London Symphonies, including No. 94, the “Surprise”, with its sudden timpani stroke to wake drowsy listeners. Oxford University made him an honorary doctor. On his return he gave lessons to the young Beethoven.

Inspired by the Handel oratorios he heard in London, he composed The Creation (1798) and The Seasons (1801), both enormously successful. In 1797 he wrote the Emperor’s Hymn, whose melody is now that of the German national anthem. He died in Vienna on 31 May 1809, during Napoleon’s occupation of the city; Napoleon placed a guard of honour outside his house. Nicknamed “Papa Haydn”, he is regarded as the father of the symphony and the string quartet.