Joseph Haydn

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Haydn once described himself as a man with no escape from his own mind. "Usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture," he told his biographer Dies in 1806. "I cannot escape them, they stand like walls before me." By then the Austrian composer was old and ill, unable to turn the ideas into finished works. He smiled and called himself something stranger still. "I am really just a living clavier."

  This was a man born in a rural village to parents who could not read music. He would end his life as the most celebrated composer in Europe. Between those two points lies a career that ran from roughly 1749 to 1802, six decades that overlapped with both the death of the Baroque and the birth of something new.

  How does a wheelwright's son become known as the Father of the Symphony? Why did decades of isolation in a remote palace make his music more original, not less? And how did a composer of cheerful tunes end up writing music that addressed the meaning of life itself? The answers run through palaces in Hungary, concert halls in London, and a skull that took 145 years to find its way home.

• 2. A Hungry Apprenticeship

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  Around the time he turned six, Joseph Haydn left his parents in Rohrau and never lived with them again. His father Mathias was a wheelwright who also served as Marktrichter, the marketplace supervisor. Neither parent could read music, though Mathias had taught himself the harp during his journeyman years and the family sang together often. Recognizing their son's gift, they accepted an offer from a relative, the schoolmaster Johann Matthias Frankh in nearby Hainburg, to take the boy on as a musical apprentice.

  Life in the Frankh household left Haydn frequently hungry and humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. He remembered it that way for the rest of his life. Yet he learned fast, soon playing both harpsichord and violin and singing treble in the church choir. His voice was good enough that in 1739 it caught the attention of Georg Reutter the Younger, the director of music at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was passing through Hainburg in search of new choirboys.

  Haydn passed his audition and moved to Vienna in 1740, working nine years as a chorister. He lived in the Kapellhaus beside the cathedral with Reutter, Reutter's family, and the other choirboys, who after 1745 included his younger brother Michael. The boys studied Latin, voice, violin, and keyboard. Reutter gave Haydn only two lessons in music theory and composition during his entire time there. Hunger followed him here too, since Reutter did not always bother to feed him properly. According to Anthony Tommasini, the choir director once proposed that Joseph's soprano voice be surgically preserved, a letter that must have horrified his father.

• 3. Forced To Become Original

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  By 1749 Haydn could no longer sing the high parts, and Empress Maria Theresa herself complained that his singing sounded like "crowing." The end came over a prank. Haydn snipped off the pigtail of a fellow chorister, and Reutter had him caned, dismissed, and sent into the streets. A friend named Johann Michael Spangler took him into a crowded garret room for a few months while he began chasing work as a freelance musician.

  The freelance years were lean. Haydn taught music, served as a street serenader, and in 1752 became valet-accompanist to the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition." He also played organ in the Bohemian Chancellery chapel at the Judenplatz. With no systematic training, he taught himself, working through the counterpoint exercises in Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum and studying Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Of Bach's first six keyboard sonatas he said, "I did not leave my clavier till I played them through."

  Reputation came slowly. His comic opera Der krumme Teufel, written for the actor Joseph Felix von Kurz, premiered successfully in 1753 before censors closed it over "offensive remarks." Patronage followed. In 1756 Baron Carl Josef Fürnberg employed him at the country estate Weinzierl, where Haydn wrote his first string quartets. Fürnberg recommended him to Count Morzin, who in 1757 became his first full-time employer at a salary of 200 florins a year, plus board and lodging. For Morzin, Haydn wrote his first symphonies, perhaps ten to twenty, the exact number now unknown.

• 4. The Esterhazy Years

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  In 1761, Prince Paul Anton of the immensely wealthy Esterhazy family hired Haydn after Count Morzin's finances collapsed. His title was only Vice-Kapellmeister, with the old Kapellmeister Gregor Werner retaining authority over church music. When Werner died in 1766, Haydn became full Kapellmeister. As a house officer he wore livery and followed the family between palaces, most importantly the ancestral Schloss Esterhazy in Eisenstadt and the grand new Esterhaza, built in rural Hungary in the 1760s.

  The workload was punishing. Haydn composed, ran the orchestra, played chamber music with his patrons, and mounted operatic productions. Yet the position gave him daily access to his own orchestra and patrons who valued his work. The princes, Paul Anton and then Nikolaus I from 1762 to 1790, were genuine connoisseurs. Isolation became his strange advantage. "I was set apart from the world," he reflected. "There was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so I had to be original."

  His patron's tastes shaped his output. Around 1765 Prince Nikolaus took up the baryton, an uncommon instrument with plucked sympathetic strings, and over the next ten years Haydn produced about 200 works for it, including 126 baryton trios. Around 1775 the prince abandoned the baryton for opera, and Esterhaza's theatre hosted a season that rivalled any opera house in Europe. Haydn served as de facto company director, even writing substitution arias to insert into other composers' operas. Across nearly thirty years at the court, he poured out a flood of music while his style kept evolving.

• 5. The Catalyst Of 1779

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  In 1779, a renegotiated contract changed everything. Until then, all of Haydn's compositions had been the property of the Esterhazy family. Now he could write for others and sell his work to publishers. He shifted toward fewer operas and more quartets and symphonies, negotiating with publishers both Austrian and foreign. By 1790, as the scholar Jones notes, he occupied a paradoxical position: Europe's leading composer, yet a duty-bound Kapellmeister in a remote Hungarian palace.

  The new freedom produced a wave of string quartets, the six-quartet sets of Op. 33, 50, 54/55, and 64. The Op. 33 quartets, published in 1781, came with Haydn's announcement that they were written in "a new and completely special way." Charles Rosen argued this was no sales talk. He pointed to real advances: phrasing where each motif emerges from the previous one without interruption, accompanying material evolving into melody, and a kind of Classical counterpoint where each part keeps its own integrity. Commissions arrived from abroad, including the Paris symphonies of 1785-1786 and The Seven Last Words of Christ, a 1786 commission from Cadiz, Spain.

  Esterhaza's remoteness, farther from Vienna than Eisenstadt, left Haydn lonely. He treasured his Vienna friendships. One was a close, platonic relationship begun in 1789 with Maria Anna von Genzinger, the wife of Prince Nikolaus's physician. He wrote to her often of his loneliness, and her early death in 1793 struck him hard. Another friend was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he met around 1784. The two sometimes played string quartets together with Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Johann Baptist Wanhal. Mozart returned Haydn's esteem in his "Haydn" quartets, and in 1785 Haydn joined Mozart's Masonic lodge, the "Zur wahren Eintracht."

• 6. London And The Open Sea

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  On the 15th of December 1790, after fond farewells from Mozart, the 58-year-old Haydn left Vienna with the German violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon. They reached Calais in time to cross the English Channel on New Year's Day of 1791. It was the first time Haydn had ever seen the sea. Prince Nikolaus had died that year, and his successor Anton, looking to economize, was happy to let Haydn travel while keeping him on a reduced salary of 400 florins, alongside a 1000-florin pension from Nikolaus.

  Haydn was already wildly popular in London. Since the death of Johann Christian Bach in 1782, his music had dominated the city's concerts; hardly a concert went by without a work by him. He stayed with Salomon in Great Pulteney Street near Piccadilly Circus and worked in a borrowed studio at the Broadwood piano firm. Audiences flocked to his concerts. Charles Burney reviewed the first one, writing that the sight of the renowned composer at the piano "so electrified the audience" that it excited a pleasure superior to any caused by instrumental music in England.

  The two visits, in 1791-1792 and again in 1794-1795, made him financially secure and produced some of his best-known work: the Surprise, Military, Drumroll, and London symphonies, the Rider quartet, and the "Gypsy Rondo" piano trio. Not everything went smoothly. His commissioned opera L'anima del filosofo went unstaged after impresario John Gallini failed to secure a licence, though Haydn was paid £300 for it. A rival orchestra, the Professional Concerts, recruited Haydn's old pupil Ignaz Pleyel as a competing composer. The two refused to play the rivalry, dined together, and programmed each other's symphonies. At Oxford, the university awarded Haydn an honorary doctorate, performing his Symphony No. 92, ever since known as the Oxford Symphony. His final benefit concert at the end of the 1795 season, "Dr. Haydn's night," was perhaps the peak of his English career. Griesinger wrote that Haydn considered the days in England the happiest of his life.

• 7. The Living Clavier

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  On Haydn's return from his first journey, the young Ludwig van Beethoven came to Vienna and studied with him until the second London trip. Haydn had met Beethoven in Bonn in 1790 and now took him to Eisenstadt for a summer, teaching him counterpoint. When Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna in 1792, his patron Count Waldstein wrote, "You will receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn."

  Back in Vienna after 1795, Haydn entered his last turning point. Prince Nikolaus II revived the Esterhazy musical establishment, and Haydn served part-time, spending summers in Eisenstadt and writing six masses, including the Lord Nelson mass of 1798. Now a rich man, he felt he could take his time and write for posterity. Working with his librettist Gottfried van Swieten, he composed two great oratorios, The Creation in 1798 and The Seasons in 1801, each taking over a year. The Creation drew on Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Tommasini described its opening, "The Representation of Chaos," and the moment the choir sings "Let there be light," when the music bursts into a shimmering C-major chord "so glorious and so bright you almost feel the need to squint."

  He also wrote the popular Trumpet Concerto and the late string quartets, including the Fifths, Emperor, and Sunrise. In 1797, inspired by hearing London audiences sing God Save the King, he wrote "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser," the "Emperor's Hymn." Its melody later carried von Fallersleben's Deutschlandlied of 1841, whose third stanza is today the national anthem of Germany. By the end of 1803, illness left him unable to compose, suffering weakness, dizziness, and painfully swollen legs. Jones suggests arteriosclerosis. The ideas kept coming even as he could no longer write them down, which is when he called himself a living clavier.

• 8. Where Haydn Is

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  On the 27th of March 1808, a performance of The Creation was organized in Haydn's honour. The very frail composer was carried into the hall on an armchair to the sound of trumpets and drums, greeted by Beethoven and by Salieri, who led the performance. Moved and exhausted, Haydn had to leave at intermission. He lived 14 more months. During his long illness he often found solace at the piano, playing his "Emperor's Hymn."

  His final days were not serene. In May 1809 Napoleon's army attacked Vienna, and on the 10th of May bombarded his neighbourhood. According to Griesinger, four case shots rattled the windows and doors. Haydn called out to his frightened servants, "Don't be afraid, children, where Haydn is, no harm can reach you." Yet he had hardly spoken the words when his whole body began to tremble. The city fell on the 13th of May. On the 17th of May a French cavalry officer named Sulemy came to pay his respects and sang, skillfully, an aria from The Creation.

  On the 26th of May Haydn played his "Emperor's Hymn" three times with unusual gusto. That same evening he collapsed, and he died peacefully in his own home at 12:40 a.m. on the 31st of May 1809, aged 77. A memorial service on the 15th of June at the Schottenkirche performed Mozart's Requiem. His remains rested in the Hundsturm cemetery until 1820, when Prince Nikolaus moved them to Eisenstadt. His head took a different journey. Phrenologists stole the skull shortly after burial, and it was not reunited with the rest of him until 1954, now interred in the north tower of the Bergkirche. The wheelwright's son who excelled in every genre had become, in James Webster's words, the Enlightenment ideal of the honnete homme, the honest man.