Joseph Haydn

Austrian composer

• Born: March 31, 1732
• Birthplace: Rohrau, Austria
• Died: May 31, 1809
• Place of death: Vienna, Austrian Empire (now in Austria)

For nearly fifty years, Haydn expressed his joy of life and love of beauty through music. Considered the father of instrumental music, he developed the form of the string quartet. Haydn’s collected works include 17 operas, 68 string quartets, 62 sonatas, and 107 symphonies.

Early Life

Joseph Haydn (YOH-zehf HID-n) was born in 1732 to Mathias Haydn and Maria Koller Haydn. Mathias, a wagon maker, though not poor by the standards of the day, was nevertheless unable to provide the education or training that his son so obviously needed. The young Haydn’s musical talents were noted at an early age and, when he was six years old, he was given the opportunity to study at the Church of St. Philip and St. James in Hainburg. At the age of eight, fortune smiled on him again, and he was chosen to become a member of the boys’ choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. There, his musical talents were nurtured, and his love of beauty was stimulated. There also, his love of mischief flourished, and a combination of boyish pranks and a changing voice led to his dismissal in 1749.

On his own at the age of seventeen, Haydn found that the world of Vienna offered a variety of opportunities for an industrious and talented musician. Haydn earned his keep by giving music lessons and by playing with the strolling musicians who populated Vienna. Haydn’s talent and teaching (and a certain amount of luck) brought him into contact with an ever larger and more important circle of musical patrons in Vienna, and, in 1859, he was hired as musical director for Count Ferdinand Maximilian von Morzin. Through this position, he met and married Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller. Haydn had loved Anna’s younger sister, but she chose to become a nun rather than wed. He then married Anna and was thus bound into a loveless marriage.

When financial reverses led Count Morzin to give up his orchestra, Haydn moved into the service of the family with which he was to be associated for the fifty years of his greatest musical development. In 1761, Prince Pál Antal Esterházy hired Haydn as vice-chapel master, and Haydn, with his wife, moved to the great estate of Eisenstadt, where he had his own church, opera house, choir, and orchestra. When Prince Miklós József Esterházy succeeded his brother, Haydn found in him the perfect patron, a man whose passion for music equaled his own. Most of his early works were composed for Prince Miklós, for whom Haydn developed the form of the string quartet. It was also for Prince Miklós that Haydn wrote his Surprise Symphony (1791), as a subtle hint that he and his musicians needed a vacation from the isolation imposed by Miklós’s sojourn at the remote, fairy-tale palace at Esterháza. Each of the performers, as he completed his part, quietly blew out his candle and left the orchestra.

Life’s Work

Joseph Haydn’s fortune and fame grew under the Esterházys’s patronage. Becoming chapel master in 1766, Haydn happily lived a rather isolated existence, but one in which his musical style grew and developed, while meeting a rigorous schedule of two concerts per week. In 1781, Haydn met the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Though vastly different in age, temperament, and musical development, these two men shared an enormous respect for each other, and each influenced the other’s work. Haydn, by the 1780’s, had a reputation that had spread beyond the Esterházy estates and even beyond Vienna and Austria.

In 1790, Prince Miklós died. His successor, Prince Antal, had great love neither for music nor for the enormous and remote palace of Esterháza. He paid Haydn a pension that kept him nominally in service to the family but that, in fact, left Haydn free to move to Vienna, which he did almost at once. Scarcely had Haydn settled himself and his wife when he was invited to visit and perform both in Italy and in England. Faced with the choice, Haydn accepted the offer to journey to London. When Mozart protested, saying that Haydn had no experience with travel and could not speak the language, Haydn replied, “But my language is understood all over the world.”

At the age of fifty-eight, Haydn set forth for London, where some of his greatest music was composed and where he expanded his genius into the new musical form of oratorios. Haydn was young in spirit and in good health, and his two years in London were happy and spectacularly successful. He composed dozens of new works and gave a variety of public concerts, all of which were well received by the English. For the first time, Haydn, who had always been a servant of princes, moved in royal circles as a free and equal man. He was a house guest of the prince of Wales and was awarded an honorary doctor of music degree from Oxford. As always, he was admired by women, and his diary contains many love letters from a wealthy London widow.

Haydn was short but solidly built—his legs seemingly almost too short to support his body. His face was characterized by a strong nose, a broad forehead, and remarkably bright eyes. In spite of the smallpox scars that marred his face, his portraits show a not unattractive man of pleasant visage wearing the curled wig of his day. Far more appealing than his features were Haydn’s naïve pleasure in his surroundings, his love of beauty, his zest for life, and his frank admiration of women. Especially strong were his ties to Maria Anna von Genzinger, to whom he wrote long letters that reveal both his daily activities and his observations on music and the world. His letters to her from London provide an especially valuable insight into Haydn’s state of mind, as well as a record of his many activities in England.

Haydn was enormously successful in London. The warm adulation of the crowd nourished his creative talents. Among the triumphs of his sojourn in England were the symphonies inspired by the visit, which mark the peak of Haydn’s instrumental compositions and the height of his maturity as a composer. In London, also, Haydn attended a performance of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah (1742) in Westminster Abbey, with a choir of more than one thousand voices. He was greatly moved by this performance and musical style and was stimulated and challenged to emulate it. Haydn soon began work on his own masterpiece, Die Schöpfung (1798; The Creation).

As he returned to Austria in 1792, Haydn met the young Ludwig van Beethoven, who made plans to join Haydn and study under his direction in Vienna. In 1794, Haydn again returned to London, where he remained extremely popular. Though encouraged to make his home in London, Haydn returned to Vienna in 1795 at the behest of his nominal employer, Prince Miklós II, who had succeeded to the title and who, like his more illustrious ancestor, was eager to use his world-famous chapel master.

Haydn’s duties upon his return were not arduous, consisting largely of the requirement that he compose masses for the prince and works for special occasions. Meanwhile, Haydn began work on his great oratorio, The Creation, basing the libretto on John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). For three years, Haydn labored over this work. When the premier performance was given in 1798 to selected guests in Vienna, twelve policemen and eighteen mounted guards were necessary to contain the excited crowds of music lovers who thronged outside. The Creation was a triumph, and it was performed for many years, with the considerable proceeds going largely to charity.

The work on The Creation drained Haydn both physically and emotionally, but still the master continued to work. Another oratorio, Die Jahreszeiten (1801; The Seasons), followed, as did various orchestral works. Haydn’s health, however, continued to decline, and on May 31, 1809, he died. Napoleon I (whose troops occupied much of Austria) sent members of the French army to form an honor guard around the catafalque, a tribute to a truly international man.

There was a curious epilogue to Haydn’s death. When his body was removed to Eisenstadt for reburial in 1814, it was discovered that his head was missing. It had been removed by two of Haydn’s admirers and was eventually bequeathed to the museum of the Society of Friends of Music in Vienna. In 1954, it was finally united with the body in the mausoleum built for Haydn by Prince Esterházy.

Significance

Joseph Haydn was a man who enjoyed life, and this attitude was reflected in his music. His talent matured slowly; by the time he reached the age at which Mozart died, Haydn had barely begun to compose. His long life and robust health enabled him to compose many works, an accurate accounting of which is made all the more difficult by the unfortunate habit minor composers had of publishing their own works under Haydn’s name in the hope of encouraging sales. Haydn was primarily an instrumental composer, and his major works include at least 37 concerti, 62 sonatas, 107 symphonies, 68 string quartets, and 45 piano trios, as well as other works. In addition to these instrumental pieces, he composed 17 operas, 2 oratorios, 60 songs, and 14 masses.

The whimsical Haydn also composed lovely small works, including a symphony for toy instruments and strings to delight children. He composed small pieces for musical clocks as well, and these were often gifts to his patron prince. A staunch patriot, Haydn was especially impressed during his sojourn in London by the stirring strains of “God Save the King,” and he felt strongly the lack of a similar anthem for his own land. As the advances of Napoleon I threatened his beloved Austria, Haydn authorized the writing of a patriotic text that he set to music as the Austrian national anthem. It was first played for the emperor’s birthday in 1797 and enjoyed great popularity. A variation of the familiar tune (made notorious through its use by the Nazi movement) formed the basis for one of Haydn’s string quartets (op. 76), but it is most often enjoyed in the English-speaking world as the church hymn “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken.”

Haydn was a truly remarkable individual whose musical style influenced two generations of composers. He developed and perfected the intimate form of the string quartet, arguably more difficult to write even than symphonies. Haydn worked with the different voices of the four instruments and the ways in which they could be blended together. It was a musical form uniquely his own.

Haydn’s own style grew and changed as he studied and experimented with music. The tranquil years at Esterháza were especially valuable for the isolation and the time they provided him for this study. He was fundamentally interested in structure for its own sake, and this interest expressed itself in his music. His works are joyous and forthright in mood, seldom delving into the complex emotional conflicts of the Romantic composers, who so often despised Haydn’s singleness of style and purpose. His rare ability to use the different sounds and range of each instrument in the orchestra makes Haydn’s instrumental music especially fine. Haydn has often been rebuffed by musicians and critics for his style and for the supposed lack of seriousness in his adaptation of folk music to his symphonies, but the twentieth century saw a rebirth of Haydn’s reputation and a new appreciation of his greatness. Haydn’s life, reflected so perfectly in his music, was joyous and optimistic and was inspirational both to his era and to the future.

Bibliography

Barrett-Ayers, Reginald. Joseph Haydn and the String Quartet. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974. A specialized book for serious students of music. Nevertheless, because of its size, simplification of approach, and manageability of subject, this is an excellent book devoted to special areas of Haydn’s music.

Geiringer, Karl, with Irene Geiringer. Haydn: A Creative Life in Music. 1946. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. This book is by far the best single-volume treatment of Haydn’s life. Includes updated scholarship and evaluation of available manuscripts as well as a sympathetic portrayal of the composer. Almost half of the book is devoted to a brief analysis of Haydn’s work and the stylistic development throughout his life.

Griesinger, G. A., and A. C. Dies. Joseph Haydn: Eighteenth-Century Gentleman and Genius. Translated by Gernon Gotwals. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963. A delightful firsthand report on Haydn, often in his own words, by two men who knew him and worked with him. Griesinger, a business associate of Haydn, emerged as the official biographer to whom Haydn recounted the major events of his life. Dies was an art gallery director employed by Prince Esterházy who counted at least thirty visits with Haydn.

Hughes, Rosemary. Haydn. Rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. This short biography includes an analysis of Haydn’s music in its various forms. The author credits the Geiringers as the inspiration for the biography, and this book follows much the same pattern as that earlier work. A worthwhile study of both Haydn and his music. Possibly the most readily available source for the life of Haydn.

Landon, H. C. Robbins. Haydn. New York: Praeger, 1972. A slim volume, easily read, and a good introduction to Haydn. Includes brief musical bars and references to incorporate his music into a brief sketch of his life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Haydn: Chronicle and Works. 5 vols. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Absolutely invaluable to serious students of Haydn. The definitive work on Haydn, this book takes advantage of the best available publications of Haydn’s music. Provides a strong framework of Austrian history and culture, as well as that of England during Haydn’s visits. Very detailed research on Haydn’s music makes these volumes difficult for general readers but invaluable for the trained musician.

Sisman, Elaine R., ed. Haydn and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997. Collection of essays by musicologists, including an examination of Haydn’s chamber music, oratorios, and symphonies. Also includes a list of the contents of Haydn’s library.

Webster, James, and Georg Feder, eds. The New Grove Haydn. New York: Grove Press, 2002. The section about Haydn that originally was published in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians has been updated to appeal to general readers and reprinted in this individual volume. Also includes a list of Haydn’s works, a bibliography, and illustrations.