Joseph Haydn

Anyone asking who was Joseph Haydn should begin in Rohrau, a small market village in Lower Austria near the Hungarian border, where Franz Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 ^[1]. His father Mathias was a wheelwright who also served as the village magistrate, and his mother Maria, born Koller, had worked as a cook at the local castle before her marriage. Neither parent could read music, but the household sang together in the evenings, and the boy's exceptional voice and ear were noticed early ^[2].

At about the age of six, Haydn was sent to live with a relative, the schoolmaster and choir director Johann Mathias Franck, in the nearby town of Hainburg. There he received basic schooling and his first formal instruction in singing and instruments. The arrangement was harsh, and Haydn later recalled being frequently hungry and poorly dressed, yet the training paid off. Around 1740 Georg von Reutter, music director of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, heard the boy sing and recruited him for the cathedral choir ^[1].

Haydn spent roughly nine years as a chorister at St. Stephen's, absorbing an enormous amount of sacred music in daily performance while receiving little systematic teaching in composition. When his voice broke, around 1749, he was dismissed from the choir school and turned out onto the streets of Vienna with almost nothing ^[2].

The years that followed were lean. Haydn survived as a freelance musician in Vienna, teaching keyboard pupils, playing in street serenades, and working for a time as accompanist and valet to the Italian composer and singing teacher Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned the true fundamentals of composition ^[3]. He studied counterpoint on his own from Johann Joseph Fux's treatise Gradus ad Parnassum and analyzed the keyboard sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose expressive style left a lasting mark on him ^[2].

His first steady posts came through aristocratic patronage. In the late 1750s he served as music director for Count Morzin, for whom he wrote his earliest symphonies. Then, in 1761, came the appointment that defined his career: Prince Paul Anton Esterházy engaged him as vice-Kapellmeister, and Haydn entered the service of one of the wealthiest noble families in the Habsburg lands ^[1]. He became full Kapellmeister in 1766.

Under Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, who succeeded his brother in 1762, Haydn directed the court orchestra, composed on demand, staged operas, and managed the musical establishment at the remote palace of Eszterháza in rural Hungary. The isolation, he famously observed, forced him to become original, since there was no one nearby to confuse him and he could experiment freely with his own ensemble ^[3].

Any list of Joseph Haydn achievements starts with the symphony. Across more than 100 works in the genre, he transformed a modest form of entertainment music into a vehicle for sustained argument, wit, and drama, earning the nickname father of the symphony ^[4]. Landmarks include the Sturm und Drang symphonies of the late 1760s and early 1770s, the six Paris symphonies of 1785 and 1786, and the twelve London symphonies of the 1790s, among them the Surprise (No. 94), the Military (No. 100), and the London (No. 104) ^[1].

He did comparable work for chamber music. His roughly 68 string quartets, especially the Op. 20 set of 1772 and the Op. 33 set of 1781, established the four-movement quartet as a conversation among equal instruments, a model that Mozart openly acknowledged when he dedicated six quartets to Haydn in 1785 ^[4]. The two men admired each other deeply, and Haydn told Mozart's father that his son was the greatest composer known to him ^[2].

Haydn's late choral works crowned his career. After hearing Handel's oratorios in London, he composed The Creation, first performed publicly in Vienna in 1799, and The Seasons, premiered in 1801. Both were immediate successes across Europe ^[3]. His 1797 melody for the hymn Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser served as the Austrian imperial anthem and later became the tune of the German national anthem ^[5].

In 1760 Haydn married Maria Anna Keller, the daughter of a Viennese wigmaker. The marriage was unhappy: the couple had no children, and by most accounts husband and wife lived largely separate emotional lives ^[2]. During his Eszterháza years Haydn formed a long attachment to the singer Luigia Polzelli, and in London he enjoyed a warm friendship, preserved in surviving letters, with the widow Rebecca Schroeter ^[3].

Contemporaries described Haydn as practical, industrious, and good-humored, a devout Catholic who often wrote In nomine Domini at the head of his scores and Laus Deo at the end ^[1]. Fellow musicians called him Papa Haydn, a nickname that reflected both his seniority and his reputation for fairness in managing the Esterházy players. His music's jokes, from the sudden fortissimo chord of the Surprise Symphony to the staged walk-off of the Farewell Symphony, matched a personality that colleagues found genuinely witty ^[4].

When Prince Nikolaus Esterházy died in 1790, his successor dissolved most of the musical establishment while keeping Haydn on a nominal salary. Freed from daily duties, Haydn accepted an offer from the German-born impresario Johann Peter Salomon to come to England ^[1]. Two extended visits, from 1791 to 1792 and from 1794 to 1795, brought him the twelve London symphonies, packed concert halls, an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1791, and earnings beyond anything his court service had provided ^[3].

Back in Vienna, Haydn served the restored Esterházy musical establishment on lighter terms, producing six late masses, including the Nelson Mass of 1798, alongside The Creation and The Seasons ^[4]. He also briefly taught the young Ludwig van Beethoven, who had come to Vienna in 1792 partly to study with him; the lessons were uneven, but Beethoven later dedicated his first three piano sonatas to his teacher ^[2].

His health declined after 1803, and composition became impossible in his final years. He died in Vienna on May 31, 1809, days after Napoleon's army had bombarded and occupied the city; the French emperor is reported to have posted a guard of honor at the dying composer's house ^[1].

Haydn's influence runs through the whole classical tradition. The formal habits he refined, including the four-movement symphony, the developmental treatment of small motifs, and the string quartet as serious music, became the shared language of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and generations after them ^[4]. Brahms owned the autograph of one of his quartets, and twentieth-century scholarship, led by researchers such as H. C. Robbins Landon, restored many neglected works to the repertoire ^[3].

Useful Joseph Haydn facts for modern readers: the standard Hoboken catalog lists over 750 works, including 104 numbered symphonies, about 68 string quartets, more than 50 keyboard sonatas, 14 masses, and roughly two dozen operas ^[5]. His skull, stolen by phrenologists shortly after burial, was only reunited with his body in 1954, when his remains were placed in a marble tomb at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, the town where he had served the Esterházy court ^[5].

Any Joseph Haydn biography ultimately tells a story of patient craft rewarded. A wheelwright's son from a village on the Leitha river ended his life as the most famous composer in Europe, and the forms he perfected still organize concert programs more than two centuries later ^[1].