A Choirboy Turned Household Officer
Franz Joseph Haydn was born at Rohrau in Lower Austria in 1732, the son of a wheelwright who could not read music. A visiting relative spotted the voice, and at eight he entered the choir school of Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. When the voice broke he was dismissed into the street with nothing, and spent nearly a decade in precarious freelance work: teaching, playing at dances, accompanying the singing master Nicola Porpora in exchange for lessons. He learned counterpoint largely from textbooks and from the keyboard sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
In 1761 he entered the service of the Esterhazy family as vice-Kapellmeister, subordinate to the ageing Gregor Werner. The contract was that of a senior domestic servant. He wore livery, presented himself for orders, supervised instruments and personnel, and accepted that the music he wrote belonged to the prince and could not be circulated without permission. It is a useful corrective to the image of the free artist. The most inventive composer in Europe spent his working prime as a uniformed employee of a noble household.
The Long Isolation at Esterhaza
Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy built a vast palace in the marshes of what is now western Hungary and kept his court there for much of the year. Haydn had an orchestra, a chapel, an opera house and a marionette theatre at his disposal, and almost no competition or fashion to imitate. He later reflected that being cut off had forced him to become original. Across those years he produced the bulk of more than a hundred symphonies and dozens of string quartets, testing ideas week by week on players he knew intimately.
He also managed people. When the prince prolonged a season and kept the musicians from their families, Haydn wrote the symphony in which players extinguish their candles and leave the stage one by one, a piece of tactful pressure that reportedly worked. He was generous to rivals, formed a genuine friendship with Mozart, whose quartets were dedicated to him, and later taught the young Beethoven, an arrangement both men found unsatisfying. His authority came from craft rather than from temperament.
London, Late Fame, and Overstated Titles
Nikolaus died in 1790 and his successor disbanded the orchestra, leaving Haydn a pension and his freedom. The violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon brought him to London for two extended visits between 1791 and 1795, where he wrote his last twelve symphonies for a paying public rather than a patron, received an honorary doctorate at Oxford, and encountered the choral Handel tradition that shaped the oratorios of his final decade. The Creation, first heard in 1798, was the fruit of that encounter.
He is often called the father of the symphony and of the string quartet. The titles flatter and mislead. Both forms were already evolving in the hands of Sammartini, the Mannheim composers around Johann Stamitz, and many working provincial musicians. What Haydn supplied was coherence: a way of building long movements from small motives, of making four instruments argue as equals, and of using wit and surprise structurally. He died in Vienna in May 1809 while Napoleon's army bombarded the city.
