Josef Haydn

1732–1809

Composer

Early Years.

Josef Haydn's long life and career spanned the transition from the late Baroque to the Romantic era. Born into a modest family of artisans, his relatives were nonetheless musical. A local schoolteacher offered the young Haydn the opportunity to attend school, and within a few years he had been invited to become a choirboy at St. Stephan's Cathedral in Vienna, a post he accepted at the age of seven. Once his voice changed and he was forced to leave the choir, he spent several years as a freelance teacher, studying composition on his own, including the works of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Mutual friends put him in contact with the composer Nicola Porpora, who hired him as an accompanist for his voice students, helped him with composition, and introduced him to prominent musicians and patrons. His "Missa brevis in F" dates from these early years, although many other works from this period do not survive.

The EsterhÁzy Court.

For a time Haydn secured employment in the household of Count Karl Morzin in Vienna and Bohemia. The year 1761 marked an important change, when he was offered a position in the court of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, the head of a very powerful Hungarian family. Soon Paul Anton was succeeded by his brother Nicholas. The Esterhàzy's main estate was at Eisenstadt, just south of Vienna, with a second home near Lake Neusiedl in Hungary, known as Esterháza. Nicholas was to build this home into a spectacular palace complete with two theaters and two music rooms. Haydn was put in charge of both musicians and compositions; he would remain many years with the court, and built his international reputation from this role as a court musician. He was required to compose at the prince's request, and the court retained rights to his works. By 1766 Haydn was also in charge of church music. He wrote a number of masses, among them his "Great" and "Little Organ Masses," and his noted "Stabat Mater" of 1767. He continued to visit Vienna often, and there eventually met and befriended the much younger composer Mozart.

International Reputation.

The court featured frequent musical performances. During the 1760s, Haydn wrote over 25 symphonies for concerts there. Over time the Esterhàzys began to favor opera and musical theater over instrumental music, requiring more works than any single composer could provide. Haydn's operas, successful in their day, are seldom performed now, primarily because their libretti are not always up to the high standards of music that Haydn composed for them. By the late 1770s, Haydn seems to have been spending more time as an impresario, producing performances of the works of many others, than as composer of his own operatic works. He was able to renegotiate his agreement about rights to compositions and was now allowed to accept commissions from other patrons as well as to publish his works. Haydn's compositions were among the first publications of a new Viennese music press, Artaria. He quickly grew accustomed to the profitable and treacherous world of international music publishing. He tried to maximize his own profits in each country with a separate printing privilege, and also wrote more compositions specifically for the publishing market. These publishing ventures further extended his fame and the popularity of his works. He continued to receive a number of important international commissions. In 1784, for instance, the French Count d'Ogny asked him to write six symphonies for public performance in Paris, a commission that produced the famous Paris Symphonies. His services were also demanded to set a series of instrumental pieces on the theme of Christ's "Seven Last Words" for a Holy Week service in Cádiz in Spain. Despite the reputation of the performances at the Esterházy court, Prince Nicholas's son and successor Anton disbanded the court's orchestra in 1791. Haydn retained a pension but was free from his duties. He traveled to London, conducting and composing new works, including his famous London Symphonies. Hearing the works of Handel in England influenced the composition of his most famous oratorio, The Creation. The work has three parts; the first two treat the six days of creation itself, and the third focuses on Adam and Eve. When Prince Anton died in 1794, his successor Nicholas II invited Haydn back to the Esterházy court, which now resided primarily in Vienna. Haydn returned, by now widely celebrated as an international composer, and wrote an annual mass for the prince as well as works of his own choosing. He remained in Vienna until his death in 1809.

Importance.

Haydn is often referred to as the "father of the symphony" both because he wrote so many of them (104 in all), and because he was so influential in developing and establishing the form. His instrumentation usually depends on that of the group for which he wrote the work. His early symphonies used strings (the number available ranged from around 10 to 25), continuo, two oboes, and two horns. Some of these early symphonies were written in the three-movement style of the early sinfonia, that is fast-slow-fast. Yet before long he settled on the four-movement pattern that later became the norm: allegro, andante, minuet/trio, and allegro. He used sonata form for first movements, though less rigorously than later writers did. Bold contrasts of dynamics and changes of mood characterize many of the symphonies he wrote around 1770, often referred to as his "Sturm und Drang" period. Somewhat later, by the time he was receiving international commissions, he came to expect more from his audiences and performers alike. The later symphonies included a broad range of instruments and made greater demands, in other words, on both the listener and their performers. His London Symphonies included parts for clarinets, and both woodwind and brass parts had a more independent set of sounds. He selected themes that were fairly simple and could be broken apart and developed, and used a great harmonic range. In his later works, Haydn used the symphony as the arena for developing and presenting a composer's most creative ideas, and for serious, active listening and enjoyment on the part of the audience. These came to be the standards that were to prevail in European serious music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

sources

H. C. Robbins Landon and David Wyn Jones, Haydn: His Life and Music (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988).

Charles Rosen, The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1997).

Elaine Sisman, ed., Haydn and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

James Webster and Georg Feder, The New Grove Haydn (London: Grove, 2002).

David Wyn Jones, ed., Haydn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).