Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732–1809)

HAYDN, FRANZ JOSEPH (1732–1809)

HAYDN, FRANZ JOSEPH (1732–1809), Austrian composer considered the founder of Vienna classicism. Born in modest circumstances as the son of a wheelwright in the Lower Austrian town of Rohrau, Haydn was by 1800 the most celebrated composer in Europe. He is sometimes called the father of both the symphony and the string quartet.

Haydn was raised in a devoutly Catholic household and his parents had hopes of his entering the clergy. He showed an early aptitude for music, which was noticed by a visiting schoolmaster who convinced his parents to send the six-year-old Joseph to a parish school in the neighboring town of Hainburg. Catholic parish schools had traditionally emphasized music (the schoolmaster usually doubled as the church organist) since pupils were needed to sing or perform in the parish's annual cycle of regular masses, baptisms, funerals, and processions. Haydn acquired his first formal training in music at the Hainburg school, and at the age of eight left to continue his musical education as a pupil at the choir school of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. He remained a pupil at St. Stephen's for almost ten years until he was forced to leave around 1749—not, as legend has it, to escape castration but because his voice broke.

Haydn's early years as a composer and musician illustrate the crucial importance of aristocratic musical patronage in eighteenth-century Europe. After struggling for several years as a teacher, freelance musician, and occasional composer for the popular Viennese stage, Haydn finally obtained a measure of financial security when Count Karl Joseph Franz Morzin took him into his household as music director around 1757. Haydn's first symphonies as well as his earliest string quartets date from this period. Decisive for his career was his entry a few years later (1761) into the service of Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, scion of the wealthiest magnate family in Hungary. Haydn, in his capacity as Vice-Kapellmeister (1761–1765) and later Kapellmeister (1761–1790), was in charge of supervising, if not composing, the music performed at the prince's palace at Esterháza. There Haydn was responsible for providing both vocal and instrumental music, including operas performed in the prince's lavish theater. Although Haydn's operas are today the least regarded part of his musical oeuvre—perhaps because they would soon be so overshadowed by Mozart's—Haydn devoted much of his musical energy in the years between 1766 and 1783 to operatic compositions. Best known today are his comic (or buffa ) operas, such as those based on librettos by the eighteenth-century Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (Lo speziale [1768)], Le pescatrici [1769–1770], and Il mondo della luna [1777]). But they also included dramatic pieces like Armida (1783), adapted from the late-humanist poet Torquato Tasso, which was the last opera Haydn produced. In the meantime Haydn continued to experiment with the symphonic form, moving from the syncopated eccentricities of his Sturm und Drang ('storm and stress') phase (1768–1772) to the exquisite sublimity of his later symphonies. During Haydn's years at Esterháza his string quartets also acquired the quintessentially conversational style that would be their hallmark, evoking the atmosphere of the Enlightenment salons he frequented during visits to Vienna in the 1770s and 1780s.

By the 1780s Haydn had begun to free himself financially from dependence on his Esterházy patrons. He did this partly by successfully marketing his compositions to publishing houses in Vienna, London, and Paris, and partly through commissions like Die sieben letzten Worte unseres Erlösers am Kreuze (1785–1786; Seven last words of our Redeemer on the cross), an oratorio composed for the cathedral of Cádiz in southern Spain for performance during Holy Week. But it was above all the financial success of Haydn's triumphal London tours (1791–1792, 1794–1795) that sealed his economic independence. Haydn skillfully exploited the opportunities for performance and composition offered by the city's commercialized musical culture with its theaters, subscription concerts, and public pleasure gardens. All in all, Haydn's London visits earned him some 24,000 gulden, the equivalent of twenty years' salary at Esterháza. His "London symphonies" (nos. 93–104) achieved particular success in the British capital. His succeeding years in Vienna, where he spent the remainder of his life, won him popular acclaim as well. Die Schöpfung (1797; The creation) and Die Jahreszeiten (1801; The seasons), oratorios that remain two of his most beloved compositions today, served especially to crown his broad popularity in the Austrian capital.

In this respect Haydn's career epitomized the transition from aristocratic patronage to public performance that had begun to characterize the social history of music during his day. The legend of "Papa Haydn," the good-natured and self-effacing figure known for his generous encouragement of Mozart and Beethoven, can obscure the attention Haydn devoted to promoting the public reception of his own music. Commercially savvy, Haydn was keenly attuned to the tastes of his public. He often incorporated folk themes into his music, and the playful and mischievous qualities that came to be a hallmark of many of Haydn's compositions doubtless contributed to his broad appeal. As his "Surprise" Symphony (no. 94) or "Joke" Quartet (op. 33, no. 2) illustrate, Haydn loved musical gags, sudden reversals of tempo, the injection of a humorous moment into an ostensibly serious one. Critics of his day sometimes attacked this aspect of Haydn's music, noting his penchant for shifting unexpectedly between refinement and coarseness, the elevated and the vulgar. Yet Haydn's success in blurring the boundaries between high and low was a key element of his popularity, attesting to his ability to appeal to a wide audience.

See also Goldoni, Carlo ; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ; Music ; Vienna .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gotwals, Vernon. Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits. Madison, Wis., 1963.

Landon, H. C. Robbins. Haydn: Chronicle and Works. 5 vols. London, 1976–1980.

Landon, H. C. Robbins, and David Wyn Jones. Haydn: His Life and Music. London and Bloomington, Ind., 1988.

Webster, James. "Haydn, (Franz) Joseph." In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, vol. 11, pp. 171–271. London and New York, 2001.

James Van Horn Melton