Franz Joseph Haydn

No other figure so fully embodies the goals and triumphs of the Classical period as Franz Joseph Haydn. His single greatest contribution lay in refining the structural framework known as sonata form, a set of expectations whose perfection produced an impact felt across musical history. Across hundreds of instrumental sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies he simultaneously opened fresh territory and supplied enduring templates, placing him among the originators of these core classical genres. Later in life he also fashioned several exceptional oratorios and masses. His operas, long overlooked, have at last gained recognition as skillfully made works meriting far wider hearing than they received during the twentieth century. The reach of his example on subsequent generations remains beyond measure: Beethoven, his most celebrated student, drew direct benefit from the older composer’s inventive mind, while traces of Haydn’s presence appear within, and at times dominate, the output of Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. Integral to that formal command was an celebrated wit and an instinct for the unforeseen yet graceful turn. By one reckoning he generated roughly 340 hours of music, exceeding the totals left by Bach, Handel, Mozart, or Beethoven, and scarcely any of these scores lacks some surprising detail or ingenious resolution of a structural challenge. The sheer volume of his output sprang not only from relentless industry and boundless creative resources but equally from the conditions of his career: he stood as the final major recipient of the aristocratic patronage system that had sustained European composition since the Renaissance.

He entered the world in the modest Austrian hamlet of Rohrau and, at the age of eight, entered the choir at Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, soon followed there by his younger sibling Michael Haydn, himself later a composer. Once his voice changed and he was dismissed from the choir, he sustained himself through uncertain freelance engagements as a teenage musician in the capital. His prospects improved in the late 1750s once Vienna’s noble households began to notice his work, and on 1 May 1761 he entered the service of the Esterházy family, remaining for three decades. During that span he produced numerous instrumental pieces, among them dozens of keyboard sonatas and trios written for the now-obsolete baryton, together with operas staged at the family’s expansive summer residence, Esterháza. Although creative endeavor can end in hardship, Haydn survived long enough to enjoy the fruits of his labor. The Esterházys reduced their musical establishment in 1790, yet by then his reputation had spread throughout Europe and he was widely viewed as the preeminent living composer, a judgment he himself qualified by yielding precedence to Mozart; the cordial rivalry between the two men enriched the music of each. Two journeys to London in the 1790s yielded two groups of six symphonies apiece, among them the “Surprise” symphony, works that continue to anchor the orchestral repertory. Between 1790 and 1799 five collections of string quartets also appeared in print. His concluding masterworks comprised potent, vividly pictorial choral compositions: the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons plus a set of six masses. Composition ceased in 1803; thereafter he headed his letters with a brief musical excerpt, drawn from one of his part-songs, set to the words “Gone is all my strength; I am old and weak.” He died in Vienna on 31 May 1809.