Joseph Haydn





(Franz) Joseph Haydn (sometimes Josef, he never used the Franz)
(March 31, 1732 - May 31, 1809) was a leading composer of the high
classical period, second only to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He was
the brother of Michael Haydn, a composer, and Johann Evangelist
Haydn, a tenor singer.

Life

A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent most of his career as a court
musician, running the orchestra, opera company, etc. of the wealthy
Eszterh‡zy family on their remote estate, for which he had to compose most
of the music. Being isolated from other composers and currents of music, he
was, as he put it, "forced to become original".

Haydn was born in 1732, the son of a wheelwright living in the village of
Rohrau near the border of Hungary. His musical ability was recognized when
he was a small child, and at age six he was sent to live with relatives in
nearby Hainburg, where he could be trained as a choral singer. In 1740,
Haydn was noticed by Georg von Reutter, the director of music in St.
Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, who was touring the provinces looking for
talented choirboys. Reutter took Haydn with him to Vienna, where Haydn
worked for nine years as a chorister, the last four in the company of his
younger brother Michael. Reutter often let his choristers go hungry and
neglected their musical education, but Haydn certainly learned a great deal
from being a professional musician at an early age in an important musical location.

In 1749, Haydn had matured physically to the point that he was no longer
able to sing high choral parts. On a weak pretext, he was summarily
dismissed from his job. He evidently spent one night homeless on a park
bench, but was taken in by friends and began to pursue a career as a
freelance musician. During this arduous period, which lasted ten years,
Haydn worked many different jobs, including valet/accompanist for the
Italian composer Niccola Porpora. He labored to fill the gaps in his
training, and eventually came to write his first string quartets and his
first opera. During this time Haydn's professional reputation gradually increased.

In 1759, Haydn received his first important position, that of Kapellmeister
(music director) for Count Karl von Morzin. In this capacity, he directed
the count's small orchestra, and for this ensemble wrote his first
symphonies. Count Morzin soon suffered financial reverses that forced him to
dismiss his musical establishment, but Haydn was quickly offered a similar
job (1761) as assistant Kapellmeister to the Eszterh‡zy family, one of the
wealthiest and most important in the Austrian Empire. When the old
Kapellmeister, Gregor Werner, finally died in 1766, Haydn was elevated to
full Kapellmeister.

As a liveried servant of the Eszterh‡zys, Haydn followed them about among
their three main residences: the family seat in Eisenstadt, about 35 miles
from Vienna; their winter palace in Vienna, and Eszterh‡za, a grand new
palace built in rural Hungary in the 1760's. Haydn had a huge range of
responsibilities, including composition, running the orchestra, playing
chamber music for and with his patrons, and eventually the mounting of
operatic productions. Despite the backbreaking workload, Haydn considered
himself fortunate to have his job. The Eszterh‡zy princes (first Paul Anton,
then most importantly Nikolaus I) were musical connoisseurs who appreciated
his work and gave him the conditions needed for his artistic development,
including daily access to his own small orchestra.

In 1760, with the security of a Kapellmeister position, Haydn married. He
and his wife, the former Maria Anna Keller, did not get along, and they
produced no children. Haydn may have had one or more children with Luigia
Polzelli, a singer in the Eszterh‡zy establishment with whom he carried on a
long-term love affair.

During the nearly thirty years that Haydn worked in the Eszterh‡zy
household, he produced a flood of compositions, and his musical style became
ever more developed. His popularity in the outside world also increased.
Gradually, Haydn came to write as much for publication as for his employer,
and several important works of this period, such as the Paris symphonies
(1785-6) and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of
Christ (1786), were commissions from abroad.

Around 1781 Haydn established a close friendship with Mozart, whose work he
had already been influencing by example for many years. The two composers
enjoyed playing in string quartets together. Haydn was hugely impressed with
Mozart's work; it is probably significant that around this time, Haydn
largely ceased to compose operas and concertos--two of the genres where
Mozart was at his strongest. Mozart, in contrast, worked hard to produce six
string quartets that would live up to the standard of Haydn's recently
completed opus 33 series, and when they were completed Mozart dedicated the
quartets to his friend.

In 1790, Prince Nikolaus died, and was succeeded by a thoroughly unmusical
successor who dismissed the entire musical establishment and put Haydn on
pension. Somewhat at loose ends, Haydn accepted a lucrative offer from
Johann Peter Salomon, a German impresario, to visit England and conduct his
new symphonies with a large orchestra.

The visit (1791-2, with a repeat visit in 1794-5) was a huge success.
Audiences flocked to Haydn's concerts, and he quickly achieved wealth and
stardom. Musically, the visits to England generated some of Haydn's
best-known work, including the "Surprise", "Military", "Drumroll", and
"London" symphonies, the "Rider" quartet, and the "Gypsy Rondo" piano trio.

Haydn actually considered becoming an English citizen and settling
permanently, but eventually took a different course. He returned to Vienna,
had a large house built for himself, and turned to the composition of large
religious works for chorus and orchestra. These include his two great
oratorios The Creation and The Seasons and six masses for the Eszterh‡zy
family, which by this time was once again headed by a musically-inclined
prince. Haydn also composed the last nine in his long series of string
quartets, including the "Emperor", "Sunrise", and "Fifths" quartets. Despite
his increasing age, Haydn looked to the future, exclaiming once in a letter,
"how much remains to be done in this glorious art!".

In 1802, Haydn found that an illness from which he had been suffering for
some time had increased greatly in severity, to the point that he became
physically unable to compose. This was doubtless very difficult for Haydn,
because, as he acknowledged, the flow of fresh musical ideas waiting to be
worked out as compositions did not cease. Haydn was well cared for by his
servants, and he received many visitors and public honors during his last
years, but they cannot have been very happy years for him. During his
illness, Haydn often found solace by sitting at the piano and playing the
Austrian national anthem, which he had composed himself as a patriotic
gesture in 1797.

Haydn's death occurred in 1809, following an attack on Vienna by the French
army under Napoleon. Among his last words were his attempt to calm and
reassure his servants as cannon shot fell on the neighborhood.

Character and Appearance

Haydn was known among his contemporaries for his kindly, optimistic, and
congenial personality. He had a robust sense of humor, evident in his love
of practical jokes and often apparent in his music. He was particularly
respected by the Eszterh‡zy court musicians whom he supervised, as he
maintained a cordial working atmosphere and effectively represented the
musicians' interests with their employer.

Haydn was a devout Catholic, who often turned to his rosary when he got
stuck in composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective. When
he finished a composition, he would write "Laus deo" ("praise be to God") or
some similar expression at the end of the manuscript. His favorite hobbies
were hunting and fishing.

Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed
throughout most of his youth. Like many in his day, he was a survivor of
smallpox, and his face was pitted with the scars of this disease. He was not
handsome, and was quite surprised when women flocked to him during his
London visits. The various portraitists who drew or painted Haydn during his
lifetime each took a different path in attempting to portray the attractive
personality instead of the ugly face; hence no two surviving portraits of
Haydn are alike.

Works

Haydn is traditionally considered the father of the symphony and string
quartet, and he did write the first well-known works in those genres.
Besides the symphony and string quartet, Haydn also pioneered the
development of sonata form, and was innovative in his writing of keyboard
sonatas and of piano trios.

Structure of the Music

A central characteristic of Haydn's music is the development of larger
structures out of very short, simple musical motifs. The music is often
quite formally concentrated, and the important musical events of a movement
can unfold rather quickly.

The organizational principle for much of Haydn's work is sonata form, of
which the basic elements--as they appear in Haydn--are as follows:

   * Exposition: presentation of the initial musical material, followed by a
     modulation to the dominant key (creating an increase of musical
     tension), and a local resolution and cadence in the dominant. A notable
     feature of many of Haydn's expositions is that (unlike Mozart and
     Beethoven) he often uses no contrasting "second theme" at the
     appearance of the dominant; instead he repeats the opening theme or
     some modification thereof.

   * Development: the musical material is rearranged, transformed, and often
     fragmented, moving through a series of more remote keys and often
     reaching a kind of crisis point, usually in the relative minor key.

   * Recapitulation: the material of the exposition is presented again, this
     time remaining largely in the original key. Usually the recapitulation
     includes a "secondary development", occurring at the location where the
     exposition modulated to the dominant; this secondary development
     usually explores the subdominant key. Haydn, unlike Mozart and
     Beethoven, often rearranges the themes of the recapitulation into a
     different order.

Haydn's compositional practice influenced both Mozart and Beethoven.
Beethoven began his career writing rather discursive, loosely organized
sonata expositions; but with the onset of his "middle period", he revived
and intensified Haydn's practice, developing very highly organized musical
structures from extremely simple basic motifs.

Perhaps more than any other composer, Haydn is known for the jokes that he
put into his music. The most famous example is the sudden loud chord in his
"Surprise Symphony", no. 94, but others are perhaps funnier: the fake
endings in the quartets Op. 33 no. 2 and Op. 50 no. 3, or the remarkable
rhythmic illusion placed in the trio of Op. 50 no. 1.

Evolution of Haydn's Style

Haydn's early work dates from a period in which the compositional style of
the High Baroque (seen in Bach and Handel's music) had gone out of fashion,
but composers had not yet hit upon ways of writing music in the newly
emerging idioms that would bear comparable weight. This was a period of
exploration and uncertainty, and Haydn (born 18 years before the death of
Bach) was himself one of the musical explorers of this time. An older
contemporary whose work Haydn acknowledged as an important influence was
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the third son of Johann Sebastian.

Tracing Haydn's work over the five decades it was produced (roughly, 1749 to
1802), one finds a gradual but ever increasing complexity and musical
sophistication, which developed as Haydn learned from his own experience and
that of his colleagues. Several important landmarks have been observed in
the evolution of Haydn's musical style.

In the late 1760s and early 1770s Haydn entered a stylistic period known as
"Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress), full of jagged chords, abrupt
transitions, and strange minor-key harmonies. Most of the symphonies
numbered between 35 and about 55 are of this kind. Around this time, Haydn
discovered the work of J. S. Bach, and experimented with writing fugues,
notable in the final movements of the six string quartets (the "Sun
quartets") of Op. 20 (1772).

In 1781, Haydn published the six string quartets of opus 33, announcing (in
a letter to potential purchasers) that they were written in "a completely
new and special way". Charles Rosen has argued that this assertion on
Haydn's part was not just sales talk, but meant quite seriously; and he
points out a number of important advances in Haydn's style that appear in
these quartets. These include a fluid form of phrasing, in which each motif
emerges from the previous one without interruption, the practice of letting
accompanying material evolve into melodic material, and a kind of "classical
counterpoint" in which each instrumental part maintains its own integrity.
These traits continue in the many quartets that Haydn wrote after opus 33.

In the 1790's, stimulated by his England journey, Haydn developed what Rosen
calls his "popular style," a way of composition that, with unprecedented
success, created music which both held great popular appeal and retained a
learned and rigorous musical structure. An important element of the popular
style was the frequent use of folk (or invented, pseudo-folk) material.
Haydn took care to deploy this material in appropriate locations, such as
the endings of sonata expositions or the opening themes of finales. In such
locations, the folk material serves as an element of solidity, helping to
anchor the larger structure. Haydn's popular style can be heard in virtually
all of his later work, including the twelve London symphonies, the late
quartets and piano trios, and the two late oratorios.

Books About Haydn

Biography:

Haydn by Rosemary Hughes (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux 1970) gives a
sympathetic and witty account of Haydn's life, along with a survey of the
music. Another biography, based on the most recent scholarship, is James
Webster's contribution to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(New York: Grove, 2001). Haydn: Chronicle and Works, by H. C. Robbins Landon
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976-1980), is a near-exhaustive
compilation of the information we have about Haydn's life.

Criticism and analysis:

The Classical Style by Charles Rosen (2nd ed., New York: Norton 1997) is the
essential work, covering much of Haydn's output, and explicating Haydn's
central role in the creation of the classical style.

Catalogs

Some of Haydn's works are referred to by opus numbers, but Hob or Hoboken
numbers, after Anthony van Hoboken's 1957 classification, are also
frequently used.