73 Facts About Haydn

Franz Joseph Haydn was an Austrian composer of the Classical period.

Haydn was instrumental in the development of chamber music such as the string quartet and piano trio.

Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterhazy family at their Eszterhaza Castle.

Haydn was a friend and mentor of Mozart, a tutor of Beethoven, and the elder brother of composer Michael Haydn.

Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria, a village that at that time stood on the border with Hungary.

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Haydn's parents had noticed that their son was musically gifted and knew that in Rohrau he would have no chance to obtain serious musical training.

Haydn therefore went off with Frankh to Hainburg and he never again lived with his parents.

Haydn began his musical training there, and could soon play both harpsichord and violin.

Haydn passed his audition with Reutter, and after several months of further training moved to Vienna, where he worked for the next nine years as a chorister.

Haydn lived in the Kapellhaus next to the cathedral, along with Reutter, Reutter's family, and the other four choirboys, which after 1745 included his younger brother Michael.

However, since St Stephen's was one of the leading musical centres in Europe, Haydn learned a great deal simply by serving as a professional musician there.

One day, Haydn carried out a prank, snipping off the pigtail of a fellow chorister.

Haydn had the good fortune to be taken in by a friend, Johann Michael Spangler, who shared his family's crowded garret room with Haydn for a few months.

Haydn immediately began his pursuit of a career as a freelance musician.

Haydn struggled at first, working at many different jobs: as a music teacher, as a street serenader, and eventually, in 1752, as valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, from whom he later said he learned "the true fundamentals of composition".

Haydn was briefly in Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz's employ, playing the organ in the Bohemian Chancellery chapel at the Judenplatz.

Haydn noticed, apparently without annoyance, that works he had simply given away were being published and sold in local music shops.

Haydn was among several musicians who were paid for services as supplementary musicians at balls given for the imperial children during carnival season, and as supplementary singers in the imperial chapel in Lent and Holy Week.

Countess Thun, having seen one of Haydn's compositions, summoned him and engaged him as her singing and keyboard teacher.

Furnberg later recommended Haydn to Count Morzin, who, in 1757, became his first full-time employer.

Haydn's salary was a respectable 200 florins a year, plus free board and lodging.

Haydn led the count's small orchestra in Unterlukawitz and wrote his first symphonies for this ensemble – perhaps numbering in the double figures.

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.

Haydn was commanded to provide music for the prince to play, and over the next ten years produced about 200 works for this instrument in various ensembles, the most notable of which are the 126 baryton trios.

Haydn served as company director, recruiting and training the singers and preparing and leading the performances.

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Haydn wrote several of the operas performed and wrote substitution arias to insert into the operas of other composers.

Haydn soon shifted his emphasis in composition to reflect this and he negotiated with multiple publishers, both Austrian and foreign.

Haydn composed in response to commissions from abroad: the Paris symphonies and the original orchestral version of The Seven Last Words of Christ, a commission from Cadiz, Spain.

Haydn longed to visit Vienna because of his friendships there.

Haydn wrote to Mrs Genzinger often, expressing his loneliness at Esterhaza and his happiness for the few occasions on which he was able to visit her in Vienna.

Haydn was hugely impressed with Mozart's work and praised it unstintingly to others.

In 1785 Haydn was admitted to the same Masonic lodge as Mozart, the "Zur wahren Eintracht" in Vienna.

Haydn retained a nominal appointment with Anton, at a reduced salary of 400 florins, as well as a 1000-florin pension from Nikolaus.

Since the death of Johann Christian Bach in 1782, Haydn's music had dominated the concert scene in London; "hardly a concert did not feature a work by him".

Haydn was well paid for the opera but much time was wasted.

Haydn spent some of the time in the country, but had time to travel, notably to Oxford, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university.

Haydn took Beethoven with him to Eisenstadt for the summer, where Haydn had little to do, and taught Beethoven some counterpoint.

Haydn arranged for the performance of some of his London symphonies in local concerts.

For 1795, Salomon had abandoned his own series, citing difficulty in obtaining "vocal performers of the first rank from abroad", and Haydn joined forces with the Opera Concerts, headed by the violinist Giovanni Battista Viotti.

The final benefit concert for Haydn at the end of the 1795 season was a great success and was perhaps the peak of his English career.

Haydn spent his summers with the Esterhazys in Eisenstadt, and over the course of several years wrote six masses for them including the Lord Nelson mass in 1798.

Haydn spent most of his time in his home, a large house in the suburb of Windmuhle, and wrote works for public performance.

Haydn frequently appeared before the public, often leading performances of The Creation and The Seasons for charity benefits, including Tonkunstler-Societat programs with massed musical forces.

Haydn composed instrumental music: the popular Trumpet Concerto, and the last nine in his long series of string quartets, including the Fifths, Emperor, and Sunrise.

Directly inspired by hearing audiences sing God Save the King in London, in 1797 Haydn wrote a patriotic "Emperor's Hymn" Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, .

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Haydn's last summer in Eisenstadt was in 1803, and his last appearance before the public as a conductor was a charity performance of The Seven Last Words on 26 December 1803.

Haydn was well cared for by his servants, and he received many visitors and public honors during his last years, but they could not have been very happy years for him.

Haydn was both moved and exhausted by the experience and had to depart at intermission.

Haydn's remains were interred in the local Hundsturm cemetery until 1820, when they were moved to Eisenstadt by Prince Nikolaus.

Haydn's head took a different journey; it was stolen by phrenologists shortly after burial, and the skull was reunited with the other remains only in 1954, now interred in a tomb in the north tower of the Bergkirche.

Haydn had a robust sense of humor, evident in his love of practical jokes and often apparent in his music, and he had many friends.

Haydn was a devout Catholic who often turned to his rosary when he had trouble composing, a practice that he usually found to be effective.

Haydn normally began the manuscript of each composition with "in nomine Domini" and ended with "Laus Deo" .

Webster notes that Haydn's ruthlessness in business might be viewed more sympathetically in light of his struggles with poverty during his years as a freelancer—and that outside of the world of business, in his dealings, for example, with relatives, musicians and servants, and in volunteering his services for charitable concerts, Haydn was a generous man – offering to teach the two infant sons of Mozart for free after their father's death.

When Haydn died he was certainly comfortably off, but by middle class rather than aristocratic standards.

Haydn was short in stature, perhaps as a result of having been underfed throughout most of his youth.

Haydn was not handsome, and like many in his day he was a survivor of smallpox; his face was pitted with the scars of this disease.

Haydn is familiarly known as the 'father of the symphony' because he composed 107 symphonies, and could with greater justice be thus regarded for the string quartet; no other composer approaches his combination of productivity, quality and historical importance in these genres.

Central characteristic of Haydn's music is the development of larger structures out of very short, simple musical motifs, often derived from standard accompanying figures.

Haydn's work was central to the development of what came to be called sonata form.

Haydn's practice differed in some ways from that of Mozart and Beethoven, his younger contemporaries who likewise excelled in this form of composition.

Haydn was particularly fond of the so-called monothematic exposition, in which the music that establishes the dominant key is similar or identical to the opening theme.

Haydn was the principal exponent of the double variation form—variations on two alternating themes, which are often major- and minor-mode versions of each other.

Some characteristic examples of Haydn's "rollicking" finale type are found in the "London" Symphony No 104, the String Quartet Op.

Over time, Haydn turned some of his minuets into "scherzi" which are much faster, at one beat to the bar.

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An older contemporary whose work Haydn acknowledged as an important influence was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.

Haydn sometimes recycled his opera music in symphonic works, which helped him continue his career as a symphonist during this hectic decade.

In 1779, an important change in Haydn's contract permitted him to publish his compositions without prior authorization from his employer.

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 compositional technique that appear in these quartets, advances that mark the advent of the Classical style in full flower.

Haydn took care to deploy this material in appropriate locations, such as the endings of sonata expositions or the opening themes of finales.

Haydn once remarked that he had worked on The Creation so long because he wanted it to last.

Change in Haydn's approach was important in the history of classical music, as other composers were soon following his lead.

In Vienna in 1788 Haydn bought himself a fortepiano made by Wenzel Schantz.