1732–1809 · Classical
Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) worked in the Classical style and spent almost thirty years as Kapellmeister to the Esterházy princes; modern scholars call him the 'Father of the Symphony' and the 'Father of the String Quartet' for shaping those genres. The site's catalogue brings together his piano sonatas, choral pieces and an aria for voice and piano at various levels of difficulty.
Joseph Haydn was born on 31 March 1732 in the village of Rohrau, on the estate of the Counts Harrach, near the border with Hungary. His father Mathias Haydn worked as a wheelwright, and his mother Anna Maria, née Koller, served as a cook in Count Harrach's palace; both enjoyed singing and making music together at home.
Around 1737 he was taken in by a relative, Johann Matthias Frankh, a schoolmaster and choirmaster in nearby Hainburg an der Donau, to whom the boy was sent to train as a musician; Haydn never again lived with his parents. In Hainburg he quickly learned to play the harpsichord and violin and sang in the church choir, though he later recalled often being hungry and ashamed of his poor clothing. His singing was heard by Georg von Reutter, who directed the choir of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, and in 1740 Reutter took the boy to Vienna, where he sang in the church choir for the next nine years — among the other choirboys there was later his younger brother Michael.
In 1749, once Haydn's voice had broken to the point where he could no longer manage the high parts, the choirmaster Reutter let him go; for a time a friend, Johann Michael Spangler, gave him shelter, sharing his own cramped room with him. Left without a post, Haydn picked up whatever work he could find — giving music lessons, singing serenades in the street, and from 1752 serving as valet and accompanist to the composer and singing teacher Nicola Porpora, who looked over his compositions and offered guidance. Haydn later credited Porpora with teaching him what he called the real foundations of composition.
Lacking any formal training in theory, Haydn taught himself counterpoint from Johann Joseph Fux's treatise and pored over Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach's keyboard sonatas; later, in the 1750s, he also worked through an extensive treatise by Johann Mattheson. Even before leaving the choir, in 1749, he wrote his first major works, the Missa brevis in F major and in G major. Around that time he began to build a reputation: he wrote the opera Der krumme Teufel for a comic actor, Joseph Felix von Kurz; it was staged in Vienna but soon banned by the censors over 'offensive remarks' and has not survived to this day.
Having taken the post of Kapellmeister — musical director — to Count Karl von Morzin, who kept a small orchestra of his own, Haydn wrote his first symphonies for that orchestra and travelled with the musicians wherever the count happened to be living, in town or at his country estate. In 1760, already holding this secure position, he married Maria Anna Theresia Keller (1729–1800), the sister of a woman he had previously been in love with. The marriage produced no children, the couple lived unhappily, and the laws of the time allowed no divorce. Soon after Haydn's marriage, Morzin ran into financial trouble and was forced to disband his orchestra.
When Morzin's orchestra collapsed, Haydn was engaged in 1761 for a comparable position by Prince Paul Anton, head of the enormously rich Esterházy family of Hungary. His title was at first only Vice-Kapellmeister, yet he was placed almost at once in charge of most of the prince's musical affairs, while the veteran Gregor Werner kept sole authority over sacred music alone; once Werner died in 1766, Haydn rose to full Kapellmeister, now serving Paul Anton's younger brother and heir, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. His duties ranged over composing music, running the orchestra, playing chamber music before his patron and staging operas; he wore livery and moved with the household between residences, including the grand new palace of Eszterháza built out in rural Hungary. Cut off from other musicians, Haydn later said, he had no choice but to seek out new paths and stay original.
Haydn's contract was rewritten in 1779: ownership of everything he composed used to rest with the Esterházys, but from then on he could sell his output to outside publishers and compose for other patrons too; as a result he turned out fewer operas and far more quartets and symphonies, striking deals with several print houses at home and abroad. Wide circulation of his printed music, scholars judge, made Haydn the most talked-about composer in Europe, even while his contract still tied him to a Kapellmeister's post on a remote Hungarian estate. During these same years he struck up a friendship in Vienna with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and at the close of 1781 he dedicated a set of six quartets, Op. 33 — later nicknamed the 'Russian' quartets — to the future Russian emperor Paul I, then visiting Vienna. On 11 February 1785 Haydn joined the Masonic lodge 'Zur wahren Eintracht'.
In 1790 Prince Nikolaus Esterházy died, and his son and successor Anton disbanded the musical establishment he had inherited. A year later Haydn accepted an offer from the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, organiser of the 'Subscription Concerts' in London, and set off for England; in all he made two trips there, in 1791–1792 and 1794–1795. For Salomon's concerts he wrote twelve symphonies that later became known as the London symphonies; huge crowds of listeners flocked to his London performances, bringing Haydn fame and financial independence.
In 1791 the University of Oxford awarded Haydn an honorary doctorate; for the occasion his Symphony No. 92, written two years earlier, was performed — it has since been known as the 'Oxford' Symphony. Passing through Bonn, Haydn met the young Ludwig van Beethoven and later taught him in Vienna up until his second journey to London. Haydn named his Symphony No. 104 'Salomon, or the Londoner', in honour of the impresario who had invited him.
Haydn came back from his second London trip and made Vienna his home again in 1795. By then Prince Anton was dead, and his heir Nikolaus II wanted to bring the Esterházy musical establishment back to life, asking Haydn to lead it once more as Kapellmeister, albeit in a part-time capacity; each summer he now joined the Esterházys at Eisenstadt, and over a period of several years produced six masses there.
Now a well-known figure in Viennese society, Haydn kept to his own spacious house in one of the city's outer districts for much of his time, turning out music meant for concert audiences. It was there that he produced two of his best-known large-scale works, the oratorio The Creation, finished in 1798, and The Seasons, finished in 1801, both carrying forward the oratorio tradition established by Handel; the words for The Creation draw on Genesis, the Psalms, and Milton's Paradise Lost. Haydn himself often stood before the public to conduct charity performances of these pieces, and in the same period turned out a well-loved concerto for trumpet along with the closing works in his lengthy run of string quartets.
A few years after settling back in Vienna, Haydn grew too frail to go on composing at all: he battled fatigue, dizzy spells, trouble focusing his thoughts, and legs so swollen they caused him pain, though musical ideas, in his own words, kept chasing him as though he had turned into a living clavier. As early as 1802 he had completed his last mass, the Harmoniemesse, while the string quartet, Op. 103, that he began afterwards was left unfinished and published with only two movements. The final time Haydn stood before an audience with a baton in hand came at a charity concert of The Seven Last Words of Christ, given in December 1803. On 27 March 1808 a performance of The Creation was staged as a tribute to him: attendants wheeled the frail composer into the hall on an armchair while trumpets and drums sounded, and he received greetings from Beethoven, from Salieri, who conducted, and from other musicians, but he was so overcome and worn out that he left at the interval.
In May 1809 Napoleon's French army was shelling Vienna; on 10 May, during the bombardment, shots landed close to Haydn's house, and the composer kept telling his terrified household that no harm could come to them while he was there. Haydn died at home on the night of 31 May 1809, at the age of 77. Two weeks afterwards, on 15 June, mourners gathered at the Schottenkirche for a memorial service that included a performance of Mozart's Requiem.
Over his lifetime Haydn worked in almost every genre of his time and, in scholars' view, played a decisive role in shaping the symphony and the string quartet — which is why he is sometimes called the 'Father of the Symphony' and the 'Father of the String Quartet'. For almost thirty years he served as Kapellmeister to the Esterházy princes with an orchestra of his own at his disposal, but it was precisely his isolation from other musicians and trends that, in his own words, forced him to seek out new things and remain original. The list of his works, gathered in the Hoboken catalogue, includes over a hundred symphonies, 83 string quartets, 126 baryton trios, dozens of keyboard sonatas, concertos for various instruments, 14 masses and three oratorios. Among his best-known works are the twelve London symphonies, the six 'Russian' quartets of Op. 33, and the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons.
In performing practice Haydn's sonatas are usually cited not by a running number but by their Hoboken catalogue entry, which is why the site labels them Hob. XVI:27 and Hob. XVI:28. The piano collection gathers three movements from each of these two sonatas. The movements of the first — 'Allegro con brio', 'Menuetto' and 'Presto' — are set at the upper-intermediate level, while the movements of the second range from intermediate ('Menuetto') to advanced ('Allegro moderato'), with 'Presto' likewise at the upper-intermediate level.
The choral section includes the Latin hymn 'Tantum Ergo Sacramentum' at the elementary-plus level, the song 'Der Greis' at the upper-intermediate level, and 'Das Lied der Deutschen', which uses the melody Haydn wrote for the emperor Francis's hymn and which later became the basis of the German national anthem; on the site this piece is listed at the intermediate level. Rounding out the selection is the aria 'Air (Raphael)' for voice and piano, at the advanced level. The site suggests starting with the hymn 'Tantum Ergo Sacramentum', then moving on to the second sonata's minuet and the movements of the first sonata, working gradually up to the more demanding parts.