Joseph Haydn did not look or act like one of the most innovative and influential composers in our tradition. A lot of his music sounds to our ears too genial and easygoing to be anything earthshaking. In his person Haydn was homely, amiable, old-fashioned in clothes and wig, generally called “Papa” by his employees and students. In adulthood he had few enemies other than his wife. They were childless and she had no use for music; she cut up his manuscripts to roll her hair.
It is not strictly accurate to call Haydn a revolutionary; he was too involved with tradition and too attentive to present influences for that. All the same, nobody affected the history of his art more profoundly than he did. He is remembered today as the “father of the symphony” and “father of the string quartet.” He invented neither genre, but rather showed the future what could be done with them. Among the first to put that wisdom to use was a younger friend of his named Mozart and a student of his named Beethoven. The naturalness of his music, its easy grace, its predictability here and boisterous unpredictability there, were painstakingly mastered over many years. If Haydn was no revolutionary, he left the future not only marvelous music but a fund of ideas that proved virtually inexhaustible. Long ago I learned that when encountering Beethoven’s supposed innovations, you often find that Haydn got there first.
Franz Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Austria, to a wheelwright’s family. The child soon revealed a considerable talent for music. When he was five, a musical cousin offered to take him in and give him some training; from that point Haydn rarely saw his hometown again. He recalled the cousin as providing “more flogging than food.” When he was eight, he was taken into the boys’ choir of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna—later known as the Vienna Boys Choir. (He narrowly escaped being made a castrato.) His younger brother Michael, destined to become an important composer of sacred music, joined the choir as well. Joseph spent nine years singing and studying the great choral literature, but when his voice changed at age seventeen, he was summarily booted out of the choir.
There followed years of intensive self-study and gnawing poverty. He lived in a garret and practiced on a worm-eaten harpsichord, taking what musical piecework he could find, including playing on the street. He pulled his way up the professional ladder slowly but with great resilience. In his early twenties he became a servant of the well-known Italian composer and teacher Nicola Porpora, who had Haydn accompany his singing students and gave him composing tips. At age twenty-six Haydn served briefly as the music director and composer for a Bohemian count, for whose orchestra he wrote his first symphony.
His music to that point was pleasant and conventional, as was expected of court composers. His next step up was a huge one: in 1761, aged twenty-nine, he became assistant orchestra conductor and composer for the glittering, rich, highly musical court of Hungarian prince Paul Antal Esterházy. If one was amenable to an existence as a uniformed servant composing and performing to order, a composer could not find a better position in those days. The prince had a palace in Vienna where he wintered and a castle 30 miles away at Eisenstadt. Haydn would appear before the prince for his orders in the morning, and spent his days rehearsing, conducting, and composing. After a few years he became court music director, which made him responsible for the palace orchestra, chamber music, operas, conducting, composing, teaching, hiring and firing.
Haydn lived and worked at the Esterházy court for thirty years. He did his assigned duties tirelessly and well, making the Esterházy instrumental and operatic forces into some of the finest in European courts. In the course of those decades he also made himself one of the most important and celebrated creators on the continent. As he later wrote, while he lived largely isolated from the world, with a prince who appreciated his music, and with a collection of first-rate musicians at his command, he could experiment, learn, and be as original as he liked.
Haydn worked away in the Esterházy palaces, watched princes come and go, and grew steadily in his art and his fame. Estranged from his wife, he took up with a married soprano at court, though she was likely more interested in his money than his charms. When Mozart arrived in Vienna, Haydn befriended him, telling his father, Leopold Mozart, that his son was the best composer he had ever known. Haydn was a generous man and a good friend, and the much younger Mozart reciprocated; the two traded composition tricks and musical ideas. Mozart said Haydn taught him how to write string quartets, and dedicated an important set of six to the older man. Haydn had written a number of operas for the court theater and for years considered himself mainly an opera composer. That illusion ended when Mozart’s operas appeared in Vienna. The last time somebody offered Haydn a commission for an opera he responded, that would be a big risk for me—you should hire Mozart.
In the 1790s Haydn was more or less pensioned off by the current Esterházy prince, though he kept writing masses for the court. A letter to a friend shows he was relieved to see the end of his days as a court composer: “The knowledge that I am no longer a hired servant repays me for all my troubles.” Shortly thereafter an entrepreneur showed up and promised him piles of gold and mountains of acclaim if he came to England. Haydn agreed, and the prophecy actually turned out: over two visits he found himself idolized by the British public, and ended up comfortably wealthy. If there had been any doubt that he was at the summit of living composers, there no longer was. The one sorrow of his London sojourns was when he learned of the death of Mozart. Haydn was staggered by the loss of “this indispensable man.”
After his triumph in London he kept working, but with more and more difficulty. His last pieces were largely vocal, masses for the Esterházy court and the two oratorios The Creation and The Seasons. Both oratorios were inspired by his enthusiasm for Handel’s oratorios, especially Messiah, which he heard in London. Meanwhile, inspired by the British anthem “God Save the King,” he composed the exquisite “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser” (God Save Kaiser Franz), and was honored to find its becoming the unofficial Austrian anthem. It’s surely the finest of national anthems, another Haydn melody that seems to have always been there.
By then he was slipping. He said composing The Seasons had been a struggle that “broke my back.” His final years were melancholy; he was unable to compose and became increasingly frail, fearful, and forgetful. Every day he would sit down at the piano and play his Austrian anthem, the only musical effort he could still manage. His last public appearance was at a gala Vienna performance of The Creation in 1808, where he was extravagantly lauded and his one-time student Beethoven knelt to kiss his hands. But Haydn could not make it through the performance. The next year he died during Napoleon’s assault on Vienna, shortly after a bomb exploded in his garden and terrified the household.
It was demanded of composers in those days that they be prolific. By the end of his life, Haydn’s works included 108 symphonies, 68 string quartets, 52 piano sonatas, 20 operas, 14 masses, 6 oratorios, and a great deal of other chamber music. Some of those genres he changed once and for all.
Most of Haydn’s concertos for various instruments have fallen by the wayside. He didn’t give them that much time because while he played keyboard and violin, he admitted he was “no conjuror.” The greatest concertos, from Bach to Beethoven and beyond, were mostly written by their composers for themselves. It’s surprising, then, that a one-off concerto of Haydn’s is among his most beloved works: the Trumpet Concerto that he wrote for a short-lived instrument that had keys like a saxophone. Trumpets and French horns in those days had no valves, so could only play a restricted range of notes. With its keys, this new trumpet could play all pitches. Clearly that excited Haydn. Here on display is his warmth, his melodies that are so inevitable they seem to have written themselves. Beyond that, for this oddball instrument Haydn wrote music that managed to suit it perfectly while at the same time had remarkably little to do with the traditions of trumpet writing, which tended toward the festive and fanfarish. Here perhaps for the first time, as in the lovely slow movement, the trumpet truly sings.
When it came to keyboard sonatas, not only did Haydn undergo a long artistic development over the course of his career, his instruments did likewise. He began writing for harpsichord, but in his later years the piano had edged out the older instrument. Meanwhile the piano itself was undergoing a rapid evolution from the near-harpsichord sound of the 1790s to bigger, richer, more robust models. In all cases, recall that keyboard sonatas in Haydn’s day were house music, never played in public but rather for friends and family and one’s own pleasure. I’ll recommend two for a start. The Piano Sonata No. 46 in A-flat Major is a middle-period work that, despite its major key, manages to be poignant throughout. Its middle movement begins memorably with a single-line soliloquy. The finale is gay, charming, Haydn at his most winning. (I suggest listening to this and the next one both on a modern piano and on a period fortepiano.)
The Piano Sonata No. 52 in E-flat Major announces its eccentricity from the first bar: a rich, rolling E-flat chord and a quick and mystifying modulation to A-flat major. The grand opening phrase is followed by a sweetly tender interlude, which tells us that the movement and to a degree the whole sonata is going to be a dialogue of sharply contrasting characters. In the first movement we hear quick shifts from noble to puckish, warm to exhilarating. I taught this piece for years; my students were invariably boggled by how varied in material and keys it is, how unpredictable yet logical in form, how richly pianistic (Haydn wrote it in England, probably for the more robust British pianos). After a lyrical and affecting slow movement in the distant key of E major, the finale is racing, ironic, great fun.
When the young Haydn began writing string quartets they were extremely popular among amateur players but still a minor genre, usually what amounted to an accompanied first-violin solo. By his last quartets he had transformed them into the most important chamber genre, a dialogue of four largely equal instruments, though still aimed at music lovers who played them at home. Haydn also gave quartets the reputation of being a window into a composer’s heart and soul, and the best demonstration of his craft. That’s why history has named Haydn “father of the string quartet.” His finest quartets are ageless, kaleidoscopic in variety, witty charming and poignant, one of those rare creative achievements that can help make life worth living.
Haydn published the six quartets of Op. 20 in 1772, when he was forty. They were dubbed the “Sun” quartets, from an engraving of the sun on the cover. They amount to the first modern string quartets, mainly because they have become a conversation of four roughly equal members, the cello liberated from its old role of just sawing away on the bass line. With his usual sense of logic, in String Quartet, Op. 20, No. 2, Haydn tells us that up front: it begins with a cello solo. This set also shows the impact of the decade’s tumultuous, passionate, even anarchic “Sturm und Drang” (Storm and Stress) movement—a foreshadowing of the next century’s romanticism. No. 2 is in C major, a key that in those days tended to be noble and uncomplicated in tone. But this is a C major touched by Sturm und Drang, with a quirky and pensive vein dogging the high spirits. After a rather ominous second movement in minor comes a folksy and delicate minuet. One of the ways Haydn lifted himself beyond the lightweight preciousness of the composers around him was to restore counterpoint to his music, as seen here in the fugal finale.
Haydn’s Opus 33 quartets demonstrate a new depth and breadth of ideas and a delicious humor. He wrote that these pieces were composed “in an entirely new and particular manner,” meaning that he stressed the equality of the four voices even more than before. They also unveil a brand new kind of movement: the scherzo, the word meaning “joke,” created by speeding up the three-beat minuet to make a racing and usually exuberant movement.
The most famous quartet of Op. 33 is No. 2 in E-flat Major, itself dubbed “The Joke.” The swagger of the first movement’s opening theme is ironic, looking at itself with some amusement, and the rest is full of twists and little jokes. It’s because of moments like this that some have called the whole of Op. 33 “music about music.” (Another example of that kind of thing is the finale of Op. 76, No. 5, which starts off sounding like an ending and can’t seem to get going because it keeps on ending.) The second-movement scherzo of “The Joke” has I think a tone of high irony, if you’re listening carefully. The slow third movement begins with a tender duet and continues in kind. The finale sets off in a tone of impish fun, but the source of the quartet’s nickname doesn’t appear until the coda: the quartet ends; we start to applaud; it breaks out again and ends again; we applaud, a little tentatively this time; it starts again, teases us with silences as we sit there with hands suspended in air; and it finally concludes almost in midphrase, so we’re still uncertain whether to clap. It’s hilarious, one of many examples of Haydn playing his audience as a master psychologist, convincing us we know what he’s doing while he sneaks around to administer a kick. The most famous example of that, of course, is the heart-stopping explosion in the middle of the slow movement of the “Surprise” Symphony (No. 94). Reportedly Haydn said it “will wake up the ladies.” That joke, it’s worth noting, is carefully set up earlier in a series of small pauses that we expect to mark the theme. The ability to be logical and surprising at the same time is one of the great achievements of the Classical period.
Not quite the last but the climax of Haydn’s quartets are the magnificent four of Op. 76, published in 1799. Op. 76, No. 2 in D Minor is known as the “Quinten” (Fifths) from the prevailing interval of the opening theme that dominates a movement a bit fierce and playful by turns. That fifth-motif turns up in the all the movements, including the canonic, mock-demonic “Witch’s Round” of the scherzo.
Haydn was also called “Father of the Symphony.” As he had done with quartets, he began writing symphonies in the style of the time, meaning pieces lightweight and short, for an orchestra of fourteen to twenty players. By the time he reached his last, No. 104, he had made the symphony the king of instrumental genres, at a level of weight and ambition that was ready for Mozart and then Beethoven to pick it up and carry it on.
With his massive body of symphonies it’s hard to know where to begin. Try Symphony No. 48 in C Major, written around 1769 and dubbed “Maria Theresia” because it may have been composed for a visit of that Austrian empress. The tone justifies the title: from the pealing high horns of the first movement the music is the definition of grand and regal, but still vivacious. The second movement manages to be elegant and graceful without getting sentimental about it; much the same can be said of the minuet, though it strays into some stern territory. Both middle movements feature the horns again, as does the wry and chatty finale.
For Haydn on the other end of the spectrum, try Symphony No. 80 in D Minor, from around 1783. This is not one of his best-known symphonies, but it’s one of his strangest. Biographers claim that he was past Sturm und Drang by this point, but to me this symphony says otherwise. It begins on a furiously driving figure enlivened by explosive accents. The movement is marked by sudden jolts of volume and shifts of direction: the intense and a bit scary exposition is finished by a tipsy little oom-pah-pah dance that emerges out of nowhere. The main theme of the second movement is a sighing, very beautiful melody, then the second theme arrives in a surge of passion and orchestral color. Some of the intensity of the first movement turns up in the minuet, which is far from the usual elegant and galant outing. The finale is one of Haydn’s quirkiest. Much of its distinctive character has to do with rhythm: its main theme begins on an offbeat and is so syncopated that for some time we have no idea where the actual beat is. For the rest of an eccentric movement we are jerked back and forth between the real and the ersatz pulse.
The main fruit of his two British visits were twelve symphonies, the set collectively known as the “London.” Haydn’s last symphony from 1795, Symphony No. 104 in D Major, is individually called the “London” as well. Here he has left Sturm und Drang behind and as in the rest of the set is writing on a stately plane, partly because he had larger orchestras at his disposal. All the same, the symphony has its share of Haydnesque wit and folksiness. It begins with a stern introduction, but the amiable allegro that follows is folklike. The rustic finale quotes a Croatian folk song.
Haydn’s virtues are ones that have fallen out of fashion: restraint, modesty, subtlety, the kind of art that hides its artfulness. He was one of the most sophisticated of musical thinkers, but he wasn’t interested in showing it off. One of his favorite compliments was the word natural. If you’re not paying attention, he can seem bland and slight. True, neither Haydn nor his contemporaries were much inclined to tragic expression; the Enlightenment was a period of tremendous hope for humanity and science and art. His music rose from that hope. Late in life Haydn said that if his music could lift us out of our cares for a little while, that was worth all his trouble. That’s a modest ambition for an artist, but it’s as worthy as any I know. If we let him, he can still do that.
More Haydn: the rest of the Op. 76 quartets and rest of the “London” Symphonies; The Creation.