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Joseph Haydn: Music
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Joseph Haydn composed over 750 works and arranged over 330 songs. Between 1934 and 1971 Anthony von Hoboken compiled a directory of Haydn's works according to musical forms. His results were published by the company Schott under the title "Joseph Haydn - Thematisch-bibliographisches Werkverzeichnis" (Eng. "J. Haydn - Thematic-bibliographic Listing of his Works"). Hoboken assigned a number to each work, and this idea was so helpful, that most of Haydn's works are now known not only through their title but ... through their Hoboken (H) number.
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Joseph Haydn virtually created the classical formal structures of the string quartet and symphony, which were developed later by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. He participated in the development of other forms of 18th-century instrumental music, in addition to composing prolifically in the fields of sacred music, opera, and song. Throughout a lifetime of experimentation he developed in the quartet and symphony a fully mature classical tonal idiom, characterized externally by the four-movement structure (allegro, slow movement, minuet and trio, and finale) of the majority of these works and internally by emphasis on thematic and motivic development within a balanced tonal framework. Haydn evolved a tonal language that exhibited a gradual growth toward contrapuntal complexity and a vast range of expression in comparison to the technical simplicity and expressive triviality of much mid-18th-century instrumental music of the style galant.
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Joseph Haydn was born in 1732. He was the second of twelve children to Mathias and Anna Maria Haydn, of whom only six survived infancy. Neither of his parents had any musical talent, but the family would have musical evenings where Mathias would try to play the harp, while the rest of the family sung.
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Haydn remained productive nearly to the end of his life. Yet the principal role that he played in these last years was neither that of composer nor that of Kapellmeister. He had become, most importantly, Vienna's grand old man of music: an inspiration to younger generations, a man internationally revered even by unmusical souls. In May 1809, when Napoleon's armies captured the city of Vienna after an intense bombardment, Napoleon himself ordered that an honor guard be placed outside the home where the master composer lay on his death bed. Haydn passed away May 31, 1809, at the age of seventy-seven. At his memorial service two weeks later, Mozart's Requiem was sung in Vienna's Schottenkirche.
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During this period keyboard pieces by Haydn began circulating in Vienna. Countess Philippine Aloysia Thun liked one of them so much that she sought out Haydn to teach her keyboard technique and singing. To have such a student certainly added luster to Haydn's name, but it was probably the attractiveness and originality of his music that ultimately gained him his first patron, Freiherr Karl Joseph von Fürnberg, an amateur violinist at whose country house in Weinzierl musicians gathered. There Haydn produced his first string quartets to great acclaim. In 1759 Fürnberg recommended Haydn to Count Karl von Morzin, whereupon the count made the composer his music director; as such Haydn spent at least one summer at the count's estate at Lukavec, Bohemia. For Fürnberg and Morzin, and probably for concerts in Vienna, Haydn began the imposing series of symphonies and string quartets for which he is best known.
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With the disbanding of Morzin's orchestra, Haydn was free to seek a new position. He found it with the Esterházys, one of the wealthiest and most influential families in all of Austria. The Esterházys, led by the ruling Prince Paul Anton and his successor Prince Nikolaus, were famed for their love of music and for the excellence of their musical establishment. As Haydn was still young and little known, he would have felt privileged to work there and it must have been with pleasure that he signed the contract May 1, 1761. At first, he was only Vice-Kapellmeister, serving beneath principal Kapellmeister Gregor Joseph Werner. But Werner was elderly and ill. Haydn quickly took on a greater portion of the duties, so that long before Werner's death in 1766, the younger man was already principal Kapellmeister in all but name.
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