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Haydn, (Franz) Joseph



JAMES WEBSTER (text, bibliography)

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001

Haydn, (Franz) Joseph

(b Rohrau, Lower Austria, 31 March 1732; d Vienna, 31 May 1809). Austrian composer, brother of Michael Haydn. Neither he nor his contemporaries used the name Franz, and there is no reason to do so today. He began his career in the traditional patronage system of the late Austrian Baroque, and ended as a ‘free’ artist within the burgeoning Romanticism of the early 19th century. Famous as early as the mid-1760s, by the 1780s he had become the most celebrated composer of his time, and from the 1790s until his death was a culture-hero throughout Europe. Since the early 19th century he has been venerated as the first of the three ‘Viennese Classics’ (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven). He excelled in every musical genre; during the first half of his career his vocal works were as famous as his instrumental ones, although after his death the reception of his music focussed on the latter (except for The Creation). He is familiarly known as the ‘father of the symphony’ 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. In the 20th century he was understood primarily as an ‘absolute’ musician (exhibiting wit, originality of form, motivic saturation and a ‘modernist’ tendency to problematize music rather than merely to compose it), but earnestness, depth of feeling and referential tendencies are equally important to his art.

1. Background, childhood, choirboy, 1732–c1749.

2. Vienna, c1750–61.

3. Esterházy court, 1761–90.

4. London, 1791–5.

5. Vienna, 1795–1809.

6. Character and personality.

7. Style, aesthetics, compositional method.

8. Sacred vocal music.

9. Secular vocal music.

10. Orchestral music.

11. Chamber music without keyboard.

12. Keyboard music.

13. Haydn's career.

WORKS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haydn, Joseph

1. Background, childhood, choirboy, 1732–c1749.

Documentary information on Haydn's life and musical activity before his employ by the Esterházy court in 1761 is scanty. The primary sources comprise an autobiographical letter of 1776 and brief biographies published just after his death by (in order of general reliability) Georg August Griesinger, Albert Christoph Dies, Giuseppe Carpani and Nicolas Etienne Framery, supplemented by parish registers, musical archives, dated autographs and the like. Haydn was born into a family of primarily south German stock, albeit in an area of considerable ethnic diversity in which Croats and Hungarians were also prominent. His immediate ancestors were not peasants (as legend has it), but artisans and tradespeople. His grandfather and his father, Mathias (1699–1763), were master wheelwrights; Mathias also functioned as Marktrichter (magistrate) of the ‘market village’ (as Haydn called it) Rohrau, near Bruck an der Leitha. Rohrau was a possession of Count Karl Anton Harrach (1692–1758); his grandson Karl Leonhard (1765–1831) erected a monument to Haydn in the castle garden in 1793. Haydn's mother, Anna Maria Koller (1707–54), had before her marriage in 1728 been a cook at the Harrach castle.

Mathias Haydn was ‘a great lover of music by nature’ (this phrase in Haydn's laconic account is ordinarily taken as applying to Harrach, but it must be his father who was meant), who ‘played the harp without reading a note of music’; his mother sang the melodies. Indeed all three of their surviving male children became professional musicians, two of them famous composers. (The third, Johann Evangelist, 1743–1805, was a tenor in a church choir and later at the Esterházy court.) Dies says of Haydn's father that ‘all the children had to join in his concerts, to learn the songs, and to develop their singing voice’, adding that he also organized concerts among the neighbours.

Haydn's talent became evident early on. ‘As a boy of five I sang all [my father's] simple easy pieces correctly’; according to Griesinger he still remembered these melodies in old age. ‘Almighty God … granted me so much facility, especially in music, that when I was only six I boldly sang masses down from the choirloft, and could also get around on the harpsichord and violin.’ In 1737 or 1738 Johann Mathias Franck, a cousin of Mathias Haydn's by marriage and a school principal in the nearby town of Hainburg (Mathias's birthplace), heard Haydn sing in the family circle; Griesinger and Dies also have him pretending to be playing a violin by scraping a stick against his arm. Franck was so impressed by Haydn's voice and musical accuracy that he suggested that he come to live with him, ‘so that there I could learn the rudiments of music along with other juvenile necessities’. It being clear that his abilities could not be developed in Rohrau, his parents agreed, whether in the hope that he might amount to something as a musician or the belief that musical and educational accomplishments might be useful in what they (especially his mother) imagined as his true calling, that of a priest.

Franck was not only a school principal but the choir director of a Hainburg church; presumably he oversaw Haydn's education personally. The latter was scarcely an autodidact, as myth used to have it. Griesinger writes:

He received instruction in reading and writing, in the catechism, in singing, and on almost all the string and wind instruments, and even on the timpani: ‘I will be grateful to this man even in the grave’, Haydn often said, ‘that he taught me so much, even though in the process I received more beatings than food’.

Such exaggerations aside, he doubtless made rapid progress; his account of mass singing and harpsichord and violin studies ‘in my sixth year’ implies that these took place in Hainburg. As Griesinger says, his schooling was not musical alone; this was also the case when he was a choirboy in Vienna, where his non-musical studies, though ‘scanty’, included Latin, religion, arithmetic and writing.

In 1739 or 1740 (‘in my 7th year’; Griesinger and Dies: in his eighth year) Haydn was recruited to serve as choirboy at the Stephansdom in Vienna: ‘Kapellmeister Reutter, on a trip through Hainburg, heard my thin but pleasant voice from a distance, and at once accepted me into the Capell Hauss’ (choir school). Georg Reutter the younger, Kapellmeister at the Stephansdom since 1738 (later Hofkapellmeister), was travelling through the provinces in search of new talent; in Hainburg the parish priest, an old friend, suggested that Haydn might be a suitable candidate. According to several accounts Haydn did not know how to trill but, after Reutter demonstrated, triumphantly got it right on his third attempt, thus sealing his acceptance. For the next ten years, ‘I sang soprano both at St Stephan's and at court to great applause’. At the choir school, ‘I was taught the art of singing, the harpsichord and the violin by very good masters’; in singing these included Adam Gegenbauer and the tenor Ignaz Finsterbusch (both d 1753). To be sure, there was apparently little formal training in theory or composition, although the singing included solfeggio and the harpsichord instruction probably entailed figured bass. But in their enthusiasm for the notion that Haydn's development amounted to ‘making something out of nothing’ (Dies, allegedly quoting Haydn), most accounts again exaggerate this supposed lack of instruction. ‘Haydn recalled having had only two lessons [in theory] from the worthy Reutter’, writes Griesinger, but if he could recall two, he might have had more. In any case, ‘Reutter encouraged him to make whatever variations he liked on the motets and Salves that he had to sing in church, and this discipline soon led him to ideas of his own, which Reutter corrected’; this scarcely implies outright neglect.

It was surely not on Haydn's own that ‘he also came to know Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister (1739) and Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (1725). With tireless exertion Haydn sought to understand Fux's theory; he worked his way through the entire treatise’. However, although both Griesinger and Dies mention Fux in the context of the choir school, Haydn's study of him would more plausibly have taken place during the 1750s. In any case, his copy of Gradus is heavily annotated (in Latin); he made it the basis of his own teaching of composition, as did Mozart. Another activity entrusted to competent older choirboys was the instruction of their younger colleagues in musical fundamentals; among those whom Haydn taught was his brother Michael, who joined him there about 1745. Most important, for ten full years, at a highly impressionable age, Haydn rehearsed and sang in performances of the greatest art-music then being produced in Catholic Europe, amid the pomp and splendour of the cathedral and court of an imperial capital. This experience will have fundamentally shaped his musical intellect even without formal training in composition.

But this life could not last; his voice broke. A characteristic anecdote adds insult to injury by relating that after one performance Maria Theresa said that he sang ‘like a crow’, while rewarding Michael for his beautiful singing. Griesinger states that Reutter had earlier suggested that Haydn might become a castrato, but his father refused permission (although this seems potentially inconsistent with his parents' original hope that he become a priest). Be this as it may, soon after his voice broke he was dismissed from the choir school. Haydn wrote that he remained there ‘until into my 18th year’ (i.e. April 1749 to March 1750); Griesinger's estimate, ‘in his sixteenth year’, is generally thought to be too early. Carl Ferdinand Pohl, who had access to many documents now lost but gives no source in this instance, writes: ‘We find Haydn on the street; it was a damp November evening in 1749’. Pathos aside (the date and atmosphere derive from Framery), the date is consistent with Haydn's statement.

Haydn, Joseph

2. Vienna, c1750–61.

Haydn's account of his freelance 1750s narrates a classic ‘rags to riches’ story:

When my voice finally broke, for eight whole years I was forced to eke out a wretched existence by teaching young people. Many geniuses are ruined by this miserable [need to earn their] daily bread, because they lack time to study. This could well have happened to me; I would never have achieved what little I have done, had I not carried on with my zeal for composition during the night. I composed diligently, but not quite correctly, until I finally had the good fortune to learn the true fundamentals of composition from the famous Porpora (who was in Vienna at the time). Finally, owing to a recommendation from the late [Baron] von Fürnberg (who was especially generous to me), I was appointed as director with Count Morzin, and from there as Kapellmeister with his highness Prince [Esterházy].

This period comprises three stages, of which the first two overlap without clear division. (1) During the ‘lean years’, about 1749 to the mid-1750s, Haydn was a freelance musician, teacher and budding composer. Even then, however, he was reaping professional and social advantage from contact with figures such as Porpora and Metastasio. (2) Beginning around 1753, and increasingly after 1755, his compositional activity expanded, as his reputation and access to patronage grew. (3) His first regular appointment, as director of music for Count Morzin, began probably in 1757 and lasted until winter 1760–61 or spring 1761.

Haydn's first lodgings (according to Framery) were offered by Johann Michael Spangler, a tenor (later regens chori) at the Michaelerkirche, in a garret with Spangler’s wife and infant son (b February 1749). This situation obviously could be no more than temporary, especially as Spangler’s wife was soon pregnant with their second child, Maddelena (b 4 September 1750); these birthdates are consistent with Haydn’s having moved there in November 1749 and with Framery’s account. (In 1768 Haydn engaged Maddelena Spangler as a soprano at the Esterházy court, where among other roles she created Vespina in L'infedeltà delusa and Rezia in L'incontro improvviso; she was also the first Sara in Il ritorno di Tobia.) Another good deed was done him by Johann Wilhelm Buchholz, a lacemaker, whose granddaughter was remembered in Haydn's will ‘because her grandfather lent me 150 gulden without interest in my youth and great need'; the amount was close to a year's salary for an ordinary musician at a minor court. It was perhaps in the following spring (1750) that he journeyed to the huge Benedictine pilgrimage church in Mariazell (Styria). Griesinger relates that he took with him ‘several motets which he had composed and asked the regens chori there for permission to put out the parts in the church and sing them’, and continues with an anecdote according to which Haydn the next day got his way by trickery. If ‘motet’ means a liturgical work other than a mass, it can only have been his first Lauda Sion hymns, hXXIIIc:5; another possibility is the Missa brevis in F. In any case this pilgrimage was important to Haydn; later he composed both the Missa Cellensis and the ‘Mariazellermesse’ with Mariazell in mind.

According to Pohl, it was in the spring or summer of 1750 that Haydn occupied his most frequently described early lodgings: a ‘miserable little garret without a stove’ (Griesinger) in the so-called Michaelerhaus, attached to the Michaelerkirche. At this time ‘his entire life was devoted to giving lessons, the study of his art, and performing. He played in serenades and in orchestras for pay, and devoted himself diligently to composition, for “when I sat at my old, worm-eaten clavier, I envied no king his good fortune”’. Here occurred the first of many strokes of luck through which, in addition to his genius and unremitting labour, he gradually improved his professional lot. Griesinger writes:

In the same house … lived as well the famous poet Metastasio. He was raising one Fräulein Martinez; Haydn was engaged to give her lessons in singing and on the clavier, in return for which he received free board for three years. At Metastasio's he also made the acquaintance of the aging Kapellmeister Porpora. Porpora was teaching singing to the mistress of the Venetian ambassador, Correr; however, because he was too proper and too fond of his ease to accompany at the piano himself, he delegated this task to our Giuseppe. ‘There was no lack of Ass, Blockhead, Rascal and pokes in the ribs, but I willingly put up with it all, for I profited immensely from Porpora in singing, composition and Italian.’ In the summer Correr travelled with the lady to the popular bathing resort Mannersdorf …; Porpora went as well … and took Haydn with him. For three months Haydn served there as Porpora's valet; he ate at Correr's officers' table, and was paid six ducats [c25 gulden] a month. From time to time he was required to accompany Porpora on the clavier at one Prince von Hildburghausen's, in the presence of Gluck, Wagenseil and other famous masters; the approval of these connoisseurs was especially encouraging to him.

Access to such personages – whose overlapping relations were as much social as artistic – was essential for an aspiring young musician. ‘Fräulein Martinez’ was the composer and singer Marianne von Martínez. At the court of Joseph Friedrich, Prince of Sachsen-Hildburghausen (1702–87), Haydn could also have encountered Dittersdorf (whom he certainly knew by the mid-1750s) and Giuseppe Bonno, later Hofkapellmeister.

All these events took place during the first half of the 1750s. Haydn's instruction of Martínez began in 1751 or 1752; presumably his three years with Metastasio were from 1751 to 1754. Porpora arrived in Vienna from Dresden in late 1752 or early 1753; Haydn might well have met him in March 1753, when Metastasio was considering him as composer of his new opera L'isola disabitata (which in the event he assigned to Bonno; Haydn himself set this libretto in 1779). Given the mastery of Haydn's music by 1755–6, 1753 or 1754 are the latest plausible dates for his having ‘learnt the true fundamentals of composition’ from Porpora, whose expert knowledge of singing and Italian – ‘singing’ in this context implies Italian opera and oratorio – was also of great importance; Haydn became fluent in Italian and the italianate singing style. In addition, it may well have been at Porpora's instigation that he systematically worked through Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum (the only work mentioned by any source that offers ‘true fundamentals’). Another important musical encounter was Haydn's discovery of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but this is unlikely to have taken place as early as about 1750, as the biographers claim. Dies portrays Haydn asking for ‘a good theoretical textbook’; this can refer only to the second volume of Bach's Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen. However, it appeared far too late (1762) to serve the function Dies attributes to it; even Bach's first volume (1753) was apparently not sold in Vienna until the 1760s. Moreover, unlike Fux or Mattheson, neither volume figures in Haydn's library catalogue (1804) or his estate. Indeed Griesinger speaks more plausibly of compositions:

About this time [his move to the Michaelerhaus] Haydn came upon the first six sonatas of Emanuel Bach; ‘I did not leave my clavier until I had played them through, and whoever knows me thoroughly must discover that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I understood him and studied him with diligence. Emanuel Bach once paid me a compliment on that score himself’.

Although it is unclear which of Bach's sonatas Griesinger meant by ‘the first six’, there is no doubt of his influence on Haydn as a composer. Again, however, Haydn's style does not reflect that influence until the 1760s.

An important early personal contact was with Joseph Felix von Kurz, a well-known comic actor (under the stage-name Bernardon) and minor impresario active at the Kärntnertortheater, for whom Haydn supplied music to Der krumme Teufel, a comedy of the Hanswurst type. It was apparently given its première in the 1751–2 season and revived in May 1753, with considerable success. Neither libretto nor music of this, his earliest stage work, survives; a libretto does survive for a later version of 1759, often called Der neue krumme Teufel, but, again, there is no music. It has been speculated that many anonymous numbers in contemporary Viennese collections of theatrical songs stem from this work or others that Haydn might have composed, although documentation is lacking.

Haydn's lot improved substantially in the mid-1750s, as Griesinger describes:

At first Haydn received only two gulden a month for giving lessons, but gradually the price rose to five gulden, so that he was able to look about for more suitable quarters. While he was living in the Seilerstätte, all his few possessions were stolen … Haydn soon saw his loss made good by the generosity of good friends … [he] recovered through a stay of two months with Baron Fürnberg, which cost him nothing.

A 150% increase in fees implies a rise not only in Haydn's economic status but his professional reputation – and therefore increased access to patronage. The most important figure was Baron Carl Joseph Fürnberg (1720–67), who employed him as music master to his children (he lived near the Seilerstätte), commissioned his first string quartets and eventually recommended him to Morzin. Important as well was the elder Countess Maria Christine Thun, who (according to Framery) took singing and keyboard lessons from Haydn.

His freelance activities continued apace. Griesinger writes:

In this period Haydn was also leader of the orchestra in the convent of the Barmherzige Brüder … at 60 gulden a year. Here he had to be in the church at eight o'clock in the morning on Sundays and feast days, at ten o'clock he played the organ in what was then the chapel of Count Haugwitz, and at eleven o'clock he sang at St Stephan's. He was paid 17 kreutzer for each service. In the evenings Haydn often went ‘gassatim’ with his musical comrades, when one of his compositions was usually performed, and he recalled having composed a quintet [possibly hII:2] for that purpose in 1753.

(Both Griesinger and Dies supply the obligatory comic anecdotes involving Haydn and Dittersdorf.) Griesinger's account conflates several church jobs: from 1754 to 1756 Haydn performed as a singer in the Hofkapelle during Lent (1 gulden per service, not 17 kreuzer), and in 1755 and 1756 as an orchestral violinist for balls during carnival (4 gulden per evening). In the Hofkapelle he sang both concerted and a cappella works, including Palestrina's Stabat mater and the Allegri Miserere. His Sunday job at Count Haugwitz’s newly consecrated chapel near the Piaristenkirche began in mid-1759; he was responsible for the entire concerted music. According to an account by a Prussian prisoner of war, he participated in chamber-music parties arranged by Count Harrach at Rohrau. Of Haydn's many students during these years, Martínez has already been mentioned; another of more than marginal importance was Robert Kimmerling, later regens chori at Melk.

Although a sizable number of Haydn's works originated during the 1750s, documented dates are few. Both the very early Missa brevis in F and the first Lauda Sion exhibit technical faults, implying that he composed them before learning the ‘true fundamentals’ (i.e. before c1753–4); such faults are found in no other surviving genuine works. Griesinger writes: ‘In addition to performing and teaching, Haydn was indefatigable in composing. Many of his easy clavier sonatas, trios and so on belong to this period, and he generally took into consideration the needs and capacities of his pupils’. Numerous tiny keyboard sonatas and ‘concertinos’ indeed survive, although some authorities argue that the smallest sonatas are not necessarily the earliest or least accomplished, and the concertinos appear to date from about 1760; possibly some keyboard trios antedate 1755 as well, although none is so short or simple. In any case Haydn's compositional activity increased exponentially in the mid-1750s. The quintet-divertimento hII:2 survives in a later source dated 1754, and many of his ensemble divertimentos probably date from before 1761. Of the ten or so pre-1780 keyboard trios and the 21 or so string trios, the earliest also may date from the mid-1750s, although others are from the early 1760s. Late in life Haydn dated the autographs of the Organ Concerto in C (hXVIII:1) and the Salve regina in E (hXXIIIb:1) ‘1756’ (fig.2).

The precise dates of the final two stages of Haydn's early ‘progress’ – Fürnberg and Morzin – also remain uncertain. Griesinger writes:

The following, purely coincidental circumstance led him to try his hand at the composition of quartets. A certain Baron Fürnberg had an estate in Weinzierl, several stages from Vienna; from time to time he invited his parish priest, his estate manager, and Albrechtsberger (a brother of the well-known contrapuntist) in order to have a little music. Fürnberg asked Haydn to compose something that could be played by these four friends of the art. Haydn, who was then 18, accepted the proposal, and so originated his first quartet [incipit of hIII:1], which, immediately upon its appearance, received such uncommon applause as to encourage him to continue in this genre.

Griesinger's statement that Haydn composed his first quartet at 18, although roughly supported by Dies and Carpani, is far too early. All the circumstantial details, as well as the sheer mastery of Haydn's early quartets, suggest rather the Seilerstätte period, i.e. about 1755–7. Whether hIII:1 was actually Haydn's first quartet, or whether he (or Griesinger) named it simply because it occupied first position in Pleyel's famous edition (1801) and therefore in his own thematic catalogue, cannot be determined. In any case Haydn had not yet adopted the ‘opus’ format; there are, simply, ten early quartets, of which hIII:1–4, 6 (op.1 nos.1–4, 6) and hII:6 (‘op.0’) are probably the earliest, hIII:10, 12 (op.2 nos.4, 6) perhaps in the middle, and hIII:7–8 (op.2 nos.1–2) probably the latest, perhaps even 1759–60.

Regarding Haydn's employ by Count Karl Joseph Franz Morzin (1717–83), Griesinger states:

In the year 1759 Haydn was engaged as music director to Count Morzin in Vienna at a salary of 200 gulden, free lodging and board at the officers' table. Here he was finally able to enjoy the happiness of a carefree existence; he was quite contented. The winters were spent in Vienna, the summers in Bohemia [at Dolní Lukavice, usually referred to as Lukavec]…. As music director in the service of Count Morzin Haydn composed his first symphony [incipit of no.1].

Although Dies agrees regarding the date (‘about 27’), Haydn's earliest symphony cannot be as late as 1759: a manuscript source for no.37 is dated 1758 (Carpani's date), implying a date of composition in that year or, more likely, at least a year earlier. Moreover, Haydn himself in old age organized a list of his symphonies according to ten-year periods: 1757–67, 1767–77 etc.; ‘1757’ is so precise that he must have believed that it was the actual year of his first symphony – or, perhaps, of his appointment with Morzin. (The list also appears to confirm Griesinger's identification of the symphony we know as ‘no.1’ as the earliest.) Finally, if one accepts 1749 as the date of Haydn's dismissal from the Stephansdom and takes literally his ‘eight whole years’ of ‘wretched existence’, 1757 is implied as end-point; but the most likely marker of the latter, again, was his appointment with Morzin. Be all this as it may, the free-spending Count Morzin soon had to dissolve his little musical establishment. Although the early biographers again disagree as to the date, Haydn's marriage certificate (26 November 1760) refers to him as ‘Music Director with Count v. Morzin’, so he probably moved from Morzin to Esterházy without meaningful interruption. Haydn's compositions during the Morzin years include about 15 symphonies; keyboard sonatas (including hXVI:6, probably not later than 1760), trios, divertimentos (including hXIV:11, 1760) and concertos; string trios; partitas for wind band (including hII:15, 1760) and possibly the quartets op.2 nos.1–2.

On 26 November 1760 Haydn was married to Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller (bap. 9 Feb 1729; d 20 March 1800); the marriage contract, in which he pledged 1000 gulden as a matching sum to her dowry (a common custom), is dated 9 November. The bride was the daughter of the wigmaker Johann Peter Keller, who is said variously to have assisted him in his years of poverty or employed him as a music teacher. The early biographers relate that in the mid-1750s Haydn had fallen in love with her younger sister Therese (b 1733), who however was compelled by her devout parents to enter a nunnery in 1755, taking her formal vows in 1756. It has been speculated that he composed the Salve regina in E and perhaps the Organ Concerto in C on the latter occasion. Whether (the speculation continues) out of continuing gratitude to the Kellers or owing to a psychological displacement of his own affections, he married the elder sister four years later. The marriage was an unhappy one (we have only his side of the story) and led to infidelities on both sides; as he said to Griesinger (somewhat illogically): ‘My wife was incapable of bearing children, and thus I was less indifferent to the charms of other women’.

Haydn, Joseph

3. Esterházy court, 1761–90.

With Haydn's move to the Esterházy court, evidence regarding his activities increases a hundredfold. However, its scope is uneven: although the archives are informative regarding theatrical activities, entertainments for noble visitors, personnel, payments for services, petitions etc., they tell us little about day-to-day musical activities, especially in the realm of instrumental music. Many documents and musical sources were destroyed in a fire at Eszterháza castle in 1779, and little correspondence of Haydn's survives until the upswing in his commercial activity beginning in 1780.

(i) Vice-Kapellmeister, 1761–5.

(ii) Kapellmeister, 1766–90.

(iii) Opera impresario, 1776–90.

(iv) Independence, 1779–90.

Haydn, Joseph, §3: Esterházy, 1761–90

(i) Vice-Kapellmeister, 1761–5.

The Esterházy family, the richest and most influential among the Hungarian nobility, had long been important patrons of culture and the arts; Prince Paul Anton was a music lover and capable performer. Haydn's predecessor as Kapellmeister, Gregor Joseph Werner, had been appointed in 1728; he was a solid professional who composed church music in the first instance, but also symphonies, trio sonatas and other instrumental works including an entertaining ‘Musical Calendar’ (1748); in 1804 Haydn honoured his predecessor by publishing six introductions and fugues from his oratorios, arranged for string quartet. Paul, who from 1750 to 1752 was ambassador in Naples and travelled widely elsewhere, collected a large quantity of vocal and instrumental music (he had a catalogue made during the period 1759–62; it lists one symphony by Haydn, acquired in 1760). By about 1760 Werner was becoming infirm and his musical orientation increasingly conservative; Paul set about modernizing and enlarging the establishment, appointing several new musicians before recruiting Haydn and others in 1761.

Haydn's appointment was in the first instance as vice-Kapellmeister; the first and last clauses of his contract address this somewhat delicate situation, while illustrating the Esterházys’ concern for the welfare of valued employees:

… Whereas
1mo a Kapellmeister at Eisenstadt named Gregorius Werner has devoted many years of true and faithful service to the princely house, but now, on account of his great age and the resulting infirmities … is not always capable of performing his duties, therefore said Gregorius Werner, in consideration of his long service, shall continue to serve, as Ober-Kapellmeister. On the other hand the said Joseph Haydn, as vice-Kapellmeister, shall be subordinate to … said Gregorio Werner, quà Ober-Kapellmeister, in regard to the choral music [Chor-Musique] in Eisenstadt; but in all other circumstances where any sort of music is to be made, everything pertaining to the music, in general and in particular, is the responsibility of said vice-Kapellmeister.
14mo His Highness not only undertakes to retain the said Joseph Haydn in service during this period [three years, renewable], but, should he provide complete satisfaction, he shall also have expectations of the position of Oberkapellmeister.

Although the contract is dated 1 May 1761, Haydn may have begun working for the court earlier that year. Griesinger states that he began on 19 March 1760; this cannot be correct, unless it was an error for 1761 (Dies also names 1760), and the specific date ‘19’ is suspect (the surviving contracts begin on the first of the month). But the Prince was in Vienna in March 1761 (music was performed at the Esterházy palace several times that month); indeed he may have remained there much of the time until his death in March 1762. Moreover, the contracts with several musicians appointed 1 April 1761 include a clause requiring them to obey not only the Kapellmeister but the vice-Kapellmeister, but the latter position did not exist until Haydn's appointment. Hence he may well have selected most or all of the musicians hired from April on, and so helped to shape the newly constituted orchestra himself.

Haydn's contract, once thought to be demeaning, is now understood as a standard document of its type; its terms were favourable to a young man of 29 with only one previous position to his credit. He was no servant, but a professional employee or ‘house officer’; he received 400 gulden a year, plus various considerations in kind including uniforms and board at the officers' table. He was in charge of the ‘Camer-Musique’, which comprised not only all instrumental music but secular vocal and stage music as well. He had full authority over the musicians, both professionally and in terms of their behaviour; but he was close to many of them personally as well, often serving as godfather to their children. His duties included responsibility for the musical archives and instruments (including purchase, upkeep and repair), instruction in singing, performing both as leader and as soloist (‘because [he] is competent on various instruments’) – and, of course, composition:

4to Whenever His Princely Highness commands, the vice-Kapellmeister is obligated to compose such works of music as His Highness may demand; further not to communicate [such] new compositions to anyone, still less allow them to be copied [for others], but to reserve them entirely and exclusively for His Highness; most of all to compose nothing for any other person without prior knowledge and gracious consent.

Despite the immense labour and considerable tribulation this position entailed, Haydn must have known that it was the opportunity of a lifetime. One can well understand the joy and satisfaction conveyed by Griesinger's remark: ‘It was still granted to Haydn's father [d 1763] to see his son in the blue and gold uniform of the court, and to hear the prince's many praises of his son's talent’.

Paul Anton, already in uncertain health in 1761, declined rapidly in early 1762 and died on 18 March. Childless, he was succeeded by his brother Nicolaus, an even more enthusiastic musician, who harboured even grander designs for the physical and artistic development of the court. Goethe coined the phrase ‘das Esterházysche Feenreich’ to describe his display at the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt in 1764, which has passed into the literature; in his own day he was called ‘der Prachtliebende’ (‘the Magnificent’). His treatment of Haydn was generous: he raised his salary to 600 gulden, regularly dispensed gold ducats as thanks for the submission of baryton trios and after successful opera productions and, following fires that destroyed Haydn's house in Eisenstadt in 1768 and 1776, paid to have it rebuilt. As a matter of course his musical taste decisively influenced what genres Haydn cultivated at court; whether it affected Haydn's style as well cannot be determined (except in cases like the works for baryton).

The musical ensemble was at first very small, normally comprising 13 to 15 players (of whom many performed on more than one instrument): strings (approximately 6 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello, 1 bass), 2 oboes, 2 horns and a bassoon (plus a flute in certain works or movements). Haydn led from the violin; no keyboard continuo was employed except in the theatre. Beginning in the 1770s, the ensemble was gradually enlarged, owing primarily to the increasing importance of the court opera; at its height in the 1780s it counted 22–4 members. Especially at first, it was manned largely by virtuosos (including Luigi Tomasini, violin, Joseph Weigl and later Anton Kraft, cello, Carl Franz, horn and baryton), some of whom remained at the court for decades. This situation is reflected in many difficult and exposed passages in Haydn's symphonies, as well as numerous concertos from the 1760s. Indeed symphonies nos.6–8, Le matin, Le midi and Le soir (1761) – among his first compositions in his new position; Dies states that the ‘times of day’ topic was suggested by the prince – were expressly calculated to show off the new ensemble, both as a whole and in terms of the individual players, all of whom receive solos. But Haydn was also demonstrating his own prowess: although the topics were traditional, the works have no precedent, either generally or in his own output.

During the first half of the 1760s Haydn composed chiefly instrumental music, as far as we know exclusively for performance at court. His most productive genre was the symphony, with about 25 works; in addition to nos.6–8 they include nos.22 (‘The Philosopher’) and 30 and 31 (‘Alleluja’, ‘Hornsignal’). The concertos include two or three for violin, the Cello Concerto in C, a concerto for violone (the first ever composed, as far as is known), two horn concertos and one for two horns, one for flute and perhaps one for bassoon; many of them are lost. Only a few keyboard works are known, primarily trios and quartet divertimentos; there are also a few ensemble divertimentos as well as minuets and other dances. In addition, there were a few large-scale vocal works, usually intended as celebrations of particular occasions: the festa teatrale Acide (1762, first performed in January 1763, for the marriage of Anton, the prince's eldest son) and the somewhat mysterious commedia Marchese (La marchesa Nespola, 1762–3; only fragments survive, and three similar works are lost), as well as several cantatas honouring Nicolaus himself, whether on his nameday (Destatevi o miei fidi, 1763; Qual dubbio ormai, 1764), his return from distant journeys (Da qual gioia improvvisa, 1764, from Frankfurt; Al tuo arrivo felice, 1767, from Paris) or his convalescence from illness (Dei clementi, undated). The only sacred vocal work of consequence is the first of Haydn's two Te Deum settings (hXXIIIc:1).

We know little of Haydn's daily routine or that of the musical establishment during these years, or of noteworthy events in his life. His contract required him to appear every morning and afternoon to see if music was desired, although a later document specified that academies were to be given regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. From 1762 to 1765 Nicolaus lived primarily in Eisenstadt, with frequent shorter stays at other properties. Haydn and his wife lived in an apartment in the same building as the other musicians, next to the ‘Bergkirche’, just up the hill from the castle. He was seriously ill in the winter of 1764–5; the following year his brother Johann was engaged, nominally as a tenor but de facto charitably supported by Haydn.

Haydn, Joseph, §3: Esterházy, 1761–90

(ii) Kapellmeister, 1766–90.

In late 1765 and early 1766 Haydn's status and activities at the Esterházy court changed radically. First came a series of crises in his relations with the prince. In September 1765 the flautist Franz Sigl accidentally burnt down a house; the chief court administrator, Ludwig Peter Rahier (with whom Haydn often clashed), recommended that Sigl be imprisoned, and Haydn was reprimanded by the prince. Haydn however eloquently defended himself and succeeded in having Sigl's punishment reduced to simple dismissal (indeed he was later rehired). In October, Werner, having just signed his last will, wrote a vituperative letter to the prince in which he accused Haydn of neglecting the instruments and musical archives and the supervision of the singers. In late November or early December Nicolaus again sent Haydn a reprimand (perhaps drafted by Rahier), instructing him to see to these matters and to prepare a catalogue of the archives and instruments of the Chor-Musique. At the end stood the following postscript: ‘Kapellmeister Haydn is urgently enjoined to apply himself to composition more zealously than heretofore, and especially to compose more pieces that one can play on the [baryton]’. The baryton was a member of the viol family, on which the performer could ‘accompany himself’ by plucking a series of sympathetically vibrating strings while also playing normally with the bow; the prince was an accomplished performer. Haydn, though doubtless angry and dismayed, at once began to compose baryton trios in quantity. On 4 January 1766 he submitted three new ones (Nicolaus pronounced himself satisfied and awarded him 12 ducats, while immediately ordering six more), and completed a ‘book’ of 24 (they were elegantly bound in sets) that autumn; two additional books followed by July 1768. Thereafter production dropped off somewhat, though remaining steady into the mid-1770s, for a total of 126 trios plus sundry other works.

A different kind of response (so it is assumed) was Haydn's decision to begin a thematic catalogue of his own compositions, and thereby to refute the prince's charge of non-productivity. This document, misleadingly called the Entwurf-Katalog (‘draft catalogue’, fig.3), is of capital importance for our knowledge of Haydn's output from the pre-Esterházy days up to the late 1770s, as well as its chronology. It was laid out in about 1765–6 by Joseph Elssler, the most important music copyist at the court, doubtless according to Haydn's plan; Haydn made additional entries more or less regularly until the late 1770s.

On 3 March 1766 Werner died; Haydn was now Kapellmeister, responsible for the church music as well as everything else. It was presumably this higher status (his salary did not change) that induced him in May to purchase a house in Eisenstadt (now a Haydn museum). A more important change was signalled later that year: a portion of the court, including Haydn and some musicians, spent the summer at Nicolaus's splendid new castle, Eszterháza, then beginning to rise in reclaimed swampland east of Lake Neusiedl (present-day Hungary). Over time, the prince became increasingly attached to it, and ‘summer’ eventually expanded to ten months. Such an extension occasioned the ‘Farewell’ Symphony (no.45, autumn 1772), in which the pantomime of the departing musicians brought home to the prince the need to return to Eisenstadt.

As a result of these new circumstances, Haydn's compositional activity changed substantially. In addition to the upsurge in baryton music, in 1766 he began to compose large-scale vocal works, both sacred and secular. In the former domain he at once produced two works on the largest scale, with an astonishing assurance of style and technique for someone who had composed no church music for a decade. The first was the Missa Cellensis in honorem BVM of 1766 (possibly completed later), apparently intended for Mariazell (where earlier Esterházys had erected a chapel) or a Viennese church associated with that shrine. More masses followed: in 1768 the Missa ‘Sunt bona mixta malis’, about 1768–9 the Missa in honorem BVM (‘Great Organ Mass’; Haydn presumably performed the obbligato organ part), in 1772 the Missa Sancti Nicolai (the title implies a celebration of the prince's nameday, 6 December) and about 1775–8 a missa brevis (‘Little Organ Mass’). His other ‘inaugural’ liturgical masterpiece was the Stabat mater of 1767. Its original purpose is unknown; Haydn was confident enough to send it to Hasse, earning a letter of praise that he much valued, and he performed it in Vienna in March 1768. There followed a Salve regina (hXXIIIb:2; 1771) for four solo voices, string orchestra and obbligato organ (again performed by Haydn). It was presumably this work, not (as he later claimed) the Stabat mater, that resulted from his vow to compose a work of thanksgiving to the Virgin if he were cured of a serious illness; he suffered from a ‘raging fever’ (Griesinger) about 1770–71, so threatening that his brother applied for leave from Salzburg to visit him. The celebratory cantata Applausus (1768) was commissioned in honour of the abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Zwettl; because Haydn was unable to be present, he accompanied the work with a long and informative letter on performing practice. Haydn composed the Italian oratorio Il ritorno di Tobia (1774–5) for the annual Lenten concert of the Tonkünstler-Societät in Vienna, a charitable organization for musicians' widows and children founded by Hofkapellmeister Gassmann in 1771. He conducted the premières on 2 and 4 April 1775; most of the roles were sung by members of his own Kapelle. The work was a notable success; a review praised the choruses in particular and referred to his growing international reputation.

Beginning in 1766, the prince began to require operatic productions at the new castle; eventually opera would become the focus of the entire musical establishment (see §(iii) below). For the time being, however, Haydn's primary task was to compose operas to be produced during the festivities celebrating visits by high personages. Three comic operas date from the late 1760s: La canterina (1766) apparently had its première in the summer during a visit of the imperial court to Eisenstadt (in a makeshift theatre) and was afterwards produced in Pressburg (Bratislava). Lo speziale (1768) and Le pescatrici (1769–70) are both based on librettos by Goldoni; the former inaugurated the new opera house at Eszterháza probably during the last week of September 1768, on the visit of the Hungarian regent, Duke Albert of Saxe-Techsen, while the latter had its première on 16 September 1770 during the wedding celebrations of Countess Lamberg, the prince's niece. After a pause, operatic composition resumed in 1773 with L'infedeltà delusa, given on 26 July (the nameday of the dowager Princess Maria Anna, Paul Anton's widow), and Philemon und Baucis, a German marionette opera, given on 2 September during the festivities in honour of a ‘state’ visit by Empress Maria Theresa to Eszterháza. (Hexenschabbas, another marionette opera from about this time, is lost.) L'infedeltà delusa was also given for the empress; the performance occasioned her famous remark (if it is genuine) that in order to see a good opera she had to go to the country. Haydn's last opera during this phase was L'incontro improvviso, first given on 29 August 1775, during a visit by Archduke Ferdinand and his court.

During the late 1760s and early 1770s Haydn continued to compose instrumental works, albeit at a slower rate than before (except during the operatic hiatus of 1770–72). But they became longer, more passionate and more daring. The symphonies comprise nos.26, 35, 38, 41–9, 52, 58–9, 65; many of these are among his best-known before the London period, as is evident from their nicknames, which include ‘Lamentatione’, ‘Maria Theresa’, ‘La passione’, ‘Mourning’, ‘Farewell’ and ‘The Schoolmaster’. He also took up the string quartet, not cultivated since the 1750s, producing three increasingly imposing opera in rapid succession: op.9 (c1769–70), op.17 (1771) and op.20 (1772). The reason is unknown: there is no documentation of quartet performances at the Esterházy court, and it has been speculated that he composed them for Viennese patrons (Burney described the audience's transports at a performance of Haydn quartets in Vienna in September 1772). He also composed numerous keyboard sonatas for connoisseurs: hXVI:45 (1766), 19 (1767), 46 (late 1760s), 20 (in C minor, 1771), as well as seven lost works and one that survives only as a fragment (hXVI:2a–g, XIV:5) which, to judge from the incipits, were on the same scale. A few concertos date from this period as well. Many of these works are so bold and expressive that in the 20th century they became subsumed under the appellation Sturm und Drang. The term has been criticized: taken from the title of a play of 1776 by Maximilian Klinger, it properly pertains to a literary movement of the middle and late 1770s rather than a musical one of about 1768–72, and early proponents of this interpretation assumed implausibly and without evidence that these works expressed a ‘romantic crisis' in Haydn's life. Nevertheless, his style during these years was distinctive; furthermore, similar traits are found in the contemporary music of many other Austrian composers, including the young Mozart's G minor Symphony k183/173dB and D minor String Quartet k173.

In Haydn's case this development may have been related to his turn to vocal music beginning in 1766: perhaps the demand for expressive depth in sacred works and dramatic effectiveness in opera, as well as the tendency towards through-composition in both genres, stimulated this expansion of his instrumental music. In 1769 Nicolaus began engaging a theatrical troupe each summer season; in the seasons 1772–7 it was the famous one directed by Carl Wahr, which played primarily comedies and other entertainments, although Shakespeare's tragedies were also mounted. It has been speculated that Haydn supplied incidental music for these productions (including even Hamlet and King Lear) and that some Sturm und Drang symphonies recycle this music, although the only documented example is Symphony no.60 (‘Il distratto’, 1774), from a very un-Shakespearean French comedy. In any case, from about 1773 Haydn's instrumental music became generally lighter in style – the reason (if any) is again unknown; there is no evidence of princely intervention – and was again addressed to amateurs as well as connoisseurs. The string quartet was abandoned. Both the symphonies of 1773–5 (nos.50–51, 54–7, 60, 64, 66–9) and two contemporaneous sets of keyboard sonatas, hXVI:21–6 (1773) and especially 27–32 (1774–6), exemplify this mixed orientation; the former was published in Vienna in 1774 (the first authorized publication of Haydn's music) with a dedication to the prince, who presumably paid the costs. A third set (nos.35–9 and 20), again mixed in style, was published in 1780.

Haydn, Joseph, §3: Esterházy, 1761–90

(iii) Opera impresario, 1776–90.

In 1778 Haydn sold his house in Eisenstadt; the court now stayed at Eszterháza at least ten months every year, and he increasingly spent the short winter season in Vienna (see §3(iv)). The very long stays at Eszterháza were linked to Nicolaus's reorganization of the theatrical entertainment there in 1776. Now there was a regular ‘season’ each year, comprising opera, stage plays and marionette operas (in a separate small theatre); in principle there was theatrical entertainment every evening the prince was in residence. At first, stage plays predominated (184 evenings in 1778, as opposed to only 50 operas – and only two musical academies; four others took place during the day, in the ‘apartments’), but the number of opera evenings increased steadily, reaching a high of 124 or 125 in 1786. New productions were henceforth not grand, ‘occasional’ events, but a regular occurrence; in 1776 there were five, and in the banner year 1786 there were eight, together with nine revivals. Under these conditions Haydn could not compose more than a small fraction of what was needed, nor were new works commissioned from other composers. Instead, operas were acquired from Vienna, where there were many productions and a lively trade in copying; it is not known how many were selected by the prince or Haydn during their brief winter sojourns. Some were acquired by agents (e.g. Nunziato Porta, the librettist of Orlando paladino), others supplied by newly arrived singers etc., and still others purchased from archives and estates (Dittersdorf sold the court several of his own operas in 1776). The up-to-date repertory centred on opera buffa: the composer represented by the greatest number of productions from 1776 to 1790 was Cimarosa (13), followed in order by Anfossi, Paisiello, Sarti and Haydn (seven), and 24 other composers with fewer.

Once it was decided to produce a given opera, Haydn was responsible for any musical alterations that might be required, supervising the copying of parts, rehearsing the singers and orchestra, and conducting all the performances – for no fewer than 88 productions in the 15 years from 1776 to 1790. This was by any reckoning a full-time job, even if one does not count his own new stage works, of which six originated between 1777 and 1783, or almost one per year. First came a dramma giocoso by Goldoni, Il mondo della luna (given on 3 August 1777, on the marriage of Nicolaus's younger son). La vera costanza (1778–9) is the subject of implausible and conflicting anecdotes in Griesinger and Dies, according to which it was originally commissioned for the Burgtheater in Vienna but scuttled by intrigue (neither Joseph II nor his musicians were well-disposed towards Haydn); in fact it had its première at Eszterháza, on 25 April 1779. It was lost in the fire that largely destroyed the Eszterháza opera theatre on 18 November 1779; the surviving version represents Haydn's reconstruction of the work from 1785. It is a measure of the prince's commitment (or obsession) that an opera was given just three days after the fire, in the marionette theatre, which had been hastily adapted for staged opera (yet another noble marriage was to be celebrated). Haydn's L'isola disabitata to a libretto by Metastasio also had its première on schedule on 6 December (the prince's nameday). Next came La fedeltà premiata (1780; given on 25 February 1781, on the inauguration of the rebuilt opera house). In 1783 Haydn took the unusual step of publishing the great scena for Celia in Act 2, ‘Ah, come il core … Ombra del caro bene’, in full score; it received a detailed and laudatory review by C.F. Cramer in his Magazin der Musik. Haydn's last two Eszterháza operas were Orlando paladino (1782, for the prince's nameday) and Armida (1783; given 26 February 1784). The later 1770s saw three German marionette operas, also all lost in the 1779 fire: Dido (1776), Vom abgebrannten Haus (date uncertain) and Die bestrafte Rachbegierde (1779; its production can be inferred only from the printed libretto); the occasionally seen Die Feuersbrunst is either spurious or represents an arrangement of Vom abgebrannten Haus.

After 1783 Haydn composed no more operas for the court. It is not known why he abandoned the genre, which he had cultivated intensively since 1766 and in which he was proud of his achievements (see §6 below), or how he persuaded the prince to consent at a time when the number of productions was still rising. Perhaps he was increasingly drawn to his new career as composer of instrumental music for publication (see §(iv) below). In any case all his other duties for the court theatre remained in force; in particular he still revised the operas in production to suit his provincial stage and limited personnel. Haydn made many cuts, both of entire numbers and within them, re-orchestrated (often adding winds), changed tempos (usually speeding them up) and ‘tailored’ arias to ‘fit’ his singers, as Mozart would have said. He composed about 20 substitute (‘insertion’) arias (hXXIVb) as well as long passages within numbers not rejected as a whole.

The majority of the insertion arias and simplifications were composed for Luigia Polzelli, a young Italian mezzo-soprano who joined the troupe in March 1779 along with her much older husband, a violinist. Both proved inadequate and were dismissed in December 1780 – but promptly rehired: Luigia and Haydn had become lovers, a relationship that, like so many in that milieu, was probably an open secret. (Haydn told Griesinger that the painter Ludwig Guttenbrunn had been his wife's lover during his stay at the court in 1770–72.) While at Eszterháza Luigia gave birth to her second son, Antonio, in 1783. He and his mother believed that Haydn was the father (there is no evidence of such a belief on Haydn's part); he became a professional musician and was appointed to the Esterházy orchestra in 1803. Haydn was well disposed towards him, and even more towards his elder brother Pietro (b 1777); he taught them both music and maintained contact with them throughout his life. As for Luigia, following the dissolution of the Kapelle in 1790 Haydn attempted to procure engagements for her in Italy; however, he would not have her with him in London, even though her sister was engaged there as a singer (see §4 below). Although there are no letters from the 1780s by which we might assess the nature of their feelings, he wrote to her often (in Italian) during his first London visit. Those up to early spring 1792 are ardent: ‘Perhaps I shall never regain the good humour that I used to have with you; you are always in my heart, and I shall never, never forget you … Think from time to time about your Haydn, who esteems you and loves you tenderly, and will always be faithful to you’ (14 January). But those from May and June are notably cooler – he had entered a new relationship – and none survives from his second London visit. He acceded to Polzelli's requests for money, but not always immediately or in the demanded amount, while complaining (misleadingly) how little he had, as well as (accurately) how hard he had to work.

The vastly increased operatic and theatrical activity at the Esterházy court from 1776 on led to an equally drastic reduction in the performance of instrumental music. As noted above, only six ‘academies’ were listed for the entire year 1778 (all in January and February). Presumably the prince simply lost interest; even Haydn's stream of baryton works began to dry up after 1773 and ceased entirely about 1775, following the octets hX:1–6. The symphony, from the late 1750s to 1775 the one constant in Haydn's output, declined as well; only nine were completed in the six years 1776–81 (nos.53, 61–3, 70–71, 73–5), none at all in 1777 or the first half of 1778. Even these few symphonies often include adaptations of stage music. No.63 in C begins with the overture to Il mondo della luna, and the slow movement (‘La Roxelane’) is based on a theme from a stage play; the slow movement of no.73, ‘La chasse’, uses his own lied Gegenliebe and the finale recycles the overture to La fedeltà premiata. He even recycled the overture hIa:7 twice, in the finale of one version of no.53 (‘Imperial’) and the opening movement of no.62. From this time on, the Esterházy court was no longer the primary destination for Haydn’s instrumental music.

Haydn, Joseph, §3: Esterházy, 1761–90

(iv) Independence, 1779–90.

Nevertheless, Haydn was able to continue his career as an instrumental composer. In contrast to London, Paris and elsewhere, where unauthorized editions of his music had been appearing steadily since 1764, there was no music publishing industry to speak of in the Habsburg realm; most music circulated in manuscript copies. This situation changed in 1778, when Artaria & Co., hitherto primarily art dealers and mapmakers, expanded into music printing; other firms soon followed. Artaria and Haydn must have made contact in 1779 (it is not known who took the initiative); their first publication was a set of six keyboard sonatas, hXVI:35–9, 20 (delivered in winter 1779–80, published in April 1780), dedicated to the virtuoso sisters Katharina and Marianna von Auenbrugger. Dozens of Viennese publications of Haydn's music followed over the next decade. This would not have been possible on the terms of his 1761 contract, which forbade him from selling music on his own or composing for anyone else without permission. However, he signed a new contract on New Year's Day 1779, in which these prohibitions were omitted; the conjunction with Artaria's founding in 1778 and Haydn's publication of music with them beginning in 1779–80 cannot be coincidental. The prince was losing interest in instrumental music; Haydn must have persuaded him to strike a compromise, whereby he remained in residence at court, continued in charge of the opera and drew his full salary, but was granted compositional independence in other respects, including the income from sales of his music. In addition, he began to market his music in other countries: in England beginning in 1781 with Forster, to whom he sold more music than to anyone except Artaria; in France beginning in 1783, selling Symphonies nos.76–8 (composed 1782) to Boyer and offering nos.79–81 (1783–4) to Naderman. (To be sure, certain works not composed for the court – for example, the ‘Paris’ Symphonies – were still performed, or at any rate tried out, there before being sent into the world, and others, such as the piano sonatas hXVI:40–42, were dedicated to members of the princely family.)

Haydn soon learnt to maximize his income by selling a given work in several countries, accepting a separate fee for each. Except in Vienna and London he often worked through a middleman. These activities were in many respects unregulated (modern copyright law being in its infancy); unauthorized ‘double copying’ was a constant danger, and everyone attempted to maximize his advantage – including Haydn, whose tactics were often unscrupulous, to say the least. He often earned his ‘little extra’ by selling manuscript copies of new works to private individuals; such ‘subscription’ copies still carried a certain prestige. An example is offered by his famous letters offering the string quartets op.33, composed in summer and autumn 1781 and sold to Artaria by prior arrangement. On 3 December he wrote to between ten and 20 noble and well-to-do music lovers, including the Swiss intellectual Johann Caspar Lavater:

I love and happily read your works … Since I know that in Zürich and Winterthur there are many gentlemen amateurs and great connoisseurs and patrons of music, I cannot conceal from you the fact that I am issuing a work consisting of 6 Quartets for two violins, viola and violoncello concertante, by subscription for the price of six ducats; they are of a new and entirely special kind, for I haven't written any for ten years … Subscribers who live abroad will receive them before I issue the works here …

However, Artaria (who presumably knew nothing of these activities) announced the forthcoming publication of the quartets on 29 December at a price of 4 gulden (6 ducats equalled approximately 25 gulden). Haydn was furious:

It was with astonishment that I read … that you intend to publish my quartets in four weeks … Such a proceeding places me in a most dishonourable position and is very damaging; it is a most extortionate step on your part … Mr Hummel [the publisher] also wanted to be a subscriber, but I did not want to behave so shabbily, and I did not send them to Berlin solely out of regard for our friendship and further transactions; by God! you owe me more than 50 ducats, since I have not yet satisfied many of the subscribers, and cannot possibly send copies to those living abroad; this step must cause the cessation of further transactions between us.

In fact, it did not come to a rupture: Artaria delayed publication until April, and Haydn apparently sold the quartets to Hummel after all; both parties now better understood the ground rules (‘the next time’, wrote Haydn later, ‘we shall both be more prudent’). A loss of 50 ducats implies about eight unsold copies; in 1784 Haydn claimed to Artaria that he had ‘always received more than 100 ducats through subscriptions to my quartets’. Even as his publications increased, Haydn continued to market manuscript copies, especially in genres that were not ordinarily published (such as sacred vocal music), and to sell all sorts of music in places where there was still no music publishing industry, notably Spain. These were hardly ever new works. To be sure, he wrote to Artaria in 1784: ‘The quartets I'm working on just now … are very small and with only three movements; they are destined for Spain’, but n







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