Musical creativity may often, it is true, meet a tragic end, but Haydn lived long enough to reap the rewards of his own imagination and toil. He remained in their employ for the next 30 years, writing many of his instrumental compositions, which included dozens of keyboard sonatas and trios for the now forgotten instrument, the baryton, and operas for performance at their vast summer palace, Esterháza. His fortunes began to turn in the late 1750s as members of Vienna's noble families became aware of his music, and on May 1, 1761, he went to work for the Esterházy family. After Haydn's voice broke and he was turned out of the choir, he eked out a precarious living as a teenage freelance musician in Vienna. Stephen's cathedral in Vienna when he was eight, later joined by his younger brother, Michael Haydn, also destined to be a composer. Haydn was prolific not just because he was a tireless worker with an inexhaustible musical imagination, but also because of the circumstances of his musical career: he was the last prominent beneficiary of the system of noble patronage that had nourished European musical composition since the Renaissance.īorn in the small Austrian village of Rohrau, he became a choirboy at St. Few of them lack some unexpected detail or clever solution to a formal problem. By one estimate, Haydn produced some 340 hours of music, more than Bach or Handel, Mozart or Beethoven. Part and parcel of Haydn's formal mastery was his famous sense of humor, his feeling for the unpredictable, elegant twist. His influence upon later composers is immeasurable Haydn's most illustrious pupil, Beethoven, was the direct beneficiary of the elder master's musical imagination, and Haydn's shadow lurks within (and sometimes looms over) the music of composers like Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Brahms. His operas, too, have finally come to be regarded as well-crafted and deserving of far greater attention than they had historically received in the 20th century. He also wrote several masterful oratorios and masses, especially in his later years.
In hundreds of instrumental sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies, Haydn both broke new ground and provided durable models indeed, he was among the creators of these fundamental genres of classical music. Perhaps his most important achievement was that he developed and evolved the most influential structural principle in the history of music: his perfection of the set of expectations known as sonata form made an epochal impact. Franz Joseph Haydn is the composer who, more than any other, epitomizes the aims and achievements of the Classical era.
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