Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn was born in Rohrau, Lower Austria, in March 1732, the son of a wheelwright with a part-time musical sideline. He was sent at six to be a chorister at the Stephansdom in Vienna, where he stayed until his voice broke. The next decade was a hand-to-mouth existence as a freelance musician in Vienna; he studied composition by working through the textbooks of Fux and the keyboard works of C P E Bach, and in 1761 was appointed Vice-Kapellmeister to the Esterházy court at Eisenstadt.

He served the Esterházy family for nearly thirty years — most of them at the remote palace of Eszterháza in present-day Hungary — and his isolation from the wider musical world allowed him to develop, almost in private, the standard forms of the Classical era: the symphony, the string quartet, and the piano sonata. His 106 symphonies, 68 quartets, twelve operas, fourteen masses, and the late oratorios *The Creation* (1798) and *The Seasons* (1801) effectively defined what those forms could do. His two London visits in the 1790s, as guest of the impresario Salomon, made him for a time the most celebrated composer in Europe.

Haydn died in Vienna in May 1809, during the French occupation of the city. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his symphonic, chamber and choral work.