Franz Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn wrote 106 symphonies and effectively invented the string quartet. Born in Rohrau in Austria in 1732, the son of a wheelwright and a cook, he was sent away at six to a relative who taught him music and neglected to feed him, and at eight became a chorister at St Stephen's in Vienna, where he was dismissed at seventeen when his voice broke. He spent a decade in poverty, teaching, playing in the street and accompanying, and taught himself composition from Fux and C. P. E. Bach. In 1761 he entered the service of the Esterházy princes and stayed nearly thirty years, mostly at a remote palace in the Hungarian marshes. He wore livery, was contractually a servant, and had an orchestra to experiment with. He wrote later that he was cut off from the world and so was forced to become original. He established the four-movement symphony and the string quartet as forms, and worked out sonata form's dramatic possibilities — the Farewell Symphony, in which players leave one by one, was a hint to the prince that the musicians wanted to go home, and it worked. He was funny in a way almost no other composer is: the Surprise Symphony's chord, the Joke Quartet's false endings. He was a friend of Mozart, who called him father, and taught Beethoven, who found him insufficiently attentive. He was freed by the prince's death, and his two London visits in the 1790s made him famous and rich, producing the last twelve symphonies. He wrote The Creation in his sixties and died in 1809 as Napoleon shelled Vienna.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history