Haydn, JOSEPH, a German composer, was born at the village of Rohran, on the confines of Hungary and Austria, 1st April 1732. He was the son of a poor wheelwright; and manifesting great musical talent, he was received at the age of eight into the choir of the cathedral of St Stephen's, at Vienna. Here he remained till his eighteenth year, acquiring a practical rather than a theoretical knowledge of his art, by singing the music of the best Italian and German religious composers. In that year, however, his voice broke, and he lost his place as a chorister. He wandered about the streets of Vienna, and earned a precarious livelihood by playing the violin in serenading parties and at dances. A charitable singer offered him a lodging, which for a short while he availed himself of. Ultimately, by the exercise of great thrift, he was enabled to hire an attic and a piano; then he devoted all his leisure time to study. He bought by accident the six sonatas of C. P. E. Bach at a cheap bookstall, and the indefatigable study of them revealed to him the possibility of new form in music—form which should be the reaction against the old contrapuntal style of J. S. Bach and Handel, and which it became thenceforward his mission to inaugurate. The main essentials of this reaction were the abandonment of the fugue form as the basis of musical composition, and the substitution in its room of two free melodies as themes for treatment, not necessarily constructed in double counterpoint to one another. During this period of assiduous study Haydn still kept up his connection with the serenaders and dance-players of Vienna, for whom he often now wrote the music. One evening as he was playing a serenade of his composition, along with other instrumentalists, under the window of Frau Kurz, the wife of the theatrical manager of that name, her husband was very much struck by the music, and calling Haydn up, commissioned him to write an opera as melodious as the serenade. This was the beginning of his fortunes. His opera made him acquainted with the poet Metastasio, at that time a tutor in Vienna, by whom he was introduced to the composer Porpora, and enabled to remedy the deficiencies of an education principally obtained hitherto through private study.
In the later part of 1750 he composed his first quartet for stringed instruments. In 1759 Count Morzin engaged him as capellmeister. For Count Morzin's orchestra Haydn wrote his First Symphony in D. The once obscure musician was now a popular music-master in Vienna. He married at this time Maria Anna Keller, the daughter of a wig-maker, who had been kind to him in his days of pennury. This union did not prove a happy one. The circumstances of it were singular; he had designed to marry the younger sister, but she had determined to retire into a convent, and Haydn was persuaded by the father to take the elder one instead, for whom he had always entertained an objection. 'It is nothing to her,' said Haydn near the close of his life, 'whether her husband be a cobbler or an artist.' Her sole ambition was to squander Haydn's earnings. In 1760 Prince Esterhazy offered him the post of vice-capellmeister. His duties in this new situation were to conduct two operas a week, for which he sometimes had to compose the music, to conduct and compose for an orchestral concert every afternoon, to have a fresh composition for the prince's 'reception' every morning, besides supplying the music for incidental water-parties, dances, &c. Many of Haydn's most beautiful symphonies were written here, and the greater number of his magnificent quartets. The excessive demands on his invention do not seem to have impaired its fertility in the slightest. After the death of Prince Esterhazy in 1790 Haydn accompanied Salomon the violinist to England, where, in 1791-92, he produced six of his Twelve Grand Symphonies. His reception was brilliant in the highest degree. On his return to Vienna he had Beethoven for a pupil. In 1794 he made a second engagement with Salomon for England, and during this period brought out the remaining six symphonies. In England he first obtained that recognition which afterwards fell to his share in his own country. On his return to Austria he purchased a small house with a garden in one of the suburbs of Vienna. Here he composed his oratorios the Creation and the Seasons. The former work, the harmonies of which are pervaded with the fire of youth, was written in his sixty-fifth year; the Seasons (completed in eleven months) was almost his last work. He died at Vienna, 31st May 1809.
In person Haydn was below the middle stature. His features were regular, and the general cast of his countenance a stern one. He had the peculiarity of never laughing aloud. He was very neat and methodical in his habits—composing a certain number of hours daily, and wearing full court dress when so engaged. His musical style is marked by the predominance of melody—melody in its tenderness, melody in its power, melody incessant. His works have therefore more spontaneity and charm than the elder school of Bach and Handel, but less massiveness, sublimity, and majesty. He clearly realised and pursued his aim, laying down the principle that 'melody is the charm of music, and the invention of a fine air is a work of genius.' He is the father of the symphony, and conducted more than any other man to that separation of instrumental music from vocal, unknown or little practised before his day, which has given an independent life to instrumental music up to the present time.
Haydn's works are exceedingly numerous, comprising 125 symphonies, 83 quartets, 38 trios, 14 operas, 8 oratorios, 175 pieces for the baritone, 24 concertos for different instruments, 14 masses, 1 Stabat Mater, 10 smaller church pieces, 44 sonatas for the pianoforte, with and without accompaniments; 12 German and Italian songs, 39 canzonets, 13 hymns in three and four parts, the harmony and accompaniment to 364 old Scottish songs, besides a prodigious number of divertissements and pieces for various instruments.
Compare Carpani's Le Haydine (2d ed. Padua, 1823); Haydn's autobiographical sketch, first published in the Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst (1836); Karajan's Joseph Haydn in London (Vienna, 1861); Pohl, Joseph Haydn (3 vols. 1875-90); Miss Townsend's Life of Haydn (London, 1884).