Joseph Haydn

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) was the most successful working composer of the 18th century — and the most self-aware about it. He spent 30 years as Kapellmeister for Prince Esterházy, the Hungarian aristocratic family whose vast country estate had its own opera house, two theaters, and an orchestra of 25. He was simultaneously the most famous composer in Europe and essentially a live-in servant: required to write everything the prince wanted, attend every event, and be perpetually available. He composed at a desk in a corner of the palace while the orchestra practiced around him.

The isolation produced something remarkable. With no one to answer to but the prince, and no competition except Mozart, Haydn invented the modern symphony and string quartet. He wrote 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets, and he took both forms seriously enough to develop them structurally — the sonata form that Beethoven inherited, the cyclical variation techniques that show up in late Beethoven, the idea that a symphony should have a unified argument rather than a sequence of movements.

The Esterházy orchestra was disbanded in 1776, forcing Haydn to spend much of the next decade in Vienna and commuting to Eisenstadt. He went to London twice (1791–92 and 1794–95), conducting his own symphonies with an orchestra of 60 and earning more in a single season than he'd made in a decade at Esterházy. Mozart introduced him to Beethoven. Beethoven thought Haydn was insufficiently rigorous as a teacher — and he was right.

StyleClassical period structure at its clearest. Clear phrase lengths, regular cadences, balanced orchestration. But the wit and surprise are all Haydns — sudden pauses, unexpected harmonic detours, the feeling that the music is thinking out loud in real time.

Listen: Symphony No. 94 (Surprise), No. 104 (London). Then the string quartets Op. 76 — any of them, starting with the Emperor Quartet.