In 1790, at the age of 58, Haydn (1732-1809) finally got to leave Austria. He went to England, where, at Oxford, he received an honorary degree, his music having preceded him abroad to considerable acclaim. But despite the fact that he was delighted-he wrote to a friend: “How sweet is the taste of liberty!”-he had not been unhappy with his life. Indeed, he seems to have been a man who appreciated whatever came his way. He responded to most events as opportunities, oftentimes opportunities to create.
A glance at his tenure in the employ of the Esterhazy family bears out Haydn’s general ease with his fortune. Prince Paul hired him in 1761 to be vice-kapellmeister; he served, respectfully, with another musician who was not especially cordial to him. But Prince Paul died, and in 1762 Nicholas I, a great music lover, took over. For 28 years Haydn enjoyed a comfortable life, producing music for the court at a remarkable rate—even more than 150 pieces for the Prince’s favorite instrument, the baryton. He was reluctant to ask for time off, and the Prince was reluctant to give him more than a few days off to go to Vienna.
When Nicholas died in 1790, Haydn was able to go abroad because the new Prince, Anton, cared little for music. But Anton’s death brought another music lover to power, Nicholas II, so Haydn stayed close to home again, writing half a dozen masses because the new ruler was interested in sacred music.
So…a prodigious output from a composer who was not, like his contemporaries, Mozart and Beethoven, a prodigy or a restless spirit. He lived a life of equanimity, and a tidy one, too, insofar as he was able to compile, in 1805, a “catalogue of all compositions which I remember offhand to have written from my 18th to 73rd year,” and to enjoy the veneration of a Viennese public that saw him off at a farewell concert a year before his death at 77.
- Concert notes by Paul Lamar