Today I want to explore popular music in Jane Austen’s time, specifically Franz Haydn, the composer often referred to as “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet”.

He was born in 1732 to a wheelright and a former palace cook. Although neither could read music, his father was an enthusiastic street musician who taught himself to play the harp. In later years Haydn said his family was extremely musical and frequently sang together and with their friends and neighbors.

Poverty, as well as his budding musical ability, sent him at the age of six to live with Johann Matthias Frankh, a schoolmaster and choirmaster in Hainburg to train as a musician. He never lived with his family again.

He was frequently hungry through these years, and humiliated by the filthy state of his clothing. It seems Mr. Frankh was not the most caring individual, although he did teach the boy the harpsichord and violin. Young Mr. Haydn also sang alto in the church choir. His musical talent was noticed by the director of music for St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, where he spent nine years as a chorister.

The twists and turns of life saw him spending time as a music teacher, a street serenader, and eventually, as valet–accompanist for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora. From him, Haydn later said he learned the “true fundamentals of composition”.

Haydn was, for the most part, self-taught. While a chorister, he received no systematic training in music theory and composition. As a remedy, he worked his way through the counterpoint exercises in the text Gradus ad Parnassum by Johann Joseph Fux and carefully studied the work of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whom he later acknowledged as an important influence. Of CPE Bach’s first six keyboard sonatas he said, “I did not leave my clavier till I played them through, and whoever knows me thoroughly must discover that I owe a great deal to Emanuel Bach, that I understood him and have studied him with diligence.”

Haydn spent much of his career as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family at their Eszterháza Castle. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, “forced to become original”. Yet his music circulated widely, and for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe.

He was a friend and mentor of Mozart, tutored Beethoven, and was the elder brother of Michael Haydn.

Haydn spent the early part of the 1790’s in England, where he was enormously popular, his music having dominated London’s concert scene since the death of Johann Christian Bach in 1782. It was there that, for the first time in his life, he became financially secure. His concerts were widely attended and lauded, which increased his fame and his wealth.

He returned to Vienna in 1795 and a home purchased and renovated with the profits from his time in England. He composed two great oratorios, “The Creation”(1798), and “The Seasons” (1801).

By late 1803, his health declined to the point where he could no longer physically compose, suffering from weakness, dizziness, inability to concentrate and painfully swollen legs.

His biographer Dies reported Haydn saying in 1806:

“I must have something to do—usually musical ideas are pursuing me, to the point of torture, I cannot escape them, they stand like walls before me. If it’s an allegro that pursues me, my pulse keeps beating faster, I can get no sleep. If it’s an adagio, then I notice my pulse beating slowly. My imagination plays on me as if I were a clavier.” Haydn smiled, the blood rushed to his face, and he said “I am really just a living clavier.”

He died in his sleep May 31, 1809 and was interred in a local cemetery, which is another story in itself, involving the theft of his head, among other things.

I love the variety of compositions the man produced. The following is a short Trumpet Concerto that I think is light and cheerful. Take the time to listen, then go to YouTube and listen to more of his work. You will not be disappointed.

To prove I’m not too highbrow, the first time I saw the drummer in this orchestra, I thought I was watching Al Bundy from Married…With Children.