MuseData: Franz Joseph Haydn

Fran Josef Haydn was one of the best-loved composers of the eighteenth century. His string quartets, symphonies, concertos, masses, keyboard, and chamber music all became models of their genres. Haydn encapsulated the eighteenth-century ideal of well articulated organization, balance of resources with enough rotation to avoid blandness, and a critical ear. The music was famously good-natured and found an easy reception.

Yet Haydn himself never received the praise for his operas he would have wished. Many were written for performance in Eisenstadt, which his employer's wife was an Italian noblewoman. His operas are more approachable today than they were in his time. Some, on texts by Carlo Goldoni, are comic.

Digitized sources

A recent online exhibit of Haydn resources at Stanford University provides a good overview of the varied genres in which the composer worked. Some of the fragmentation in Haydn's oeuvre owed to the vicissitudes of patronage. Only recently a composer might have been supported throughout his life by a duke or prince. Haydn's fortunes were mixed. A great deal of his music is associated with the Esterhazy family, who had one court in Eisenstadt (on the Austrian side of today's border) and another, grander one some miles east of the today's Hungarian border. Like most Austro-Hungarian and Bohemia nobles of the time, they also had a town house in Vienna.

Encoded editions (CCARH)

Unlike other major composers of his generation, Haydn was not honored with a catalogue or a complete edition of works in the nineteenth century. The reasons for this are many and varied. Haydn's chamber music was printed in short editions by scattered publishers, each with a different system for numbering both works and editions. The Hoboken catalogue does its job well but it often difficult to link up with random editions. (See further remarks under String Quartets.) A comprehensive edition is not nearing completion.