Adventures with Beethoven

Scene One

Beethoven’s Contemporaries

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Franz Joseph Haydn (Hi-den) was born in 1732 in a small village in Austria near the border with Hungary. He showed musical ability at a young age and his parents quickly realized that he would never realize his full potential if he stayed at home. When he was six, Haydn was sent to live with relatives where he could receive a better education; he never lived with his parents again. At nine, Haydn gained the attention of the choir master at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He became a choir boy there and remained at the cathedral for nine years until he was turned out of the program due to disciplinary issues. He worked for a while on his own, teaching himself theory and composition by studying the works of Johann Joseph Fux and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. Eventually Haydn began to get jobs at court, leading to his job as music director for the Esterházy family, nobility who owned a large estate near the Hungarian border. Haydn’s career was spent serving the family as composer, conductor, and musical instructor. The Esterházy estate was remote, which isolated Haydn from society at large. While this inhibited his ability to hear new music by other composers, it allowed Haydn a huge amount of creative freedom since he was free to compose what he liked, without outside influences. Even though Haydn lived away from Vienna, his music was widely disseminated there and throughout the rest of Europe. He was, at the time, the most celebrated composer on the continent and was influential in the modern development of the symphony and string quartet, earning the nickname “Papa Haydn”, as the father of the forms. Haydn’s influence was widespread, he was a friend and mentor to Mozart and a teacher for Beethoven. His works cemented standard musical forms and coalesced the Classical style.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is one of the most widely known and influential classical musicians. Mozart was born in Salzburg, Austria in 1756 and showed prodigious musical ability at an early age. A composer and performer from the age of five, Mozart, along with his father and sister, musicians in their own right, toured the royal courts of Europe. By the age of seventeen, Mozart had been given a position at court in Salzburg. However, interested in better opportunities, he travelled and eventually settled in Vienna. While in Vienna, he gained fame and wrote some of his best-known pieces, for both the concert hall and the opera stage. Although famous, his works rarely transferred into fortune and money was a constant worry. In the last years of his life, Mozart composed many of his most notable pieces. In his short life, he composed over 600 works. He wrote symphonies, concertos, operas, and incidental music, an amazingly broad repertoire. Mozart is one of the most influential composers in western music. Beethoven began his compositional career in Mozart’s shadow. Haydn, a friend and mentor of Mozart, wrote that “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years.”

For a lengthier discussion of Haydn and Mozart, check out Scene Two!