Joseph Haydn

Choirboy at St Stephen's in Vienna until his voice broke, Haydn spent the years that followed teaching, playing and arranging professionally, working through counterpoint treatises on his own and picking up what he could of vocal writing from Nicola Porpora. His Esterházy appointment in 1761 led to nearly three decades at Eisenstadt and Eszterháza, the court orchestra, music written to order for court occasions, and an opera house to run. He thought the isolation had served him — cut off from the world, he said, he was forced to become original — and while he worked in a Hungarian marshland his printed music travelled across Europe without him. His lifetime output includes more than a hundred symphonies and some sixty-eight quartets. Released from full-time service after 1790, he made two long visits to London and wrote the twelve symphonies that carry the city's name. The Creation and The Seasons, both from his sixties, belong to his late works. He taught Beethoven, outlived Mozart — who had dedicated six quartets to him — and died in Vienna in 1809. The London journeys were made at the invitation of the violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, in 1791 and 1792 and again in 1794 and 1795, and Oxford made him an honorary doctor.