Music's Greatest Innovator by David Hurwitz, LISTEN Magazine
On the occasion of his seventy-fourth birthday in 1806, Joseph Haydn reportedly remarked: “My calling has no limits; what may yet be done in music is far greater than what has already been done.” It's a fitting comment from music's greatest innovator. Haydn was born in 1732, the son of a wheelwright living on the Austro-Hungarian border, and he died in Vienna in 1809. At the time of his death he was Europe;s most beloved composer. He had been Mozart's best friend and Beethoven's teacher. Bach and Handel were still alive when Haydn began writing music, but the Baroque period was waning. A more dynamic style based on the lively and tuneful musical language of Italian comic opera would soon characterize what we now call the Classical period, in a true musical revolution led by Haydn himself. At the end of his life Romanticism was in the air, yet Haydn was still, amazingly, at the forefront of the latest musical developments.
In his instrumental works Haydn enlarged the expressive scope of music to include not just happiness and sadness in varying degrees, but also humor, irony, desolation, ambivalence — the entire gamut of emotional expression. His “Farewell” Symphony (No. 45) remains one of the most turbulent, disturbing and ultimately wistful pieces in the form. It is the only symphony in the unusual key of F-sharp minor written in the entire eighteenth century, and the only orchestral work of note in that key written before the twentieth century. I say this not to make a tedious academic point, but to suggest that Haydn's method for expanding music's range of emotion and contrast occurred in tandem with a new approach to form, instrumental color and texture. His music isn't necessarily longer than a lot of previous Baroque music, but it's incomparably more diverse, dramatic and action-packed.
While Haydn wrote a great deal of superb vocal music — his late oratorios The Creation and The Seasons remain perennial favorites — his fame rests primarily on his instrumental music, as “the father of the symphony” and the “inventor” of the string quartet. The fact is that both of these genres existed before Haydn came along, but until he got his hands on them, they didn’t matter. After Haydn, the symphony became a feature concert attraction, a showpiece for the entire orchestra, and the string quartet found its niche as the vehicle for the most profound and intimate expression yet achieved in instrumental music. Absent Haydn's achievement, the entire subsequent history of orchestral and chamber music would have been very different. He also left us similarly extraordinary, if less frequently cited, bodies of work in two other fields: piano solo (sonatas and variations) and piano trios.
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