5. Vienna, 1795–1809.

‘Haydn often said that he first became famous in Germany owing to his reputation in England’ (Griesinger). From 1761 to 1790, notwithstanding his fame as a composer and the brilliance of the Esterházy court, he had been ‘stuck in the country’ (letter to Artaria, 17 May 1781); he could never be in Vienna for very long, his music was not in favour at the imperial court and his relationship with the Tonkünstler was strained. In 1795, by contrast, he returned as a culture-hero. Many of his remaining works originated in collaboration with the cultural-political establishment and were staged as ‘events’ of social and ideological as well as musical import. The key figure was Baron van Swieten, the imperial librarian and censor and the resolutely high-minded leader of the Gesellschaft der Associirten, an organization of noble patrons who subsidized large-scale performances of oratorios and the like. In addition, Haydn's position as Esterházy Kapellmeister was far less onerous than before. Nicolaus II largely abandoned Eszterháza in favour of Vienna and Eisenstadt; Haydn's primary duty was to supply a mass each year for performance in conjunction with the celebration of the nameday (8 September) of Maria Hermenegild, Nicolaus's consort; this took place in Eisenstadt, where he usually spent the summer.

As a result, Haydn's compositional orientation changed fundamentally. He composed little instrumental music: no orchestral works save the Trumpet Concerto (1796) and only one piano work (the trio no.30, 1796; nos.27–9 may have been completed then as well); the only genre he actively cultivated was the string quartet, with op.76 (completed 1797, dedicated to Count Joseph Erdődy; published in 1799) and op.77 (1799, dedicated to Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz; published in 1802). Instead, he devoted himself primarily to sacred vocal music: masses for Esterházy and oratorios for Vienna. Both the Missa Sancti Bernardi von Offida (Heiligmesse) and the Missa in tempore belli (Paukenmesse) are dated 1796; the former was apparently composed first and performed in Eisenstadt, while the latter originated in the autumn and was first given at the Piaristenkirche in Vienna on 26 December, then produced in Eisenstadt in 1797. There followed the Missa in angustiis (commonly known as the ‘Nelson Mass’) in 1798, the Theresienmesse in 1799, the Schöpfungsmesse in 1801 and the Harmoniemesse in 1802; thereafter this office was fulfilled by other composers, including Hummel and, in 1807, Beethoven. The absence of new masses in 1797 and 1800 doubtless reflects Haydn’s intense work on The Creation and The Seasons, respectively, during those two years.

Haydn's collaboration with Swieten began in early 1796 with an arrangement of the Seven Last Words as a kind of oratorio: more precisely, a reworking of Friebert's arrangement (see §4). He added chorale-like a cappella intonations preceding most of the ‘words’ and a wind band introduction to the second part, rewrote the choral parts and revised the orchestration; Swieten revised the text and arranged for the première at the Schwarzenberg Palace, on 26–7 March. Haydn produced it often thereafter, usually for the benefit of the Tonkünstler-Societät. In 1797 that organization finally made up for its earlier neglect: on 20 January, a letter signed by Salieri and Paul Wranitzky granted Haydn free admission to all their concerts for life, and on 11 December he was elected a ‘senior assessor’ in perpetuity.

An overtly political composition was the ‘Emperor's Hymn’, Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser, from winter 1796–7. Although one later account has Swieten manipulating things, the immediate impetus came from Count Joseph Franz Saurau, the president of Lower Austria and later Minister of the Interior:

I have often regretted that unlike the English we had no national anthem suited to display before the entire world the devoted attachment of the people to their Landesvater … This seemed especially necessary at a time when the Revolution in France was raging at its strongest … I had a text fashioned by the worthy poet [Lorenz Leopold] Haschka; and to have it set to music, I turned to our immortal compatriot Haydn, who, I felt, was the only man capable of creating something that could be placed at the side of … ‘God Save the King’.

Haydn identified thoroughly with the cultural politics of this project. In late January 1797 the hymn was hastily printed and disseminated, and performed in theatres throughout the Habsburg realm on the emperor's birthday, 12 February. This ‘Volkslied', as he called it, combined hymnlike and popular elements so successfully that it became the anthem of both Austria and Germany. Later in 1797 he employed the melody as the basis for the variation movement in the String Quartet op.76 no.3, and in his last years he played it daily at the piano.

But Haydn and Swieten were already pursuing bigger game. On Haydn's departure from England Salomon had given him a libretto (now lost) entitled The Creation of the World, supposedly written for Handel but never set to music. Back in Vienna, Haydn showed it to Swieten: ‘I recognized at once that such an exalted subject would give Haydn the opportunity I had long desired, to show the whole compass of his profound accomplishments and to express the full power of his inexhaustible genius’; the emphasized phrase implies that Swieten's purpose was not artistic alone, but cultural-political as well. The Associirten guaranteed Haydn 500 ducats and subsidized the copying and performance. Haydn, whose enthusiasm for the project was bound up with his experience of Handel in London, conceived the remarkable notion of disseminating the work in both German and English (it is apparently the first original bilingual composition). Swieten translated the libretto and adapted the English prosody to his German version; he also made suggestions regarding the musical setting, many of which Haydn adopted. He began the composition apparently in autumn 1796 (Albrechtsberger wrote to Beethoven in December that he had heard him ‘improvise’ from it); it was at least half done by summer 1797 and according to F.S. Silverstolpe (see Stellan Mörner, E1969) was completed during the autumn, in Eisenstadt, although the preparation of performance materials (which entailed revisions) lasted up to March 1798.

The Associirten at first produced the work only in private, again at the Schwarzenberg Palace; following a ‘Generalprobe’ on 29 April the official première took place on the 30th, with additional performances on 7 and 10 May. The effect was overwhelming; Silverstolpe reported:

No one, not even Baron van Swieten, had seen the page of the score wherein the Creation of Light is portrayed … Haydn had the expression of someone who is thinking of biting his tongue, either to hide his embarrassment or to conceal a secret. And in that moment when Light broke forth for the first time, one would have said that light-rays darted from the composer's blazing eyes. The enchantment of the electrified Viennese was so profound that the performers could not proceed for some minutes.

The first public performance took place on 19 March 1799, at the Burgtheater, with a complement of about 180 performers (not 400, as has been speculated); a benefit for the Tonkünstler followed on 22 December. The work immediately became a staple especially of charity performances, many conducted by Haydn himself, which brought in tens of thousands of gulden. ‘I know that God has favoured me’, he said to Griesinger, ‘but the world may as well know that I have been no useless member of society, and that one can also do good by means of music’. Beyond this, The Creation ‘made history’ immediately and on a pan-European scale in a way equalled by no other composition, owing to its fortunate combination of sublime subject, cultural-historical ‘moment’ on the cusp between Enlightenment and Romanticism, appeal to both high-minded and ordinary listeners, Haydn's unrivalled stature and the originality and grandeur of his music. His pride in and personal identification with the work, in addition to his usual concern for financial advantage, induced him to publish it himself, selling it ‘by subscription’ all over Europe, with the assistance of colleagues such as Dr Burney; his advertisement (June 1799) reads:

The success which my Oratorio The Creation has been fortunate enough to enjoy … [has] induced me to arrange for its dissemination myself. Thus the work will appear … neatly and correctly engraved and printed on good paper, with German and English texts; and in full score, so that [at least] one work of my composition will be available to the public in its entirety, and the connoisseur will be in a position to see it as a whole and to judge it.

The edition appeared at the end of February 1800 with a list of more than 400 subscribers.

By spring 1799 Haydn and Swieten were planning a second oratorio, The Seasons, with a libretto based on James Thomson's pastoral epic of 1726–8; Haydn composed the music apparently from autumn 1799 to the end of 1800. He suffered a serious illness in winter 1800–01, as the work neared completion, during which he again identified with his own oratorio. His pupil Sigismund Ritter von Neukomm reported:

Speaking of the penultimate aria, ‘Behold, O weak and foolish man, Behold the picture of thy life’ … he said: ‘This aria refers to me!’ And in this wonderful masterpiece he really did speak entirely from his inmost soul, so much so that he became seriously ill while composing it, and … the Lord … allowed him to see ‘his life's image and his open grave’.

The private première at the Schwarzenberg Palace took place on 24 April 1801, the first public production on 19 May. Although the initial reception of The Seasons was favourable – Haydn wrote to Clementi that it had enjoyed ‘unanimous approval’ and that ‘many prefer it to The Creation, because of its greater variety’ – critical opinion soon became mixed, owing in part to its perceived ‘lower’ subject, in part to a growing aesthetic resistance to its many pictorialisms. Haydn himself contributed to both strands of criticism: he supposedly said to Francis II, ‘In The Creation angels speak and tell of God, but in The Seasons only Simon speaks’ (Dies); and he indiscreetly criticized Swieten's croaking frogs (‘Frenchified trash’) and the absurdity of a choral hymn to toil (Fleiss). Nonetheless he maintained that it would join The Creation in assuring his lasting fame. For the publication he took the path of lesser resistance, selling the rights to Breitkopf & Härtel.

Other than masses, Haydn's only important liturgical work from this period is the Te Deum ‘for the Empress’ (hXXIIIc:2), probably composed in 1800 and apparently first given in September in Eisenstadt, perhaps in conjunction with the visit there of Lord Nelson (whence the nickname ‘Nelson Mass’ for the Missa in angustiis). A very different kind of vocal composition is represented by the 13 partsongs (hXXV), composed in the years 1796–9. A number of lieder and canons date from the same years; the latter were also ‘private’ works, the autographs of which Haydn framed and mounted on the walls of his house. A chapter in its own right is the hundreds of arrangements of British folksongs he sold to the publisher George Thomson in Edinburgh, not all from his own pen; as in so many other respects, Beethoven followed him in this lucrative commission.

In 1799 Haydn began to complain of physical and mental weakness. He wrote to Härtel in June:

Every day the world compliments me on the fire of my recent works, but no one will believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce them. Some days my enfeebled memory and the unstrung state of my nerves crush me to the earth to such an extent that I fall prey to the worst sort of depression, and am quite incapable of finding even a single idea for many days thereafter; until at last Providence revives me, and I can again sit down at the pianoforte and begin to scratch away.

Indeed his productivity began to decline about this time, although his music continued to gain in ‘fire’ and cogency as long as he continued to compose. His last major completed work was the Harmoniemesse given in September 1802; there followed only (perhaps) the ‘Hungarian National March’ (hVIII:4; referred to in a letter of November) and the unfinished String Quartet op.103 of 1802–3, originally intended to go with op.77 to complete an opus of three (published 1806, dedicated to Count Moritz von Fries). He deeply regretted his loss of the stamina and concentration necessary for composition. On 6 December 1802 he thanked Pleyel for the receipt of the latter's edition of his complete string quartets, adding: ‘I only wish that I could have back 10 years of my advanced age, so that I could provide you with something new of my composition – perhaps – despite everything – it can still happen'; a draft or alternative version (printed by Griesinger) of the letter to Härtel quoted above includes the passage: ‘It is almost as if with the decline in my mental powers, my desire and compulsion to work increase. O God! how much remains to be done in this glorious art, even by such a man as I have been!’ One inevitably thinks of Beethoven, who would soon prove him right: their relationship was difficult around the years 1798–1803, owing to Beethoven's ‘anxiety of influence’ vis-à-vis Haydn, the crisis of his deafness, Haydn's increasing frailty and their mutual ambivalence regarding Beethoven's eventual assumption of the mantle of greatest living composer.

In the same letter Haydn also complained about the press of business (he was then arranging the self-publication of The Creation). Härtel added to that burden by initiating negotiations towards the publication of the so-called Oeuvres complettes (1800–06). This was not a complete edition but comprised salable works for or with piano, analogous to an edition of Mozart already under way. In this connection Härtel sent Haydn a list of compositions attributed to him, asking him to pronounce on their authorship; Haydn (rather casually) did so. This was the first of several initiatives that led to Haydn's and Elssler's production in 1805 of the comprehensive ‘Catalogue of all those compositions that I approximately recall having composed from my 18th to my 73rd year’, or ‘Haydn-Verzeichnis’.

In 1800 Haydn's wife died, leaving much of her modest estate to him. No longer interested in marriage, he signed a declaration in which he promised to marry Luigia Polzelli or no-one, as well as to bequeath her 300 gulden a year (a sum he later reduced to 150). In May–June 1801 he drew up his will; the largest bequests were to his two brothers, but he also included among the beneficiaries many other relatives, former benefactors (and perhaps lovers), servants, religious and charitable institutions. From 1800 on he received a steady stream of distinguished visitors, honours and medals of which a gold medal from and honorary citizenship of the City of Vienna, in recognition of his charitable performances, meant the most to him. He also continued to talk shop with younger musicians; in addition to Pleyel and Beethoven, those who benefited included Anton Wranitzky, Neukomm, Reicha, Eybler, Weigl, Seyfried, Hummel, Diabelli, Kalkbrenner and Weber.

Haydn's last public musical function was on 26 December 1803, when he conducted the Seven Last Words. Thereafter he mainly stayed at home in Gumpendorf; after 1805 he wrote no letters in his own hand. His youngest brother Johann died in Eisenstadt in that year, and Michael (who in 1801–2 had declined an invitation to succeed him as Esterházy Kapellmeister) followed in 1806. His last public appearance of any kind was on 27 March 1808, at a gala performance of The Creation in honour of his 76th birthday, in the Great Hall of the University. He signed his last will on 7 February 1809, altered primarily to reflect the many deaths that had taken place in the meantime. It disbursed about 24,000 gulden; his estate totalled about 55,000 gulden. During the spring he progressively weakened and had to be cared for by Elssler and other servants. His final decline was hastened by the French bombardment of Vienna on 11–12 May; Napoleon ordered that a guard of honour be stationed at his house, and his last known visitor was a French officer who paid his respects and sang an aria from The Creation. After playing the ‘Emperor's Hymn’ on 26 May ‘with such expression and taste that our good Papa was astonished about it himself … and was very pleased’ (Elssler), he had to be assisted to bed; he did not rise again. He died at about 20 minutes before 1 a.m. on 31 May; owing to the war only a simple burial was possible, the following afternoon. On 15 June a solemn memorial service was held in the Schottenkirche, with a performance of Mozart's Requiem. His remains are now interred in the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt.

Haydn, Joseph