Becoming Original: Haydn and the Cult of Genius

Abstract

During his last decade, Haydn received a series of visits at his lodgings in Vienna from Georg August Griesinger, a music-loving functionary in the Elector of Saxony's legation. Griesinger's main business with the composer was to represent the interests of the Leipzig publishing firm of Breitkopf und Hartel.1 But without Haydn's knowledge, immediately after his visits Griesinger began writing down Haydn's recollections of his life and career. By the time of Haydn's death in May 1809, Griesinger had woven these jottings into a series of the first installment of which appeared that July in Breitkopf und Hirtel's house organ, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Together with the biographical account of Haydn published by the landscape painter Albert Christoph Dies in 1810, also based on an extended series of visits with the composer, Griesinger's Biographische Notizen represent one of the most important and trustworthy sources of information on Haydn's life and character. In one much-discussed passage in Griesinger's notices, Haydn recalled how auspicious the circumstances of his employment at the court of Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy had been for the cultivation of his talents. Prince Nikolaus had hired Haydn in 1761 to serve as vice chapelmaster and understudy to the aging Gregor Werner, whom Haydn duly succeeded as chapelmaster on Werner's death in 1766, about the time the court moved to the magnificent new palace Nikolaus had built at Eszterhaza. During the first fifteen of Haydn's thirty years in the service of the court, his creative duties involved him intensely with the instrumental genres on which his subsequent fame came to rest-the symphony, keyboard sonata, and string quartet. Presumably Haydn had in mind the remarkable string of compositions he had created in these genres when he capped his comments to Griesinger on these years with the memorable apothegm: Und so musste ich original werden. A characteristically straightforward remark, so it would seem, and one easily reconciled with both the circumstances in which he worked at Eszterhaza and the fruits of his labors. And yet even today one detects a certain amount of scholarly disagreement over how