In the autumn of 1772, an orchestra at a remote Hungarian palace played a new symphony for their employer, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy. Near the end, something strange began to happen. One by one, the musicians stopped playing, snuffed out the candles on their stands and walked off. Eventually, only two muted violins remained in the dim room. The composer was Joseph Haydn, and the Haydn Farewell Symphony was the most polite protest letter in music history.

A Wheelwright’s Son

Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in Rohrau, a small Austrian village near the Hungarian border. His father was the village wheelwright and an enthusiastic amateur folk musician. Although nobody in the family could read music, the household sang constantly. Their son showed such promise that, at age six, he went to live with a relative who ran a school and trained him in music.

At eight, Haydn joined the boys’ choir at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He spent nearly a decade there, singing for the imperial court and learning mostly by ear. However, the choir fed its boys poorly. Haydn later recalled that he sang his hardest at events where food was served. When his voice broke in his late teens, the choir let him go. According to one popular story, a prank helped speed his exit, after he snipped off a fellow singer’s pigtail.

The Lean Years

Haydn spent the next several years scraping by in Vienna. He gave music lessons and took whatever freelance playing work he could find. Meanwhile, he taught himself composition from books. In particular, he pored over the keyboard sonatas of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, the second son of Johann Sebastian Bach. Haydn later credited that music with shaping his own.

Gradually, his reputation grew. He worked as an accompanist and valet for the Italian composer Nicola Porpora, who corrected his work in exchange. Then, in 1761, Prince Paul Anton Esterházy hired him as assistant music director. It was the start of a partnership that would last nearly three decades.

Life at Eszterháza

The Esterházy family ranked among the richest in the Habsburg empire, and they took their music seriously. In 1766, Haydn became Kapellmeister, the head of the entire musical operation. By then, Prince Paul Anton had died, and his brother Nikolaus had taken over. Nikolaus loved music so much that he built a lavish summer palace called Eszterháza in the marshy Hungarian countryside. Some visitors compared it to Versailles.

For Haydn, the palace was both a gift and a cage. He had a skilled orchestra at his command and a patron willing to try anything. On the other hand, Eszterháza sat far from Vienna and its musical life. Haydn later told his biographer Georg August Griesinger that his isolation left him free to experiment. “There was no one near to confuse me,” he said, “and so I was forced to become original.”

That originality changed music. Over his long career, Haydn wrote 104 symphonies and nearly 70 string quartets. In both forms, he set the patterns later composers followed, which is why he earned the nicknames “Father of the Symphony” and “Father of the String Quartet.”

Eventually, only two muted violins remained in the dim room.

The Story of the Haydn Farewell Symphony

Haydn told the story behind the symphony to Griesinger many years later. In 1772, Prince Nikolaus kept his court at Eszterháza much longer than usual. Most of the musicians had been forced to leave their wives at home in Eisenstadt, a long journey away. As the weeks dragged on, they grew restless and asked Haydn for help.

Rather than complain directly to the prince, Haydn wrote his request into the music. The symphony opens in F-sharp minor, an unusually stormy key for the time. Its finale starts at a brisk pace, then suddenly stops and gives way to a slow Adagio. As that last section unfolds, the players finish their parts in turn and leave the stage. Finally, two violins play on alone. According to Haydn, the prince understood the hint immediately. The next day, he let the musicians go home.

The trick worked so well because Haydn knew his patron. Nikolaus liked a musical joke, and Haydn delivered the message without anyone having to say a word. Even so, the symphony is more than a gag. Its turbulent opening still sounds startling today, and the fading finale has a strange, quiet beauty of its own.

Fame in London

Despite his isolation, Haydn’s music traveled across Europe through published editions. By the 1780s, he had become one of the most celebrated composers on the continent. He also formed a warm friendship with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was 24 years younger. Mozart dedicated six string quartets to him, and Haydn told Mozart’s father that his son was the greatest composer he knew.

When Prince Nikolaus died in 1790, his successor cut back the orchestra. Haydn finally had his freedom, and the concert promoter Johann Peter Salomon wasted no time. He persuaded Haydn to come to London, where audiences treated him like a star. Across two visits between 1791 and 1795, Haydn wrote his final 12 symphonies. They include the “Surprise” Symphony, whose sudden loud chord was supposedly meant to wake up dozing listeners.

Back in Vienna, Haydn briefly taught a young Ludwig van Beethoven. He also composed his great oratorio The Creation and the anthem “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser.” That melody later became the tune of the German national anthem.

The Composer Who Lost His Head

Haydn died in Vienna on May 31, 1809, at the age of 77. At the time, Napoleon’s army occupied the city. Nevertheless, the French reportedly posted an honor guard outside his house as a mark of respect.

His burial at Vienna’s Hundsturm cemetery should have been the end of the story. Instead, a few days later, a gravedigger secretly removed Haydn’s head. He did it for two enthusiasts of phrenology, a fashionable pseudoscience that claimed the shape of the skull revealed character and talent. One of them, Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, had once worked for the Esterházy family. The other, Johann Nepomuk Peter, ran a prison.

In 1820, Prince Nikolaus II had Haydn’s remains moved to Eisenstadt. When the coffin was opened, the prince discovered the body had no head. Rosenbaum handed over a substitute skull, which was buried with the body, and quietly kept the real one. Afterward, the skull passed from owner to owner and eventually landed with Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music. Finally, on June 5, 1954, it rejoined the rest of Haydn in his tomb at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, 145 years after the theft.

Haydn and La Mirada

The La Mirada Symphony performed selected works by Haydn at The Old Masters Revisited on February 24, 2019. That program also featured Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel. Fortunately, our musicians stayed through the final note, and every candle stayed lit.