Haydn's personality

Until recently, it might have seemed odd to suggest that Haydn possessed anything resembling a coherent aesthetics. Such a notion is incompatible with the traditional image of “Papa Haydn”: pious, good-humored, concerned for the welfare of others, proud of his students, regular in habits, conservative; but also naive and unreflective. However, this image is one-sided; it reflects the elderly and increasingly frail man encountered by his first biographers, Georg August Griesinger and Albert Christoph Dies. For a more accurate sense of Haydn's personality, we must turn to his correspondence and other primary sources, insofar as possible from different periods of his life. These are more revealing than has usually been assumed, and convey a tangible sense of the man Haydn: the vigorous and productive composer, performer, Kapellmeister, impresario, businessman, conqueror of London, friend, husband, and lover. Once he is understood as a real person actively engaged in his world, it may seem plausible to inquire into his aesthetic beliefs.

Even the sobriquet “Papa” can be understood in more appropriate ways: as the “father of the symphony,” obviously, but also in the sense of “patriarch,” as implied by the resolution making him a life member of the Vienna Tonkünstler-Sozietät in 1797 “by virtue of his extraordinary merit as the father and reformer of the noble art of music.” Haydn's public career largely exemplified the Enlightenment ideal of the honnête homme: the man whose good character and worldly success enable and justify each other; he has been described as the first artist of any kind to achieve European-wide celebrity in his own lifetime.