So begins one of Haydn's most remarkable letters, written to Maria Anna von Genzinger in February 1790 shortly after his return to Eszterháza from the Christmas season in Vienna. In this letter we have a rare glimpse of Haydn out of livery as “Capellmeister of His Highness the Prince [Esterházy] in whose service I wish to live and die,” as Haydn had styled himself in another well-known letter, his autobiography of 1776.

Eighteenth-century letters are characterized by “ontological ambiguity,” eliding public and private, natural and rhetorical in seductive ways, especially as sources for biography. Haydn's autobiographical letter of 1776 is a case in point. Though ostensibly a private letter addressed from one individual to another, the letter was in fact published in Das gelehrte Oesterreich, a Who's Who of Austria. By writing to a female interlocutor rather than Monsignor Zoller, for whom the letter was ultimately intended, Haydn invoked contemporary conventions of “cor-respondence” (especially with women) as “writing from the heart,” the most sincere and intimate form of communication. Though Haydn apologizes for offering an “artless hotch-potch,” the letter is in fact rhetorically accomplished, as Elaine Sisman has demonstrated, and should give us pause before accepting Haydn's reputation as illiterary.