Autobiographical sketch (Haydn)

The Autobiographical sketch of Joseph Haydn is the only autobiographical document that was ever prepared by this composer. Haydn wrote the sketch, which is about two pages long, when he was 44. He was answering a request, relayed to him by a chain of two mutual acquaintances, from Ignaz de Luca, who was preparing a volume of brief biographies of Austrian luminaries, Das gelehrte Oesterreich. The sketch was published in 1778, in Volume 1, Part 3 of that work.

Content

The sketch begins with a brief account of the first 29 years of Haydn's life. He mentions his early home life in Rohrau, his early education in Hainburg, his subsequent career as a choirboy in Vienna, his struggles during eight years of freelance work and his appointments as Kapellmeister, first with Count Morzin and then with the hugely wealthy Esterházy family.
Having related his rise to career success, Haydn says nothing at all of the years 1761 to 1776 that spent working in the Esterházy court, but he concludes his narrative with a declaration of loyalty to his employer:
Haydn held to his word: despite considerable tedium and loneliness when his employer required him to live in isolated Esterháza, he remained in official service to Prince Esterházy and his heirs until his death, in 1809.
The sketch goes on to list what Haydn regarded as his most important works up to that time: the operas Le pescatrici, L'incontro improvviso, and L'infedelta delusa; his oratorio Il Ritorno di Tobia and his Stabat Mater. All of them are vocal music; Haydn omits the pre-1776 instrumental works that arguably have received greater critical acclaim in modern times, such as the "Farewell" Symphony or the string quartets, Opus 20. Musicologist David Schroeder notes that "in the eighteenth century vocal music was considered pre-eminent. With opinion such as this as the common currency, it should not surprise us that Haydn... listed only vocal works among those he considered his finest." Jones makes the same point and goes on to say, "It was to take a further ten years or so for Haydn even to begin to realize that he had set a historical process in motion as a pre-eminent composer of instrumental music."
Haydn also offers an assessment of his then-current reputation as a composer, expressing appreciation for the praise and support of Johann Adolph Hasse, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Gottfried van Swieten as well as considerable resentment directed at various critics in Berlin:
The sketch concludes thus:

As rhetoric

The musicologist Elaine Sisman has offered a novel interpretation of the sketch as having been written, whether consciously or not, according to principles of rhetoric laid down in the Middle Ages. She notes that Haydn studied Latin as a schoolboy and that traditional Latin instruction would likely have included the principles of rhetoric. Sisman annotates the sections of Haydn's original letter as follows:

Versions

The document Haydn wrote was edited by the staff of Das gelehrte Oesterreich—in Jones's words -- "to make it suitable for a dictionary, preserving the factual content but also devitalising the human being who had supplied it." Modern reference sources tend to quote Haydn's own words, not the published version.