As he wandered irresolutely, uncertain where he could spend the night and where his next meal would come from, he met a certain Joseph Michael Spangler, a singer from St. Michael’s Church, near the Hofburg. Haydn knew Spangler very slightly but he poured his tale of woe into sympathetic ears. Spangler was himself all but a pauper. He lived in a garret with his wife and a nine-months-old baby. Nevertheless he instantly begged his distressed young friend to follow him home. Joseph might sleep in the garret, which was a trifle better than the cold street. About food Spangler could not guarantee, since he and his little family had themselves barely enough to subsist on.
Little by little Haydn set about making connections. He played the violin at dances, he found a few pupils (at absurdly low rates, it is true), he arranged for sundry instruments some trifling compositions by musically illiterate amateurs; or he participated in street serenades, which were vastly popular in Vienna. Such “Nachtmusiken” were more elaborate affairs than the love songs with guitar accompaniment customary in Italy. Here trios, quartets and even ensembles of wind-instruments performed compositions of some length and diversity. Crowds gathered, windows were filled with listeners and the players earned money and applause. Haydn not only played in these street performances, he wrote pieces for use at them. The folk music of Vienna served him well for this purpose, as did the melodies from those border regions where he was born and which were tinged with foreign strains and even exotic influences. In some incredible way he made enough for several months to keep body and soul together. Then a new problem developed. The Spanglers expected a new baby and now the wretched garret was definitely too small to house Haydn any longer. The young musician got around his difficulties temporarily by joining a party of pilgrims traveling to the wonder-working shrine of the Virgin at Mariazell, in one of the loveliest recesses of the Austrian Alps. His voice having returned to him Haydn made an effort to secure a position in the Mariazell church and appealed to the choirmaster. That worthy was not impressed by the newcomer’s appearance and suspected a swindler masquerading as an itinerant musician. Thereupon, the story goes, Haydn resorted to a bold stratagem. He returned to the church, made his way to the choir, suddenly snatched a piece of music from an astonished singer and sang it so beautifully that, as Geiringer relates, “all the choir held their breath to listen”. As a result Haydn was invited to stay a week as the choirmaster’s guest and actually earned a sum of money from the delighted musicians of Mariazell. And luck, as he found, begets luck. For soon afterwards, a certain Viennese tradesman, Anton Buchholz, resolved to help the young man carry on his studies and loaned him “unconditionally” a sum of money which may well have seemed extraordinary at this stage.
Haydn came back from his pilgrimage to Mariazell rich enough to look for a garret of his own. He found one, partitioned off from a larger room, on the sixth floor of the old Michaelerhaus, adjoining St. Michael’s Church, at the south end of the Kohlmarkt. Both house and church are still standing, looking to all intents as they did in 1750. Haydn had plenty of neighbors in his attic. Among them were a cook, a journeyman, a printer, a footman, and a man who tended the fires in the house of some rich man. Haydn had six hard flights to climb, besides which there was no window, no stove, no conveniences of any sort. If he wanted to wash in the morning he had to get water from a nearby spring and by the time he brought it up it had often turned to ice. But he had a slight degree of privacy, enough quiet to study and even to play on a ratty old clavier which, somehow or other, he had managed to drag upstairs. He got hold of a number of theoretical books—Johann Joseph Fux’s “Gradus ad Parnassum,” Mattheson’s “Vollkommener Capellmeister,” Kellner’s “Unterricht im Generalbass”—and figuratively devoured them. And on his clavier he played the first six piano sonatas of Philipp Emanuel Bach. “Innumerable times”, he afterwards related, “I played them for my own delight, especially when I felt oppressed and discouraged by worries; and always I left the instrument gay and in high spirits.”
At that time, however, he established two important ties. One was the famous harlequin, Kurz-Bernardon, who enjoyed an immense popular vogue by his clever clowning and who managed the Kärntnertor Theatre. Kurz-Bernardon had an unusually beautiful wife, whose blandishments justified numerous serenades. On one occasion, when Haydn performed in one of these, the comedian, struck by the music he heard, appeared at his door to ask who had composed it. “I did”, answered Joseph; whereupon the actor bade him “Come upstairs!” Not only was he rewarded with an introduction to the lady but, according to Carpani, Joseph left with an opera libretto in his pocket and a commission to compose it at once. The opera was called “Der krumme Teufel” (“The Limping Devil”). Haydn wrote the music in a couple of days, but as some nobleman imagined the piece a lampoon on himself, the work was forbidden before it was ever presented. One effect in the score the composer admitted had given him more trouble than “writing a fugue with a double subject.” This was a musical description of a storm at sea which the play called for. Now, neither Haydn nor Kurz-Bernardon had ever seen the sea, let alone a storm on it! Carpani’s tale is most amusing: “How can a man describe what he knows nothing about? Bernardon, all agitation, paced up and down, while the composer was seated at the harpsichord. ‘Imagine’, said the actor, ‘a mountain rising and then a valley sinking, and then another mountain and another valley....’ This fine description was of no avail and in vain did the comedian add thunder and lightning. At last, young Haydn, out of patience, extended his hands to the two ends of the harpsichord and bringing them in a glissando rapidly together, he exclaimed: ‘The devil take the tempest!’ ‘That’s it, that’s it’, cried the harlequin, springing upon his neck and almost stifling him.”
The second acquaintance proved vastly more influential than Kurz-Bernardon. In the same house—though considerably further downstairs lived the great Pietro Metastasio, author of innumerable opera librettos and poet laureate to the Habsburgs. Metastasio, who may have heard Haydn’s improvisings from afar, was apparently struck by them. He was interested in the musical training of a friend and suggested the young pianist up in the garret as a suitable teacher. Haydn was not paid for his teaching in cash, but he enjoyed free board and a cultured atmosphere. He became acquainted with Metastasio, whose courtliness and sensibility could hardly have failed to exercise a most advantageous effect upon a youth so predisposed to benefit by genteel contacts. Moreover, Haydn was equally fortunate in meeting his pupil’s singing master, the great voice teacher and famous composer, Niccolo Porpora, who spent some years in Vienna. Haydn acted as accompanist in these lessons and soon begged to be taken into Porpora’s employ as pianist and pupil in singing and composition, in exchange offering to do the now old and testy Italian every kind of menial service. Surely it was worth an occasional cuff and kick, he figured, even seasoned with a few “blockheads”, if the great Porpora would take the trouble to correct his musical exercises, give him an insight into the deep secrets of singing and show him how best to write for the voice. So he cheerfully brushed the old gentleman’s clothes, cleaned his shoes and saw that his wig was on straight. For three months Haydn served his peppery master. And in that time the young man made inestimable progress of all sorts—one of which was to acquire a fluent command of Italian.
* * *
Joseph, for all his ambition and diligence, may yet have tasted a drop of bitterness when he reflected how his brother, Michael, seemed still to outstrip him; and when their mother died in 1754 she must have gone to her grave persuaded that the truer musician of the Haydn family was Michael who, at 17, was writing masses of exceptional quality. Joseph was, indeed, gradually gaining admission into noble circles. The Countess Thun, for one, was so pleased by some of his sonatas that she asked to make his acquaintance. Then, when he confronted her face to face, she decided that this homely and badly-dressed individual, could hardly be anything but an impostor. Little by little the unfavorable impression wore off and in due course the distinguished and extremely musical lady was taking clavier and singing lessons from the man she had mistaken for a hopeless booby. Through her family Haydn met the very musical Karl Joseph von Fürnberg, who had a steward, a pastor and still another friend, all very proficient players. And it was for Fürnberg and his intimates that Haydn wrote his first string quartets. He was as industrious as ever. Carpani said: “At daybreak he took the part of the first violin at the Church of the Fathers of the Order of Mercy; thence he repaired to the chapel of Count Haugwitz, where he played the organ; at a later hour he sang the tenor part at St. Stephen’s; and lastly, having been on foot all day, he passed a part of the night at the harpsichord.” Then, in 1759, Fürnberg brought him to the attention of the Bohemian Count Ferdinand Maximilian von Morzin, who promptly engaged him as music director and Kammerkompositor. Socially, financially and otherwise Haydn had made a great step up the ladder, from which he was destined never again to descend.
One of Haydn’s duties at Count Morzin’s was to accompany the Countess Morzin when she chose to sing, which was frequently. Once, according to Griesinger, the lady was trying over some songs with Haydn when her scarf became loose, exposing her bosom. Instantly, Haydn stopped playing. The lady, irritated, asked the reason. “But, your Highness, who would not lose his head over this?” he replied. This was only one of the occasions he began to develop an eye for feminine beauty. He was now maturing, physically, and his fortunes were improving. This conjunction of circumstances made him conclude that the time was ripe for him to marry. It turned out to be one of the most unfortunate inspirations of his life. Not that Haydn would have failed to make a good husband, but for the reason that it was his fate to pick the worst possible wife.
He gave lessons to the two daughters of a Viennese hairdresser named Keller. It was not long before the composer fell in love with the younger girl, whose name was Therese. But Therese was afflicted with something of a religious mania and, about 1760, she entered a convent, as Sister Josepha. The hair-dresser, though a religious man, wanted to keep the promising young musician in the family, and before long he prevailed upon him to consider his other daughter. The latter, Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia, offered the vilest imaginable combination of qualities. She was hopelessly unmusical, poisonously jealous, bigoted, ill-favored, slatternly, a bad housekeeper and, as such women frequently are, outrageously extravagant.
Haydn got nothing he had bargained for—neither affection, home comforts nor children. So little regard did Maria Anna Aloysia have for her husband’s musical eminence that she cheerfully used his manuscripts for curl papers or else to line pie plates and cake pans. Furthermore, said Haydn, “my wife was unable to bear children and for this reason I was less indifferent to the attractions of other women” (Griesinger). Some have claimed that this Xantippe actually loved her husband, on the grounds that she obstinately refused to give up a certain picture of him. Dr. Geiringer says the composer was so little deluded by this seeming show of affection that he insisted his wife prized the portrait so highly only because a lover of hers had painted it.