Soon, in order to be alone, and to work in peace, he took a room in another attic, and bade good-bye to his very good friends. His room was cold in winter and let in the rains and snows, but it did have a spinet on which Haydn was allowed to play, and fortunately Metastasio the librettist lived in this house. Here Haydn studied the works of Karl Philip Emanuel Bach, Fuchs’ Gradus ad Parnassum (Steps to Parnassus, Parnassus meaning the mountain upon which the Greek Muses lived and so comes to mean the home of learning). He practised too, during this time, on any instrument he could find and learned so much that he became the founder of the modern orchestra.
When Metastasio discovered that there was a hard working musician in his house he met him and then introduced him to Porpora the greatest Italian singing teacher in Vienna. Not long after meeting him, Porpora entrusted to his care Marianne Van Martines, his ten year old pupil, the future musical celebrity. At seventeen Marianne wrote a mass which was used at St. Michael’s Church and she became the favorite singer and player of Empress Maria Theresa. You see women even in those days composed and performed!
So began Haydn’s successes. Porpora engaged him as accompanist, and treated him half way between a valet and a musician, but Haydn’s sweet nature carried him through all unpleasantnesses and he was so anxious to learn and to earn his six ducats that he did not care if he did have to eat with the servants.
In 1751–2, he wrote his first mass, his first string quartet, and his first comic opera for Kurz, The Crooked Devil, the music of which has been lost. Soon after he met Gluck at the concerts of the Prince of Hildburghausen, where Haydn acted as accompanist; at the prince’s house too, he met Ditter von Dittersdorf, the violinist. The princes and nobles of these days did much for music for it was usually at their homes and under their guidance that the composers received opportunities to work.
Nevertheless, we see Haydn during these days slaving to make his daily bread, but with the money he made he bought books on music theory and held himself sternly down to hard work, morning, noon, and night.
In 1755 Baron von Fürnburg, a music amateur, who gave concerts at his home, asked him to compose for him, and he wrote eighteen quartets, six scherzandi for wind instruments (the ancestors of his own symphonies), four string quartets, to be played by the village priest, himself, the steward, and the ’cellist Albrechtsberger.
All these pieces show how much happier he was since becoming part of the Baron’s staff, for they are merry and jolly, and filled with that humor which Haydn was the first to put into music.
Here, too, he met the cultivated Countess Thun, who was so interested in his struggle for success, and in the youth himself that she became his pupil. From this time on he began to earn more and to live more comfortably.
Everything seemed to be clearing up for him now. The Countess introduced him to Count Morzin, a Bohemian nobleman of great wealth, and in 1759 he became his musical director. His orchestra had eighteen members and here he wrote his first Symphony (the first of one hundred and twenty-five!)
All this time he kept up his teaching and very soon married the daughter of a wig-maker, who did not understand him and with whom he was very unhappy, but he lived with her like the good man he was until within a few years of his death.