Haydn meets the market
A composer, an impresario and the rise of the modern concert industry Haydn meets the market A composer, an impresario and the rise of the modern concert industry

When Joseph Haydn first set foot on English soil at five o’clock on the afternoon of 1 January 1791, a new year – and a new chapter in his life – began. His arrival would also help reshape the concert business.

He found an eager audience. Since the mid-eighteenth century, Britain – and London in particular – had been gripped by a passion for music. Music was played everywhere, in every conceivable style, with opportunities to participate in one form or another extending across society.

The music business had also undergone profound changes: in 1765, Johann Christian Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, and his business partner Carl Friedrich Abel launched a subscription concert series that became one of London’s leading musical attractions. What particularly distinguished London’s musical life was the influence of a paying audience. Musical success depended on more than the preferences of a princely patron: listeners helped determine what reached the concert stage and, ultimately, what endured in the repertoire.

Joseph Haydn Superstar!

Even so, Haydn’s arrival was a defining moment in London’s musical life – though his immediate concern was seasickness. “Towards the end, though”, he wrote a week after the Channel crossing, “I became a little frightened, and a little indisposed, too.” His two visits to England, in 1791-92 and 1794-95, would total about three years and contribute to a flourishing period in London’s musical life. Despite his initial apprehension, Haydn would remember his time in England as “the happiest [days] of his life”, according to his early biographer Georg August Griesinger.

Even before his arrival, Haydn had the English public at his feet. Audiences had long known and loved his music, and attempts to bring him to England stretched back several years. Haydn had repeatedly declined, citing his obligations as Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Nikolaus I Esterházy. In January 1785, the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser jokingly proposed kidnapping him: “Would it not be an achievement equal to a pilgrimage, for some aspiring youths to rescue him from his fortune and transplant him to Great Britain, the country for which his music seems to be made?”

Rage for Musick

When Haydn’s long-standing employer died in September 1790, Johann Peter Salomon promptly undertook the ‘pilgrimage’ to entice him to England with an attractive offer. His name was Johann Peter Salomon: a native of Bonn, an accomplished violinist and an experienced concert promoter. He knew the advantages his adopted home of London offered for public concerts: an affluent audience of aristocrats and wealthy citizens willing to pay handsomely in advance for a subscription covering the whole season; skilled professional musicians from whom substantial orchestras could be assembled; an influential press; and enterprising publishers. Since 1775, the Hanover Square Rooms had also provided a large concert hall in which competing series vied for audiences.

This “Rage for Musick” created an appetite for a constant succession of musical sensations. Salomon knew that securing his place in this fiercely competitive market meant attracting big names. With Haydn as his star attraction, he announced a concert season for which he would assume the financial risk. By late December 1790, he was publicising the forthcoming “Salomon’s Concerts”.

Composing against the competition

The consequences followed a commercial logic. Salomon’s concerts had to hold their own against rival series: his financial investment and Haydn’s reputation were at stake. Haydn was therefore composing in a fiercely competitive environment, where success depended on the response of audiences and the press rather than on satisfying a princely employer. Many individuals now had a say, a characteristic feature of “bourgeois” concert culture – not because its audiences consisted exclusively of the middle classes, but because success depended on securing broad approval among paying listeners.

Haydn had a keen instinct for what appealed to an audience. His twelve “London” symphonies and the Sinfonia concertante were written not for his prince but, in a sense, against the competition, and their ambition is audible in the music. The symphonies, Nos. 93 to 104, build on his earlier achievements with expansive forms, dramatic contrasts and a wealth of musical surprises. The famous orchestral chord reinforced by timpani in Symphony No. 94 was part of that calculation: Haydn later told Griesinger that he wanted to surprise the public with something new and avoid being outdone by his former pupil Ignaz Pleyel, who was appearing in a rival concert series. Artistic invention and commercial success spurred each other on.

Haydn’s new freedom

There is a qualification: this new bourgeois public was initially defined by wealth. Anyone who could afford a season ticket at Hanover Square belonged to the upper or at least the upper middle class. Concert attendance distinguished its patrons from ordinary people primarily through purchasing power, rather than musical knowledge. The ideal of the reverent, cultivated concert audience would only take shape from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Haydn’s listeners came to enjoy themselves, to see and be seen. For all its democratic impulses and its subscription system, the celebrity culture of Haydn and Salomon’s London, with its emphasis on making music an “event”, did not yet embrace a mission claimed by much of today’s classical music world: educating its audiences.

For Haydn, this may have represented a far greater change than it did for London’s already flourishing concert business. Neither he nor Salomon invented the model they followed. But they demonstrated that a composer, spurred on by an audience whose approval had to be won, could do more than survive without relying on a princely patron: he could compose at the height of his powers. Perhaps the real point of the story is Griesinger’s observation that Haydn considered these the happiest days of his life. It was the market, rather than the court, that ultimately gave him the freedom for which his music seems to have been made.