The Lord of the Village

This was the city palace of the Harrach family, and in 1732, on their estate in a village a couple of hours' ride to the east of here, a wheelwright's son came into the world.

 

His father couldn't read a single note and played the harp from memory. A relative who worked as a schoolmaster took the boy in when he was six to teach him singing and the violin, and without that stroke of chance Joseph Haydn would have ended up making wagons.

 

The relationship between families like this and their musicians shaped how music got made, because Haydn spent most of his life in livery with the Esterházys, bound to compose whatever his prince wanted and forbidden from handing his work to anyone else.

 

It wasn't until he was around sixty that he travelled to London, where he discovered that concerts for a paying audience earned him more in two seasons than thirty years of court service ever had.

 

We follow the Schottengasse uphill to the raised terrace with its houses.