The attic and the court poet

The passage beside the church leads to a quiet courtyard, and four floors above you, right under the roof, was the room where the seventeen-year-old Joseph Haydn slept.

 

He had just lost his place in the choir of St Stephen's Cathedral because his voice broke, and that left him out on the street. What followed were years of scraping by through teaching, playing at weddings and performing serenades under windows, with this unheated attic as his home. The water in his washbowl froze, he wrote later, and he was happy there, because he could finally do what he wanted.

 

The lovely part is who lived downstairs. Pietro Metastasio, court poet of the empire and the most sought-after librettist of his day, had a spacious apartment in this very building. Through him Haydn found pupils, and through those pupils an Italian master who hired him as both accompanist and servant.

 

That was how a career took shape in those years, not through any school but through the different floors of a single block.

 

We cross the square and follow the Herrengasse until the street bends to the left.