3 Review(s)

Admired and studied by both Mozart and Beethoven, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) imbued his life-enhancing compositions with wit, elegance and deep emotion. His output was prolific and included symphonies (most notably those written during his two visits to London, where he received a rapturous welcome), string quartets, chamber music, piano sonatas and choral works. This concise biography, first published in 1884, forms part of music critic Francis Hueffer's Great Musicians series, which was intended to provide succinct accounts of popular composers for the general reader. The author, Pauline D. Townsend, drew much of her material for the book from the painstaking research on Haydn published by the German musicologist Carl Ferdinand Pohl, archivist and librarian of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. A list of Haydn's works forms an appendix, based on the information in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians.