Joseph Haydn

Haydn came from a wheelwright's family in rural Austria and sang as a choirboy at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna before scraping by as a freelance musician. His break came when the aristocratic Esterházy family hired him as music director at their estate, Eszterháza, where he spent most of his working life conducting his own orchestra in near-total geographic isolation. That remoteness, he said, forced him to become original - and the music he wrote there, circulated in print across Europe, made him the continent's most celebrated composer by the time his patron died in 1790. Freed to travel, he performed to packed houses in London and Vienna, then capped his career with the oratorios The Creation and The Seasons before declining health ended his output in 1803. He died in Vienna in 1809 at seventy-seven, having taught Beethoven and mentored Mozart along the way.