The 31st English Haydn Festival is set to take place in the beautiful market town of Bridgnorth. The Festival offers a fascinating array of the music of Joseph Haydn and his contemporaries, performed in St Mary’s Church, built by the great 18th century engineer Thomas Telford in 1792, set next to the spectacular remains of the Castle and overlooking the river Severn. The theme this year demonstrates Haydn’s mastery of producing musical sounds that reflect ‘Images of Life’.

HAYDN: MUSICAL IMAGES OF LIFE

Joseph Haydn was born into the Baroque era, during an age of inventions and new ideas, and through his own creativity became the first great master of the “classical” style. In the late 1750s he began composing symphonies, and by 1761 he had composed a triptych (Morning, Noon, and Evening) solidly in the contemporary mode. Haydn spent much of his career, from 1761 onwards, as a court musician for the wealthy Esterházy family at their remote estate. Until the later part of his life, this isolated him from other composers and trends in music so that he was, as he put it, "forced to become original". As assistant, and later Kapellmeister, his output expanded: he composed over forty symphonies in the 1760s alone. While his fame grew, as his orchestra expanded, his compositions were copied and disseminated, and his music circulated widely, so for much of his career he was the most celebrated composer in Europe. Haydn reached a place in music that set him above all other composers, matching in stature that of the Baroque era's George Frideric Handel. Haydn took existing ideas, and radically altered how they functioned. His contributions to musical form have earned him the titles "father of the symphony" and "father of the string quartet". Joseph’s new ideas formed the basis for music through the “classical” and “romantic” periods, extending onwards to his influence on Prokofiev, who, in 1917, paid tribute by writing his symphony No. 1, in the “classical” style. It would be difficult to overstate Haydn's contribution to musical composition throughout the ages, and therefore to the future of Western music.

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