Joseph Haydn never lived in Salzburg. But the city's greatest composer dedicated six string quartets to him, and Haydn called Mozart "the greatest composer known to me," a verdict that still stands. The friendship between these two men is one of the deepest creative bonds in musical history, and it runs directly through the world that Salzburg produced.
The Story
Haydn and Mozart met in Vienna in the early 1780s and formed one of the most extraordinary friendships in the history of music. Haydn was a generation older, already famous as the composer who had defined the symphony and the string quartet as forms. Mozart was in his late twenties, at the height of his powers and already surpassing everything around him. The two men played chamber music together, argued about music, and held each other in unreserved esteem.
In 1785, Mozart completed six string quartets that he had been working on for three years. He dedicated them to Haydn, calling them in his dedication letter his "six sons," acknowledging the older man as a father of the form and the friend whose standards had set the target. Haydn received the dedication and heard the works. His response to Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father, was direct and absolute: "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name."
Haydn's Salzburg connection also runs through his brother Michael Haydn, who spent the bulk of his career in the city as court musician and Konzertmeister. Michael Haydn was Salzburg's composer in residence in a way his brother never was, and the two brothers were close. Joseph was aware of the city's musical world through Michael's decades of work there.
Haydn's own career was centred on the Esterhazy court at Eisenstadt, three decades of service that kept him physically remote from Salzburg but shaped by the same Central European musical culture. The works he produced there, the later symphonies, the string quartets from Op. 33 onward, and the great oratorios The Creation and The Seasons, are the structural foundation that Mozart studied and transformed. The Salzburg Festival performs Haydn's work alongside Mozart's as part of the same Classical inheritance. The two composers are inseparable, and the friendship that bound them was formed and expressed in the very years when Mozart was at his peak.
