”The Austrian composer Joseph Haydn was the third prominent figure of the Viennese Classic period along with Mozart and Beethoven” – we learnt something like this at school and read something similar in most encyclopaedias. Still, Haydn belongs to us Hungarians a little bit as well. His native village, Rohrau, lies close to the river Leitha, which once formed the border between Austria and Hungary. The composer thus grew up in a borderland ”musical melting pot”, where elements of Austrian, Hungarian, Slovak and even Croatian culture mixed freely. The impact of Haydn’s early experiences can be felt in the characteristically Hungarian- or Gypsy-influenced elements contained in some of his compositions. Even more importantly, at the age of 28 the composer became the court conductor for the Eszterházys, possibly the most influential aristocratic family in Hungary during the era, composing the bulk of his oeuvre at its service. Since the famous ‘Pomp-loving’ Prince Miklós Eszterházy preferred to stay at the Eszterházy Palace that he had built for himself, Haydn spent most of the year in Hungary for more than two decades. Moreover, history would have it that the major part of the Eszterházy’s music archive and the richest collection of Haydn manuscripts in the world are preserved at the National Széchényi Library in Budapest, where research based on these sources has transformed Haydn into an even greater ”national cause” in Hungary over the past decades. So in 2009, as the world remembers Haydn as one of the greatest composers in the musical history of Europe, we Hungarians can celebrate him with a particularly warm heart as the greatest ’a little bit Hungarian’ composers of all time.
