In the style of Mike Rowe’s podcast “The Way I Heard It” and Paul Harvey’s radio show “The Rest of the Story”, this episode of the Piano Parent Podcast brings you the backstory of a musician or song or a moment in music history. I use these musical mysteries to tell you something you might not know about someone or something that is somewhat familiar.
I’m sure you’ve heard the expression, “Where words fail, music speaks”– a quote by Hans Christian Andersen. Today’s musical mystery will tell you the story of an occasion where words could have gotten you fired so music was the only way to communicate.
In this instance, an even more timely quote might be Victor Hugo’s “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.”
Listen to the full episode here
Nick loved a party!
Nick loved a party!
Fortunately, for him, he had the means to host the best parties around. Coming from a family whose wealth could rival the Kardashians, Nick hosted large social gatherings at his home in the city as well as his summer home in the country. Nick’s family had been influential in the area for generations; his ancestors included men who defended religious freedom and national independence. His grandfathers and uncles were counted among the highest ranks of military posts, church leadership, and government offices.
When the time came for Nick to serve his country and preserve his family’s good name, he didn’t hesitate. He served in several military campaigns and supported, with his own money, the civic needs of his hometown as well as the interests of local artists.
As much as Nick appreciated the glitz and glamour that came with his public life in the city, he preferred to spend as much time as possible in the quiet environment of his summer home.
Nick’s uncle had originally purchased the summer home, just a few miles south of their place in the big city. Uncle Paul had only used it for short getaways from time to time, but Nick had fond memories of his visits there as a child. He remembered exploring the grounds, studying the beautiful art and architecture, and feasting on the lavish dinners; not to mention learning from the various international personalities of the guests who joined them there.
Since Uncle Paul had no children of his own, Nick inherited the property after Paul’s death. Once Nick took ownership of the summer home, he renovated and expanded not only the structure itself, but he also added pavilions, gardens, and water features to the exterior. He was eager to make a showplace of the home he loved.
Nick still had responsibilities in the city requiring him to spend most of his time there, but he made plans every year to get away to the county during the summer months like his Uncle Paul had done.
When he planned his summer getaways, Nick was sure to invite lots of guests. Some guests were family friends, other guests were diplomats from other parts of the world who needed to be wined and dined to build relationships that would benefit their citizens. No matter who joined them for summer holiday, they were sure to be entertained with plenty of parties.
Yes, Nick’s parties would last for days, weeks even!
Take, for instance, the summer of ’72.
Nick had been looking forward to this summer vacation since last year. He was going to host an epic party that would last the entire summer! The family’s country home was quite a distance from the city so his guests would be staying with him there for the whole season. This wouldn’t be a problem since the summer home in the country had 126 rooms!
To take care of all these important people, Nick hired the finest workers. Naturally, he employed skilled workers to keep his home maintained and clean but beyond that, he hired cooks from far and wide to serve delectable meals to guests who also came from far and wide. In addition to housekeeping and meals, servants were employed to entertain his guests with concerts, plays, and musicals.
The best entertainment, to Nick’s way of thinking, had to include music. It just wasn’t a party if there weren’t the latest tunes playing around every corner. Of course, there were the usual hits for dancing and singing but Nick also wanted music for road trips or just strolling around the property. He wanted something peppy that could keep the energy up and guests amused during the day. He also wanted calming background music during dinner parties or for winding down in the evening.
Since Nick played a few instruments himself, he enjoyed a good jam session with the other musicians, too!
Nick’s family knew Joe.
Another good thing about Nick’s family, they knew Joe.
Joe had been interested in music for as long as he could remember. Joe’s parents, who were devout Catholics, had hoped he would grow up to become a priest. After all, they had named him Joseph in honor of Mary’s husband!
Though neither of his parents were particularly musical, his dad played a little bit on stringed instruments and the family often sang together (Joe had two younger brothers, Michael and John). When the opportunity came for Joe to move in with a distant family member who was also a Catholic schoolteacher and music director, they agreed. Joe was in it for the music; his parents were hoping the experience would persuade him closer to their chosen career.
Joe hadn’t lived away from his parents for very long when another opportunity presented itself. A talent scout for a prestigious Catholic Boys Choir came to town to hold auditions. Joe impressed the scout so much that he was one of a very small group of boys to receive a scholarship to join the choir.
Joe enjoyed his time in the boys choir. Truth be told, Joe enjoyed his time most anywhere. He inherited his social skills and good humor from his father, who was a well-respected leader in his community back home. The other fellows in the choir knew Joe as a fun-loving prankster. Climbing the off-limits scaffolding at a nearby construction site to make crazy noises at his classmates below was well worth the risk and the thrashing he got from his teacher later.
His time with the boys choir eventually came to an end. The reason for the departure depends on who you talk to – either he was expelled for yet another prank on a classmate (he cut a boy’s long hair so short that the boy wouldn’t go out in public), or he left because, like most older teenage boys, his voice changed.
Joe found himself in his late teens with a decision to make. He could go back home and follow his parents’ wish for him to join the priesthood with its financial stability or he could take his chances on the road as a musician.
Though the next few years weren’t easy, Joe was able to eke out a meager living playing a few street gigs, writing music, and teaching lessons. Joe also spent this time networking. It seems that everyone who met Joe wanted to collaborate with him in some way. Whether he was writing music to accommodate the skills of his pupils or arranging music for whichever kinds of instruments and musicians he could gather, Joe was honing his skills as a composer and songwriter.
Once he met a comedic actor who invited him to write songs and the score for his musical, “The Crooked Devil”.
On another occasion, Joe taught music lessons to family members of Georg, an old music buddy from his boys choir days. The family had two daughters and the youngest, Therese caught Joe’s eye. Though he was head over heels in love with her, and the family was terribly fond of him, Therese had always intended to dedicate her life to the Convent and become a nun. I wonder if Joe tried to convince her to marry him instead. He knew what it felt like to be pressured by your parents to make such sacred vows. Therese must have convinced him that the decision was hers and as fond as she was of him, he was no match for what she believed was her destiny.
You may be surprised to learn that Joe, though brokenhearted, agreed to write and direct the music for her vow ceremony. I wonder if that demonstrates his love of music or, more, his love for Therese and honoring her life decision. He kept the manuscripts, dated the spring of ‘56, for the rest of his life.
Once the relationship with Therese ended, Joe poured himself into his music working as music director for one establishment after another. Each time, his networking skills promoted him to ever more renowned positions.
Even with all his success, he never gave up on marriage, and in the fall of ’60, Joe married Maria Keller. There is a lot of speculation about what might have attracted these two together because they seemed to be polar opposites. Remember, Joe was a fun-loving people person. Maria was anything but. One biographer describes her as “a domineering, unfriendly character”. To make matters worse, she was not at all interested in music. In fact, she would use Joe’s handwritten music scores to curl and set her hair or as liners in her baking pans. As bad as all that is, her worst crime was being the older sister of Joe’s true love, Therese.
Maybe he married her because of her resemblance to Therese. Maybe he felt a sense of duty to the family. Maybe she pestered him for marriage until he finally gave in. Whatever the reason, it is no surprise that theirs was an unhappy marriage.
It makes sense then, that when Joe was offered a job with Nick’s wealthy and prominent family, he took it without hesitation. Nick’s Uncle Paul had been in attendance during one of Joe’s previous concerts and thoroughly enjoyed the thrilling new music he heard. Mr. Werner, the gentleman who was currently organizing all the music for the family galas and social events was talented enough but he was getting on up in years and his musical tastes were a little old-fashioned. Twenty-eight-year-old Joe had the charisma and musical daring that Paul was looking for to assist Mr. Werner and replace him when the time came.
Within the first year of Joe’s new employment, Paul died and Nick assumed the position as the family’s patriarch. Fortunately for Joe, Nick loved music even more than Paul had. Theirs was a great collaboration from the beginning. Joe knew his place, but he was given the freedom and the means to hire more singers and instrumentalists to cover all of Nick’s musical needs. Joe’s people skills paid off when he met the family valet, Lui. Lui had been working for the family for about a decade as a valet when it was discovered that he could also play the violin. Lui was moved off the household payroll and onto the musician’s payroll and he and Joe remained lifelong friends.
The summer of '72
Now that you have a little more background on Joe, let’s get back to the summer of ’72.
Nick had spent most of ’71 working on affairs of the state and he felt he was overdue for some rest and relaxation. In January of ’72, he notified Joe and the other musicians that they would be spending more time at the summer place in the country later that year. There is a document that indicates Joe had requested the families of the musicians join them on this summer tour but, for reasons that have been lost to history, Nick denied the request. I guess all 126 rooms were already booked with important guests and there just wasn’t enough space for the wives and children of 22 orchestra musicians.
The musicians all needed the work, so they agreed to spend the summer away from their families making music out in the country. Maybe Nick thought the families would be a distraction from all the music they would be making. He had hired a new theatrical troupe to perform Shakespearean plays, pyrotechnicians for amazing firework displays, and ballet dancers straight from the finest dance salons in Vienna. All these amazing acts would need music to accompany them.
It truly was an exciting summer! Joe once wrote about this experience, “I was cut off from the world. There was no one to confuse or torment me, and I was forced to become original.” This was a unique time in Joe’s life – to be able to create music for so many different uses and to be original and innovative with his musical ideas.
The problem was that when summer ended, Nick was just getting started. He was having so much fun at the summer country place that he didn’t want to leave.
By the time November rolled around, Joe was caught in the middle. He valued his job and enjoyed the music he was creating but he also recognized how lonely his colleagues were away from their families. (You may recall that Joe and his wife were not exactly a match made in heaven. Ironically, his wife was allowed to join him for the tour. He might have offered to trade her presence in exchange for the other families coming to visit!)
Knowing his place with his employer, Joe devised a plan that would help Nick get the message.
All the guests were gathered in the great concert hall one night for a grand orchestral performance. The music was well performed and applauded all evening. Nick must have been very proud of his musicians for helping him look so good in front of his important guests. At last, the final movement of the closing piece began and just when the music’s momentum would bring everything to a dramatic close, Joe directed the musicians into an unexpected extra movement, much slower and more emotional than the rest.
As the beautiful melody swept over Nick and his guests, they must have felt a sense of loneliness and longing for home. Suddenly, player after player stopped performing, collected their music, blew out the candle on their music stand, their only source of light, and walked off stage. Finally, in the dim light of two candles, only two violinists remained, Joe and Lui, each playing a haunting melody that intertwined with the other. As they, too, completed the piece and blew out their candles, the concert hall was left in complete darkness and Nick finally realized that all good things must come to an end.
By December 1772, Prince Nicolaus and Franz Joseph Haydn, along with the guests and performers were soon leaving the Palace at Esterhazy located in the countryside of Austria to return to the big city of Vienna.
More reasons to love Haydn...
Here are a few other things to love about Franz Joseph Haydn:
- Haydn was so loved by his fellow musicians that they called him Papa Haydn.
- Haydn was very well received in London a few years later, possibly because some of the patrons of the arts in London had been Prince Nicolaus’ guests at Esterhazy the summer of 1772.
- Haydn remembered the people who took him under their wing, and he did the same to a young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven.
- He was such a prolific writer that he is known as
- the Father of the Symphony – 104 (Beethoven wrote 9, Mozart wrote 50)
- the Father of the String Quartet – 68 (Beethoven 16, Mozart 23)
- the Father of the Sonata, Haydn was a champion of the Sonata-Allegro form, writing 62 keyboard sonatas (Beethoven 35, Mozart 35). Not bad for a guy who wasn’t really known as a pianist.
- Haydn’s sense of humor appeared again in his Surprise Symphony and much of this other music.
In 1805 a rumor was going around that he died, four years before his actual death. Many composers wrote memorial pieces, and a special memorial concert was arranged to be performed in Paris, including Mozart’s Requiem. When Haydn heard about the rumor, he wrote a thank you message and said, “Had I only known of it in time, I could have traveled to Paris to conduct the Requiem myself!”
Resources
If you would like to learn more about this musical mystery, you might be interested in these resources:
Online Resources
A Portrait of Nicolaus Esterházy, the “Good Prince” (1714-1790), Commemorating His 300th Birthday
Papa Haydn – the Father of the Symphony, the Sonata, and the String Quartet
The Esterházy family and their palace in Eisenstadt, a Baroque masterpiece of Austria
The Listener’s Club “Hey Nick…Can We Go Home Now?”
Joseph Haydn – Haydn Seek – 1772
Los Angeles Philharmonic – Symphony No. 45, “Farewell”
YouTube Resources
Classical Cake “Who was Franz Joseph Haydn – Part 1”
Book Resources
“Haydn: His Life and Music” by Vickers
You might also enjoy these Musical Mysteries
Listen to the full catalog of Musical Mysteries here: PPP Musical Mysteries
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