Johann Michael Haydn (1737–1806) was the younger brother of Joseph Haydn. In 1760 Michael was appointed Kapellmeister at Großwardein (today Oradea) and later, in 1762, concertmaster at Salzburg, where he remained for 44 years, during which he wrote over 360 compositions comprising both church and instrumental music. From their mutual sojourn in Salzburg, Haydn was acquainted with Mozart, who held his work in high esteem. Michael remained close to his brother Joseph all of his life; Joseph regarded his brother's music highly.
Michael Haydn composed this Requiem for the death of the Archbishop of Salzburg on December 16, 1771. Siegmund III Christoph Graf von Schrattenbach was Prince Archbishop of Salzburg from 1753 to 1771. The archbishop - a connoisseur of the arts and a liberal patron of music - had always shown great respect for his concertmaster Michael Haydn as an artist. Coincidentally, the composer was still mourning the death of his only child, Aloysia Antonia, who had died a few months before her first birthday. This compounded loss seems to have inspired Michael Haydn to produce some of his most profound and sublime music. Haydn seems to have composed his Requiem at a furious pace. Nothing else adequately explains the depth and passionate intensity that illuminate this work. The C minor Requiem, the first product of Haydn's full maturity as a composer, deserves a place as one of the finest Requiem settings of the eighteenth century for both liturgical and expressive reasons. Three years after Michael Haydn's own death, this Requiem was performed at the funeral of his famous brother, Joseph Haydn.
18th century Salzburg was, as it had been for centuries, an archiepiscopal establishment, ruled by the archbishops of Salzburg, Princes of the Holy Roman Empire since the 13th century. From medieval times, music had always played a key part in life in the city, and by the 17th century, when Muffat and Biber held the chief musical positions, a total of seventy-nine musicians were at their disposal for music-making at
court and at the Catholic cathedral.
Michael Haydn worked most of his life in Salzburg, alongside Leopold Mozart and, for a time, his son Wolfgang. He was hired as a composer and concertmaster at the Salzburg court in 1762, when the younger Mozart was only 6 years old, and remained in that position until his death some 43 years later, working first for Prince Archbishop Siegmund Count Schrattenbach and later for his successor, Prince Archbishop Colloredo, the last Salzburg prince archbishop before the secularization of 1803. While Michael Haydn remained in Salzburg during Colloredo's reign, Mozart left soon after.
The work is in the dark key of C minor, and its use of four trumpets and three trombones - the only winds in the piece - gives it a deeply somber and ceremonial color. Scholars have often pointed out similarities between this work and Mozart's Requiem, written some 20 years later. Such parallels are probably no coincidence, for Mozart would almost certainly have heard Haydn's work in Salzburg, and Michael Haydn's influence on the young Mozart has long been recognized.
Although he also wrote symphonies, concertos, and chamber music, it was in the genre of religious music that Michael Haydn was especially admired by Mozart, his father, and many others of his time, and that he was praised long after his death by a composer as eminent as Schubert. According to one of his contemporaries, "All connoisseurs of music know, and have known for some time, that as a composer of sacred music Michael Haydn ranks among the best of all ages and nations... In this field he is his brother's equal; indeed, in the seriousness of his conception he often surpasses him by far".
Listen to: Ensemble VocalArt / Amardia Ensemble / Marian Polin, Leitung