Paul Anton Esterházy, one of the toniest aristocrats of the Hapsburg territories, needed a new kapellmeister. Old age was taking its inevitable toll on Gregor Joseph Werner, nor had the old-school Esterházy kapellmeister kept up with the musical tsunami that was wiping out the older Baroque style in favor of the new Classical and Rococo idioms.
Esterházy, a cultured and perceptive man, had no trouble in identifying the ideal candidate: Joseph Haydn, who at 29 years old was ripe and ready for a career upgrade. Haydn had spent the previous decade kicking around Vienna as a hardscrabble but successful freelancer, a compositional gun for hire who could write just about anything, from starchy religious anthems to bumptious blue-collar burlesque shows. Haydn had earned his stripes as accompanist-apprentice-valet-slave to the grumpy Italian opera master Nicolai Porpora, and furthermore had established himself as a rising hotshot. A short but fruitful period of service to Maximilian von Morzin, a minor landowner in what is nowadays the Czech Republic, had given Haydn some experience with formal court service. An appointment to the Esterházy court meant arrival in the big leagues.
Commentators have been known to emit a steady chorus of disapproving tut-tuts as they describe Haydn’s contract of May 1, 1761. Oh, the Unfairness of It All, they wail. To specify what kinds of stockings he must wear, to require him to eat at the servant’s table, to demand that he cower in an anteroom every day waiting for his marching orders? How disgraceful, how demeaning, how insulting to a Great Artist. Those aristocratic twits; how dare they?
But show that contract to an everyday working musician, and the reaction changes: oh yeah, that’s all pretty basic stuff. That’s because there’s very little in that contract that looks unfamiliar (or unfair) to anybody who has ever had real-life musical employment—that is, playing music for paying audiences—in contrast to many commentators, who are often speaking from their lofty and relatively unrestricted (or so they think) academic perches.
So let’s take a look at parts of that contract, titled "Convention and Rules for Behaviour of the Vice-Capell-Meister", appointing "Joseph Heÿden" to "the service of his Serene Princely Highness Herr Paul Anton, Prince of the Holy Roman Empire, of Eszterházÿ and Galantha Tit., etc. etc."
Item: Haydn was required to perform in a uniform that included not only his dress coat, but white stockings, white linen, and his hair powdered and done up either in a pigtail or in a hairbag. And your point is? Consider symphony musicians and tuxedos or black dresses, band musicians and their white jackets, bow ties, slacks and dress shoes, singing groups and their dress/grooming code. Is there a musician in the world who doesn’t understand the need to dress for the occasion? Maybe rock bands and the like go for a different look—but that is, in and of itself, a kind of dress code.
Item: Haydn was required to compose music on command. Well, duh….the job was to write music for performances. He didn’t have all that much of a choice as to what he wrote, but so what? A symphony musician is not allowed to decide what he or she will play, after all. Nor is a member of a band or a singing group, or a freelancer scraping out a living playing gigs. You play a wedding and the bride wants you to play Memory, you play Memory. You get a restaurant gig and with any luck you have enough common sense to refrain from programming Pierrot lunaire.
Item: Haydn was required to show up on time for gigs and ensure that the musicians under his supervision were on time as well. This one doesn’t need any comment, does it?
Item: Haydn was required to behave like a gentleman, and to do the best he could to keep the musicians’ behavior in check. (That wasn’t always easy; the Esterházy court musicians tended to be young.) Again this would be in keeping with the usual requirements and restrictions of a performing institution. Symphony musicians are expected to be polite to patrons, for example, or exert due control over their language when in public. Imagine an orchestra player yelling out OK, who the fuck filled my violin case with jello?? onstage while the symphony is gathering. Should that happen, we can expect said orchestra player to receive a warning and/or fine shortly thereafter.
There’s more in the contract, but very little that should raise eyebrows. Oh, Haydn needed to give ample advance notice before leaving his employment, but the same would be true of a full-time faculty member at a conservatory—you can’t just call the front office and ask them to send somebody over, after all. And the contract specified how much he would be paid, precisely when those payments would be made, and even specified that satisfactory performance would result in his promotion to full kapellmeister, i.e., it was a tenure-track affair.
In short, it was a fine and solid contract, and not just by 18th-century standards. Joseph Haydn was a working musician, and if anybody had told him that this goldmine of a contract was demeaning, no doubt his reply would have been along the lines of: Hey, bub, what on earth have you been smoking? I just landed vice-kapellmeister with the Esterházy court! Sheesh…if they told me to wear a bunny suit and make fart noises while pedalling a unicycle, I’d do it.
Just change vice-kapellmeister with the Esterházy court to principal with the Chicago Symphony, and all should be clear.