Count Morzin

Count Morzin was an aristocrat of the Austrian Empire during the 18th century. He is remembered today as the first person to employ the composer Joseph Haydn as his Kapellmeister, or music director. The first few of Haydn's many symphonies were written for the Count.

Different authorities give a different interpretation to the phrase "Count Morzin" (the sole words by which early Haydn biographies identified the man); the phrase is ambiguous because the title of count was hereditary, so that there was a whole line of Counts Morzin. The New Grove (article by James Webster) asserts that the "Count Morzin" who played an important role in Haydn's life was Karl Joseph Franz Morzin (1717–1783), whereas a biography by the leading Haydn scholar H. C. Robbins Landon asserts that it was Ferdinand Maximilan Franz Morzin' (1693–1763). The difference apparently involves the question of whether Haydn was hired by the reigning count (Ferdinand Maximilian) or his son (Karl Joseph); see External Link below.

The date of Haydn's appointment is also uncertain; it was either in 1757 or in 1759. (For discussion of the uncertainty see Robbins Landon and Jones (1988, 34) and Webster (2002, 10)). The appointment ended a period of struggle and economic insecurity for the composer, during which time he had worked as a freelance, gradually increasing his reputation and his connections with the aristocracy. Haydn's biographer Georg August Griesinger (1810), who interviewed the composer in his old age, wrote:

This migratory pattern was characteristic of aristocracy in Haydn's day: summers on their hereditary estates in the provinces, winters in the fashionable capital. The location of the Count's estate has been more precisely specified by Robbins Landon as German: Unter-Lukawitz (Czech: Dolní Lukavice), usually referred to as Lukavec, now in the Czech Republic. Robbins Landon, writing in 1988, adds "the castle, which still stands, is now used as a mental hospital." Jones (2009) says of the castle that is "still survives, though now empty and in a state of decay."

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