Joseph Haydn: The Spotify Edition

278 years ago tomorrow, the first master of the classical period, Father of the Symphony and the String Quartet, and the composer of the Austrian and German national anthems, Franz Joseph Haydn was born.

His output is so voluminous that it's almost impossible to create a chronicle playlist for him, so I just put together all the eight volumes of Warner's Haydn Editions, and substituted the two volumes of symphonies with The complete symphonies conducted by Antal Doráti (that's 104 of them! 33 CDs), replaced the piano trios volume with the legendary complete recordings of Beaux Arts Trio, and also put in John McCabe's wonderful recordings for the solo piano works instead of Warner's vol.3. The Angeles String Quartet's recording of the complete string quartets (21 CDs), included in the playlist here, has received rave reviews since it's release. Also included are two volumes (20 CDs) of operas from Philips records.

Here's the Spotify playlist of Joseph Haydn (1782 tracks, 5.5 days).  If you don't know where to start, go to the end of the playlist, there's a nice 4-CD audiobook from Naxos, Life And Works: Joseph Haydn. And here's some good Haydn recommendations too. This playlist just offers one way to browse Haydn's works on Spotify, feel free to make you own mini-playlists out of it, to highlight important works or arrange better play orders, and it would be great if you can share them on the comments here. Thanks.