Haydn

He spent nearly thirty years as Kapellmeister to the Esterházy family, and put it himself: cut off from the world, with nobody to confuse him, he was forced to become original. A hundred and four symphonies and sixty-eight string quartets, building both forms from almost nothing into the shapes everyone afterwards used.

He is the funniest of the Viennese classics. The slow movement of the Surprise Symphony detonates one loud chord; in the Farewell the players blow out their candles and leave one by one, which was a hint to the prince about overdue leave. Listen for the surprises inside the phrasing — his favourite trick is to let you think a sentence has ended and then add two more bars. He became an international celebrity in London late in life, and outlived Mozart by more than thirty years.