We have seen both the pathos and the tragedy of young deaths, and yet there was an extraordinary body of work from that group and the eternal question as to what might have been had they lived longer. So what happened with those who survived beyond their seventh decade? Was it all autumnal contentment? But perhaps the key question is whether some may have just laid down their pens because they ran out of ideas and, if they did, were there underlying medical reasons for that or did they just reasonably retire? In relating health to composition, old age, not least today with its anxieties about senile degeneration, is an important condition to consider. It has become a clinical entity and takes people in diverse ways.

On Haydn's seventy-sixth birthday in 1808, Antonio Salieri conducted The Creation. In the audience was a former pupil, who tearfully came forward to embrace the equally lachrymose Haydn. That pupil was Beethoven. By 1808 Haydn was the doyen of composers, to whom Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert had variously paid their obsequies. His long career as Kapellmeister to the Princes Esterházy at Eszterháza, rather than his probably loveless marriage, was the bedrock of his security. His wife, Anna Maria, was barren, to his eternal sadness, as well as being unsympathetic to music, especially Haydn's, whose manuscripts she used to roll pastry upon. He may have fathered a child with his mistress, an Italian singer, Luigia Polzelli. The Swedish composer Johan Fredrik Berwald suggested that his unhappy marriage was why he composed so much. Haydn was not only a stable personality, but he was agreeable, pragmatic and with his wits about him.

Like other allegedly triumphant old ages, Haydn's was less easy than popular supposition might have us believe. From 1803 until his death in 1809, Haydn composed almost nothing, and Neumayr believes he was ill for his last ten years.