When the English musician and writer Charles Burney visited Vienna in 1772 he was particularly impressed with the city’s church music: ‘There is scarce a church or convent in Vienna, which has not every morning it’s mass in music: that is, a great portion of the church service of the day, set in parts, and performed with voices, accompanied by at least three or four violins, a tenor and a base, besides the organ.’ This intense cultivation of figuraliter – instrumentally accompanied – church music contributed a great deal to Viennese musical life, as it still does today. A few years later another Protestant visitor to Vienna, the Prussian bookseller Friedrich Nicolai, wrote in astonishment that he ‘certainly could hear the music for three or four Masses on Sundays and holidays’, since each church had a different starting time. By this means, freelance musicians were able hold several church jobs at once: in old age the young Joseph Haydn told one of his biographers that, in his youth, he had filled up his Sunday mornings by playing the violin for the Brothers of Mercy at 8am, playing the organ at Count Haugwitz’s chapel at 10am, and by singing at St Stephen’s Cathedral at 11am. Haydn wrote some of his first music for these hectic Sunday mornings; indeed, a Missa Brevis in F, written when he was about seventeen, may be his earliest surviving work.