Haydn’s first term of permanent employment lasted little more than a year. Count Morzin, who had appointed him as his Kapellmeister in 1759, soon ran into financial difficulties and had to dismiss his orchestra. Fortuitously, Prince Paul Anton Esterházy had attended one of the concerts at Morzin’s Bohemian summer castle in which Haydn is supposed to have conducted his Symphony No 1. He was impressed to the extent that when he heard of his redundancy he offered him the post of Deputy Kapellmeister at his own court at Eisenstadt in the Burgenland, south of Vienna. And so, with the contract that was signed on 1 May 1761, there began one of the most remarkable cases of musical patronage in the annals of music history, a tenure that lasted for almost exactly thirty years.