We love composers who rebel, who stick it to their masters. We applaud Mozart for telling his patron Prince-Arch-bishop Colloredo of Salzburg where to stuff it, after the young composer was upbraided for his court truancy. We extol Beethoven for turning his backside to the Emperor of Austria on a chance encounter in the town of Teplitz.

For us today artistic autonomy is everything. And the story of how this came about, of how the artist overthrew the intolerable tyranny of the patron, excites us. We see their acts of rudeness as progress. As successful breakouts from the prisons of 18th-century life. As attempts to liberate art as well as the artist from subservience to the cloth-eared aristocracy. After Mozart and Beethoven, the toffs would bow to the artist, not the artist to the toffs.

It might be why Haydn gets such a raw deal. Musically he was a revolutionary. But socially, he bowed and scraped and grovelled. Yet so did most of the great Baroque composers. Bach became servant to the town of Leipzig and various dukes at Weimar (where he was imprisoned) and at Coethen (where he was sacked). Handel laboured under the Dukes of Chandos and at the court of Hanover, Purcell at the court of three British monarchs. The story of Baroque music is a story of the enlightened patron.

And, in this year of Haydn, two centuries after his death, as Ian Page and his Classical Opera Company perform a selection of his greatest works at the King’s Place in London, it is perhaps time to rehabilitate this most famous and successful relationship between musical patron and artist.

The contentment Haydn achieved at the remote court at Esterháza, which had been built on the reclaimed swamplands of northeast Hungary, seems quite strange to us today. Like any other servant, Haydn wore the blue and gold livery of the House of Esterházy, reported to work each day as might the butler or the cook, and did his master’s bidding. Spectacular bidding. Bidding that magicked up some of the greatest music of his career. All created while Haydn was still a mere retainer.

According to the modern narrative, Haydn will have done this in spite of Prince Nikolaus. Genius that he was, Haydn could find a way through “the weight of conformity”, as Marshall Marcus, head of music at Southbank Centre, puts it.

Yet, all the evidence is that Haydn prospered at the court; for him, limitation was liberation.

“I could, as head of the orchestra, make experiments,” Haydn once enthused to his friend, “observe what enhanced an effect, and what weakened it, thus improving, adding to, cutting away, and running risks. I was set apart from the world, there was nobody in my vicinity to confuse and annoy me in my course, and so I had to be original.”

Not until the invention of the MIDI would composers have the chance to hear their compositions, as Haydn did at Esterháza, as they sat and wrote. And few in history would have the chance to write as much music as he did, which included 68 string quartets, 106 symphonies, 15 operas and hundreds of solo instrumental works. Few, however, will ever experience anything like the daily summons that the prince demanded. Or the daily wish list.

Writing on demand, says the conductor Ian Page, might have made a lesser composer lazy but for Haydn the rigour fired his creativity. “The fact that he was required to write whatever Nikolaus wanted,” Page explains, “turned out to be a strong and helpful discipline for Haydn.” That his salary was so consistently healthy must have helped too.

Nikolaus’s generosity was such that Haydn’s wife became an unhinged shopaholic and Haydn had to request several salary top-ups to keep up with her purchases. The prince also paid for the reconstruction of Haydn’s townhouse the two times it burnt to the ground. And when Haydn came down with a life-threatening fever in 1770, the prince paid for his medicine as well.

One can only imagine how this sort of assistance could have affected the life of Schubert. Or the life of Berlioz, who, says the conductor Sir Roger Norrington, was desperate for more chances to compose and earn. “He’d have been happy as a sandboy to have a regular job.”

The demands of a regular 18th-century gig with the same fusty overlord, however, had its drawbacks. Each patron’s particular tastes, for example, had to be sated. For Prince Nikolaus this was an obsession with an obscure cello-like instrument, the baryton. And Haydn duly knocked off nearly 200 works for it. When the prince’s taste for the baryton gave way to opera in the 1770s, Haydn, ever the obedient servant, followed in tow, dashing off several for his new private theatre.

Indeed, some argue that the effect of being a servant — Haydn lived with the other court musicians and, among all the servants, ranked only just above the head housekeeper — had a deleterious influence on his music. His experimentation had to stick within the very strict confines of court tastes and, some say, remained unduly deferential.

Page disagrees: “If anything there was something rather impolite about a lot of Haydn,” he insists. “He was a very impish character; rebellious, even. Think of the Surprise Symphony where he wanted to put off the people who snored in slow movements and so he threw in a really loud chord. I’m sure there would have been other patrons who would have sacked him for that.”

While the input of the prince was not direct — there was no hands-on collaboration, no reworking (that we know of) — the impact of his patronage of Haydn is important. Without him and his stand-by orchestra and theatre troupe it is unlikely that Haydn would have taken on the forms that he did: the symphony, the string quartet and the operas.

Strangely, today, things seem to have come full circle. As a result of dwindling income, classical music is again allying itself to patrons, modern Esterházys, such as Ralph Kohn, who financed John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantatas project. The model is both helpfully engaged and respectfully detached. Encouraging artists to strike a happy medium between Beethoven’s two-fingered salute and Haydn’s servitude.

“We should give them the sort of means which will allow them to lead a reasonable existence where they can devote themselves with heart, soul and body to their work,” Kohn says. “But the patron should not be their possessor. As Clifford Curzon once said: ‘Isn’t it nice that we can give something to young artists so that we can lift them closer to the stars.’ That’s all it’s about.”

Haydn’s Brave New World runs at Kings Place, London N1, March 11-15 (www.kingsplace.co.uk). The OAE's Haydn series continues on March 10 at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (0871 6632597)

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