Reutter was considered a great musician in his day--he was ennobled in 1740--but he did not distinguish himself by kind treatment of little Joseph, who was poorly clad, half starved, and indifferently taught. The boy, however, seems, even at this early age, to have had a definite idea of what he wanted, and doggedly pursued his own path. He got what instruction he could from the masters of the school, purchased two heavy and difficult works on thoroughbass and counterpoint, spent play hours in practice on his clavier, and filled reams of paper with notes. He afterwards said that he remembered having two lessons from von Reutter in ten years. When he was seventeen years old his voice broke, and, being of no further service to the chapel master, he was turned out of the school on a trivial pretext. The period that followed was one that even the sweet-natured man must sometimes have wished to forget. He was without money or friends--or at least so he thought--and it is said he spent the night after leaving school in wandering about the streets of the city. Unknown to himself, however, the little singer at the cathedral had made friends, and with one of the humbler of these he found a temporary home. Another good Viennese lent him one hundred and fifty florins--a debt which Haydn not only soon paid, but remembered for sixty years, as an item in his will shows. He soon got a few pupils, played the violin at wedding festivals and the like, and kept himself steadily at the study of composition. He obtained the clavier sonatas of Emanuel Bach and mastered their style so thoroughly that the composer afterward sent him word that he alone had fully mastered his writings and learned to use them. At twenty Haydn wrote his first mass, and at about the same time received a considerable sum for composing the music to a comic opera. He exchanged his cold attic for a more comfortable loft which happened to be in the same house in which the great Metastasio lived. The poet was impressed by Haydn’s gifts and obtained for him the position of music master in an important Spanish family, resident in Vienna.