50 Euro Joseph Haydn

Issued in the year of Haydn's 200th birth anniversary — he was born in Rohrau in 1732 — this coin belongs to Austria's long-running "Great Composers" gold series. Haydn spent nearly thirty years in the employ of the Esterházy family at Eszterháza, largely isolated from the wider musical world, a circumstance he later credited with forcing him into genuine originality.

The .986 fineness, fractionally shy of pure, follows the traditional Ducaten standard that Austrian mints had maintained for centuries.