Haydn's name

The choice of such saint's names followed the common practice of Roman Catholicism (the parents' religion) in Haydn's time.

Jones explains the situation thus: "As was frequently the practice in Austria, Haydn's parents gave their children two Christian names, the second of which was routinely used.

"[5] The patterns of English usage can be observed in the reports of the Google Ngram Viewer, which analyzes a large corpus of books, matches particular sequences of characters and gives the results on a year-by-year basis.

[7][8] Even in German-language works, "Josef" is still a minority choice in referring to the composer, as authors tend to favor the historical spelling.

For German books "Josef" peaked around the end of World War II and plunged to a low but steady level shortly thereafter.