Matthias Haydn (January 31, 1699-September 12, 1763) was the father of two famous composers, Joseph and Michael Haydn. He worked as a wheelwright in the Austrian village of Rohrau, where he also served as Marktrichter, an office akin to village mayor. January 31 is the 31st day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... September 12 is the 255th day of the year (256th in leap years). ... Portrait by Thomas Hardy, 1792 Franz Joseph Haydn[1] (March 31, 1732 – May 31, 1809) was one of the most prominent composers of the Classical period, and is called by some the Father of the Symphony and Father of the String Quartet. A life-long resident of Austria, Haydn spent... Michael Haydn Johann Michael Haydn (September 14, 1737 – August 10, 1806) was an Austrian composer, the younger brother of (Franz) Joseph Haydn. ... Wheelwright reenactor New Salem, Illinois Wheelwrights Workshop at the Amberley Working Museum, West Sussex, England A wheelwright is a person who builds or repairs wheels. ... There are several communities and places that have the name Rohrau : In Austria Rohrau, a town in Lower Austria Schloss Rohrau In Germany Rohrau zu Gärtringen, Baden-Württemberg This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

Life

Matthias was born in Hainburg, a small town not far from Rohrau, to Thomas Haydn, also a wheelwright. He served an apprenticeship as a wheelwright and then in 1717 left Hainburg on the traditional travels of the journeyman, which took him among other places to Frankfurt am Main. On his return to Hainburg he became a master wheelwright and joined the guild of wheelwrights of that town. In 1727 he moved to Rohrau, and the following year married Maria Koller, aged 21, who had worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the aristocratic patron of Rohrau. The couple had twelve children, of whom six died in infancy.^[1] Joseph was born in 1732, Michael in 1737. There are communes and places that have the name Hainburg: In Austria Hainburg an der Donau, Lower Austria in Germany Hainburg, Hesse This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... This article is about the tradesperson. ... Frankfurt am Main [ˈfraŋkfʊrt] is the largest city in the German state of Hessen and the fifth largest city of Germany. ...

Maria died 22 February, 1754, aged 47.^[2] Mathias later remarried, to "his servant girl of nineteen" ^[3]. The second marriage produced no children.

Mathias lived on to 1763. This was long enough to see both of his sons reach professional success: Michael was a Kapellmeister at Grosswardein^[4], and Joseph had become Vice-Kapellmeister (in fact, Kapellmeister in all but name) for the fabulously wealthy Esterházy family in Eisenstadt. Haydn biographer Georg August Griesinger wrote (1810): A Kapellmeister is nowadays the director or conductor of an orchestra or choir. ... The House of Esterházy was a noble family in the Kingdom of Hungary since the Middle Ages. ... The Schloss Esterházy is a palace in Eisenstadt, Austria; The capital of the Burgenland state. ...

Haydn's father thus had the pleasure of seeing his son in the uniform of [the Esterházy ] family, blue, trimmed with gold, and of hearing from the Prince many eulogies of the talent of his son. A short time after this visit, a wood pile fell on Meister Mathias while he was at work. He suffered broken ribs and died soon thereafter.^[5]

Prince Nikolaus Esterházy was a Hungarian prince who lived during the 18th century. ...

Matthias and music

Matthias apparently enjoyed music a great deal. Griesinger (1810) recorded what Joseph had told him in his elderly reminiscences:

The father had seen a bit of world, as was customary in his trade, and during his stay in Frankfurt am Main he had learned to strum the harp. As a master craftsman in Rohrau he continued to practice this instrument for pleasure after work. Nature, moreover, had endowed him with a good tenor voice, and his wife ... used to sing to the harp. The melodies of these songs were so deeply stamped in Joseph Haydn's memory that he could still recall them in advanced old age.^[6]

For further information, see Haydn and folk music. The harp is a stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. ... This article discusses the influence of folk music on the work of the celebrated composer Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). ...

Matthias, with his wife Maria, was also responsible for launching his sons' careers as professional musicians. The crucial event (in the case of Joseph) is also narrated by Griesinger:

One day the headmaster from the neighboring town of Hainburg, a distant relative of the Haydn family,^[7] came to Rohrau. Meister Mathias and his wife gave their usual little concert, and five-year-old Joseph sat near his parents and sawed at his left arm with a stick, as if he were accompanying on the violin. It astonished the schoolteacher that the boy observed time so correctly. He inferred from this a natural talent for music and advised the parents to send their Sepperl^[8] ... to Hainburg so that he might be [given musical training].^[9]

The parents accepted their relative's offer, and shortly afterward Joseph left for Hainburg. He was never to live with his parents again.

Griesinger adds that the ambitions of the parents were not actually to have Joseph become a musician, but that the training he would receive would be the first step toward becoming a Roman Catholic priest.

Mathias's social standing

The standing in society of Mathias bears on the biographies of his composer sons, which sometimes portray the Haydn family as impoverished, or as peasants. Geiringer writes:^[10]

Mathias lived in a Rohrau in a cottage built by himself, and from the outset was fairly prosperous. It has been the custom of Haydn biographers to stress the extreme poverty of his father, and judging from the appearance of the house in which the Haydns lived throughout their lives, this attitude seems to be justified. The little low-roofed, thatch-covered cottage is bound to fill us with pity, and we all feel like Beethoven, who on his deathbed, which shown a picture of the Haydn house, exclaimed, "Strange that so great a man should have been born in so poor a house!"

Geiringer goes on to refute the view of poverty, based on evidence from bills that Mathias submitted for his work to Count Harrach as well as Mathias's tax records. Apparently, Mathias had "his own wine cellar, his own farmland, and some cattle".^[11]. In addition, a letter he wrote to Michael in the mid-1750's (when both Joseph and Michael were living in Vienna) indicates he could afford at least the occasional extravagance: A portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820 Ludwig van Beethoven (IPA: ), (baptised December 17, 1770[1] – March 26, 1827) was a German composer. ... Vienna (German: , see also other names) is the capital of Austria, and also one of the nine States of Austria. ...

Jesus Christ be praised!

My very dearest Hanßmichl, I am herewith sending you a carriage from Rohrau which can bring you and perhaps a good friend back and forth, and the river will spend the night in the Landstraß at the Falcon or the Angel; you can talk to heim and arrange that you and Joseph and perhaps Ehrrath, all three of you, can get on the road early on Saturday. Mistress Nänerl and Mistress Loßl and another young lady will also receive a carriage, but only very early because it's so pitch dark at night, so heartfelt greetings to all of you, and in God's name

Mathias Haydn^[12]

Mathias as Marktrichter

From 1741 to 1761, Mathias was Marktrichter (German; literally "market judge") of Rohrau. According to Geiringer,^[13] "the list of his duties [was] imposing ... He was responsible for the good conduct of the population and had to keep a sharp lookout for adultery or excessive gambling. He had to see that people went to church and did not break the Sunday rest. It was his job to allot among the inhabitants of Rohrau the labor required by the patron, Count Harrach, and he was responsible for keeping the local roads in good repair On Sundays at six in the morning he had to report on all such matters to the count's steward. Every two years an open-air meeting of the whole community took place at which the Marktrichter rendered a detailed account of the work done during the past period."

Visits to Joseph in Vienna

Although Mathias sent both of his future-composer sons away from home at a tender age, he certainly did not lose interest in them. This is attested, for instance, by the letter quoted above, and by two visits he made to Vienna that were remembered decades later by Joseph and related to biographers.

Of these, the more dramatic was one in which Mathias rescued Joseph from being turned into a castrato. Griesinger (1810) relates the tale thus:^[14] A castrato is a male soprano, mezzo-soprano, or alto voice produced either by castration of the singer before puberty or one who, because of an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity. ...

At that time there were still many castrati employed at the court and in the churches in Vienna, and the director of the Choir School^[15] doubtless supposed he was making young Haydn's fortune when he came up with a plan to turn him into a soprano, and actually asked the father for permission. The father, whom this proposal utterly displeased, set off at once on the road for Vienna; and thinking that the operation might perhaps already have been undertaken, he entered the room where his son was with the question, "Sepperl, does anything hurt you? Can you still walk?" Delighted to find his son unharmed, he protested against all further unreasonable demands of this sort. ... The truth of this anecdote was vouched for by persons to whom [Joseph] Haydn has oftentimes told it.

A few years later, when Joseph as working as a freelance musician and living in very humble quarters, he suffered a burglary, and Mathias came to Vienna to help:

While he was living in the Seilerstadt, all his few possessions were stolen. Haydn wrote to his parents to see if they might send him some linen for a few shirts; his father came to Vienna, brought his son a seventeen-kreutzer piece and the advice "Fear God, and love thy neighbor!" By the generosity of good friends, Haydn soon had his loss restored.

Notes

1. ^ Information in this paragraph from Geiringer 1982, 5-6
2. ^ Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 30
3. ^ Geiringer 1982, 7
4. ^ Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 31
5. ^ Griesinger 1810, 16
6. ^ Griesinger 1810, 9
7. ^ This was Johann Matthias Franck, the husband of Matthias Haydn's step-sister Juliane Rosina Seefranz (Matthias's mother Katharina had remarried following her husband's death in 1701); Geiringer p. 6.
8. ^ Griesinger identifies this as an diminutive form of the name "Joseph"; presumably, it consists of an infantile pronunciation of the second syllable, plus the Austrian German diminutive suffix -erl
9. ^ Griesinger 1810, 9
10. ^ Geiringer, 7
11. ^ Geiringer, 7
12. ^ Robbins Landon and Jones, 31
13. ^ p. 7
14. ^ Griesinger 1810, 11
15. ^ Georg Reutter

A diminutive is a formation of a word used to convey a slight degree of the root meaning, smallness of the object named, encapsulation, intimacy, or endearment. ... Carl Georg Reutter (the Younger) was born as the son of Georg Reutter (the Elder) in Vienna on 8 April 1708. ...

References

• Geiringer, Karl, in collaboration with Irene Geiringer (3rd ed., 1982) Haydn: A Creative Life in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Griesinger, Georg August (1810) Biographical Notes Concerning Joseph Haydn. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel. English translation by Vernon Gotwals, in Haydn: Two Contemporary Portraits, Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Robbins Landon, H.C. and David Wyn Jones (1988) Haydn: His Life and Music, Thames and Hudson.