Haydn | Page 4

to the Danube, and some little distance from Rohrau.
More cannot be said of his ancestors than that for some generations
they had been hard-working, honest folk of the peasant class, given to
music, but by no means a family of musicians like the Bachs. His
mother was born Maria Koller, and it has been suggested that the name
is a variant or corruption of the Croatian Kolar, meaning a wheelwright.
Perhaps she thought that, bearing such a name, she must marry Mathias,
a wheelwright. The point is that this fact, if fact it be, is another
indication or proof of Haydn's Croatian descent. It seems, indeed, to be
established that by blood he was pure Slav, the name being formerly
spelt Hajdgn. It is just as well for our tongues that it was changed.
Franz Joseph (he dropped the Franz) was the second of twelve children,
the only other worth noting being Michael (in full, Johann Michael),
who became a famous musician in his day, and a friend of the Mozarts
in Salzburg. Maria, the mother, died in 1754, the father in 1763.
It has always seemed to me the great composers had fine luck in being
born so long ago, before the towns had grown big and dirty, before the
locomotive and motor-car had denied the beautiful earth, and stinking
factories floundered over all the lands. Carlyle rightly grows eloquent
on the value of the sweet country air and sights and sounds to young
Teufelsdröckh, and Haydn must have taken impressions of sunrises,
sunsets, midday splendours, and the ever-plashing river flowing to the
far-away sea, that afterwards went to the making of his most wonderful
music. He had to go out early to fight his way in the world; only six
years of peaceful village life, free from care and responsibility, were
allowed him. Those first years, I take it, were happy enough. Mathias
was only, it is true, a wheelwright, and in time there were a dozen
mouths to feed. But we hear of him and Maria making music only in

the evenings; his days were more profitably occupied. It goes very
much without saying that he was not rich--in what age or clime are
working wheelwrights rich?--but he cannot be called poor. Poverty is a
comparative term; even to-day peasants feel its biting teeth only when
they desert or are driven from their country-side, and make for the
overcrowded towns. Joseph, but for a few accidents, might have
remained a peasant all his days, and never faced what he would
consider hardship. The first accident was his voice, which was
undoubtedly of singular beauty; the second was an extraordinary
musical aptitude, which led him to sing expressively and perfectly in
tune the airs he heard his father and mother sing. Mathias, by the way,
accompanied himself on the harp; and Joseph, long before he had a
fiddle of his own, imitated the fiddling of his elders with two bits of
wood, so the family orchestra was complete. The last accident was the
arrival of one Frankh, a distant relative. This was long before the
magical feats of the baby Mozart had set every grasping parent staring
for signs of musical precocity in his children. But Mathias undoubtedly
wanted to do his best for his boy, and Joseph himself must have had
ambition of a sort--witness his endeavours to play the fiddle without a
fiddle to play--and when Frankh undertook to place the boy in a choir
and teach him music, the offer was joyfully accepted. So he went to
Hainburg, never to return to Rohrau until he was an old and celebrated
man.
Nothing need be recorded of his life in Hainburg save that Frankh
worked him hard. Indeed, much later Haydn declared himself thankful
to Frankh for forming in him the habit of working hard. He sang,
played the fiddle and harpsichord, and went to school; and suddenly
one George Reutter came on the scene. He came, heard, and was
conquered by Haydn's voice. He was Hofcompositor and Kapellmeister
at St. Stephen's Church in Vienna, and he took the boy on the same
terms as those on which Frankh had brought him away from Rohrau.
To Vienna Haydn went, was entered in the Cantorei of St. Stephen's,
and there for some years he sang in the choir. In return he was taught
reading, writing and arithmetic, religion and Latin. He had excellent
masters for singing and for violin and harpsichord; but he had no
teaching in theory. Reutter gave him only two lessons, and he was left

without guidance to cover as much music-paper as he could get hold of.
But he stuck grimly to the task of making himself an efficient composer,
and worked out his own salvation. Reutter, having secured him for his
voice, took