Haydn | Page 5

picturesque
thatched roof has given place to a covering of less inflammable
material, the "Zum Haydn" presents its extensive frontage to the road,
just as it did of yore. Our illustration shows it exactly as it is to-day.
[See an interesting account of a visit to the cottage after the fire, in The
Musical Times for July 1899.] Schindler relates that when Beethoven,
shortly before his death, was shown a print of the cottage, sent to him
by Diabelli, he remarked: "Strange that so great a man should have
been born in so poor a home!" Beethoven's relations with Haydn, as we
shall see later on, were at one time somewhat strained; but the years
had softened his asperity, and this indirect tribute to his brother
composer may readily be accepted as a set-off to some things that the
biographer of the greater genius would willingly forget.
A Poor Home
It was indeed a poor home into which Haydn had been born; but
tenderness, piety, thrift and orderliness were there, and probably the
happiest part of his career was that which he spent in the tiny,
dim-lighted rooms within sound of Leitha's waters.

In later life, when his name had been inscribed on the roll of fame, he
looked back to the cottage at Rohrau, "sweet through strange years,"
with a kind of mingled pride and pathetic regret. Flattered by the great
and acclaimed by the devotees of his art, he never felt ashamed of his
lowly origin. On the contrary, he boasted of it. He was proud, as he said,
of having "made something out of nothing." He does not seem to have
been often at Rohrau after he was launched into the world, a stripling
not yet in his teens. But he retained a fond memory of his birthplace.
When in 1795 he was invited to inspect a monument erected to his
honour in the grounds of Castle Rohrau, he knelt down on the threshold
of the old home by the market-place and kissed the ground his feet had
trod in the far-away days of youth. When he came to make his will, his
thoughts went back to Rohrau, and one of his bequests provided for
two of its poorest orphans.
Genealogy
Modern theories of heredity and the origin of genius find but scanty
illustration in the case of Haydn. Unlike the ancestors of Bach and
Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the pedigrees show, had as
little of genius, musical or other, in their composition, as the families of
Shakespeare and Cervantes. In the male line they were hard-working,
honest tradesmen, totally undistinguished even in their sober walk in
life. They came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's
great-grandfather, Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre
when the town was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's
father, Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright,
combining with his trade the office of parish sexton. He belonged to the
better peasant class, and, though ignorant as we should now regard him,
was yet not without a tincture of artistic taste. He had been to Frankfort
during his "travelling years," and had there picked up some little
information of a miscellaneous kind. "He was a great lover of music by
nature," says his famous son, "and played the harp without knowing a
note of music." He had a fine tenor voice, and when the day's toil was
over he would gather his household around him and set them singing to
his well-meant accompaniment.

Haydn's Mother
It is rather a pretty picture that the imagination here conjures up, but it
does not help us very much in trying to account for the musical genius
of the composer. Even the popular idea that genius is derived from the
mother does not hold in Haydn's case. If Frau Haydn had a genius for
anything it was merely for moral excellence and religion and the good
management of her household. Like Leigh Hunt's mother, however, she
was "fond of music, and a gentle singer in her way"; and more than one
intimate of Haydn in his old age declared that he still knew by heart all
the simple airs which she had been wont to lilt about the house. The
maiden name of this estimable woman was Marie Koller. She was a
daughter of the Marktrichter (market judge), and had been a cook in the
family of Count Harrach, one of the local magnates. Eight years
younger than her husband, she was just twenty-one at her marriage, and
bore him twelve children. Haydn's regard for her was deep and sincere;
and it was one of the tricks of destiny that she was not spared to
witness more of his rising fame, being cut off in 1754, when