Haydn | Page 6

she was
only forty-six. Matthias Haydn promptly married again, and had a
second family of five children, all of whom died in infancy. The
stepmother survived her husband--who died, as the result of an accident,
in 1763--and then she too entered a second time into the wedded state.
Haydn can never have been very intimate with her, and he appears to
have lost sight of her entirely in her later years. But he bequeathed a
small sum to her in his will, "to be transferred to her children should
she be no longer alive."
Birth
Joseph Haydn, to give the composer the name which he now usually
bears, was the second of the twelve children born to the Rohrau
wheelwright. The exact date of his birth is uncertain, but it was either
the 31st of March or the 1st of April 1732. Haydn himself gave the
latter as the correct date, alleging that his brother Michael had fixed
upon the previous day to save him from being called an April fool!
Probably we shall not be far off the mark if we assume with Pohl that
Haydn was born in the night between the 31st of March and the 1st of

April.
His Precocity
Very few details have come down to us in regard to his earlier years;
and such details as we have refer almost wholly to his musical
precocity. It was not such a precocity as that of Mozart, who was
playing minuets at the age of four, and writing concertos when he was
five; but just on that account it is all the more credible. One's
sympathies are with the frank Philistine who pooh-poohs the tales told
of baby composers, and hints that they must have been a trial to their
friends. Precocious they no doubt were; but precocity often evaporates
before it can become genius, leaving a sediment of disappointed hopes
and vain ambitions. In literature, as Mr Andrew Lang has well observed,
genius may show itself chiefly in acquisition, as in Sir Walter Scott,
who, as a boy, was packing all sorts of lore into a singularly capacious
mind, while doing next to nothing that was noticeable. In music it is
different. Various learning is not so important as a keenly sensitive
organism. The principal thing is emotion, duly ordered by the intellect,
not intellect touched by emotion. Haydn's precocity at any rate was of
this sort. It proclaimed itself in a quick impressionableness to sound, a
delicately-strung ear, and an acute perception of rhythm.
Informal Music-Making
We have seen how the father had his musical evenings with his harp
and the voices of wife and children. These informal rehearsals were
young Haydn's delight. We hear more particularly of his attempts at
music-making by sawing away upon a piece of stick at his father's side,
pretending to play the violin like the village schoolmaster under whom
he was now learning his rudiments. The parent was hugely pleased at
these manifestations of musical talent in his son. He had none of the
absurd, old-world ideas of Surgeon Handel as to the degrading
character of the divine art, but encouraged the youngster in every
possible way. Already he dreamt--what father of a clever boy has not
done the same?--that Joseph would in some way or other make the
family name famous; and although it is said that like his wife, he had
notions of the boy becoming a priest, he took the view that his progress

towards holy orders would be helped rather than hindered by the
judicious cultivation of his undoubted taste for music.
His First Teacher
While these thoughts were passing through his head, the chance visit of
a relation practically decided young Haydn's future. His grandmother,
being left a widow, had married a journeyman wheelwright, Matthias
Seefranz, and one of their children married a schoolmaster, Johann
Matthias Frankh. Frankh combined with the post of pedagogue that of
choir-regent at Hainburg, the ancestral home of the Haydns, some four
leagues from Rohrau. He came occasionally to Rohrau to see his
relatives, and one day he surprised Haydn keeping strict time to the
family music on his improvised fiddle. Some discussion following
about the boy's unmistakable talent, the schoolmaster generously
offered to take him to Hainburg that he might learn "the first elements
of music and other juvenile acquirements." The father was pleased; the
mother, hesitating at first, gave her reluctant approval, and Haydn left
the family home never to return, except on a flying visit. This was in
1738, when he was six years of age.
Hainburg
The town of Hainburg lies close to the Danube, and looks very
picturesque with its old walls and towers. According to the Nibelungen
Lied, King Attila once spent a night in the place, and a stone figure of
that "scourge