Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Jane Robins, with special credit to Linda Cantoni for the music files, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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[Illustration: FAMOUS COMPOSERS AND THEIR WORKS
John Knowles Paine Theodore Thomas and Karl Klauser
Copyright, 1891, by J. B. MILLET COMPANY.
_Reproduction of a steel engraving by L. Sichling, after an oil portrait by Röster._]
On the river Leitha, in Lower Austria, and some fifteen miles south-east from Vienna, is a village so insignificant that it is not set down on the ordinary maps. It is called Rohrau, and there, during the night of March 31, 1732, and descended from a long line of humble hand-toilers, was born Franz Joseph Haydn, who was destined to make the family name immortal. His father, Mathias Haydn, was a master wheelwright, whose father, Thomas Haydn, had followed the same occupation. The mother of Franz, or Joseph, as he is now called, was Maria Koller, daughter of the market inspector of the locality, and a cook in the household of Count Harrach, the lord of the village. The ancestry of the Haydns is undistinguished as far back as it can be traced. This union of the wheelwright and the cook resulted in a family of twelve children, of whom three developed into musicians. They were Franz Joseph, the subject of this sketch, Johann Michael, the church composer, and Johann Evangelist, a singer of no special excellence. There is no record of musical talent on the side of either the Haydns or the Kollers previous to its appearance in the family of Mathias, and its sudden development in three of the offspring of this marriage is inexplicable.
In addition to his occupation as a wheelwright, Mathias Haydn officiated as sexton of his parish. Both he and his wife were able to sing sufficiently well to increase their scant earnings by singing in church on Sundays and holidays, and at fairs and festivals. They also indulged in music at home, after a rude fashion, the father accompanying the voices on the harp, which he had learned to play by ear. The parents of the future composer were hard-working people who feared God, and so thoroughly did they instill their religious feelings into their children, that Haydn felt the influence of this early discipline all through his long life. Of his earliest years but little is known except that, while yet a tender child, he began to manifest the musical instinct that was in him by singing the simple tunes that his father was able to strum on the harp, and by exciting wonder at the correctness of his ear and his keen sense of rhythm. These gifts, however, are by no means rare in children, and the possession of them does not necessarily insure that their possessors shall develop into Haydns and Mozarts.
