On 31 March 1809, Joseph Haydn turned 77, passing the day unostentatiously at his home in Gumpendorf, a village near Vienna. Nine days later, Austria declared war on France, and within a month Napoleon’s cannonballs were flying over Gumpendorf, one landing in the courtyard of Haydn’s property. These were hardly the placid conditions the ailing composer needed, and they cast a shadow as he stoically endured his final illness.
undefinedHaydn died on 31 May, widely acknowledged as one of classical music’s greatest masters. Two weeks later a grand memorial service was held in Vienna, with the cream of Viennese society present. The burial itself, constricted by wartime conditions, had been a quieter affair, unadorned with pomp and circumstance. A simple ceremony was held in Gumpendorf, and Haydn was laid to rest in the nearby Hundsturm Cemetery.
What happened to Haydn's skull?
He would not, however, rest there long. Just days after the interment, two enthusiasts of phrenology, a newly invented pseudo-science relating bumps on the skull to personality traits, approached the gravedigger at Hundsturm with a proposition – might he possibly be interested in digging Haydn up, cutting off his head, and delivering it for phrenological investigation?
Attracted by the sum of money offered, the gravedigger didn’t hesitate. On 4 June, he performed the gruesome act of decapitation, passing the severed skull to Joseph Carl Rosenbaum (who knew Haydn from serving the aristocratic Esterházy family) and Johann Nepomuk Peter, a prison governor. The composer’s head had already decomposed significantly, causing Rosenbaum to retch as he placed it in a carriage.
An hour-long examination was all it took for the amateur phrenologists to conclude that the ‘music bump’ on Haydn’s head was indeed impressively developed – hardly a startling conclusion. Stripped to the bone and bleached, the skull was then placed in a bespoke display cabinet topped by a lyre, and stored in Johann Peter’s home along with other skulls he had collected.
'A ghoulish game of cranial pass-the-parcel'
At some point in the following decade a ghoulish game of cranial pass-the-parcel was started. It began when Johann Peter tired of his collection and passed some of the skulls (including Haydn’s) on to Rosenbaum. Then, in 1820, Prince Nicholas Esterházy II, Haydn’s final patron, moved to bring the beloved composer’s remains back to the family estate at Eisenstadt. On exhumation, however, the corpse was found to be headless.
Why did Haydn's corpse have the wrong head?
Peter and Rosenbaum were quickly identified as the culprits, and an enraged Nicholas demanded the return of his former employee’s head. Instead, he was eventually given a skull purported to be Haydn’s, but in fact belonging to someone else. This was placed on top of Haydn’s shoulders, and the composer was re-buried at Eisenstadt. Rosenbaum meanwhile kept the real Haydn head, reportedly confessing to the deception on his deathbed.
When were Haydn's head and body reunited?
The skull reverted to his old friend Peter, and eventually (in 1895) passed via two further owners to Vienna’s prestigious Gesellschaft der Musik. There it was put in a glass case on a piano, and viewed by visitors. Then, in 1932, Prince Paul Esterházy V constructed a handsome marble tomb at the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, expressly designed to reunite the long separated parts of Haydn’s body.
That reunion finally happened 22 years later, on 5 June 1954. Haydn’s head was blessed by the Archbishop of Vienna then taken in a hearse to Eisenstadt where, at the Bergkirche, the sculptor Gustinus Ambrosi raised the skull dramatically in the air before placing it with Haydn’s skeleton in a new copper coffin. This was laid in the marble tomb, where it remains to this day, a short walk from the palace for which much of Haydn’s greatest music was created.
Recommended recording: Collegium Musicum 90/Richard Hickox Chandos CHAN 0640
Haydn features in our list of the best Austrian composers of all time. He also finishes strongly in our countdown of the very greatest composers of all time.
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