Odd this day
10 May 1809
It’s the 216th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte firing cannonballs at Joseph Haydn. The composer survived the experience, but died at the end of the month — at which point someone stole his head to study phrenologically, and he was only reunited with it in 1954.
(Yes, I could have just started this with his death and run it on 31st, but where’s the fun in that?)
Napoleon arrived outside Vienna on 10th, and swiftly started bombarding the place. Strictly speaking, he didn’t fire cannonballs at Haydn. What landed in the great composer’s garden were case shot (or canister shot) — essentially, mini-cannonballs packed into a metal cylinder and fired using artillery. Apparently, it was four of these smaller balls that came to rest among Haydn’s flowerbeds, rather than one big lump of metal.
Anyway, according to Richard Bratby in the Spectator,
His valet recorded that the bedroom door blew open and every window in the house rattled. Shaking violently, the 77-year-old composer’s first thought was for his household, which at that point comprised six servants and a talking parrot who addressed him as ‘Papa’. ‘Children, don’t be afraid, for where Haydn is, nothing can happen to you,’ he shouted.
These details originate in Georg August Griesinger’s Biographical Notes Concerning Joseph Haydn, and given that they were friends, he seems a reliable source. Griesinger, though, says Haydn’s shaking started only after he’d reassured everyone:
But the spirit was stronger than the flesh, for he had hardly uttered the brave words when his whole body began to tremble.
Either way, he’d been declining for a while (with what was probably arteriosclerosis), and had retired, not composing anything major since 1802. Some sources suggest that, when Napoleon learned Haydn was ill, he put an armed guard on the man’s house. Even if that isn’t true, his last visitor was a French army captain on 17 May.
When the servant told him his master was lying in bed, the captain begged that he might at least be permitted to see through the keyhole the man he esteemed so highly. Haydn, who was informed of this, had the officer come in. Enthusiastically the soldier described the feelings that Haydn’s nearness gave to him, and the great pleasure that he owed to the study of his works. At Haydn’s request he sang at the clavier in a neighboring room with great perfection the aria from The Creation, Mit Würd’ und Hoheit angethan [In Native Worth and Honor Clad]. Haydn was deeply moved, the officer not less so, they embraced one another, and parted amidst the warmest tears.
This officer, apparently named Clement Sulemy, then departed for the Battle of Aspern, from which he did not return. At the end of the month, Haydn joined him in shuffling off this mortal coil, and — what with the war raging — had a simple funeral service and burial in the local cemetery. According to Haydn: a creative life in music, a biography by 20th century musicologists Karl and Irene Geiringer (I think Karl was descended from Georg August), Haydn’s former employer Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II
applied for permission to have the body exhumed and moved to Eisenstadt. But presently the whole matter slipped his memory, and though he received the permission, no action was taken … until in 1820 he was reminded of his obligations by Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge. This distinguished visitor observed, after attending a gala performance of The Creation given in his honor at Eisenstadt: “How fortunate was the man who employed this Haydn in his lifetime and now possesses his mortal remains.” Prince Esterhazy did not care to contradict his guest’s assumption, but he gave orders immediately for the body to be brought to Eisenstadt for burial in the Bergkirche, where Haydn had so often performed his own Masses. When the coffin was opened for identification, the horrified officials found no head on the body, but only the wig. Inquiries soon brought an explanation of the mystery.
Yes, indeed: the wig is a marvellous detail. As The Musical Times put it in 1932, the head had been
obtained by an act of desecration. The sacrilegious deed was committed in the year 1809, shortly after Haydn was buried, by two students of [Franz Joseph] Gall’s phrenology — the Esterhazy secretary, Karl Rosenbaum, and Johann Nepomuk Peter, the governor of the Lower Austrian provincial prison.
Rather remarkably, Rosenbaum had been a friend of Haydn’s for 20 years. According to a Radio 4 documentary, this was the eighth night after the burial, and they justified it to themselves on the grounds that
According to the law, there was nothing to stop one obtaining that which isn’t owned by someone else.
Hmmm. So (according to the Geiringers), they “bribed the gravedigger” and stole Haydn’s head to — in their own words — “protect it from desecration”. Righto. I suppose one can say that, after they had decapitated a corpse, they treated the skull reverently, in their own way.
Peter had a black wooden box made, with a golden lyre at the top and glass windows. In it the skull was placed on a white silk cushion trimmed with black.
The documentary goes into some splendidly disgusting detail about the skull’s stench and how green (but still recognisable) it was, so if you like that kind of thing, do feel free to pause here and listen.
(It’s fascinating, and contains such extraordinary facts as: Haydn’s brother had also been posthumously decapitated, and Haydn’s head thieves had already robbed a famous actress buried next to him of her head, plus there’s even a cameo for the Nazis, who stole Franz Joseph Gall’s skull collection.)
Anyway, in 1820, poor Haydn was finally dug up, and Nikolaus II discovered he was… incomplete. Others in Vienna already had, at the very least, suspicions about who was responsible, so (back to the Geiringers’ account):
When Haydn’s body arrived in Eisenstadt without the head, the Prince was furious and sent the police to Peter, who said that he had given the skull to Rosenbaum. A search in the latter’s house did not yield any result, since Rosenbaum’s wife, the singer Therese Gassmann, hid the skull in her straw mattress and lay down on the bed
…and according to more than one account said she couldn’t possibly be moved because she was menstruating.
The Prince now tried bribery, and his emissary promised Rosenbaum a large sum if he would deliver the skull, whereupon the skull of an old man was handed to the Prince and buried with Haydn’s body.
Mind you, according to The Musical Times, this wasn’t the first skull offered:
Rosenbaum … delivered up first of all the head of a youth
…which was rejected because it looked like that of a young man, but either way:
a spurious head was added to Haydn’s bones. Shortly before Rosenbaum’s death the real head came once more into Peter’s possession, on condition that it should be bequeathed to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde [Society of Friends of Viennese Music].
The 2009 Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn reckons this didn’t happen until 1895, after Peter gave it to his doctor, Karl Heller, who gave it to someone called Dr Rokitansky (who, according to Radio 4 was court anatomist to the Habsburgs), and his sons eventually gave it to the society. And if all that isn’t bizarre enough, a review of the Geiringers’ book says that in the 1930s Karl Geiringer was curator at this society of music, and spent a fair amount of his time there
showing the skull “reverently preserved” to “countless admirers of Haydn”.
In 1932, Prince Paul Esterházy (a descendant of Nikolaus II) built a marble tomb for Haydn, and tried again to put the old boy back together for his bicentenary. Back to that book review:
In point of fact painful disputes broke out again … But of all this and of the final outcome Dr. Geiringer gives no word. One cannot help feeling that his Postlude says either too little or too much.
…which sounds very much like skull-related shenanigans were still going on, and that Dr Karl was the one who was hanging on to the bonce this time. Then, of course, WWII rather got in the way, and only in 1954, 145 years after he was first buried, was Haydn’s head finally reunited with the rest of him. Even then, the story hadn’t quite given up all of its weirdness. The rogue head, which didn’t belong to Haydn, was kept with him, and his grave now contains one skeleton from the neck down, and two skulls from the neck up.
Mind you, as Richard Bratby said of Haydn, his life had not been without incident, and the adventure of the cannonball
was nothing particularly new. Over a long life Haydn survived smallpox, saw his house burn down (twice) and narrowly escaped castration at the hands of an overenthusiastic choirmaster.
(This was true. He’d been a boy soprano at St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna for several years, and, when puberty threatened his high notes, his kapellmeister suggested the operation. Depending on your source, either his parents objected, his father alone did, or — according to David Dubal’s The Essential Canon of Classical Music — Haydn was “already susceptible to the charms of women” (puberty, remember) and “horrified at the proposal”.)
The popular story is that he was kicked out of the choir for cutting off another chorister’s pigtail. Frankly, who knows? Whichever version is true, he was a struggling musician for several years, and only found fame late in life, but (Bratby again)
he remained an optimist — by all accounts, a man of deep generosity and warmth, who infused his most human qualities into his music. Mozart converses with angels. Beethoven storms the heavens. But Haydn pours out a big glass of Tokaj and invites you in for a really good chat.
It was reading that article back in 2020 that first convinced me to listen to a bit of Haydn for the first time, and…
…he’s bloody right, you know. While he was alive, the contents of that man’s head were remarkable, and remain so to this day.
