Joseph Haydn
Near the front of Wiener Zentralfriedhof, the grand cemetery of Vienna, Austria, sit the final resting spots for a murderer’s row of history’s most celebrated classical composers. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), to name but a few. There’s even a monument to Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791), although he’s actually buried in an unmarked grave in another Vienna cemetery.
But missing is perhaps the greatest composer of all: Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). Besides writing a lot of great music, he’s considered the father of symphonies and string quartets. Haydn is now entombed 40 miles away in Eisenstadt, capital of the rural Austrian state of Burgenland, where he composed and debuted so many of his famous works.
However, herein lies a tale full of deception, chicanery and just plain un-believability. Four days after Haydn’s death in 1809, associates severed his skull, supposedly for scientific research. Initially buried in Vienna, the rest of Haydn’s body made it back to Eisenstadt in 1820 while the head remained in Vienna, first hidden but later bequeathed by will, passed around and sometimes put on public display!
It wasn’t until 1954–a full 145 years after Haydn’s death at age 77–that his real skull and body came together again where they are now. That’s in a marble mausoleum attached to the Bergkirche (Hill Church), an ornate 18th Century Catholic church built by Haydn’s musical patrons, the noble Esterházy family, and informally known as Haydn’s Church. It’s largely pay-per-view. The church today charged me, a tourist far from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters, three euros ($3.30 at current exchange rate) to open the thick mausoleum door on the side of the main sanctuary. Revealed was the sarcophagus, protected by bars, containing all of the great man–and, as it turns out, a little extra. Stay with me on this.
I’ll leave discussion of the details of Haydn’s musical life to others. It’s his afterlife I’m focusing on here.
The theft of Haydn’s head was at the behest of students of phrenology, a now-discredited science whereby a person’s mental abilities could be determined by the size and shape of the head. The students here were Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, an Esterhazy family associate operating on his own, and Johann Nepomuk Peter, a local prison official. Although Haydn died in Esterstadt, the initial burial was at a cemetery in Vienna. Rosenbaum and Peter bribed the gravedigger, who before burying the body in a casket secretly cut off the head and gave it to them. After an examination that essentially proved nothing, the head was effectively embalmed and kept as a curiosity, first by Peter and then Rosenbaum.
This might have been the end of the story. But a decade later, in 1820 a son of England’s King George III–the monarch so roundly denounced in the U.S. Declaration of Independence in 1776–came to Eisenstadt to visit Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II. The son asked to see the grave of Haydn, who composed some of his works in London and had been very popular there. After expressing surprise the burial plot was in Vienna, he persuaded Nikolaus to move Haydn’s remains to Esterstadt.
One can only imagine the shock in Eisenstadt when the exhumed coffin was opened to reveal a headless body topped by a wig!
An outraged Nikolaus demanded the head. It appears at least one ringer head from another body was sent to Eisenstadt. The real head stayed in Vienna. Upon his death in 1829, Rosenbaum willed the head to Peters. It seems there may have been further thefts–and bequests–of the skull. Eventually, the head surfaced at the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna, where it was shown to visitors. Lawsuits ensued.
In 1932–only 123 years after Haydn’s death–Nikolaus’s descendant, Paul Esterházy, built the mausoleum for Haydn at the Bergkirche but said it would remain empty until all of Haydn could be assembled. World War II and the post-war division of Austria delayed things. Eisenstadt was in the Russian controlled sector, while most of Vienna was not. Paul himself was arrested by the Russians and sentenced to years in prison for being rich.
Finally, in 1954, on the eve of the Russian withdrawal from Austria, the great powers agreed to the return. In a grand event widely reported around the world, Austria’s president, chancellor, diplomats and religious leaders gathered on June 5 at a Vienna church. After a big send-off, Haydn’s head was transported via motorcade to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt. Cheering crowds lined the streets. “Composer Haydn’s skull, severed 145 years, is blessed, reunited to body,” said a typical headline that day in the Baltimore Evening Sun.
Moving dead composers is something of an Austrian tradition, even if chopping them up is not. The remains of Beethoven and Schubert were also re-interred.
Now about that extra in that Haydn mausoleum at the Bergkirche. Remember that the Esterhazy family had been sent a ringer head? According to news accounts from the 1950s, they decided to also put that skull in the sarcophagus alongside Haydn’s, as a sign of respect for the deceased. Symbolically–unlike the crew planted at Wiener Zentralfriedhof–one could almost call this the Tomb of the Unknown Musician.