Joseph Haydn's Ethnicity - The Haydn-as-German Hypothesis and Modern Scholarship

The Haydn-as-German Hypothesis and Modern Scholarship

Despite its acquired associations with National Socialist musicology, Schmid's work has over the long term convinced not just Schroeder, but all mainstream Haydn scholarship.

Karl Geiringer endorses Schmid's views, both in his Haydn biography and in the fourth edition of the Grove Dictionary. In the 1982 revision of his biography, Geiringer wrote

"Schmid undertk elaborate genealogical research, tracing the family names back to the Middle Ages and producing most valuable data about Haydn's ancestors. According to his final conclusions, here can be no doubt that the Haydn and Koller families were of German origin."

Schmid's views were also endorsed by the French scholar, Michel Brenet, and by Rosemary Hughes in their Haydn biographies. H. C. Robbins Landon devoted the opening pages of his massive work Haydn: Chronicle and Works with a long summary and warm endorsement of Schmid's research.

The Danish scholar Jens Peter Larsen, writing in the 1980 New Grove, says of this question:

"the matter must be regarded as settled by . It may we be said that Schmid 'was even more intent to prove Haydn a German than Kuhač and Hadow had been to prove him a Slav' . But the weight of the documentary evidence that supports his case is decisive."

In the current version of the Grove Dictionary, the Haydn biography (by James Webster) does not even mention the old controversy, other than to cite Schmid's work in the bibliography. Neither Kuhač nor Hadow is cited.