Mathias Haydn - Launching His Sons' Careers

Launching His Sons' Careers

Matthias, with his wife Maria, was also responsible for launching his sons' careers as professional musicians. The crucial events (in the case of Joseph) are narrated, rather differently, by Griesinger and Dies. Here is Griesinger's account:

One day the headmaster from the neighboring town of Hainburg, a distant relative of the Haydn family, came to Rohrau. Meister Mathias and his wife gave their usual little concert, and five-year-old Joseph sat near his parents and sawed at his left arm with a stick, as if he were accompanying on the violin. It astonished the schoolteacher that the boy observed time so correctly. He inferred from this a natural talent for music and advised the parents to send their Sepperl ... to Hainburg so that he might be set to an art that in time would unfailingly open to him the prospect "of becoming a clergyman." The parents, ardent admirers of the clergy, joyfully seized this proposal, and in his sixth year Joseph went to the headmaster in Hainburg.

Hainburg is eleven kilometers (seven miles) from Rohrau. As Joseph moved three years later to Vienna to become a professional chorister under Georg Reutter, he was never to live with his parents again.

Biographer Dies tells the same story (presumably, also on the basis of what Joseph Haydn told him) as follows:

Doubtless we are consider his father's love of singing as the first occasion when Haydn's spirit, already in earliest youth, entered its proper sphere. How easily the father could have set him to his own trade or dedicated him to the cloth, the heart's desire of both father and mother. This did not come about, thanks not a little to his concerts among the neighbors, by which he had won for himself a reputation in the whole town and even with the schoolmaster. And thus when the talk was of singing, all were unanimous in praise of the cartwright's son and could not commend enough his fine voice.

Since his father and the schoolmaster were close friends, it was natural for the latter to be drawn into consultation over Josephs's artistic destiny. The deliberations lasted a long time. The father still could not forget the priesthood. Finally, however, came the moment to decide. The various opinions converged. It was resolved that Joseph should stay with music and sooner or later, somewhere or other, perhaps as Regens chori or even as Kapellmeister, earn an honorable living.

Joseph had passed the age of six when he had to leave his birthplace and travel to Hainburg, a small town not far off. He was recommended to the care of the Regens chori, who undertook to guide the young boy on the virtuoso's course.

As can be seen, the biographers differ on whether it was an unnamed local schoolmaster (Dies), or Franck himself (Griesinger) who advised Haydn's parents to send their son to Franck. They also differ in whether the parents sought musical training with the view that it would help their son become a Catholic priest (Griesinger), or whether they reluctantly decided to give on their hopes for a clerical career for Joseph and let him pursue a musical one instead (Dies). In such cases of conflict Haydn biographers tend to trust Griesinger.

Dies further states that once Haydn's career in Vienna as a chorister had been ended (by puberty; i.e. the loss of his soprano voice), and Haydn faced the difficult task of trying to survive as a freelance musician in Vienna, his parents insisted that he train as a priest, but that Joseph ultimately prevailed.

The launching of Michael's career proceeded more straightforwardly, as Joseph's singing career paved the way for Michael's. According to Dies:

Reutter was so captivated by 's talents that he declared to the father that even if he had twelve sons, he would take care of them all. The father saw himself freed of a great burden by this offer, consented to it, and some five years after dedicated Joseph's brother Michael and still later Johann to the musical muse. Both were taken on as choirboys, and, to Joseph's unending joy, both brothers were turned over to him to be trained."

Unlike Joseph or Michael, Johann did not become a composer, but worked in the Esterházy household as a tenor; his support may have been paid by Joseph.