Franz Joseph Haydn
From Philosopedia
Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732—1809)
Haydn, one of the great masters of classical music, was an Austrian and a member of the Masonic Lodge. That organization was reviled for its being non-theistic, for being deistic. Its deistic rituals held that the Grand Architect of the Universe created the universe but did not interfere by causing miracles or special revelations. British author and critic, Jim Herrick, commented in New Humanist about Warren Allen Smith's having included Haydn in his Who's Who in Hell as a non-believer (a deistic Mason, of which Catholicism did not tolerate),
- Haydn may have had connections with the masons, but was surely a devout Catholic.
Beethoven studied under Haydn, and Mozart was one of his close friends. Two of his great oratorios, written in his old age, were “The Creation” (1798) and “The Seasons” (1801).
Austria was at war with France at the time, but Haydn’s burial in the Hundsthrum churchyard was a quiet event. The local prison chief, Johann Peter, was an amateur phrenologist and chose, under cover of war, to study the head of such an illustrious man as Haydn. So two days after the interment, a small group of bribed officials assisted four workmen in exhuming the body, cutting off the head, then reburying the remains. After stripping the head of all flesh, Peter cheerfully pronounced that Haydn had “the bumps of music fully developed.” Inasmuch as it was dangerous to return the skull, Peter kept it in a silk-lined box, eventually giving it to Joseph Rosenbaum, secretary to Haydn’s patron, Prince Esterhazy. Frau Rosenbaum had a glass and ebony display case made for the relic. When the Prince, unaware of what had happened, decided to rebury Haydn in his private church at Eisenstadt eight years later, the robbery was discovered.
Meanwhile, Rosenbaum’s wife refused to give up the relic but, in a ruse, another skull was produced. Upon its being examined, however, the skull was found to be that of a man in his twenties, and Haydn had died in his seventies. Eventually, Peter’s wife gave it to her doctor who gave it to the Austrian Institute of Pathology and Anatomy in 1832. Haydn’s actual skull was not reunited with his body until the summer of 1954 when, amid church music and flashbulbs and after Prince Paul Esterhazy promised to build a magnificent tomb if the head were returned, Haydn’s head was finally joined to the rest of his body.
