Michael Haydn

Michael Haydn: The Other Brother From Rohrau

On 31 December 1771, a Salzburg court musician signed and dated the autograph of a Requiem Mass he had written in roughly two weeks. The archbishop who employed him had died on 16 December; the funeral was fixed for 2 January. Less than a year earlier the composer had buried his only child, a daughter who did not reach her first birthday. The score that came out of that fortnight — the Requiem in C minor, MH 155 — is now argued to be among the finest eighteenth-century settings of the Mass for the dead, and it was heard in January 1772 by two visitors named Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart.

The Rohrau Boys

Johann Michael Haydn was born on 14 September 1737 in Rohrau, a village in Lower Austria near the Hungarian border. His father, Mathias Haydn, was a wheelwright who also served as a village official; his mother, Maria Koller, had been a cook in a palace kitchen. The household produced two professional composers, and history has been comprehensively unfair to the second of them. Michael was five years younger than Joseph, and he would spend two and a half centuries being introduced as somebody's brother.

The Vienna Choir School

At eight he followed Joseph into the choir of St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, under the demanding Georg Reutter. Contemporary accounts are surprisingly blunt about the comparison between the two boys: Michael was reckoned the brighter student, and once Joseph's voice broke, the better singer of the two. By twelve he was deputising as organist and writing preludes and fantasies of his own — the standard apprenticeship of a Habsburg church musician, learned at the keyboard rather than from a treatise. In 1753 his own voice changed and the choir school released him.

Großwardein and the Salzburg Bargain

He worked as a freelance before taking a Kapellmeister post at Großwardein — Oradea, in present-day Romania — for the bishop there; the sources disagree on whether that appointment came in 1757 or 1760. What is not in dispute is what happened in 1762, when he accepted a concertmaster's position with the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg. He stayed forty-four years. In 1781 he took over as cathedral organist from the post's previous occupant, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had left Salzburg for Vienna and never came back.

Salzburg was not a glamorous place to spend a career, and Haydn knew it. In 1802 he received offers he himself described as lucrative and honourable, from the Esterházy establishment and from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He consulted Joseph, and turned both down. Whether that was loyalty, inertia, or a clear-eyed reading of what a sixty-five-year-old church composer actually wanted from the rest of his life, the record does not say.

Marriage and Loss

On 17 August 1768 he married the soprano Maria Magdalena Lipp, who sang in Salzburg and created roles in Mozart's early operas — and who was, by the surviving accounts, cordially disliked by the women of the Mozart family. Their only child, Aloisia Josepha, was born on 31 January 1770 and died on 27 January 1771, four days short of turning one. The Requiem followed eleven months later.

The Working Ledger

The scale of what Haydn produced in Salzburg is easy to underestimate because so little of it was ever meant to leave the building. Over four decades he wrote more than 360 works there: forty-seven Mass settings, including the *Missa Hispanica* of 1786 and the St Francis Mass in D minor; some 130 graduals; sixty-five canticles; motets; more than forty symphonies; nineteen string quartets; sixty-five canons; ninety-seven part-songs; eleven Singspiele. He was also, from a scholar's point of view, an unusually considerate composer — he dated his manuscripts consistently, which is why the successive attempts to catalogue him, from Lang in 1808 through Perger in 1907 to Sherman in 1982 and the comprehensive Sherman–Thomas catalogue of 1991, had something firm to work with.

He taught, too. Carl Maria von Weber and Anton Diabelli both studied with him in Salzburg.

The Mozart Entanglement

No composer's reputation is more thoroughly braided with the Mozarts', usually to his disadvantage. Both Leopold and Wolfgang complained about his drinking, Wolfgang writing dismissively about Haydn turning up intoxicated to services. Yet the influence flowed the other way as well. His Requiem — scored for soloists, chorus, two bassoons, four trumpets in C, three trombones, timpani, strings and continuo, and cast almost entirely in C minor — is generally accepted as having shaped Mozart's own Requiem of 1791, with scholars pointing to rhythmic and structural parallels.

The most absurd chapter came posthumously. Haydn's Symphony No. 25 in G major spent generations circulating as Mozart's "Symphony No. 37," K. 444, because a surviving autograph carried a slow introduction in Mozart's hand. Modern scholarship has settled it: Mozart wrote the introduction, Haydn wrote the symphony. For well over a century, his best-known piece of orchestral music was famous only for not being his.

Why Michael Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the word attaches to him mostly by inference, and that the sources consulted here record no contemporary using it. What they do record is more interesting. Joseph Haydn — who had every reason to be competitive and no reason to flatter — judged his younger brother's religious works superior to his own. The choir school reckoned Michael the abler of the two boys. Britannica notes that in his lifetime he was widely regarded as the better church composer of the pair.

The quality involved is craft rather than conceptual daring: speed, fluency, and an exact instinct for what liturgical music has to do in a real building on a real occasion. Writing a full Requiem in a fortnight, under a hard funeral deadline and in fresh grief, and producing something still performed and studied 250 years later, is a specific and rare capacity — closer to the compositional reflex of a working craftsman operating at the top of his powers than to the restless structural invention that made his brother's symphonies historically decisive.

The counter-case is real and should not be softened. Michael Haydn broke no forms and founded no school. Even during his lifetime his sacred style was thought old-fashioned. He drank. He stayed in a provincial post while the century's music moved to Vienna. His reputation went into what Britannica calls a long eclipse after his death, and only revived after the Second World War. Karl Geiringer's verdict — that he "has not received the recognition he deserves" — is a claim about neglect, not about revolution, and it is the fairest version of the case.

Afterlife

Haydn died in Salzburg on 10 August 1806, aged sixty-eight, six years after Napoleon's armies had disrupted the city he had served for most of his adult life. The revival Geiringer called for has come slowly and partially: the Requiem has a performing life, the Missa Hispanica surfaces, the symphonies get recorded. He remains the rarest kind of figure in music history — a composer whose real problem was never obscurity of talent, but proximity to two of the largest reputations in Western music, one of whom he shared a surname with and one of whom he replaced at the cathedral organ.

Achievements

• Notable work: Symphony No. 34
• Notable work: Symphony No. 36
• Notable work: Symphony No. 1
• Instruments: pipe organ
• Genres: opera and symphony