Mathias Haydn

Matthias Haydn (31 January 1699 – 12 September 1763) was the father of two famous composers, Joseph and Michael Haydn. He worked as a wheelwright in the Austrian village of Rohrau, where he also served as Marktrichter, an office akin to village mayor.

Matthias (or Mathias) was born in Hainburg, a small town not far from Rohrau. His ancestors were inhabitants of this town, which had a troubled history; notably his paternal grandparents were fatal civilian casualties in the Turkish occupation of the town in 1683. His father, Thomas Haydn, was also a wheelwright. The material prosperity of the family seems to have increased with each generation: the grandfather Kaspar (also a wheelwright) started out as a "Burgknecht", i.e. "a day laborer with a permanent domicile"; the father Thomas built himself a house and was formally a "citizen" of Hainburg; Mathias himself rose to the rank of Marktricher in Rohrau and owned farmland as well as a house; and Mathias's son Joseph, the composer, eventually became owner of a very large house in Vienna and died with a large fortune.

In his youth, Mathias served an apprenticeship in Hainburg as a wheelwright and then in 1717 departed on the traditional travels of the journeyman. This period of his life lasted ten years, and took him among other places to Frankfurt am Main. He returned once to Hainburg (1722), a fact known because he applied there for a copy of his birth certificate.

On his final return in 1727 he became a master wheelwright and joined the guild of wheelwrights in Hainburg. However, he settled in nearby Rohrau, where he built a house for himself. The following year he married Maria Koller, aged 21, who had worked as an "under-cook" in the palace of Count Harrach, the aristocratic patron of Rohrau. The couple had twelve children, of whom six died in infancy. The six children who lived to adulthood were as follows (baptismal names not used in later life are parenthesized).

Maria Koller Haydn died 22 February 1754, aged 47. The following year Mathias remarried, to "his servant girl of nineteen", whose maiden name was Maria Anna Seeder. The second marriage produced five children, none of whom survived to adulthood.

Mathias lived on to 1763. This was long enough to see both of his composer sons reach professional success: Michael was a Kapellmeister at Grosswardein, and Joseph had become Vice-Kapellmeister (in fact, Kapellmeister in all but name) for the fabulously wealthy Esterházy family in Eisenstadt. Haydn biographer Georg August Griesinger wrote (1810):

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