“Mathias Haydn”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Mathias 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.

Life

Mathias (or Matthias) 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.^[1] 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;^[2] 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.^[3]

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"^[3] in the palace of Count Harrach, the aristocratic patron of Rohrau. The couple had twelve children, of whom six died in infancy.^[4] 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.^[6] The following year Mathias remarried, to "his servant girl of nineteen",^[7] whose maiden name was Maria Anna Seeder.^[8] The second marriage produced five children, none of whom survived to adulthood.^[9]

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,^[10] 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):

Mathias and music

Mathias apparently enjoyed music a great deal. Griesinger recorded what Joseph had told him in his elderly reminiscences:

Albert Christoph Dies, another biographer who interviewed Joseph Haydn in old age, tells a similar story, adding that, insofar as Mathias knew how, he instructed his children musically:

Launching his sons' careers

Mathias, 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:

Hainburg is eleven kilometers (seven miles) from Rohrau.^[16] 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:

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.^[18]

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.^[19]

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.^[20]

The launching of Michael's career proceeded more straightforwardly, as Joseph's singing career paved the way for Michael's. According to Dies:^[21]

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.^[9]

Mathias's social standing

The standing in society of Mathias bears on the biographies of his composer sons, which sometimes portray the Haydn family as impoverished, or as peasants. Karl Geiringer writes:^[22]

Geiringer goes on to refute the view of poverty, based on evidence from bills that Mathias submitted for his work to Count Harrach as well as Mathias's tax records. Apparently, Mathias had "his own wine cellar, his own farmland, and some cattle".^[22] In addition, a letter he wrote to Michael in the mid-1750s (when both Joseph and Michael were living in Vienna) indicates he could afford at least the occasional extravagance:

Mathias as Marktrichter

From 1741 to 1761, Mathias was Marktrichter (German; literally "market judge") of Rohrau. According to Geiringer,^[22] "the list of his duties [was] imposing ... He was responsible for the good conduct of the population and had to keep a sharp lookout for adultery or excessive gambling. He had to see that people went to church and did not break the Sunday rest. It was his job to allot among the inhabitants of Rohrau the labor required by the patron, Count Harrach, and he was responsible for keeping the local roads in good repair On Sundays at six in the morning he had to report on all such matters to the count's steward. Every two years an open-air meeting of the whole community took place at which the Marktrichter rendered a detailed account of the work done during the past period."

Visits to Joseph in Vienna

Although Mathias sent both of his future-composer sons away from home when they were young, he certainly did not lose interest in them. This is attested, for instance, by the letter quoted above, and by two visits he made to Vienna that were remembered decades later by Joseph and related to biographers.

Of these, the more dramatic was one in which Mathias rescued Joseph from being turned into a castrato. Griesinger (1810) relates the tale thus:^[25]

A few years later, when Joseph as working as a freelance musician and living in very humble quarters, he suffered a burglary, and Mathias came to Vienna to help:

Notes

1. ^Geiringer (1982:5)
2. ^Geiringer (1982:5)
3. ^¹Hughes 1970, 3
4. ^Information in this paragraph up to this point from Geiringer 1982, 5-6
5. ^Source for children and dates: David Wyn Jones, "Haydn family", in Jones 2009a. Note that birth dates were not generally preserved at the time, only the (closely coinciding) baptismal dates. Joseph Haydn was baptized 1 April 1732.
6. ^Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 30
7. ^Geiringer 1982, 7
8. ^Gotwals 1963, 215
9. ^¹Larsen 1980, 2
10. ^Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 31
11. ^¹Griesinger 1810, 16
12. ^¹Griesinger 1810, 9
13. ^Dies 1810, 80
14. ^This was Johann Matthias Franck, the husband of Mathias Haydn's step-sister Juliane Rosina Seefranz (Mathias's mother Katharina had remarried following her husband's death in 1701); Geiringer p. 6.
15. ^Griesinger identifies this as a diminutive form of the name "Joseph"; presumably, it consists of an infantile pronunciation of the second syllable, plus the Austrian German diminutive suffix -erl
16. ^Distance Calculator: How Far Is It? — Infoplease.com
17. ^Latin for "director of a choir"
18. ^Dies 1810, 81
19. ^See Webster and Feder 2001, 1; Robbins Landon and Jones 1988, 23; and Geiringer 1982, 10, who for the present story reports only Griesinger's version.
20. ^Dies 1810, 87-88
21. ^1810, 86
22. ^¹²{{Harvnb|Geiringer|1982|p=7}}
23. ^Robbins Landon and Jones, 31
24. ^Jones (2009b), however, suggests that the rental of a carriage may have been in response to a family emergency, namely the need for his sons to attend their mother's funeral (as noted above, she died in 1754).
25. ^Griesinger 1810, 11
26. ^Georg Reutter