Who Was Michael Haydn? | Op. 19
Johann Michael Haydn was Joseph Haydn’s younger brother. Based in Salzburg, Michael Haydn was widely-respected by his Classical-era contemporaries — including Mozart and Schubert. Guest Dr. Eva Neumayr will introduce you to this important composer who is little-known today.
In this episode, you’ll:
Discover why he isn’t better known in the 21st century
Learn about Michael Haydn’s relationships with both Wolfgang Amadé Mozart and his father Leopold Mozart
Hear about his strong influence on church music
For the best experience, please watch the video at the top of the page.
Episode Transcript and Timestamps
DANIEL ADAM MALTZ: Grüß Sie and welcome to Opus 19 of Classical Cake, the podcast where we discuss topics relating to Viennese classical music and Austrian culture while enjoying a delicious cake.
I'm your host, Daniel Adam Maltz.
If you’re new here, welcome!
Michael Haydn was Joseph Haydn's younger brother. He was widely respected in the classical era and was admired by Mozart.
He was musically educated alongside his brother Joseph and Johann Georg Albrechtsberger in Vienna. However, he made his career in Salzburg. He was even the teacher of Carl Maria von Weber and Anton Diabelli.
You might remember today’s guest from Classical Cake, Opus 16, The Other Mozart Prodigy: Maria Anna. Dr. Eva Neumayr is a musicologist who heads the music collection archives of the Archdiocese of Salzburg and also works with the Mozarteum Foundation. She is on the scientific advisory board of the Michael Haydn Society.
We spoke over Skype a few days ago.
Dr. Neumayr, thank you for joining me.
DR. EVA NEUMAYR: Thank you for inviting me.
Featured cake: Salzburger Nockerl [1:09]
MALTZ: Normally, we enjoy cake and coffee together while we have a nice interview. But, Austria just started another lockdown. When things are a bit more normal, I look forward to enjoying Salzburger Nockerl with you in person.
Salzburger Nockerl is a souffle-like dessert, a specialty from the city of Salzburg.
The dumplings are always freshly prepared and served warm with a light dusting of sugar. Sometimes, there is even a raspberry sauce.
So, let’s dig in.
Education in Vienna [1:43]
MALTZ: Like his older brother, Joseph, Michael was also accepted as a boy soprano into the choir at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna. What was his time there like — his early education?
NEUMAYR: Johann Michael Haydn started as a choirboy at St. Stevens Cathedral in 1745 following his older brother, who had started there earlier. He was five years older, Joseph Haydn.
These choir boys had to sing at St. Stephen's as well as at the Hofkapelle. The upper voices were always sung by boys at that time, not by women. And so they had six choir boys there to sing the choral parts and the solos. There, they were taught singing, but also instruments like the organ or the violin — so both knew how to play these two instruments — and also music theory and composition. So his time at St. Stephen's certainly was the base of his later life as a musician.
MALTZ: It's at this time that Michael sort of outshone Joseph in many ways, showed the more promising talent earlier on, even though we mostly speak of Joseph Haydn today.
Michael Haydn’s first role in Salzburg [3:16]
MALTZ: So eventually he left — he got older and his voice broke — and eventually relocated to Salzburg to be court musician and concertmaster to the Prince-Archbishop Sigismund Graf von Schrattenbach. What were his responsibilities in this position?
NEUMAYR: He was the first violinist, the leader of the first violins. Leopold Mozart, at this time, was the leader of the second violins. Violinists obviously had to play all the concerts, all the operas, as well as, at the cathedral, the masses and vespers and stuff like that. So he had a lot to do.
At that time, he was mainly asked by the court to provide music as a composer and to provide secular music — he mainly wrote concertos and symphonies and serenades and also operas, operettas like Die Hochzeit auf der Alm, singspiele and stuff like that.
Marriage [4:42]
MALTZ: It was this time in his life where he also got married. Did he have a happy marriage?
NEUMAYR: I think they were quite happy judging from the letters he wrote to his wife, Maria Magdalena Lipp. She was a gifted musician herself. She was one of the Salzburg court singers. Yeah, I think they had a good marriage.
One thing that has been reported is that she may have run into debt repeatedly and Michael Haydn had to bail her out several times. That may have been because these court singers, these female singers were very badly paid.
MALTZ: They had one daughter, but she tragically died within the first year of her life.
NEUMAYR: She died 10 days before her first birthday and Michael Haydn is reported to have been very sad afterwards. There are no reports about the mother, but I suppose she was as well. They didn't have any other children.
Requiem and church music [6:04]
MALTZ: So Prince-Archbishop Schrattenbach died in 1771 which gave way for Michael to write his first major church composition: the Requiem in C Minor. What was its reception at the time?
NEUMAYR: Well, the Schrattenbach Requiem was really his first major commission for the cathedral in Salzburg.
Leopold Mozart and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart were probably amongst the musicians who played because they had just returned from Italy the day before Schrattenbach died.
It was well received. On the other hand, Johann Michael Haydn hardly got any commissions for Salzburg Cathedral in the 10 years afterwards. And the reason for this, probably, was that Leopold Mozart was the chief organizer of the music at the cathedral and he gave all the commissions to his son. Of course, we are thankful for that because we have all the Mozart masses because of that.
But, Johann Michael Haydn got the commissions from the cathedral, the big commissions, after Mozart had left for Vienna. That was his big time as a church musician in Salzburg.
Relationship with Leopold Mozart [7:37]
MALTZ: You mentioned earlier about the 10 years after this triumph for Michael Haydn, if you will, that Leopold Mozart kind of kept him out to promote his own son. Of course, we know how hard Leopold worked for his son. But Leopold Mozart threw a couple of accusations at Michael Haydn at this time that have stuck: that he was lazy and a drunkard. Should we take Leopold at his word on this?
NEUMAYR: No, definitely not. This mainly stems from the letters of Leopold — especially one which was written after Anton Cajetan Adlgasser, another composer and court organ player, had died after a stroke he had had on the organ bench at the cathedral. After Adlgasser had died, a successor was needed for Trinity Church. Leopold Mozart was just trying to get the job again for his son, who was — he was hoping — coming back from Paris. He wanted him to be organist of Trinity Church. So that was in this emotion that he wrote that. There are other records of Haydn that Haydn did like a glass of wine or beer, but he was always very moderate in his consumption of alcohol. So we should not believe that.
Michael Haydn, of course, was appointed organist of Trinity Church. So that's why he got a little bit excited, I think.
MALTZ: Perhaps there was some animosity there.
Succeeding Mozart and gradual settings [9:32]
MALTZ: So, in 1782 Michael Haydn succeeded Mozart as court and cathedral organist. This is when you mentioned that he started writing a lot more church music for which he is most well-known today. What were his responsibilities in this position?
NEUMAYR: Well, he had to play one of the five organs of Salzburg Cathedral. He also had to teach the choir boys, the Kapellknaben, which he really did with great joy. And, of course, he was also one of the foremost composers of church music at that time.
MALTZ: He was famous particularly for gradual settings, right? This was a new thing in Salzburg.
NEUMAYR: Yes. At that time, that was kind of a new thing because, instead of the gradual, before that a sonata had been played and Colloredo wanted the text to be sung in mass, the text of the gradual.
Michael Haydn wrote a whole cycle of graduals for each Sunday of the year, and that became very famous because people copied it. Mozart, for example, was one of the first who wrote from Vienna, “Please ask Mr. Haydn to send me his gradual cycle” and several other people copied it. And it really got widely disseminated.
Relationship between Michael Haydn and Mozart [11:18]
MALTZ: We talked about the sort of competitive animosity that Leopold felt towards Michael, but what was the relationship between Michael Haydn and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart?
NEUMAYR: I think it was one of friendship and respect.
We know that Mozart copied several symphonies of Johann Michael Haydn. So he was interested in his music. And, there's this famous story that Michael Haydn was ill and had a due date coming up. He had to compose six duos for violin and viola for the Archbishop because the Archbishop was an avid violin player. So, he was sick and couldn't compose. Mozart, at the time in 1783, was visiting Salzburg for the last time with his young wife, Constanze, and he visited Johann Michael Haydn and saw that Haydn couldn't write. So, he wrote the two last duos for him, for Haydn to be able to fulfill his commission. And, on the autograph, he didn't write his name. So, obviously he gave them to Michael Haydn to turn them in. That's a kind of a nice story of a friendship.
MALTZ: It is a very nice story. It's interesting — there are letters from Mozart where he talks about the two Haydn brothers who he held in such high esteem. There was obviously more of an equality between Michael and Joseph than we tend to recognize today.
NEUMAYR: Yeah, that's true. So, I think around 1800, in church music, Michael Haydn may have been more famous than his brother. How famous he was as a church composer, as a composer of sacred music, we can see that E.T.A. Hoffman, who was from northern Germany, so far away from Salzburg, wrote — and this is my own translation, "Every connoisseur of music and its output knows and has always known that Michael Haydn, as a composer of sacred music, has to be counted amongst the first-rate composers of this discipline from every time and every nation."
That was six years after Michael Haydn’s death in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung. So, that shows how famous and how widespread his music was received.
Well, Joseph Haydn got very famous, too, around that time — mainly through his London symphonies and through The Creation, of course. That really was a bestseller piece. But still, Johann Michael Haydn was quite famous, too. If you go to the archives, sometimes around that time you find more sources of Michael Haydn than of Joseph Haydn.
Relationship between Michael and Joseph Haydn [14:53]
MALTZ: So what was their relationship like throughout their lives?
NEUMAYR: Oh, that was very friendly. They were very close in their youth as choirboys and then as aspiring young musicians in Vienna.
Their ways parted when Joseph Haydn was about 25 and Johann Michael Haydn was about 20. After that they stayed in contact via letters.
When, for example, when Michael Haydn was robbed in Salzburg during the French occupation and lost his silver watch, Joseph Haydn sent him a gold watch. Joseph Haydn was at that time already very wealthy and he could afford to help his brother.
So, they very highly estimated each other and Johann Michael Haydn also played a leading part in the performance of Joseph Haydn's big works like The Creation in Salzburg.
So, in the beginning of the 19th century, he was a very important musical influencer in Salzburg.
MALTZ: That's something we can relate to today with our own different type of influencers, right?
Why isn’t Michael Haydn more famous? [16:33]
MALTZ: Do you think that the fact that he stayed in Salzburg has something to do with the reason why we don't speak of him as much as we do Joseph Haydn or Mozart or his other contemporaries?
NEUMAYR: I think one of the reasons why he did not get as famous as his brother is that he never wanted his music printed.
Joseph Haydn's works really disseminated throughout Europe via printing also, and that's what lacks with Michael Haydn's music. That's also one of the reasons.
And, of course, Michael Haydn stayed in Salzburg all the time, so he didn't have the same exposure to other kinds of music. So that's maybe one of the reasons he did not get as famous as his brother.
Performing a Mozart vs. Michael Haydn piece [17:42]
MALTZ: To me what highlights the way that we look at these composers today: the mistaken identity — the Michael Haydn symphony that, for years, was thought to be Mozart. It was labeled as Mozart's 37 Symphony, KV 444. Then it was discovered that the whole symphony was actually Michael Haydn, but Mozart had simply composed an introductory adagio to it. This piece of music that was often performed as a late Mozart symphony fell out of favor completely just because of the name Michael Haydn. The music didn't change. But this is how we look at these lesser-known figures.
NEUMAYR: Right. There's a lot of great music written by these lesser-known figures.
Well, they are they are not part of the canon as much as Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, obviously, but I think Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven are partly performed too much. It doesn't hurt at all to hear — between all the Mozart and Haydn — a piece by Michael Haydn or by Luigi Gatti or by some other composer who did very well at this time.
MALTZ: Michael Haydn died in 1806 at the age of 69. His funeral was one of the largest that Salzburg had ever seen – a testament to the influence he held during his lifetime. He’s buried – along with Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna – at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Salzburg.
Thanks, Dr. Neumayr, for sharing this Classical Cake with me.
NEUMAYR: You're welcome. Thanks for asking me.
Suggested resources to learn more
Visit the Johann Michael Haydn Gesellschaft.