The point is
that this fact, if fact it be, is another indication or proof of Haydn's
Croatian descent. It seems, indeed, to be established that by blood he
was pure Slav, the name being formerly spelt Hajdgn. It is just as well
for our tongues that it was changed. Franz Joseph (he dropped the Franz)
was the second of twelve children, the only other worth noting being
Michael (in full, Johann Michael), who became a famous musician in his
day, and a friend of the Mozarts in Salzburg. Maria, the mother, died in
1754, the father in 1763.

It has always seemed to me the great composers had fine luck in being
born so long ago, before the towns had grown big and dirty, before the
locomotive and motor-car had denied the beautiful earth, and stinking
factories floundered over all the lands. Carlyle rightly grows eloquent
on the value of the sweet country air and sights and sounds to young
Teufelsdroeckh, and Haydn must have taken impressions of sunrises,
sunsets, midday splendours, and the ever-plashing river flowing to the
far-away sea, that afterwards went to the making of his most wonderful
music. He had to go out early to fight his way in the world; only six
years of peaceful village life, free from care and responsibility, were
allowed him. Those first years, I take it, were happy enough. Mathias
was only, it is true, a wheelwright, and in time there were a dozen
mouths to feed. But we hear of him and Maria making music only in the
evenings; his days were more profitably occupied. It goes very much
without saying that he was not rich--in what age or clime are working
wheelwrights rich?--but he cannot be called poor. Poverty is a
comparative term; even to-day peasants feel its biting teeth only when
they desert or are driven from their country-side, and make for the
overcrowded towns. Joseph, but for a few accidents, might have remained
a peasant all his days, and never faced what he would consider hardship.
The first accident was his voice, which was undoubtedly of singular
beauty; the second was an extraordinary musical aptitude, which led him
to sing expressively and perfectly in tune the airs he heard his father
and mother sing. Mathias, by the way, accompanied himself on the harp;
and Joseph, long before he had a fiddle of his own, imitated the
fiddling of his elders with two bits of wood, so the family orchestra
was complete. The last accident was the arrival of one Frankh, a distant
relative. This was long before th