However, Mathias was evidently a folk musician; according to Haydn's own testimony, his father 'played the harp without reading a note of music',[1] having taught himself the instrument while a journeyman.
Nature ... had endowed [Mathias] with a good tenor voice, and his wife, Anne-Marie [Anna Maria], used to sing to the harp.
[2]Hayden showed musical talent at a young age, recalling that, "As a boy of five I sang all [my father's] simple easy pieces correctly".
[4] Haydn is claimed to have borrowed folk tunes from several ethnic groups, including Austrians, Gypsies, and Croatians.
[5] Schroeder gives the following cautionary tale: "The source for a tune in the opening movement of an early cassation for string quintet (Hob.
II:2) is identified by [Franjo] Kuhač as a Croatian drinking song, 'Nikaj na svetu', and by [Ernst Fritz] Schmid as a German folksong, 'Es trieb ein Schaefer den Berg hinan'".
Kuhač and Hadow published a number of cases of Croatian folk tunes gathered in field work judged to have been incorporated into Haydn's compositions.
The Austro-Hungarian border region in which the composer spent his first years included a large number of people living in Croatian ethnic enclaves.
During the time Haydn lived at Eisenstadt or Esterháza, when his music resounded day and night in the castle and gardens of his Prince, why should not his own airs, or scraps at least of his own melodies, have stolen through the open windows and remained in the memories, first of the people whose duty it was to interpret them, and then of the scattered population of the surrounding country?
We cannot know at this stage whether this was meant as a little joke, or whether Haydn had actually noticed that his catchiest tunes were somehow percolating from the concert hall to the countryside.
Like Koželuch, Beethoven and Weber after him, Haydn made a great number of arrangements of Scottish and Welsh folksongs for British publishers (including Napier, George Thomson, and William Whyte); this activity began in 1791 and continued from time to time to the very end of Haydn's compositional career, ca.
[9] The arrangements are set for high voice and piano trio,[citation needed] and include versions of "Barbara Allen" and "The Border Widow's Lament".