Mathias (or Matthias) was born in Hainburg, a small town not far from Rohrau in the Archduchy of Austria, Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
The following year he married Maria Koller, aged 21, who had worked as an "under-cook"[2] in the palace of Count Harrach, the aristocratic patron of Rohrau.
Griesinger recorded what Joseph had told him in his elderly reminiscences: The father had seen a bit of the world, as was customary in his trade, and during his stay in Frankfurt am Main he had learned to strum the harp.
[11] 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: In his youth the father journeyed about, following the custom of his trade, and reached Frankfurt am Main, where he learned to play the harp a little and, because he liked to sing, to accompany himself on the harp as well as he could.
When his father sang, Joseph at the age of five used to accompany him as children will by playing with a stick on a piece of wood that his childish powers of imagination transformed into a violin.
Here is Griesinger's account: One day the headmaster from the neighboring town of Hainburg, a distant relative of the Haydn family,[13] came to Rohrau.
Meister Mathias and his wife gave their usual little concert, and five-year-old Joseph sat near his parents and sawed at his left arm with a stick, as if he were accompanying on the violin.
He inferred from this a natural talent for music and advised the parents to send their Sepperl[14] ... to Hainburg so that he might be set to an art that in time would unfailingly open to him the prospect "of becoming a clergyman."
The parents, ardent admirers of the clergy, joyfully seized this proposal, and in his sixth year Joseph went to the headmaster in Hainburg.
The father saw himself freed of a great burden by this offer, consented to it, and some five years after dedicated Joseph's brother Michael and still later Johann to the musical muse.
[8] 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.
My very dearest Hanßmichl, I am herewith sending you a carriage from Rohrau which can bring you and perhaps a good friend back and forth, and the river will spend the night in the Landstraß at the Falcon or the Angel; you can talk to him and arrange that you and Joseph and perhaps Ehrrath, all three of you, can get on the road early on Saturday.
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."
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.
Griesinger (1810) relates the tale thus:[24] At that time there were still many castrati employed at the court and in the churches in Vienna, and the director of the Choir School[25] doubtless supposed he was making young Haydn's fortune when he came up with a plan to turn him into a soprano, and actually asked the father for permission.
The father, whom this proposal utterly displeased, set off at once on the road for Vienna; and thinking that the operation might perhaps already have been undertaken, he entered the room where his son was with the question, "Sepperl, does anything hurt you?
Haydn wrote to his parents to see if they might send him some linen for a few shirts; his father came to Vienna, brought his son a seventeen-kreutzer piece and the advice "Fear God, and love thy neighbor!"