Michael Haydn

Haydn's mother Maria, née Koller, had previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the presiding aristocrat of Rohrau.

Mathias was an enthusiastic folk musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had taught himself to play the harp, and he also made sure that his children learned to sing.

Michael went to Vienna at the age of eight, his early professional career path being paved by his older brother Joseph, whose skillful singing had landed him a position as a boy soprano in the St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna choir under the direction of Georg Reutter, as were Johann Georg Albrechtsberger and Franz Joseph Aumann,[1] both composers with whom Haydn later traded manuscripts.

By Michael's 12th birthday he was earning extra money as a substitute organist at the cathedral and had, reportedly, performed preludes and fantasies of his own composition.

The father saw himself freed of a great burden by this offer, consented to it, and some five years after dedicated Joseph's brothers Michael, and still later Johann to the musical muse.

[8] In 1802, when Michael was "offered lucrative and honourable positions" by "both Esterházy and the Grand Duke of Tuscany," he wrote to Joseph in Vienna asking for advice on whether or not to accept either of them, but in the end chose to stay in Salzburg.

Musicologist Karl Geiringer has claimed that Michael Haydn has not received the recognition he deserves from posterity, taking the view that his church music, his choruses for male voices, and many of his instrumental works are on a respectable level and ought to be revived.

In 1982, Charles H. Sherman, who has edited scores of many of his symphonies for Doblinger, published a chronological catalog of them which some recording companies have adopted.

He wrote several settings of the mass ordinary in German by Franz Seraph von Kohlbrenner, named Deutsches Hochamt.