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Updated: April 30, 2025
He was Hofcompositor and Kapellmeister at St. Stephen's Church in Vienna, and he took the boy on the same terms as those on which Frankh had brought him away from Rohrau. To Vienna Haydn went, was entered in the Cantorei of St. Stephen's, and there for some years he sang in the choir. In return he was taught reading, writing and arithmetic, religion and Latin.
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.
No other great composer could have stuck to his task as he did. Mozart would have forgotten his duties; Beethoven would purposely have neglected them. But Haydn's Prince willed the thing to be done, and Haydn acquiesced. The patient blood of generations of industrious, persevering, plodding peasant labourers was in him; and perhaps his early training under Frankh and Reutter counted for something.
Frankh was a careful and strict teacher; Josef not only was taught to sing well, but learned much about various instruments. He had school lessons also. But his life in other ways was hard and cheerless. The wife of his cousin treated him with the utmost indifference, never looking after his clothing or his well being in any way.
Nothing need be recorded of his life in Hainburg save that Frankh worked him hard. Indeed, much later Haydn declared himself thankful to Frankh for forming in him the habit of working hard. He sang, played the fiddle and harpsichord, and went to school; and suddenly one George Reutter came on the scene. He came, heard, and was conquered by Haydn's voice.
The mother had a secret desire that the boy should join the priesthood, but the father, as we have seen, hoped he would make a musical career, and determined, though poor in this world's goods, to aid him in every possible way. About this time a distant relative, one Johann Mathias Frankh by name, arrived at the Haydn cottage on a visit.
Of Frankh, a very strict, but thorough and most painstaking teacher, he also said afterward: "I shall be grateful to that man as long as I live for keeping me so hard at work, though I used to get more flogging than food;" and in Haydn's will he remembered Frankh's family, leaving his daughter a sum of money and a portrait of Frankh himself, "my first instructor in music."
But Mathias undoubtedly wanted to do his best for his boy, and Joseph himself must have had ambition of a sort witness his endeavours to play the fiddle without a fiddle to play and when Frankh undertook to place the boy in a choir and teach him music, the offer was joyfully accepted. So he went to Hainburg, never to return to Rohrau until he was an old and celebrated man.
"I can find you one at least," said the pastor; "he is a scholar of Frankh, the schoolmaster, and has a sweet voice." Josef was sent for and the schoolmaster soon returned leading him by the hand. "Well my little fellow," said the Capellmeister, drawing him to his knee, "can you make a shake?" "No sir, but neither can my cousin Frankh."
Stephen's could go on without Joseph, Reutter waited for a chance of getting rid of Joseph. So Joseph, though far from wishing to oblige, must needs play a practical joke, and was ignominiously spanked and turned out into the streets. With both Frankh and Reutter he had had a hard enough time plenty of work, not too much food, and no petting but now he learnt what hard times really meant.
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