THE STRANGE MISADVENTURES OF HAYDN’S HEAD
With the war still raging at his death, Haydn was buried rather hastily in Vienna. In 1814, however, Prince Nikolaus II applied for permission to move the body to the Eszterházy estate in Eisenstadt The body was exhumed, but as officials opened the casket, they were shocked to discover that the corpse had no head.
An immediate headhunt was launched. It turned out two amateur enthusiasts of the now-debunked nineteenth-century science of phrenology (which purported to determine personality traits by analyzing the bumps on one’s skull) had bribed the gravedigger to remove it. The two would-be phrenologists, named Rosenbaum and Peters, had encased the skull in a specially made black box.
When the body arrived in Eisenstadt without its head, the prince was outraged. He ordered police to search Peters’s house but later learned that Rosenbaum’s wife had buried it in the straw of her mattress and then pretended to be asleep during the search. The prince bribed the Rosenbaums, and, in exchange for a big check, they handed over what they purported to be the proper skull.
The Haydn skull ended up a museum in Vienna, where it remained until 1954, when Prince Paul Eszterházy finally reunited it with the composer’s body in a grave in the Austrian town of Burgenland. After 131 years, Haydn was again in one piece.
