threshold of the old home by the market-place and kissed the
ground his feet had trod in the far-away days of youth. When he
came to make his will, his thoughts went back to Rohrau, and one
of his bequests provided for two of its poorest orphans.

Genealogy

Modern theories of heredity and the origin of genius find but
scanty illustration in the case of Haydn. Unlike the ancestors of
Bach and Beethoven and Mozart, his family, so far as the
pedigrees show, had as little of genius, musical or other, in
their composition, as the families of Shakespeare and Cervantes.
In the male line they were hard-working, honest tradesmen,
totally undistinguished even in their sober walk in life. They
came originally from Hainburg, where Haydn's great-grandfather,
Kaspar, had been among the few to escape massacre when the town
was stormed by the Turks in July 1683. The composer's father,
Matthias Haydn, was, like most of his brothers, a wheelwright,
combining with his trade the office of parish sexton. He belonged
to the better peasant class, and, though ignorant as we should
now regard him, was yet not without a tincture of artistic taste.
He had been to Frankfort during his "travelling years," and had
there picked up some little information of a miscellaneous kind.
"He was a great lover of music by nature," says his famous son,
"and played the harp without knowing a note of music." He had
a fine tenor voice, and when the day's toil was over he would
gather his household around him and set them singing to his
well-meant accompaniment.

Haydn's Mother