Reunion in Vienna

When great, prolific Composer Franz Joseph Haydn died in 1809, he was buried in a simple grave in one of Vienna's suburban cemeteries. Two days after the burial, enthusiastic medical students bribed the gravedigger, opened the grave and made off with Composer Haydn's head. The theft was discovered eleven years later when Haydn's remains were disinterred and buried more imposingly in the neighboring town of Eisenstadt. Pressed by the police, the skull-collectors delivered up a skull which was promptly attached to the rest of Haydn's skeleton and reburied. But the skull thus surrendered was not Haydn's.

Years later, on his deathbed, one of the students confessed the substitution and willed Haydn's real skull to a friend who passed it on to a well-known Viennese doctor. Eventually it wound up in the possession of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music, who placed it on exhibition in 1895. Meanwhile, the heirs of Prince Esterhazy, Haydn's friend and patron, had built a magnificent mausoleum in Eisenstadt for Haydn's remains, but refused to have them buried in it without his head. For many years legal complications have held up Haydn's reunion. Last week, when it was reported that the Nazis had ordered the return of Haydn's head, the Friends of Music stoutly announced they would not relinquish it.

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