Joseph Carl Rosenbaum was a former secretary of the Esterházy family (Haydn's employers); Johann Nepomuk Peter was governor of the provincial prison of Lower Austria. Rosenbaum was well known to Haydn, who during his lifetime had intervened with the Esterházys in an attempt to facilitate Rosenbaum's marriage to the soprano Therese Gassmann.
Haydn was buried in the Hindsturm cemetery in Gumpendorf, the parish in Vienna to which his house in the suburb of Windmühle belonged. Rosenbaum and Peter bribed the gravedigger, one Jakob Demuth, to steal the head. After maceration and bleaching, Peter was able to conclude that "the bump of music" was "fully developed". He added the skull to his collection.
In 1820, Haydn's old patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II was inadvertently reminded that he had forgotten to carry through his plan of having Haydn's remains transferred from Gumpendorf to his family's seat in Eisenstadt. When the remains were exhumed, the Prince was furious to find that they included no skull. He quickly deduced that Peter and Rosenbaum were responsible, but through a series of devious manuoeuvres they managed to keep possession of the skull, giving the Prince a different specimen. In 1895 (after their deaths) the genuine skull ended up in the possession of the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music.
In 1932, Prince Paul Esterházy (Nikolaus's descendant) built a marble tomb for Haydn in the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt. This was a suitable location, as some of the masses Haydn wrote for the Esterházy family had been premiered there. The Prince declared his intention to unify the composer's remains; he must have got wind that the skull with which Rosenbaum and Peter had fobbed off his ancestor in 1820 was a substitute. But there were many further delays, and it was only in 1954 that the skull could be transferred, in a splendid ceremony, from the Society of the Friends to this tomb – completing a burial process that had taken 145 years.
The substitute skull was not removed. Thus Haydn's tomb now contains two skulls.
© Haydn Thompson 2020