Skull & Bones

When prolific, peace loving Franz Joseph Haydn closed his eyes and died in 1809, all Europe reverently mourned him. In Vienna the admiration of two men expressed itself strangely: a jailer and the secretary of Prince Nicholas Esterhazy, Haydn's patron, bribed a gravedigger to spade open the grave, break the seal of the coffin, hack off for them the dead composer's hulking head.

Next year Austria plans to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Haydn's birth but over his skull & bones a dispute has arisen. All Haydn's bones up to his head are in Eisenstadt where for years Haydn lived and worked. Eisenstadt wants to stage the major celebration but she wants also the skull, possessed now by the Vienna Society of the Friends of Music. The Vienna Friends, loth to lend it, received it from the heirs of the morbid jailer. When the authorities discovered and traced the theft ten years after it was made, the culprits procured the skull of somebody else, surrendered that one.

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