Haydn's Skull: Why the Composer Was Buried With Two Skulls

Joseph Haydn died in Vienna on 31 May 1809, at the age of 77, and was buried at the Hundsturm cemetery on 1 June (Eisenstadt parish history; Neugebauer).

The grave did not stay closed for long. The Eisenstadt parish history dates the theft to 4 June 1809. Other accounts give slightly different timing, describing the theft as happening a few days after the burial or eleven days afterward, so the exact date depends on which account you follow (J. Cuthbert Hadden, *Haydn*).

The two men behind it were Johann Peter, an administrator of the Austrian provincial prisons, and Joseph Carl Rosenbaum, who had formerly been connected with the Esterházy household. With accomplices, they arranged for the grave to be opened and the head removed (Eisenstadt parish history).

Their reason was phrenology. This was the theory, associated with the physician Franz Joseph Gall and popular at the time, that a person's mental abilities and character could be read from the shape of the skull. Peter and Rosenbaum wanted to see whether Haydn's musical genius had left a mark on his cranium, a distinctive feature sometimes described as a "bump of music" (Neugebauer; ORF, "Haydns Kopf"). Phrenology has long since been discredited, but in 1809 it drew serious attention. Our story on the phrenology skull explains how the theory worked and why it fell apart.

The medical historian Wolfgang Neugebauer, writing about "the case of Joseph Haydn," and the biographer J. Cuthbert Hadden both tell the theft this way, as the project of phrenology enthusiasts.

The skull stayed hidden for eleven years. Then, in 1820, Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy ordered Haydn's remains moved from Vienna to Eisenstadt. When the coffin was opened, the skeleton was there, but the skull was not (Eisenstadt parish history). Mental Floss repeats a detail popular in later tellings: Haydn's wig was still in place, with no head beneath it (Mental Floss).

Suspicion fell on Rosenbaum and Peter. A skull was eventually handed over to the authorities, but later accounts identify it as a substitute rather than Haydn's own (Neugebauer). It was that substitute that went into the coffin. On 7 November 1820, Haydn's body was reburied in the crypt of the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt with the substitute skull, while the genuine skull stayed hidden, out of official hands.

Nobody knows whose skull the substitute is. It belonged to a real person whose identity is unknown, and that person has now shared the composer's tomb for more than two centuries.

The real skull, meanwhile, had a life of its own. Johann Peter kept it in his collection, and it later passed to Rosenbaum (Hadden). After Rosenbaum's death in 1829, historians trace it through a series of private and anatomical collections, including those of the physician Karl Heller and the anatomist Carl von Rokitansky.

In 1895, the skull was given to Vienna's Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the Society of the Friends of Music, as James Fenton recounts in *The Guardian* (James Fenton, The Guardian). There is a certain logic to it: after nearly ninety years with phrenologists and anatomists, Haydn's skull ended up with musicians. It stayed with the society until the negotiations that finally sent it to Eisenstadt.

The writer Colin Dickey places Haydn's story within a wider history of grave robbing and phrenology in his book *Cranioklepty*, and Haydn was not alone (Colin Dickey, *Cranioklepty*). Our stories on the skulls of Mozart, Goya, Schiller and Descartes follow other famous heads that took unexpected routes after death.

It took until 1954 for the skull and the skeleton to be reunited. On 5 June 1954, the skull was displayed at the Musikverein in Vienna, blessed by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer, and carried in procession through Rohrau, the village where Haydn was born, before continuing to the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt. There it was placed with the rest of his remains (Eisenstadt parish history; City of Eisenstadt). Haydn had died 145 years earlier.

The obvious question is why nobody took the substitute out. Accounts attributed to Karl and Irene Geiringer give the reason: the substitute skull's identity was unknown, and it had been part of Haydn's burial for more than a century, so it was not removed (Mental Floss). The unknown person had, in effect, become part of the grave.

So, the tomb today holds Haydn's authentic skull and the unidentified substitute together. It is an unusual arrangement, but it is also a respectful one. Rather than disturb one set of remains to make the other's story tidier, the people who reunited Haydn left both at rest.

Haydn's tomb is the Haydn Mausoleum, beneath the north tower of the Bergkirche at Joseph-Haydn-Platz 1, 7000 Eisenstadt, Austria. The hours below are the official 2026 schedule published by Burgenland Tourism (Burgenland Tourism).

The church itself is listed as freely accessible every day from 08:00 to 17:00. Guided visits that take in the church, the Calvary, the mausoleum, the crypt and the treasury need advance registration with the parish office and last about an hour. The official contact details are +43 676 880 708 098 and pfarre@haydnkirche.at. Hours change with the season, so confirm current access before you travel. The mausoleum is a grave in a working church, and it asks the same quiet you would bring to any other.

These are the questions people ask most often about Haydn's skull.

Haydn's skull spent 145 years away from the rest of him, carried off for a theory that turned out to be wrong, hidden from a prince, passed between collectors and finally kept by a society of musicians before a cardinal blessed it and a procession brought it home. The stranger detail, the second skull, comes down to a decision to leave an unknown person in peace. If you visit the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt, you are standing at the grave of two people, one of them Joseph Haydn and the other a stranger whose name nobody knows, sharing a tomb because of a phrenologist's curiosity. For another famous head with a long afterlife, see our story on Oliver Cromwell's head.

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