Together Again?

One of Composer Joseph Haydn's closest friends and sincerest admirers was a phrenology enthusiast named Carl Rosenbaum. Two nights after Haydn's funeral in 1809, Rosenbaum took a shovel, a lantern and a brace of helpers to the fresh grave. When he left, he carried Haydn's head under his arm. His purpose: to save the great man's cranium for the study and admiration of future phrenologists.

The deed was not discovered until eleven years later, when Prince Esterhazy, grandson of Haydn's patron, ordered the remains transferred to a finer tomb on the Esterhazy estate. The trail soon led to Rosenbaum, but the police turned his house upside down without finding the skull. (They did not, however, disturb Frau Rosenbaum, who, pleading illness, had taken the trophy to bed with her.)

Later, Prince Esterhazy offered a ransom for the skull. Rosenbaum solemnly sent a random substitute which was duly buried with Haydn's bones. The prince never paid the promised ransom, but Rosenbaum had the last laugh, confessed the fraud in pale glee on his deathbed. He passed the relic to a friend, with the request that it be placed eventually in the museum of Vienna's ultra-respectable Society of the Friends of Music. After long delays, the skull reached the museum in 1895, where it rests today in a glass case.

Since then, successive Esterhazy princes have tried everything from bribery to pleading to recover it. Most recent attempts: 1912, 1931, 1939 and 1948. Last week pressure on the Friends of Music by the Austrian Education Ministry apparently succeeded. If the present agreement holds till spring, the skull of the great composer will be reunited with his bones as a ceremonial event on the Esterhazy estate during the 1954 Haydn Festival.

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