Michael Haydn was born in 1737 in the Austrian village of
Rohrau, near the Hungarian border. His father was Mathias Haydn,
a wheelwright who also served as "Marktrichter", an office akin
to village mayor. Haydn's mother Maria, née Koller, had
previously worked as a cook in the palace of Count Harrach, the
presiding aristocrat of Rohrau. Mathias was an enthusiastic folk
musician, who during the journeyman period of his career had
taught himself to play the harp, and he also made sure that his
children learned to sing; for details see Mathias Haydn.
Michael's early professional career path was paved by his older
brother Joseph, whose skillful singing had landed him a position
as a boy soprano in the St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna choir
under the direction of Georg Reutter, as were Johann Georg
Albrechtsberger and Franz Joseph Aumann, both composers Haydn
later traded manuscripts with. The early 19th-century author
Albert Christoph Dies, based on Joseph's late-life
reminiscences, wrote: - "Reutter was so captiv