A true tale of what happened to Haydn's head - Part the second

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This the second part of a post about Franz Joseph Haydn. You can read the first part here: The prince was furious and wasted little time in discovering its whereabouts. However, Mrs Rosenbaum had no intention of handing over her main claim to fame. In a desperate attempt to save his own neck, Rosenbaum bought a skull from the mortuary and presented it to the prince. The story takes on the elements of farce at this point as the skull was examined by experts and found to be that of a young man, not an old composer. Perhaps the ‘bumps of music’ were not well enough defined. Back goes Rosenbaum to the mortuary and asks for an ‘old’ head, (presumably preferably with music bumps). This proved acceptable and was buried with Haydn’s body in Eisenstadt. The ‘real’ head continued to have a life of its own almost. It was willed back to Johann Peters on Rosenbaum’s death. He in turn willed it to the Vienna Conservatory of Music. However, his wife ignored the directive and gave it to her doctor. In 1832, he passed it on to the Austrian Institute of Pathology and Anatomy. Eventually it was presented to the Society of Music in Vienna. It remained in a glass bubble at the Musikverein (musical society) for many years. Later, Brahms sometimes slept in the building as he couldn’t afford his own home. As an aid to inspiration, he would take the head out at night when he was composing and place it on his desk. One hundred years pass – and Prince Paul Esterhazy offers to construct a mausoleum for Haydn if the officials will only return Haydn’s head. More years went by. Nothing was decided when World War II started and, by the time it was over, Haydn’s body was in the Soviet Zone and his head in the International Zone of a divided Vienna. It seemed that never the twain should meet! Finally, in 1954, Haydn’s remains were exhumed and the head and body reunited. They hadn’t seen each other for 145 years. Haydn’s body – and two heads – now rest in a marble tomb in the Bergkirche in Eisenstadt. Truth is stranger than fiction. The photo is of our old piano.