The ethnicity of Joseph Haydn was a controversial matter in Haydn scholarship during a period lasting from the late 19th to the mid 20th century. The principal contending ethnicities were Croatian and German. Mainstream musical scholarship in the English language today generally adopts the second of these two hypotheses. Due to the vagueness of the concept, German written scholarship does not use the term ethnicity in this context any more, but takes it for granted that Haydn's mother tongue was German.
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During the late 19th century, the Croatian ethnologist Franjo Kuhač gathered a great number of Croatian folk tunes in fieldwork. Kuhač was struck by the resemblance of a number of these tunes to themes found in Haydn's works, and suggested that Haydn knew these tunes and incorporated them into his work. Other scholars disagreed, suggesting instead that the Haydn original themes had circulated among the people, evolving gradually into more folk-like forms. For details and examples, see Haydn and folk music.
Haydn never set foot in Croatia, but he almost certainly lived in the vicinity of Croatian speakers. This is because migration in previous centuries had resulted in a considerable number of Croatians dwelling far to the north of Croatia in the Austro-Hungarian border region where Haydn was born and spent most of his life. This aspect of Kuhač's claim is considered uncontroversial, though the relative fraction of the population that was Croatian-speaking is in dispute.
Kuhač went on to claim that the reason Haydn used so many Croatian folk tunes in his music is that he was himself a Croatian; that is, a member of the Croatian diaspora. As such, he would have been a native speaker of Croatian and a participant in Croatian folk culture. Kuhač also claimed that the name "Haydn" is of Croatian origin ("Hajdin"), and likewise for the name of Haydn's mother, Maria Koller.
Kuhač wrote in Croatian, which would have been a barrier to scholarly transmission at the time. However, his works were studied by the English-speaking musicologist Henry Hadow, who promulgated them further in his book Haydn: A Croatian Composer (1897) and in the second and third editions of the prestigious Grove Dictionary.
In the 1930s, the German musicologist Ernst Fritz Schmid took up the issue of Haydn's origins, searching in parish records and elsewhere for evidence of Haydn's ancestry. He concluded on the basis of his research that Haydn's ethnic roots were not Croatian, but German, and that the names "Haydn" and "Koller" are of German origin.[1]
Schmid's work, just like Kuhač's, has been impugned as being motivated by nationalist zealotry rather than a thirst for the truth. This may be related to the fact that Schmid's research coincided historically with the rise of Nazi Germany, which included among its political doctrines a fanatical emphasis on German ethnicity.
Despite this, later Haydn scholarship seems to have been sufficiently impressed by the data Schmid gathered to accept his general premise that Haydn was of German ethnic origin.
Among the scholars who accept Schmid's finding are the musicologist Karl Geiringer, writing both in his Haydn biography and the fourth edition of the Grove Dictionary. In the 1982 revision of his biography, Geiringer wrote
Geiringer's position in turn was endorsed by the French scholar, Michel Brenet, and by Rosemary Hughes in her own Haydn biography. H. C. Robbins Landon, a leading Haydn scholar, devotes the opening pages of his massive work Haydn: Chronicle and Works with a long summary and warm endorsement of Schmid's research.
The Danish scholar Jens Peter Larsen, writing in the 1980 New Grove, says of this question:
In the current version of the Grove Dictionary, the Haydn biography (by James Webster) does not even mention the old controversy, other than to cite Schmid's work in the bibliography. Neither Kuhač nor Hadow is cited.[4]
Curiously, Haydn himself is recorded as having made a somewhat disparaging remark about Croatians. His words were remembered by the composer and pianist Friedrich Kalkbrenner, who was Haydn's student in Vienna around the year 1800; he wrote them down in his memoirs, published 1824. In the memoirs, Kalkbrenner refers to himself in the third person.