Search -
Music and manners in the classical period
Music and manners in the classical period Author:Henry Edward Krehbiel Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II HIS ENGLISH LOVE The existence of a batch of love letters written to Haydn during his visits to London has been known to students ever since Dies's litt... more »le biography of the composer appeared in Vienna in 1810. C. F. Pohl devotes several pages of his fascinating book, " Haydn in London" to them, and reprints a few passages from them ; but the letters themselves do not appear to have been printed either in their original English or a German translation until I gave them to the world through the columns of " The New York Tribune." I was enabled to do so through coming into possession of the note books described in the last chapter. Haydn had copied them out in full, a proceeding which tells its own story touching his feelings toward the missives and their fair author—for she was fair. Fourteen years after they had been received they were still treasured by the composer among his souvenirs of the English visit. To Dies, who asked him about them, Haydn answered, with a twinkle in his gray eyes : " They are letters from an English widow in London who loved me. Though sixty years old, she was still lovely and amiable, and I should in all likelihood have married her if I had been single." Alas for the lovely and amiable correspondent, there was a Mistress Haydn at home in Vienna, who still grappled the dear old man (he was fifty-nine) to her person, if not to her soul, with hoops of the law! Mistress Haydn was neither lovely nor amiable. Had she been either, or both, it is not likely that Papa's heart would so easily have become errant, though he was, as he himself confessed, fond of looking at pretty women. Frau Dok- torin, moreover, was a Xantippe. That she proved even while Mistress Schroeter was laying siege to Dr. Haydn's heart. Shortly before Haydn started for home, in i/'92...« less