re given elsewhere with some
success; but, with regard to _Armide_, he wrote stating his view that
his operatic works should not be given at all save in the conditions for
which they were composed. Those conditions have now for ever passed
away, and excepting as curiosities the operas will never be heard again.

CHAPTER VI

1790-1795

All his magnificence over, Prince Nicolaus was left to sleep tranquilly
in his tomb regardless of the mocking funereal magnificence around him;
Prince Anton succeeded him, and dismissed the band, and pensioned Haydn;
and Haydn, at the age of fifty-eight, was free. Salomon's horses must
have been made to sweat on that rush back from Cologne to Vienna, and he
was rewarded for his own enterprise and their toils. He captured Haydn
easily. Haydn, in fact, having done his day's work manfully, seemed
determined to have a jolly fling in the evening of his life, and, we may
note, he determined to have it at a profit. In the event his little
fling turned out to be, so far as externals went, quite the most
exhilarating part of his life; until now all might seem to have been
mere prelude and preparation. At Eisenstadt, Esterhaz and Vienna he had
received compliments and presents, and had been regarded as more or less
of a great little man. But in those days he had also been a servant,
compelled when on duty to wear a uniform--he never wore it at other
times, which shows how much be liked it--and to be for ever at the beck
and call of his princely master. Now Jack--or, rather, Joseph--was to be
his own master and the master of others, and to have half an aristocracy
at his beck and call; he was to conquer the heart of yet another woman
in addition to an already long list, the "pretty widow"--but I will not
anticipate the story. He had no longer to write mainly for the ears of a
Prince Nicolaus, but for those of a backward musical public accustomed
to a very different sort of music, Handel's. One is tempted to speculate
as to what might have happened had he been sooner set free. There is
nothing whatever to show that Nicolaus was ever in a hurry to urge him
on to fresh experiments, and in the absence of any evidence it is merely
fair to assume that such a prince in such a court, if he was not,
indeed, everlastingly crying out for "something more like you used to
give us," was at any rate well enough content with the older stuff, and
that in his tastes he lumbered far behind in Haydn's daring s