e
portrait. That he was an enthusiastic admirer of Mrs Billington there
can be no doubt.

Another Romance

There was another intimacy of more import, about which it is necessary
to speak at some length. When Dies published his biography of Haydn
in 1810 he referred to a batch of love-letters written to the composer
during this visit to London. The existence of the letters was known
to Pohl, who devotes a part of his Haydn in London to them, and prints
certain extracts; but the letters themselves do not appear to have been
printed either in the original English or in a German translation until
Mr Henry E. Krehbiel, the well-known American musical critic, gave them
to the world through the columns of the New York Tribune. Mr Krehbiel
was enabled to do this by coming into possession of a transcript of
Haydn's London note-book, with which we will deal presently. Haydn, as
he informs us, had copied all the letters out in full, "a proceeding
which tells its own story touching his feelings towards the missives and
their fair author." He preserved them most carefully among the souvenirs
of his visit, and when Dies asked him about them, he replied: "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." Who was the lady thus
celebrated? In Haydn's note-book the following entry occurs: "Mistress
Schroeter, No. 6 James Street, Buckingham Gate." The inquiry is here
answered: Mistress Schroeter was the lady.

Mistress Schroeter

Haydn, it will be seen, describes her as a widow of sixty. According
to Goldsmith, women and music should never be dated; but in the present
case, there is a not unnatural curiosity to discover the lady's age. Mr
Krehbiel gives good grounds for doubting Haydn's statement that Mistress
Schroeter was sixty when he met her. She had been married to Johann
Samuel Schroeter, an excellent German musician, who settled in London
in 1772. Schroeter died in 1788, three years before the date of Haydn's
visit, when he was just thirty-eight. Now Dr Burney, who must have known
the family, says that Schroeter "married a young lady of considerable
fortune, who was his scholar, and was in easy circumstances." If,
therefore, Mrs Schroeter was sixty years old when Haydn made her
acquaintance, she must have been nineteen years her husband's senior,
and could not very well be described as a