At St Paul's
But the most interesting event of this time to Haydn was the meeting of the Charity Children in St Paul's Cathedral, when something like 4000 juveniles took part. "I was more touched," he says in his diary, "by this innocent and reverent music than by any I ever heard in my life!" And then he notes the following chant by John Jones: [Jones was organist of St Paul's Cathedral at this time. His chant, which was really in the key of D, has since been supplanted. Haydn made an error in bar 12.]
[Figure: a musical score excerpt]
Curiously enough Berlioz was impressed exactly in the same way when he heard the Charity Children in 1851. He was in London as a juror at the Great Exhibition; and along with his friend, the late G. A. Osborne, he donned a surplice and sang bass in the select choir. He was so moved by the children's singing that he hid his face behind his music and wept. "It was," he says, "the realization of one part of my dreams, and a proof that the powerful effect of musical masses is still absolutely unknown." [See Berlioz's Life and Letters, English edition, Vol. I., p. 281.]
London Acquaintances
Haydn made many interesting acquaintances during this London visit. Besides those already mentioned, there was Bartolozzi, the famous engraver, to whose wife he dedicated three clavier trios and a sonata in E flat (Op. 78), which, so far unprinted in Germany, is given by Sterndale Bennett in his Classical Practice. There was also John Hunter, described by Haydn as "the greatest and most celebrated chyrurgus in London," who vainly tried to persuade him to have a polypus removed from his nose. It was Mrs Hunter who wrote the words for most of his English canzonets, including the charming "My mother bids me bind my hair." And then there was Mrs Billington, the famous singer, whom Michael Kelly describes as "an angel of beauty and the Saint Cecilia of song." There is no more familiar anecdote than that which connects Haydn with Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of this notorious character. Carpani is responsible for the tale. He says that Haydn one day found Mrs Billington sitting to Reynolds, who was painting her as St Cecilia listening to the angels. "It is like," said Haydn, "but there is a strange mistake." "What is that?" asked Reynolds. "You have painted her listening to the angels. You ought to have represented the angels listening to her." It is a very pretty story, but it cannot possibly be true. Reynolds's portrait of Mrs Billington was painted in 1789, two years before Haydn's arrival, and was actually shown in the Academy Exhibition of 1790, the last to which Sir Joshua contributed. [The portrait, a whole length, was sold in 1798 for 325 pounds, 10s., and again at Christie's, in 1845, for 505 guineas—to an American, as usual.] Of course Haydn may have made the witty remark here attributed to him, but it cannot have been at the time of the painting of the 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 "young" lady at the time of her marriage.