heard long years after in the composer's will,
where we read: "To Fraulein Anna Buchholz, 100 florins, inasmuch as in
my youth her grandfather lent me 150 florins when I greatly needed them,
which, however, I repaid fifty years ago."

"Attic" Studies

One hundred and fifty florins was no great sum assuredly, but at this
time it was a small fortune to Haydn. He was able to do a good many
things with it. First of all, he took a lodging for himself--another
attic! Spangler had been very kind, but he could not give the young
musician the privacy needed for study. It chanced that there was a room
vacant, "nigh to the gods and the clouds," in the old Michaelerhaus
in the Kohlmarkt, and Haydn rented it. It was not a very comfortable
room--just big enough to allow the poor composer to turn about. It was
dimly lighted. It "contained no stove, and the roof was in such bad
repair that the rain and the snow made unceremonious entry and drenched
the young artist in his bed. In winter the water in his jug froze so
hard during the night that he had to go and draw direct from the well."
For neighbours he had successively a journeyman printer, a footman and
a cook. These were not likely to respect his desire for quiet, but the
mere fact of his having a room all to himself made him oblivious of
external annoyances. As he expressed it, he was "too happy to envy the
lot of kings." He had his old, worm-eaten spinet, and his health and his
good spirits; and although he was still poor and unknown, he was "making
himself all the time," like Sir Walter Scott in Liddesdale.

An Early Composition

Needless to say, he was composing a great deal. Much of his manuscript
was, of course, torn up or consigned to the flames, but one piece
of work survived. This was his first Mass in F (No. 11 in Novello's
edition), erroneously dated by some writers 1742. It shows signs of
immaturity and inexperience, but when Haydn in his old age came upon the
long-forgotten score he was so far from being displeased with it that
he rearranged the music, inserting additional wind parts. One biographer
sees in this procedure "a striking testimony to the genius of the lad
of eighteen." We need not read it in that way. It rather shows a natural
human tenderness for his first work, a weakness, some might call it,
but even so, more pardonable than the weakness--well illustrated by some
later instances--of hunting out early productions and publishing them
without a touch o