"Oh, my dear, good lady, how sweet is some degree of liberty! I had
a kind prince, but was obliged at times to be dependent on base
souls. I often sighed for freedom, and now I have it in some
measure. I am quite sensible of this benefit, though my mind is
burdened with more work. The consciousness of being no longer a
bond-servant sweetens all my toils." If this liberty, this contact
with new people and new forms of existence, had come to Haydn twenty
years earlier, it might have altered the whole current of his
career. But it did not help him much in the actual composition
of "The Creation," which he found rather a tax, alike on his
inspiration and his physical powers. Writing to Breitkopf &
Hartel on June 12, 1799, he says: "The world daily pays me many
compliments, even on the fire of my last works; but no one could
believe the strain and effort it costs me to produce these,
inasmuch as many a day my feeble memory and the unstrung state of
my nerves so completely crush me to the earth, that I fall into the
most melancholy condition, so much so that for days afterwards I am
incapable of finding one single idea, till at length my heart is
revived by Providence, when I seat myself at the piano and begin
once more to hammer away at it. Then all goes well again, God be
praised!"

Self-Criticism

In the same letter he remarks that, "as for myself, now an old
man, I hope the critics may not handle my 'Creation' with too
great severity, and be too hard on it. They may perhaps find the
musical orthography faulty in various passages, and perhaps other
things also which I have for so many years been accustomed to
consider as minor points; but the genuine connoisseur will see