Such was the success of Haydn’s first visit to London for the 1791 and 1792 concert seasons (his stay amounted to some eighteen months) that attempts were made to entice him back from Austria for the following season. Johann Peter Salomon, the German-born, London-based impresario who had whisked him away from Vienna on the earlier occasion was fully expecting his return for the start of the new subscription season at the Hanover Square Rooms in February 1793. But the London Diary: or, Woodfall’s Register for 17 January 1793 noted that ‘Haydn the great composer is prevented from visiting this country as early as he expected, by a polypus in his nose, on account of which he has been obliged to undergo a painful operation, but without the desired success’. But the reasons for his delay seem to have amounted to more than ill-health. On the one hand the political situation in Europe was gradually deteriorating with the continuing repercussions of the French Revolution: the French king Louis XVI was guillotined in January 1793 and the war which would drag on until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was just beginning. Meanwhile, on the other hand, he had only been back in Vienna for some six months and had not had enough time to complete enough new music to make another trip so soon seem worthwhile.