The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2

by Rupert Hughes

But then there was a man whose life encompassed Mozart's, as a long brace encompasses a stave of music. For Joseph Haydn was born twenty-four years before Mozart, and died eighteen years after him. And this man's love affairs were of altogether different fabric.

While Mozart died in his poverty at thirty-five, Haydn, dying at seventy-seven, was worried over the endowment he should leave to a discarded mistress, whose name, strangely enough, was also Aloysia. And Haydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way by proposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with results how unlike!

Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the priests, who clustered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home. Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home, seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli. The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to "die by request," as Artemus Ward has it.

After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension. Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, sub rosa, with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does not shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity.

Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in history.

We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew, whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for a homelife in a woman's heart.

But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are often resolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which he claims to be willing, and at times even glad, to pass his life alone. We are not justified, then, in taking Beethoven as a man of domestic inclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt, and Beethoven had every qualification for driving a wife even madder than he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswerving friends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred and maltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have endured through the honeymoon.

And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy or whim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him as a great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried for wedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs,—we meet a conflict of authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder of chastity, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt.

Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he could easily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He has perpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in the furnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But how shall we blame or praise music for its effect upon Beethoven's heart, in the face of the antipodal life of such a fellow bachelor as Händel? And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor of music, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even the paltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countess is dismissed by the cautious as a fable. Schubert was a pauper to the nth degree. But he found his joy in the hilarity of the Vienna cafés with boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimum of food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never to have truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them.

There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinction between the womanless splendour of Händel's life at court, and the unilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a difference also in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicated thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who, though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.