Lord and Lady Byron separated about a year after their marriage, and they never met again.
Sir Henry Irving and his wife spent the last years of their married life in separate homes.
Haydn's marriage was unhappy. In 1758 the young composer had, after great struggles, got so far as to obtain a musical directorship with Count Morzin, and settled in Vienna. His salary was only two hundred florins, but he had board and lodging free. Many pupils came to him, and among others two daughters of the hairdresser Keller.
Haydn fell deeply in love with the younger, but his affection was not returned, for she entered a convent and became a nun.
Father Keller, who was very familiar with Haydn and had helped him oftentimes with small loans in his early struggles, persuaded the young composer to marry his elder daughter, and the marriage, after awhile, was celebrated November 26, 1760.
Maria Anna was, however, no wife for Joseph Haydn. She was extravagant, bigoted, scolded all day, and was utterly uncompanionable to a musician.
Finally she became so bad that she only did what she thought would annoy her husband. She dressed in a fashion quite unsuited to her position, invited clerical men to her table, tore Haydn's written musical scores and made curl-papers of them, etc., and yet the great composer bore it all as well as he could.
In one letter he says: "My wife is mostly sick, and is always in a bad temper. It is the same to her whether her husband is a shoemaker or an artist."
After he had suffered this state of things in a miserable marriage of thirty-two years he seemed exhausted, and wrote, then a renowned composer, to a friend from London:
"My wife, that infernal woman, has written me such horrible things that I will not return home again."