This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes again: 

“My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer.  There will sometime be an end of this torment.”

Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful tone!  As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.

Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for the unhappiness upon the husband.  Anna Keller had a remarkably long and sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case he died suddenly.  He pointed to a series of canons which he had written and framed.  When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little house she had set her heart on, naively adding that it was just a cosy size for a widow.

Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a widower.  Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of Haydn’s life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how various composers composed:  Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends; Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.

“But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of Angelica.  When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends divided his time.  For thirty years he led this life, monotona ma dolcissima, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy.  Then Boselli died and he began to feel the ennui (le noje) of a void in his days.  It was then that he went to London.”

This mistress of Haydn’s, whom Carpani and Fetis call Boselli and whom Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the spelling in Haydn’s own handwriting.  The pleasant legend Carpani gives of Haydn’s life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.  Pohl, closely followed by Haydn’s recent biographer, Schmidt, describes Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged