Twice Mozart must make concert tours for money, and twice he came home poorer than he went, but at least he left the world some of the gentlest and most hearty love-letters in its literature.  When he was at home, Vienna was busy with anecdotes of his devotion.  He was indeed so good a husband that Constanze could not even withhold forgiveness for certain occasions when he strayed from the narrow path of absolute fidelity; for she knew that his heart had its home with her.  When he died, supposedly of malignant typhus, she tried to catch his disease and die with him, and her health broke so completely that she could not attend his funeral; and when she was recovered enough to visit the cemetery, she could not discover, what no man has since found out, in just what three-deep pauper’s grave Mozart was buried.

All in all, in spite of certain ficklenesses in which this immortal musician has been surpassed by lovers of all walks of life, from blacksmiths to bishops, music has created one of tenderest, most honest of all romances.

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.