He, who sang so many love songs, could hardly be said to have been in any sense a lover.  Once he wrote of himself as a man so wrecked in health, that he was one “to whom the happiness of proffered love and friendship is but anguish; whose enthusiasm for the beautiful threatens to vanish altogether.”  Of his music he wrote, that the world seemed to like only that which was the product of his sufferings, and of his songs he exclaimed:  “For many years I sang my Lieder.  If I would fain sing of love, it turned to pain; or if I would sing of pain, it turned to love.  Thus I was torn between love and sorrow.”

He had a few flirtations, and one or two strong friendships, but the thought of marriage seems to have entered his mind only to be rejected.  In his diary he wrote: 

“Happy is he who finds a true friend; happier still is he who finds in his wife a true friend.  To the free man at this time, marriage is a frightful thought:  he confounds it either with melancholy or low sensuality.”  One of his first affairs of the heart was with Theresa Grob, who sang in his works, and for whom he wrote various songs and other compositions.  But he also wrote for her brother, and besides, she married a baker.  Anna Milder, who had been a lady’s maid, but became a famous singer and married a rich jeweller and quarrelled with Beethoven and with Spontini, was a sort of muse to Schubert, sang his songs in public, and gave him much advice.

Mary Pachler was a friend of Beethoven’s, and after his death seems to have turned her friendship to Schubert, with great happiness to him.

But the legendary romance of Schubert’s life occurred when he was twenty-one, and a music teacher to Carolina Esterhazy.  He first fell in love with her maid, it is said, and based his “Divertissement a l’Hongroise” on Hungarian melodies he heard her singing at her work.  There is no disguising the fact that Schubert, prince of musicians, was personally a hopeless little pleb.  He wrote his friend Schober in 1818 of the Esterhazy visit:  “The cook is a pleasant fellow; the housemaid is very pretty and often pays me a visit; the butler is my rival.”  Mozart also ate with the servants in the Archbishop’s household, though it ground him deep.

But Schubert was too homely even for a housemaid, so in despair he turned to the young countess and loved her—­they say, till death.  Once, she jokingly demanded why he had never dedicated anything to her, and the legend says he cried:  “Why should I, when everything I write is yours?”

The purveyors of this legend disagree as to the age of the young countess; some say she was seventeen, and some that she was eleven, while those who disbelieve the story altogether say that she was only seven years old.  But now you have heard the story, and you may take it or leave it.  There is some explanation for the belief that Schubert did not dare to love or declare his love, and some reason to believe that his reticence was wise and may have saved him worse pangs, in the fact that he was only one inch more than five feet high, and yet fat and awkward; stoop-shouldered, wild-haired, small-nosed, big-spectacled, thick-lipped, and of a complexion which has been called pasty to the point of tallowness.  Haydn, however, almost as unpromising, was a great slayer of women.  But Schubert either did not care, or did not dare.