Note especially the cluster of those wonderful musickers, who, at the end of the Middle Age, went from Flanders and thereabouts, into Italy and all around Europe, weaving their Flemish counterpoint like a net all over the world of music.  They seem all to have been marrying men, some of them super-romantical, others as stodgily domestic and workaday as any village blacksmith.  There is Marc Houtermann, called the Prince of Musicians.  He lived at Brussels, and died there aged forty, and the same year he was followed to his grave by his musically named Joanna Gavadia, who knew music well, and who, let us still hope, died of a broken heart.  Cipriano de Rore, De Croes, and Jacques Buus were all married men, and begot hostages to fortune.  Philippe de Monte may or may not have married; we only know that a pupil of his wrote him a Latin poem forty-six lines long, and we can only trust that he did not marry her.

Orlando di Lasso, “one of the morning stars of modern times,” whose music was so beautiful that once at Munich a thunder-storm was miraculously hushed at the first note of one of his motets, lived a love-life much like Schumann’s, save that he seems to have had no hard-hearted parents to strengthen and purify his resolve.  The only court he went to, to win her, was the court at Munich, where his Regina was a maid of honour.  She bore him six children, and they lived ideally, it seems.  But his health gave way now and then before his hard work, and finally, when he had reached his threescore and ten, his wife came home to find him gone mad, and unable even to recognise her, who had been at his side for thirty years.  She guarded him tenderly, and strove hard to cheer his last days, but melancholy surrendered him only to death.

Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote many wills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet, yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself a composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet’s country where her Flemish father took her.

How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wife conspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger!  When he was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a lady of the court of Ferrara.  Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was a poetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry and his music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where she outlived De Wert some twenty-seven years.

His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects of music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his family?  Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music as Jacques de Wert?