<\/p>
W<\/span>ednesday 26 November 1760 should have been a happy day for Joseph Haydn<\/a>, and perhaps it was. Aged 28, he already had a good job working as music master for an aristocrat, and had recently written the first of his 104 symphonies. Romantically, he had seemingly hit the jackpot too \u2013 that November day he married Maria Anna Keller in St\u00a0Stephen\u2019s Cathedral, Vienna, where two decades previously he had been a chorister. Years of happiness, both personal and professional, seemed to stretch out before him.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n Unfortunately it didn\u2019t work out that way. While Haydn continued to flourish as a musician \u2013 a career-defining appointment with the Esterh\u00e1zy family was just around the corner \u2013 his marriage to Maria Anna quickly crumbled to an untidy mess that would come to an end only with her death nearly 40 years later.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> \u00a0<\/p>\n What went wrong? The clue probably lies in how the relationship first got started. Maria Anna was the daughter of a wigmaker, whose brother introduced Haydn to the Keller family. But Maria Anna was not the daughter who first attracted Haydn\u2019s eye. That was Therese, her younger sibling, to whom Haydn taught piano and with whom he fell in love. Therese, however, had been earmarked by her family for the religious life, and eventually joined a nunnery.<\/span><\/p>\n And there the matter might have ended, had not a bright idea occurred to her father Johann Keller. If Haydn couldn\u2019t marry Therese, what about her older sister? Might Maria Anna be a suitable replacement? Haydn was not exactly enthusiastic about the idea \u2013 it took five years of prompting by Herr Keller, plus the influence of what one acquaintance coyly dubbed \u2018a young man\u2019s natural urges\u2019, for him to finally name the wedding day.<\/span><\/p>\n Haydn\u2019s initial reluctance to act on Johann Keller\u2019s masterplan proved prescient. Virtually from the outset, he and Maria Anna proved drastically incompatible. She had no empathy for music, he claimed, and didn\u2019t care whether he was \u2018a cobbler or an artist\u2019. Haydn\u2019s friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger expanded on the list of the hapless Maria Anna\u2019s alleged deficiencies. She had \u2018a domineering, unfriendly character\u2019, he wrote. She was a spendthrift, and also a religious bigot. It was even rumoured that she used her husband\u2019s music manuscripts to line pastry tins or curl her hair.<\/span><\/p>\n But what of Haydn himself? Was he blameless in the disintegration of his marriage? Likely not, as Haydn himself appears to indicate in a remark he made to Griesinger. \u2018My wife was incapable of having children,\u2019 he said, \u2018and thus I was less indifferent to the charms of other women.\u2019 His partner\u2019s infertility suggested as a reason for his own infidelity? It hardly paints a flattering picture of the composer. Or was Maria Anna simply averse to any sexual contact with her new husband?<\/span><\/p>\n We will never know for sure. What is certain is that both Haydn and Maria Anna had extra-marital dalliances \u2013 he with the Italian singer Luigia Polzelli, a mezzo-soprano with the Esterh\u00e1zy company. Today, the Haydns\u2019 unhappiness with one another would probably have ended in divorce court. But that was impossible for a Catholic couple in 18th-century Vienna and the pair were still officially married \u2013 though leading largely separate lives \u2013 when Maria Anna died in 1800, aged 69, of arthritis. Haydn outlived her by nine years, but did not re-marry.<\/span><\/p>\n \u2018Papa Haydn\u2019 is the beneficent image of the composer passed down to posterity through oil paintings and his genial, life-enhancing music. But his dysfunctional marriage is a sharp reminder that beneath the magnificent accomplishments of an artistic career, personal failures and imperfections can linger as a discomfiting blemish.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section><\/body><\/html>\n By BBC Music Magazine Published: Thursday, 07 April 2022 at 12:00 am Wednesday 26 November 1760 should have been a happy day for Joseph Haydn, and perhaps it was. Aged 28, he already had a good job working as music master for an aristocrat, and had recently written the first of his 104 symphonies. Romantically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":14584,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"4"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-scaled.jpg",2031,2560,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-238x300.jpg",238,300,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-768x968.jpg",768,968,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-812x1024.jpg",800,1009,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-1219x1536.jpg",1219,1536,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2022\/04\/why-haydns-marriage-to-maria-anna-keller-was-doomed-from-the-start-1625x2048.jpg",1625,2048,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By BBC Music Magazine Published: Thursday, 07 April 2022 at 12:00 am Wednesday 26 November 1760 should have been a happy day for Joseph Haydn, and perhaps it was. Aged 28, he already had a good job working as music master for an aristocrat, and had recently written the first of his 104 symphonies. Romantically,…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/14583"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Who was Haydn\u2019s wife, Maria Anna Keller?<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n
Who was to blame for their disastrous marriage?<\/h2>\n
How long was Haydn married for?<\/h2>\n
","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"