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Scan the musical history books and composer biographies, and you will find plenty of composers who enjoyed long, happy and devoted relationships with their other halves. Grieg<\/a>, Britten<\/a> or, heading further back, Tallis<\/a>: these are some of the composers who revelled in happy, secure love lives. <\/strong><\/p> Then, there are those whose affairs of the heart were ardent and turbulent in equal measure, often matching their own music \u2013 the likes of arch-Romantic composers<\/a> Chopin<\/a>, Sc<\/a>h<\/a>umann<\/a> and Wagner<\/a> spring to mind. <\/strong><\/p> Others simply didn’t care about affairs of the heart. And then there’s the fourth group: those composers for whom, for one reason or another, love brought more than its fair share of pain. Some were cruelly rejected by the objects of their fondest desires, others found themselves lumbered with spouses they could scarcely abide, and others were driven by jealousy to the brink of despair\u2026 or worse.<\/p>