These six composers had a miserable love life

If you look through music history books and composer biographies, you will find many composers who had long, happy and devoted relationships with their partners. Grieg, Britten or, even further back, Tallis: these are some of the composers who enjoyed happy, secure love lives.

Then there are those whose affairs of the heart were equally passionate and stormy, often in harmony with their own music – the arch-romantic composers Chopin, Schumann and Wagner come to mind.

Others simply didn’t care about matters of the heart. And then there is the fourth group: those composers for whom love brought more than enough pain for one reason or another. Some were cruelly rejected by the objects of their greatest desires, others had to find spouses they could barely tolerate, and still others were driven by jealousy to the brink of despair… or worse.

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So we wipe away a tear, throw the farewell letter in the trash and introduce six composers who caused unhappy love lives.

Composers with terrible love lives

Joseph Haydn: Consolation in composing (a lot)

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) was married for 30 years, but not to the person he would have preferred. As a young man, the Austrian composer fell madly in love with Therese Keller, the daughter of a Viennese wigmaker, but his future in-laws had other plans – Therese was sent to a nunnery, and Joseph married her older sister Maria Anna instead.

Although they officially married in 1860, the two were at loggerheads almost from day one. The marriage remained childless, both had affairs – she with the painter Ludwig Guttenbrunn, he with the soprano Luigia Polzelli – and gossip about their feuds became commonplace. A few years after Haydn and Maria Anna’s deaths, the Swedish composer Berwald reported: “In Vienna, people say that Haydn’s rather unhappy and childless marriage was the reason why he composed so much.”

Franz Schubert: The young dream of love, thwarted by poverty

Like Haydn, Franz Schubert (1797-1828) also fell in love with a Therese, but in the case of the then teenage composer, his hopes of marriage were not destroyed by the will of her parents, but by his own poverty. In fact, a law at the time prohibited marriage if the man could not prove that he had the financial means to support a family.

Later in his short life, Schubert fell in love with one of his students, Countess Caroline Esterházy, but she seemed to have little interest in her thin-skinned, short, bloated admirer despite his obvious talent. He was forced to look elsewhere for pleasure. Whether the syphilis that caused his death at just 31 was the result of regular visits to prostitutes is not known.

Alexander Zemlinsky: Love, well, unrequited

In 1900, Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942, picture above) fell in love with his piano student, the enchantingly beautiful Alma Schindler (later known as Alma Mahler (a hint of things to come). She, in turn, described him as a “chinless, toothless, unwashed gnome.” Nevertheless, she also found him strangely fascinating and a relationship of sorts developed between them, although by all accounts it remained unconsummated.

Meanwhile, in the background, a Gustav Mahlerwho finally made his move. Zemlinsky was devastated when Mahler and Alma married in 1902 and had apparently still not gotten over it by 1923, when he Lyric Symphonya work that tells of the suffering of unrequited love.

Three more composers who had to endure a painful love life

Leos Janáček: Broken heart = musical streak of luck

Unrequited love can be painful, but it can also be productive. If Leos Janacek (1854-1928) fell in love with Kamila Stösslová, who inspired him to some of his greatest pieces: his String Quartet No. 2 (‘Intimate Letters’) and his three operas Katya Kabanova, The clever little fox And The Makropoulos case. Love also made him a keen pen pal: the married composer wrote over 700 letters to Stösslová, who was also married, 37 years younger than him, and had neither great interest in art nor in reciprocating his feelings. Janáček was not deterred. “Oh Kamila, it is difficult to calm me down,” he wrote, “but the fire you have ignited in me is necessary. Let it burn, let it flame.”

Ethel Smyth: a late-blooming passion

Virginia Woolf remembered the first time she saw Ethel Smyth (1858-1944): “How she came hurrying along the gangway of Wigmore Hall in her tweed and gaiters, with a little cock feather in her felt and a general expression of furious energy, so that I said: ‘That is Ethel Smyth!”’

That was in 1919, but they didn’t really get to know each other until 1930. The British composer, then in her 70s, fell in love with the novelist. “I don’t think I have ever felt a deeper affection for anyone, and I think that’s because of her genius,” she wrote in her diary. Woolf didn’t feel the same way, but the two became and remained friends, a relationship that was by turns fiery, inspiring and frustrating.

When we talk about composers and their painful love lives, how could we forget this…

Carlo Gesualdo: Passion, murder, guilt … and some of the most sublime music of the Renaissance

Love became truly catastrophic in the case of the Italian composer Don Carlo GesualdoPrince of Venosa (1566-1613). When he was 24 years old, he returned to his castle to find his wife Maria d’Avalos in bed with her lover. He brutally stabbed, slashed and shot the couple, making sure they both died.

Although Gesualdo was undoubtedly responsible for the double murder, his noble status protected him from prosecution. However, he was plagued by guilt for the rest of his life. Rumors of witchcraft and sadomasochism surrounded him, but he continued to compose music that was extraordinary in its harmonic boldness. Most striking are his six books of beautiful, ethereal and sometimes otherworldly Madrigals.

A terrible love life, indeed. But one that, like the other composers we have covered, led to great art.