on Furnberg, he was appointed
Capellmeister to the Bohemian Count Morzin. This nobleman, whose country
house was at Lukavec, near Pilsen, was a great lover of music, and
maintained a small, well-chosen orchestra of some sixteen or eighteen
performers. It was for him that Haydn wrote his first Symphony in D--

[Figure: a musical score excerpt]

Falls in Love

We now approach an interesting event in Haydn's career. In the course of
some banter at the house of Rogers, Campbell the poet once remarked that
marriage in nine cases out of ten looks like madness. Haydn's case was
not the tenth. His salary from Count Morzin was only 20 pounds with
board and lodging; he was not making anything substantial by his
compositions; and his teaching could not have brought him a large
return. Yet, with the proverbial rashness of his class, he must needs
take a wife, and that, too, in spite, of the fact that Count Morzin
never kept a married man in his service! "To my mind," said Mozart,
"a bachelor lives only half a life." It is true enough; but Mozart had
little reason to bless the "better half," while Haydn had less. The lady
with whom he originally proposed to brave the future was one of his own
pupils--the younger of the two daughters of Barber Keller, to whom he
had been introduced when he was a chorister at St Stephen's. According
to Dies, Haydn had lodged with the Kellers at one time. The statement is
doubtful, but in any case his good stars were not in the ascendant when
it was ordained that he should marry into this family.

Marries

It was, as we have said, with the younger of the two daughters that he
fell in love. Unfortunately, for some unexplained reason, she took the
veil, and said good-bye to a wicked world. Like the hero in "Locksley
Hall," Haydn may have asked himself, "What is that which I should do?"
But Keller soon solved the problem for him. "Barbers are not the most
diffident people of the world," as one of the race remarks in "Gil
Blas," and Keller was assuredly not diffident. "Never mind," he said to
Haydn, "you shall have the other." Haydn very likely did not want the
other, but, recognizing with Dr Holmes's fashionable lady that "getting
married is like jumping overboard anyway you look at it," he resolved to
risk it and take Anna Maria Keller for better or worse.

His Wife

The marriage was solemnized at St Stephen's on November 26, 1760, when
the bridegroom was twenty-nine and the bride thirty-two. The