St. Stephen’s Cathedral

We mark today the 258th anniversary of the marriage of Joseph Haydn to Maria Anna Aloysia Apollonia Keller in St. Stephen’s Cathedral in the great city of Vienna. The groom was 28 years old and his blushing bride 31.

We contemplate the institution of marriage.

Marriage is like swinging a golf club: it looks so easy on TV. But when we actually pick up a golf club and/or get married, we learn soon enough how very, very, very challenging marital reality can be.

I know of what I speak. I am in my fourth marriage, though I’d hasten to point out that that’s not because I’m a disagreeable monster (although my first wife, from whom I am divorced, might beg to disagree), but because I’ve lost two wives to cancer. 

When I married for the fourth and final time to Dr. Nanci Tucker – a real doctor, one who can write a prescription – my old friend and colleague Dr. Frank LaRocca – not a real doctor; he cannot write a prescription – said to me “you win”. You see, Frank has been married three times, and with my fourth marriage he figured that the person with the greatest number of marriages was the winner. I disagreed: to my mind, the fewer the number marriages, the bigger the winner. To my mind, folks who have been married but once and have managed to stay married for the duration are the biggest winners of all. Sure: there are good times and bad times; good years and bad years; ups and down and everything in between. But if you can stay married to that first spouse and grow up together and grow old together, you are a winner in my book. 

Now, I would hazard to guess that we all know at least one married couple that has stayed together – through thick and thin – despite the fact that they do nothing but make each other miserable. We would suppose that such a thing is less common today than in earlier times, when obtaining a divorce bordered on the impossible.

Sadly, such was the case of Joseph Haydn’s marriage to Maria Anna Aloysia Keller, who Haydn came to refer to as “that infernal beast!”

There’s no kind way to put it. Haydn’s marriage was a disaster, a fiasco, a bomb, a bust, a legendary failure: the Ford Edsel, the eight-track cartridge, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 of marriages, a marriage that sank faster than a submarine with screen doors, that fizzled out more violently than a tube full of Mentos in a liter bottle of Diet Coke; the grandmother of rotten marriages, the single greatest torment in Haydn’s long life. 

Here are the particulars.

Joseph Haydn, forensic reconstruction by Thomas Becker

Sexually, Joseph Haydn was a regular, red-blooded, down-the-middle-of-the-plate heterosexual guy. Unfortunately, until his mid-twenties he had had almost no contact with girls or women his age. From the age of 8 to 17 he had been cloistered away as a choirboy at Vienna’s St. Stephen’s cathedral, and consequently, he had no contact or experience with girls of any sort at a time when he should have been learning the rules of sexual warfare.

His poverty and workload during his years as a freelancer – from the age of 17 to 25 – precluded almost entirely any social contact with women his age. It didn’t help either that Haydn – who was just about the nicest, sweetest guy any of us will ever meet – was fabulously unattractive: undersized, with bow legs too short for his body; smallpox scarred, socially awkward, and with an aquiline schnozzola (meaning a hooked nose) that occupied multiple time zo...