e the alleged one love of Schubert's
life. Few composers have been so overweighted with poverty or so gifted
with loneliness as Franz Schubert. His joy was spasmodic and short, but
his sorrow was persistent and deep.

He, who sang so many love songs, could hardly be said to have been in
any sense a lover. Once he wrote of himself as a man so wrecked in
health, that he was one "to whom the happiness of proffered love and
friendship is but anguish; whose enthusiasm for the beautiful threatens
to vanish altogether." Of his music he wrote, that the world seemed to
like only that which was the product of his sufferings, and of his
songs he exclaimed: "For many years I sang my Lieder. If I would fain
sing of love, it turned to pain; or if I would sing of pain, it turned
to love. Thus I was torn between love and sorrow."

He had a few flirtations, and one or two strong friendships, but the
thought of marriage seems to have entered his mind only to be rejected.
In his diary he wrote:

"Happy is he who finds a true friend; happier still is he who finds in
his wife a true friend. To the free man at this time, marriage is a
frightful thought: he confounds it either with melancholy or low
sensuality." One of his first affairs of the heart was with Theresa
Grob, who sang in his works, and for whom he wrote various songs and
other compositions. But he also wrote for her brother, and besides, she
married a baker. Anna Milder, who had been a lady's maid, but became a
famous singer and married a rich jeweller and quarrelled with Beethoven
and with Spontini, was a sort of muse to Schubert, sang his songs in
public, and gave him much advice.

Mary Pachler was a friend of Beethoven's, and after his death seems to
have turned her friendship to Schubert, with great happiness to him.

But the legendary romance of Schubert's life occurred when he was
twenty-one, and a music teacher to Carolina Esterhazy. He first fell in
love with her maid, it is said, and based his "Divertissement a
l'Hongroise" on Hungarian melodies he heard her singing at her work.
There is no disguising the fact that Schubert, prince of musicians, was
personally a hopeless little pleb. He wrote his friend Schober in 1818
of the Esterhazy visit: "The cook is a pleasant fellow; the housemaid
is very pretty and often pays me a visit; the butler is my rival."
Mozart also ate with the servants in the Archbishop's household, though
it ground him deep.

But Schubert was to