Although Haydn had at this time to endure humiliations and slights as well as actual want, his situation was gradually ameliorated by the patronage of some wealthy music-lovers with whom his growing reputation as a composer brought him acquainted. His first fixed post was that of music-director to a Bohemian nobleman, Count Morzin, for whose band he wrote, in 1759, his first symphony. In the next year, however, Count Morzin married and discontinued his musical establishment, and Haydn was left for a short time without definite work, until in 1761 he was installed in the post he held uninterruptedly for thirty years. His own marriage, meanwhile, took place in 1760. How Haydn, who was quite as prudent as he was amiable, could have been so rash as to marry at just this moment, it is difficult to explain; especially as he married, not the woman he had fallen in love with, but her elder sister. The whole affair is almost farcically perverse. A young composer of twenty-eight, just pulling himself up at length on the shelving bank of patronage, out of the slough of miscellaneous drudgery in which he has been weltering for years, offers to encumber himself at the critical moment with the daughter of one Keller, a barber. The lady, for unknown reasons, among which may or may not have been a dread of the quagmire, betakes herself to a nunnery. Whereupon the barber persuades the composer to marry the older daughter, Anna Maria. The outcome of this marriage, which took place in November, 1760, proved, as might have been expected, unfortunate. The wife began almost immediately to treat her husband with indifference and petty malignity, which rapidly increased. She seemed not to care whether he composed or cobbled, so long as he supplied her with money; she used his manuscripts for curling-papers; when he was in London in 1791 she wrote him appeals for money wherewith to buy “a widow’s home.” Altogether the uncongeniality was intolerable, and the pair lived together but a few years, although Frau Haydn did not die until 1800. The thirty years from 1761 to 1791, a period of the utmost importance in the development of Haydn’s genius, was of the greatest monotony so far as events are concerned. His post was that of musical director or Kapellmeister (at first Vice-Kapellmeister), to the great, princely family of Esterhazy, one of the most wealthy and influential of the noble families of Hungary. He served them both at Eisenstadt, at the foot of the Leitha mountains, in Hungary, where Prince Paul Anton Esterhazy was the reigning prince in 1761, and at Esterhaz, the magnificent palace, with groves, grottoes, hot-houses, deer-parks, and flower gardens, which Prince Nicholas erected in 1766. Of the musician’s duties and social status in this princely house, an idea may be gathered from the following sentences from the contract entered into at the beginning of his term of service as Vice-Kapellmeister: