ads:
The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2
Rupert Hughes
The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume
2, by Rupert Hughes
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2
Author: Rupert Hughes
Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11419]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Harry Jones, Sjaani and PG Distributed
Proofreaders
THE LOVE AFFAIRS
OF
GREAT MUSICIANS
_By_ RUPERT HUGHES
Author of "Contemporary American Composers," "The Musical Guide", etc.
_ILLUSTRATED_
VOLUME II.
_1903_
ads:
Livros Grátis
http://www.livrosgratis.com.br
Milhares de livros grátis para download.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. FRANZ LISZT
II. RICHARD WAGNER
III. TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER
IV. THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST
V. AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
VI. ROBERT SCHUMANN AND CLARA WIECK
VII. MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MISS SMITHSON _Frontispiece_
FRANZ LISZT
GEORGE SAND, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY L. COLAMATTA
PRINCESS CAROLYNE VON SAYN-WITTGENSTEIN AND CHILD
RICHARD WAGNER
RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER
RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
DESIREE ARTOT
LOUIS SPOHR
NICOLO PAGANINI
HENRIETTA SONTAG
MADAME MALIBRAN
GEOFFREY RUDEL
MARTIN LUTHER AND CATHERINA VON BORA
MUZIO CLEMENTI
HECTOR BERLIOZ
CHARLES GOUNOD
GIOACCHINO A. ROSSINI
OLYMPE PELISSIER, AS "JUDITH" IN THE PAINTING BY VERNET
ads:
GIUSEPPE VERDI
FRANZ SCHUBERT
ROBERT SCHUMANN
CLARA WIECK, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN
CLARA AND ROBERT SCHUMANN
CLARA (WIECK) SCHUMANN
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
FRANZ LISZT
"Liszt, or the Art of Running after Women."--NIETSCHE.
Liszt's life was so lengthy and so industriously amorous, that it is
possible only to float along over the peaks, to touch only the high
points. Why, his letters to the last of his loves alone make up four
volumes! And yet, for a life so proverbially given over to flirtations
as his, the beginnings were strangely unprophetic. He had reached the
mature age of six before he began to study the piano; compared with
Mozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert--namely,
nine years. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of his
father found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and he
was sent to Vienna to study. When he was eleven years old, after one of
his concerts, Beethoven kissed him. He survived. Then on to Paris and
duchesses and princesses galore. Here he became a proverb of popularity
as "Le petit Litz"--the French inevitably gave some twist to a foreign
name, then as to-day, when two of their favourite painters are
"Wisthler" and "Seargent."
Liszt's childhood was therefore largely fed upon the embraces and
kisses of rapturous women, even as was the young Mozart's, the
difference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Even then he
used to throw money among the gamins, as later he scattered it in how
many directions, with what liberality, and with what princeliness, and
from what a slender purse!
The father and mother had gone to Paris with him; but soon the mother
went back to Austria--she was a German, the father alone being
Hungarian. With his father the lad remained, and found him a severe and
domineering master. But in 1827 he died, leaving his sixteen-year-old
son alone in Paris. That stalwart self-reliance and sense of honour,
which gave nobility to so much of Liszt's character, now showed itself;
he sold his grand piano to pay the debts his father had left him, and
sent for his mother to come to Paris, where he supported her by giving
piano lessons. Then, as later, he found plenty of pupils, the
difference being that then, as not later, he took pay for his lessons,
though not even then from all.
Here he was at sixteen, tall and handsome, and with a face
of winsomeness that never lost its spell over womankind.
Sixteen-year-older that he was, he was a man of great fame, and the
grind of acquiring technic was all passed. Moscheles had already said
of him in print: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses everything yet heard,
in power and the vanquishing of difficulties." Here he was, then,
young, beautiful, famous, a dazzling musician, and Hungarian. What do
you expect?
It makes small difference what you expect, for the reality was that his
heart was eager for the seclusion of a monastery; his soul pined for
religious excitement only! At fourteen he had begun to rebel against
his nickname, "Le petit Litz." It was with the utmost difficulty that
his father had been able to keep him from making religion his career,
and giving up his already glittering fame. Never in his life did he
cease to thrill with an almost hysterical passion for churchly affairs
and ceremonies.
At fourteen he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It
was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella,
a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his
first love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his
mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really
his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior,
had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. The young
comtesse' mother gave her into Liszt's charge for musical education.
The young comtesse was, they say, of slender frame and angelic beauty,
and deeply imbued with that religious ardour which, as in Liszt's case,
often modulates as imperceptibly into love, as an organist can
gradually turn a hymn into a jig, or an Italian aria into a hymn.
The mother was fond of presiding at the music lessons, and of leading
the young teacher to air his views about religion and life, and she
watched with pleasure the gradual development of what was inevitable, a
more than musical sympathy between the daughter and the teacher. But
the romance seemed to win her approval, and when suddenly she saw that
she was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that he
should not refuse the young lovers their happiness. He allowed his wife
to die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without the
faintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of his
daughter with an untitled musician. His business affairs, however, kept
him away from home, and from thought upon the subject. After the death
of the mother, the comtesse and the pianist met and wept together; then
resumed their music lessons, reading much between the lines, and far
preferring dreamy duets to difficult solos.
Liszt had read little but music and religion; the slim, fair comtesse
had read much verse and romance. So she was his teacher in that
literature which would most interest a brace of young lovers. There was
no one at home to note how late he stayed of evenings, and one night he
returned to his own house to find it locked and his mother asleep.
Rather than disturb her, he spent the night on the steps. Another
evening, Franz and Caroline found parting such sweet sorrow, that when
he reached her outer door, he found it locked for the night. He was
compelled to call the porter from those slumbers which only doorkeepers
know, and this man was doorkeeperishly wrathful at having his
beauty-sleep broken; he growled his rage. This is the only time
recorded when Franz Liszt failed to respond to a hint for money. His
head was too high in the clouds, no doubt. The servant, thus suddenly
awakened to the impropriety of affairs, hastened the next morning to
inform the comte that his daughter was studying the music of the
spheres as well as that of the piano, and that her lessons were
prolonged till midnight.
The next time Franz came to teach, the ghoulish porter gleefully
informed him that his master wished to speak to him. The comte was most
politely firm, and murdered the young love with most suave apologies
for the painful amputation. The difference in rank, it went without
saying, put marriage out of the question, and, therefore, all things
considered, he could not derange monsieur to the giving of more music
lessons,--for the present, at least.
The young musician took the _coup de grace_ bravely; without a word he
gave the comte his hand in mute acceptance of his fate, and bowed
himself out. The true bitterness of his loss he sought to hide by
fleeing to the Church. His love had been pure and ardent. It had been
found impossible. His hopes had been put to death; therefore an end to
the world. He bent his burning head low upon the cold steps of Saint
Vincent de Paul, and resolved to renounce the world. He wrote ten years
later, and still with suffering: "A female form chaste and pure as the
alabaster of holy vessels, was the sacrifice I offered with tears to
the God of Christians. Renunciation of all things earthly was the only
theme, the only word of that day."
Caroline, too, sank under the bitterness of the loss. She fell
dangerously ill, and when she recovered she thought only of the
convent; but her father, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew how
to persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madame
d'Artigou; they say she gave her husband no affection, and that her
heart was still, and always, Liszt's; while in his heart she was for
ever niched as the young Madonna of his life.
For the present the shock of sacrifice threatened his whole career, and
his life and mind as well. Again the monastery beckoned him, and now it
was his mother's turn to oppose the Church in its effort to engulf this
brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a
time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his
health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary
eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself:
"The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated."
When Liszt gave up all hope of entering the Church, he began a restless
orgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foibles
allured him.
As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all
the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where
the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another
form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and
compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up
with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he
fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris
and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with
his unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to
the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next
Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the
twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up
their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the
most artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the Polish
Countess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and the
two cronies:
"I would choose Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband, Liszt for
my lover."
There seems to have been a snow-storm of love affairs at this period.
It is impossible even to name the flakes. Gossip of course gathered
into the catalogue every woman whom Liszt saw more than once; but we
need not pay this tribute to malice by mentioning the names of all of
Liszt's hostesses. Among those who may be more definitely suspected of
being made victims by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse Adele
Laprunarede, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as De
Beaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful." Her home was
lonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was a
musician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him to
spend the winter months at his chateau. For a whole winter Liszt was
kept there in her castle a prisoner, with fetters of silk. The old
comte seems never to have suspected. When Liszt eventually, like
Tannhaeuser, mutineered against the charms of the Venusberg and returned
to Paris, he wrote many letters to the comtesse, in which, as he
himself said, he gained his "first practice in the lofty French style."
But this intrigue was followed by his appearance in the procession of
George Sand's lovers. Ramann, in his biography, writes of the curious
state of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women were
beginning to demand freedom and to experiment with the writing of
perfervid romances, which questioned the very foundation principles of
marriage and made a religion of Affinity."
George Sand was a chief crusader against the curse of monogamy. She
practiced this anarchy in the guise of religion, as the old crusaders
out-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisation in the name of
the Cross. George Sand's gospel, summed up briefly by Ramann, is as
follows:
"'Love,' says the authoress, 'is Christian compassion concentrated on a
single being. It belongs to the sinner, and not to the just; only for
the former it moves restlessly, passionately, and vehemently. When
thou, O noble and upright man,' she continues, with deceitfully
fantastic warmth, 'when thou feelest a violent passion for a miserable
fallen creature, be reassured that is genuine love; blush not
therefore! so has Christ loved who crucified him.' According to this
view, the love that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely be
alarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the more
genuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steeped
in passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty,
exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you have
never loved my personal self.' It also appears to correspond with this
casuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, of
sky-storming earnestness, but adorned with all unnatural qualities,
give themselves up to the latter as to an intoxicating spell, and in
the delirium of self-delusion hold sin for virtue, and the unnatural
for higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was a
logical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressive
stubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself,' said Sand in 'Lelia';
'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man should
therefore be transitory.'"
If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand was
the most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large and
roomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only. It was in
1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caught
in the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry." Alfred de
Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to
Chopin--or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as
later the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite as
true. Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of George
Sand. But soon he was entangled in that "cameraderie" which was the
fashionable name for liaison in that time.
From her the Comtesse de Laprunarede had borrowed him for her
snow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was another
woman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off. This was the Comtesse
Marie Catherine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in
1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in
1834. It was not till six years later that the comtesse took up
literature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an art
critic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine and
English pen-name, "Daniel Stern."
The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was
signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost
equal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems
to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion
in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time she
seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with
her own fascinations.
Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the more
strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramann
has thus pictured her:
"The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:
slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in
her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair
tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular,
classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with
the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her
countenance; these were the general features which rendered it
impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or
the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the
elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the
Faubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the
purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft
melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that
her connection with the young artist began."
Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as the
mainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquest
that made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she
captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were
hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of
passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each
other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his
constitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, death
entered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. For
awhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems to
have had a moment's pause, but only to return.
Now, however, it had for Liszt something of unfreshness and monotony.
He determined to break loose, and in the spring of 1835 told the
comtesse that he was going to leave her. She, however, would not
consent. He yielding as gracefully as he could, took a lodging in a
quiet part of the city, where his life consisted of music, literature,
and the comtesse, who visited him incessantly. Her love had quite
infatuated her, to take the tone of the time; nowadays we might say
that she found it so serious that she desired to make it honest. The
means she hit upon were such as might strike a foolish woman as an
inspiration. Believing that the long way round was the short way home,
she thought to atone for her past foibles by casting them into sudden
insignificance--to clear the sultry air by a thunder crash.
When Liszt heard that the comtesse planned to leave her husband, and
even her children, and go into foreign exile with him, he felt that the
comtesse was taking the bit into her teeth with a vengeance, but saw as
he would on the lines, and cry "whoa" as he would, the runaway
comtesse still insisted on running away.
Liszt called on her mother to interfere; she was run over. He appealed
to her former confessor; his staying hand was shaken loose. He called
on the venerable family notary; the old man was upset by the
roadside--as I shall be also if I do not release this runaway metaphor.
The comtesse's mother persuaded the daughter to leave Paris for Basle,
hoping that a change of scene would bring a change of mind; Liszt
followed. It seems to me, however, more probable that the mother,
learning that her daughter was determined to leave Paris with Liszt,
went with her in the desperate effort to save appearances. But, however
that may be, we find the comtesse and the mother at one hotel, and
Liszt at another. A few days later, Liszt returned to his hotel to find
his room choked with the comtesse' trunks, and to learn that the mother
had gone back to Paris in despair. The comtesse had, as they say,
"brought her knitting" and come to stay.
Paris is not easily excited over an intrigue conducted according to the
established codes by which the intriguers bury their heads in the sand,
as a form of pretence that nobody knows that they are billing and
cooing beneath the sand, though of course everybody knows it, and they
know that everybody knows it, except possibly the one other person most
interested. But Paris was dumbfounded that a very prominent and
beautiful comtesse should leave her husband and her children in broad
daylight, and go visiting the most famous pianist in the world. The
pianist was to blame, of course, in the public eye, and the whole
affair was branded as a flagrant case of abduction. But, as we know
now, it was the pianist who was the victim of this Sabine procedure.
Liszt's actions in this affair seemed, as usual, to be an outrage upon
the ordinary laws of decency, but when the truth was learned, we find,
as the world found--as usual, too late to change its opinion of
him--that he did everything in his power to undo the evil into which
his passion had hurried him, and to set himself right with the usual
standards of society. And, as usual, he failed absolutely, because of
the curious and insane stubbornness of the woman.
Some years later, even the Comte d'Agoult, as well as the comtesse'
brother, the Comte Flavigny, confessed that Liszt had acted as a man of
honour. The comte had obtained a legal separation from his wife,
retaining their daughter. Liszt now proposed marriage. Both being
Catholics, it was necessary to experience a change of heart and become
Protestants. He exclaimed one day: "_Si nous etions Protestants"_ but
the comtesse crushed this hope with a sharp "_La Comtesse d'Agoult ne
sera jamais Madame Liszt_."
Liszt bowed to the inevitable, and kept together his many patches of
honour as well as he was permitted. The comtesse had a personal income
of four thousand dollars a year, which was as nothing. According to
Liszt's secretary, during the time of her stay with Liszt, she spent
sixty thousand dollars, the most of which Liszt earned himself by his
concerts. The pianist and the comtesse soon left Basle for Geneva,
where they remained till 1836, with the exception of one journey to
Paris, which Liszt made for a concert. But he returned rather to
literature than to music, as on another occasion did Wagner.
For five years Liszt and the comtesse travelled about Switzerland and
Italy, he occasionally being convinced that he was seriously in love
with the woman who had been so imperious and unreasonable. A few
conservatives outlawed him, but there were people enough who forgave
him, or approved him, to give him an abundance of society of the
highest and most aristocratic sort.
In 1836 his old flame, George Sand, visited Liszt and the comtesse.
They toured Switzerland on mules. George Sand has described the
wanderings in her "Lettres d'un Voyageur," where _Franz_ represents
Liszt, _Arabella_, the comtesse, and where one may read a poetic
description of the comtesse' beauty even after being drenched with
rain. Beauty that is water-proof is beauty indeed!
It is in this book of hers that Sand prints such illuminating epigrams
as these:
"There are great errors which are nearer the truth than little truths."
"The most beautiful creations of genius are those which succeed to the
epoch of the passions. The experience of life ought to precede art; art
requires repose, and does not suit with the storms of the heart. The
finest mountains of our globe are extinguished volcanoes."
"If you wish to arrive at truth, be reconciled to what is contrary; the
white light only results from the union of the coloured rays of the
spectrum."
"The oyster boasts and says: 'I have never gone astray,' Alas, poor
oyster! thou hast never walked."
When Liszt had made his concert trip to Paris, the comtesse had awaited
him at Sand's home. Then, after his famous duel with Thalberg--the
weapons being pianos--he joined the group at Nohant, where Chopin and
Sand, and Liszt and D'Agoult, and such guests as they gathered there,
led a life of elaborate entertainment which made Nohant as famous as
another Trianon. Meanwhile, there was going on a duel, the weapons of
which were not pianos, but those invisible stilettos with which two
women conduct a deadly feud, and politely tear each other's eyes out.
George Sand was famous then beyond her present-day esteem, and she was
a woman of vigour almost masculine and of a straightforwardness which
was almost an affectation. She loved to go about in boots and blouse,
and to ride bareback; she smoked cigars, and wrote at night. The
Comtesse d'Agoult was eminently feminine. She would rather have spent
one thousand francs on a gown than on anything else under heaven,
except another gown. She had in her certain literary capabilities, not
very marvellous, to be sure, but strong enough to provoke jealousy of
the overpraised Sand, who had also, incidentally, been on very intimate
terms with the present lover of the comtesse.
Unhappy is the lover who tries to play peacemaker between two of his
mistresses. This is enough to bring lava from any "extinguished
volcano." Liszt, after almost vain efforts to avoid downright
hair-pulling, decided to take the comtesse away from Nohant. He seems
to have sided with her against Sand, and said afterward: "I did not
care to expose myself to her insolence" (_sottise_). Chopin, however,
took sides with Sand, and it is said that his heart chilled toward
Liszt, who spoke bitterly of this estrangement, but on Chopin's death
wrote a biographical sketch full of affection, and of an admiration
better balanced than the over-flowery style which marks all of Liszt's
writings.
When the comtesse left Nohant, which Liszt never saw again, they went
to Lyons, where he gave a concert for the benefit of the poor and
working people. For what purposes of benevolence indeed did Liszt not
give concerts! So great and so discriminating and so self-sacrificing
was his charity, that it would almost plead atonement for a million
such unconventionalities as his. He was not content to devote the
proceeds of a single concert to some object of charity, but even gave
money, and whole tours. Besides this concert at Lyons, and various
others, one might mention the concert given for the flood sufferers at
Pesth, and for the poor of his native town, and the concert tour by
which he made Beethoven's monument possible at Bonn. Add to this the
other sums he scattered to poor artists like Wagner from his meagre
purse, and you will see one reason why women, who are more susceptible
and perceptive of such qualities of character, were almost as helpless
to resist Liszt's personality as he theirs. Even when he was "la petit
Litz," he was found holding a street-cleaner's broom while he went to
change a gold piece. And in his later years, his servant always filled
two of his pockets with coin, one with copper, and one with silver; and
the man used to say that when his master came home at night, the copper
mine was usually untouched, but the silver deposit exhausted.
It was in Lyons that the comtesse began her literary career, by a
French translation of Schubert's "Erl-Koenig." She later obtained a
considerable fame, as I have said, under the name of Daniel Stern. In
the fall of 1837 Liszt and the comtesse went to Italy, where,
especially at Bellaggio, they appear to have been genuinely happy. He
seems to be describing himself when he writes:
"Yes, my friend, when the ideal form of a woman floats before your
dreaming soul, a woman whose heaven-born charms bear no allurement for
the senses, but only wing the soul to devotion, and if you saw at her
side a youth of sincere and faithful heart, weave these forms into a
moving story of love, and give it the title, 'On the Shores of the Lake
of Como.'"
To us, who think of Liszt always by his last pictures, presenting him
in his venerable age, it is hard to remember that at this time he was
only twenty-seven. It was at this time, too, that he wrote the only
composition he ever dedicated to the comtesse. In later years, it was
almost the only composition of his that she would praise; it was a
fantasia on the "Huguenots." The two lovers continued their wanderings
through Italy and Austria, he giving concerts for the flood sufferers
and the Beethoven monument and she travelling with him. While in Rome
in 1839, the comtesse had borne him a son, Daniel, having previously
given him two daughters,--Blandine, who married the French statesman,
Emile Olivier, and died in 1862; and Cosinia, the famous wife of
Wagner. All three children had been legitimised immediately upon their
birth.
Meanwhile, he and the comtesse were drifting apart, in spite of these
three hostages to fortune. It is difficult to justify Liszt's desertion
of the woman, except by slandering her memory, and it is difficult to
save her memory without slandering his. The cause, as explained by
Ramann, is, that she cherished an ambition to be Liszt's Muse, and made
strong demands for the acceptance of her opinions upon his works. We
can easily imagine the situation: A sensitive, fiery composer, who is
incidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeous
composition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to his
companion. She, desirous of asserting her importance, listens to it
with that frame of mind which makes it easy to criticise any work of
art ever created--the desire to find fault. Benevolent and sincere as
her intentions may have been, the criticisms of this shallow and
musically untrained woman must have driven Liszt to desperation.
It is a rare musician that can tolerate the faintest disapproval of
even his poorest work, and frequently a critic lauds to the skies all
of the composer's works except one or two, and then, in order to give
his eulogy an appearance of discrimination and remove the taste of
unadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or these
two compositions are not the greatest works in existence--that unhappy
critic is practically sure to find that his eulogy has been accepted as
a mere matter of course, and his criticism bitterly resented as a
gratuitous and unwarranted assault upon beautiful creations which his
small skull and hickory-nut heart are unable to grasp.
Liszt was never especially philosophical under fault-finding, and to
have a fireside critic after him, nagging him day and night, must have
soured all the milk of human kindness in his heart. The comtesse was
stubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Liszt
degenerated into violent brawls. The young French poet, De Rocheaud,
"assisted," as the French say, at one of these combats between an
hysterical woman and a thin-skinned musician. The poet believed in
Muses and such things, using as an argument that beautiful fable which
Dante built on the most slender foundations.
"Think of Dante and Beatrice," exclaimed De Rocheaud. "Think how the
divine poet listened to her words as to revelations. Be thou Dante, and
she Beatrice." "Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!" cried Liszt, "the Dantes
create the Beatrices. The genuine die when they are eighteen years
old."
At length the gipsy spirit moved Liszt to make a long continental tour
to complete the depletions in his purse. He did not care to take the
comtesse and the children with him. With much difficulty he persuaded
her to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad terms
with her own family. Later he succeeded in reconciling the comtesse
with these, also. After the death of her mother, the comtesse inherited
a fortune, but Liszt continued to support the children.
The comtesse died of pleurisy in 1876, at the age of seventy-one. How
long these sweethearts of musicians last!
Thus closes the chapter of Liszt's affairs with the Comtesse d'Agoult.
It had lasted, all things considered, surprisingly long--five years.
A pleasant note of character was sounded by Liszt, which rings him to
the difficult love affair of Robert Schumann. In one of his letters,
Liszt tells how fond he had been of Schumann and Wieck and his daughter
Clara. Then came the famous struggle between father and suitor for the
possession of the girl. Liszt took Schumann's side, because he thought
he was in the right; he even went so far as to break off all
intercourse with Wieck--who took his revenge by publishing ferocious
criticisms on Liszt's playing.
In 1845 Liszt wrote a letter of calm, cool friendship to George Sand,
his "Dear George." For years he roved Europe, flitting from ovation to
ovation, from flirtation to flirtation. But he was drifting unwittingly
toward the grand affair of his life. A woman--the woman--was waiting
for him in Russia. Mr. Huneker says of Liszt and the Comtesse d'Agoult:
"Every one knows that he was as so much dough in her hands." So, in a
more than different way, we shall find him--who had slain his hecatomb
of hearts--helpless in the power of his one great love. Again he is
first compelling, then compelled.
February 8, 1819, in Monasterzyka in Kiev, Carolyne von Ivanovska was
born. She was the only daughter of a rich Polish nobleman. The parents
soon separated, and the child's life was divided between them. The
father brought her up, as La Mara tells, as if she were a boy. He made
her the companion of his conversations late into the night; and, in
order to make her the more congenial a comrade, he taught her to ride
wild horses and smoke strong cigars. Then the other half of the year,
she was the ward of her "beautiful, lovely, elegant" mother, who doted
on society, and introduced her daughter to the capitals and the salons
of Europe.
So, says La Mara, "under constantly changing surroundings, now in the
midst of the world, now in the deep solitude, Carolyne von Ivanovska
lived her first years."
When she was seventeen, her father bought her a husband, the son of the
Field Marshal Fuerst Wittgenstein, and on May 7, 1836, she gave her hand
to the Prince Nicolaus von Sayn-Wittgenstein, seven years her senior.
He was at the time a cavalry captain in the Russian army, a handsome,
but intellectually unimpressive man. To quote La Mara again: "From this
marriage the Princess Carolyne gained only one happiness: the birth of
a daughter, the Princess Marie, on whom she centred the glowing love of
her heart."
While the two fathers-in-law lived, the children-in-law were kept
together; but the old men soon went their way. Then the young wife gave
up attempting to endure the unhappiness of her home, and sought solace
from her loneliness in the full blaze of literary and artistic society.
In February, 1847, Franz Liszt floated in across her horizon, "_auf
Fluegeln des Gesanges_." Of course, he gave a concert in Kiev for
charity. Among the contributions, he received a one-hundred-rouble
note--about $75. Liszt desired to thank the good-hearted one in
person--Kismet!
Even if the princess had not been beautiful, La Mara thinks she would
have overwhelmed Liszt with "her wonderful eloquence and her
unbelievable intellectuality." It was a case of congeniality at
first sight. There were many meetings. The concert affected the
princess deeply (when she died she bequeathed that programme to her
daughter). The day after the concert, she heard a Pater Noster of his
sung in the church. Liszt talked of his plans for compositions. He said
he wished to express in music his impressions of Dante's "Divina
Commedia," with a diorama of scenic effects. To fit out the diorama, it
needed about $15,000.
The princess, carried away with the idea, offered him the money from
her own purse. The diorama was never built, but it required a great
many conferences, and it seemed appropriate that Liszt should visit her
at her estate, Woronince. He arrived on the tenth birthday of her
little daughter, Marie. This was in February, the same month of their
first meeting. But he could not stay many days, as his concert tour
took him to Constantinople and elsewhere. But in the summer and again
in the autumn they met, and they celebrated together his birthday and
her saint's day.
She there and then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marry
him as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, and
felt that she recognised her mission in the world--to follow and aid
this maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was
a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse
d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the
less, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after she
had provided herself, by the sale of a portion of her dowry, with a
sum, as La Mara says, of a million roubles--equal to about $750,000--a
tidy little parcel for an eloping couple.
For her husband and mother-in-law she left letters--it would seem that
there must have been little else to leave--explaining that she would
never return. At the same time she instituted divorce proceedings, and
announced that she was asking the Church to grant her freedom. Being a
Catholic, it was necessary for her to persuade the Pope himself to
permit her to wed Liszt. In the meanwhile, her husband went to the Czar
and loudly bewailed the loss of his daughter and all his money. The old
story--"My daughter! Oh, my ducats! Oh, my daughter! Oh, my Christian
ducats! Justice! the law! My ducats and my daughter!"
The princess fled across the Russian border, just at the time of the
Revolution of 1848. At the Austrian boundary Liszt's faithful valet met
her; in Ratibor she found Liszt's friend, the Prince Lichnovski, who
some months after fell a martyr to the revolution. He conducted her to
Liszt. A few days later they visited the prince for two weeks at one of
his castles. The troubles of the revolution and the barricaded streets
drove them from the country to Weimar, where Liszt had been given the
post of Kapellmeister.
It was this third-rate town that became the birthplace of a new school
of German opera, for years the hub of the musical universe. Here in
Weimar the princess lived thirteen years. She placed herself under the
protection of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, Maria Polovna, the sister of
the Czar and a friend of her childhood. She chose the Altenburg chateau
for her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hotel
too remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the chateau. Here
he spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelve
Symphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his Hungarian
Rhapsodies, and many other important works, including also literary
compositions, he achieved here. The irritation he had felt at the
superficial meddling, and domineering criticism of his would-be Muse,
the Comtesse d'Agoult, was changed to such a communion as the old Roman
king Numa enjoyed with his inspiring nymph, Egeria.
During the princess' stay in Weimar, constant pressure was brought upon
her to return to Russia to arrange a settlement of affairs. She feared
returning to that great prison-land, which cannot be easily entered or
left, lest they should forbid her return to Liszt. Even threats to
declare her an exile and confiscate her goods, would not move her.
Eventually the property she had inherited from her father was put in
her daughter's name, by the Czar's order--an arrangement Liszt had long
pleaded for in vain. The husband's feelings were mollified by the
appropriation to him of the seventh part of her property, and the
arrangement of a guardianship for the daughter.
The prince, being a Protestant, now proceeded to get a divorce, which
he obtained without difficulty. He speedily married a governess in the
household of Prince Souvaroff. None the less, the struggles went on for
the freedom of Princess Carolyne. In 1859 her daughter, Marie, was
married to Prince Constantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, aid-de-camp
and later grand steward of the Austrian emperor. Now that the daughter
was safely disposed of, the princess took active steps for her own
freedom. She chose, as a pretext for the dissolution of her marriage,
the statement that she had entered into it unwillingly at her father's
behest. Her Polish relatives were shocked at the idea of divorce, and
brought witnesses to prove that the first years of her marriage were
peaceful and content. But in spite of this the divorce was granted in
Russia, and the Pope gave it his sanction.
The princess, however, was not satisfied with a merely technical
success. She would consummate her marriage with Liszt in a blaze of
glory and with all the blessings of religion upon it. In the spring of
1860, she had gone to Rome to further her divorce proceedings. Liszt
was to arrive and be married on his fiftieth birthday, the princess
then being forty-two. All went merrily as a marriage bell. It is
generally believed that Liszt's "Festklaenge" was written for this
occasion as a splendid orchestral wedding festival of triumph.
Accordingly, at the proper time, Liszt went to Rome--as he thought.
Really, he was going to Canossa. The priest was bespoken, and the altar
of the church of San Carlo al Corso decorated. On the very eve of the
wedding, when Liszt was with the princess, they were startled to
receive a messenger from the Pope, demanding a postponement of the
marriage, and the delivery for review of the documents upon which the
divorce had been granted. The papers were surrendered, and the
disconsolate princess gave way to a superstitious resignation to fate.
It seems that the amiable relatives of the princess, chancing to be in
Rome and hearing of the wedding, determined to prevent it at all cost.
Before the Pope they charged her with securing the divorce by perjury.
The princess had friends at court, who could have procured the
satisfactory conclusion of the matter. The Cardinal Hohenlohe offered
his own chapel for the marriage. But the princess was as immovable in
her new determination as she had been in her old.
She had resisted for thirteen years the efforts of the Russian court to
decoy her back to Russia. For the next fifteen years she resisted
Liszt's ardent wooing to marriage. Even when, on the 10th of March,
1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome
considers sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in the
Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society and
Church politics. She turned her voracious intellect toward theology;
and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes far
more important than the petty ambitions of art.
The woman with a mission had changed her mission. Knowing how powerful
was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at
home, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchly
seductions.
In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother to
keep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the
evening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to the
candle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield.
Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been a
religion. By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders on
the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been
granted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege of
shaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbe.
There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty years
before run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and in
full regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The critic
and dictionary-maker, Fetis, declared that the whole affair was simply
an advertising scheme of Liszt's. But Liszt was taking himself
seriously. The Pope had called him "My dear Palestrina," and he desired
to reform church music as Palestrina had done.
The fact that this ecclesiastical passion was brief, does not prove
that it was not sincere; in Liszt's case it would rather prove its
sincerity. And by corollary the fact that it was sincere, rather proved
that it would be brief.
The artistico-ecclesiastical life, or, as the German puts it so much
more patly, "_das kloesterlich-kuenstlerische Leben_," began to wear upon
him. For a time Liszt remained in Rome, taking a dwelling in the Via
Felice; later, in June of the year 1863, he moved to the Oratorio of
the Madonna del Rosario, where the Pope, Pius IX., visited him to hear
his miraculous music. He saw the princess often, usually dining with
her, and letters fluttered thickly between his home and hers in the
Piazza di Spagna, and later in the Via del Babuino.
Liszt was never a man for one of your gray existences. He was homesick
for Weimar, and was a constant truant from Rome. But he had duties
enough with his ambition as a composer and conductor, and his cloud of
pupils whom he taught without price. To his excursions we owe four
volumes of letters to the princess. The volumes average over four
hundred pages each of smallish type. They are in French, and have been
all published, the last volume appearing in 1902, under the editorship
of La Mara. Also a publication of the princess' letters has been
announced by her daughter, who wisely believes that in a matter which
has become the gossip of the world, the best defence is the fullest
possible presentation.
In Liszt's letters there is not much of the grand style he had affected
after his first elopement with De Laprunarede, though there is much
that is hysterical:
"How it is written above that you should be my Providence and my good
angel here below! I incessantly have recourse to you with prayers,
supplications, and benedictions."
"My words flow always to you as my prayer mounts to God."
"Since I must not have the bliss of seeing you again this evening, let
me at least tell you that I will pray with you before I sleep. Our
prayers are united as our souls." (Nov. 4, 1864)
"Next to my hours in the church the sweetest and dearest are those I
spend with you." (Feb. 18, 1869.)
"My ancient errors have left me a residue of chagrin that preserves me
from temptation. Be well assured that I tell you the truth and all the
truth." (Nov. 10, 1870.)
But to attempt a quotation from these letters would be like proffering
a spoonful of brine, and saying, "Here is an idea of the ocean." The
letters are full of minute details of their busy lives and of other
notable people. There is much, of course, about music and travel, and a
vast amount of religious ardour. There is also much expression of the
utmost devotion and loneliness. Years of this life of reunion and
separation went on.
Writing to the princess on the 21st of June, 1872, he mentions Wagner,
whose marriage to Cosima von Buelow (_nee_ Liszt) scandalised the world
and alienated even Liszt. There are biographers who deny this, but in
this letter to the princess, Liszt encloses Wagner's letter of most
affectionate appeal for reconciliation, and with it his answer, giving
his long-withheld blessing. Describing this reunion with Wagner, Liszt
is moved to say to the princess:
"God will pardon me for leaning to the side of mercy, imploring his and
abandoning myself entirely to it. As for the world, I am not uneasy as
to its interpretation of that page of what you call 'my biography.' The
only chapter that I have ardently desired to add to it, is missing. May
the good angels keep you, and bring me to you in September."
Through many others of his letters rings this vain "_leit-motif_" like
the wail of Tristan. But nothing could remove the spell the Church had
cast upon the princess.
She sank deeper and deeper into seclusion, and during the twenty-seven
years she lived in Rome she left her home in the Via del Babuino only
once for twenty-four hours. She grew more and more immersed in the
Church and its affairs. Gregororius said she fairly "sputtered
spirituality." She began to write, and certain of her essays were
revised by Henri Lasserre, under the name, "Christian Life in Public,"
and were widely read, being translated into English and Spanish. Her
chief work was a twenty-four-volume study bearing the thrilling title,
"Interior Causes of the Exterior Weakness of the Church." This
ponderous affair she finished a few days before her death, with hand
already swollen almost beyond the power of holding the pen.
Here in Rome, as in Russia and at Weimar, where she was, there was a
salon. But she grew wearier and wearier of life, and weaker and weaker,
until she spent months and months in bed, and would rarely cross her
door-sill. To the last she and Liszt were lovers, however remote. And
his letters are rarely more than a few days apart. He continues to sign
himself, even in the final year of his life, "Umilissimo sclavissimo."
His last letter concerned the marriage of his granddaughter Daniela von
Buelow to a man with the ominous sounding name of "Thode." Daniela was
the daughter of Liszt's daughter, Cosima, by her first husband. The
marriage took place at Wagner's home, "Wahnfried," in Bayreuth.
It was appropriate that Liszt should spend his last years in the
company of this Wagner, for whose success he had been the chief
crusader, as for the success of how many another famous musician, and
for the charitable comfort of how numberless a throng, and in what
countless ways! It was doubly appropriate that his last appearance in
public should be at the performance of "Tristan and Isolde"--that
utmost expression of love that was fiery and lawless and yet worthy of
the peace it yearned for and never found.
Liszt died on the 31st of July, 1886. His will declared the princess to
be his sole heir and executrix. She outlived him no long time. On the
8th of March, 1887, she died of dropsy of the heart. She was buried in
the German cemetery next to St. Peter's, in Rome. Her grave bore the
legend:
"Yonder is my hope." At her funeral they played the Requiem, Liszt had
written for the death of the Emperor Maximilian. She had wished that
this music should "sing her soul to rest."
CHAPTER II.
RICHARD WAGNER
Surely, one would say, if love were ever to be the woof of any life, it
must interweave the life of this man Wagner; for he gave to every whim
and fervour of the passion an expression so nearly absolute that we are
driven almost to say: Old as music is, and ancient as love songs are,
music never truly gave full voice to desire in all its throbs until
Richard Wagner created a new orchestra, a new libretto, a new music, a
new harmony, and a new fabric of melody.
"Tristan and Isolde" seems to be so nearly the last word in dramatised
love that it seems also to be nearly the first word. From the
Vorspiel's opening measures, gaunt and hungry with despair and longing,
to the last measures of the Liebestod, sublime with resignation and
divinely sad with the apotheosis of adoration, this opera sounds every
note of the emotion of man for woman, and woman for man.
Surely, you would say, the creator of this masterwork must have had a
heart thrilled with mighty passion for womankind; surely he must have
lived a life of strange devotion.
But how often, how often we must warn ourselves against judging the
creator from his creations, the artist from his art. In his letter to
Liszt, announcing his intention to write this very opera, Wagner said:
"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a
monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginning
to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head
'Tristan and Isolde,' the simplest, but fullest, musical conception.
With 'the black flag,' which waves at the end, I shall then cover
myself--to die."
The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent
his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart.
Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is
the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I have
shown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellent
lovers, and there would be documents enough to prove Wagner another,
but we know it for a fact that his one great passion was for his art.
There is not recorded anywhere, I think, another such idolater of
ideals as Richard Wagner. To his theory of the perfect marriage of
music and poetry, he sacrificed everything,--his heart's blood, his
sensitiveness to criticisms, his extraordinary fondness for luxuries,
his sense of pride, and to these he added human sacrifice,--his wife,
his friends, and any one who stood in his way. He made himself a
pauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from every
friend who could be hypnotised into supporting his creeds. As a result,
after years of humiliation such as few men ever did, or ever cared to,
endure, after a battle against the highest and the lowest intellects,
he attained a point of glory which hardly another artist in the world's
history ever reached. He reached such a pinnacle that critics were not
lacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more important
place in the State than Religion.
Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the most
beneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life as
Wagner's. Both were eminently justified. He reaped a superb reward, but
he earned every mite of it. When his days of power and of glory came,
however, he spent them with another woman than the one who had gone
through all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered,
without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or his
creeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of a
German _Hausfrau_ to her _Mann_.
Wagner was as plainly destined for war as any Richard the Third, born
with hair and teeth. For he was born in the midst of the Napoleonic
wars at Leipzig, in 1813, and the dead bodies on the battle-field were
so many that they raised a pestilence, which carried off Wagner's
father when the child was six months old; and also threatened the life
of his elder brother and of the babe himself. His life was one long
truceless war. He once said to Edouard Schure: "The only time I ever
went to sea, I barely escaped shipwreck. Should I go to America, I am
sure the Atlantic would receive me with a cyclone."
Wagner's first love was his mother. In fact, Praeger, his Boswell,
said: "I verily believe that he never loved any one else so deeply as
his _liebes Muetterchen_." She must have been a woman of winning
manners, for, though she had seven children, the oldest fourteen, she
got another husband before her first one was a year in his grave; the
second was an actor. Wagner was so fond of his mother that through his
life he never could see a Christmas tree alight without tears.
There were other loves that busied his heart. He was remarkably fond of
animals, particularly of dogs. He suffered keenly when his parrot Papo
died; he wrote his friend Uhlig: "Ah, if I could say to you what has
died for me in this devoted creature! It matters nothing to me whether
I am laughed at for this." His dog Peps died in his arms, and he wrote
Praeger: "I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and
sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years, who has walked
and worked with me." One of Wagner's last plans was to write a book to
be called "A History of My Dogs." Anecdotes galore there are of his
humanity to dogs and cats and other members of our larger family.
Wagner had also a famous passion for gorgeous colours; his music shows
this. He liked fine stuffs peculiarly, and even in his pauperdom wore
silk next to his skin. When fortune found him, he made a veritable
rainbow of himself with his dressing-gowns, and even with many-coloured
trousers. His stomach was not so fond of luxury, and he was not
addicted to wine or beer, and for long periods drank neither at all. He
injured his health by eating too fast, though this was not, as in
Haendel's case, from gluttony, but from absent-minded interest in his
work. Yet there is something strangely human and captivating in the
story that, when he was eight years old, he traded off a volume of
Schiller's poems for a cream puff.
Wagner's career shows a curious growth away from his early ideas. He
was at first an artistic disciple of Meyerbeer, and not only drew
operatic inspirations from him, but was saved from starving by
Meyerbeer's money and by his letters of introduction; later he came to
abhor Meyerbeer's operas, and to despise the man himself and his ways.
Wagner earned himself numberless powerful enemies by his fierce hatred
for the Jewish race, and by his ferocious attack in an article called
"Judaism in Music." Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and it
was not his fault that he did not marry her. She lived in Leipzig, and
was a friend of his sister. She had the highly racial name of Leah
David, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes and
hair of jet and her Oriental features. It has been remarked that all of
Wagner's heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight.
He began it. His first view of Leah plunged him into a frenzy. "Love
me, love my dog," was an easy task for Wagner, and he was glad of the
privilege of caressing Leah's poodle, and of mauling her piano. He
never could fondle a piano without making it howl. Now Leah had a
cousin, a Dutchman and a pianist. Wagner criticised his execution, and
was invited to do better. The man hardly lived who played the piano
worse than Wagner, and the result of the duel was a foregone defeat.
The last chapter of this romance may be quoted from Praeger:
"Wagner lost his temper. Stung in his tenderest feelings before the
Hebrew maiden, with the headlong impetuosity of an unthinking youth, he
replied in such violent, rude language, that a dead silence fell upon
the guests. Then Wagner rushed out of the room, sought his cap, took
leave of Iago, and vowed vengeance. He waited two days, upon which,
having received no communication, he returned to the scene of the
quarrel. To his indignation, he was refused admittance. The next
morning he received a note in the handwriting of the young Jewess. He
opened it feverishly. It was a death-blow. Fraulein Leah was shortly
going to be married to the hated young Dutchman, Herr Meyers, and
henceforth she and Richard were to be strangers. 'It was my first love
sorrow, and I thought I should never forget it, but after all,' said
Wagner, with his wonted audacity, 'I think I cared more for the dog
than for the Jewess.'"
Wagner entered the university at Leipzig and for a time went the pace of
student dissipations; he has described them in his "Lebenserinnerungen."
He took an early disgust, however, for these forms of amusement and was
thereafter a man, whose chief vices were working and dreaming.
One of his early creeds was free love; and though he gave up this
theory, his works as a whole are by no means an argument for
domesticity. In fact they are so devout a pleading for the superiority
of passion over all other inspirations, that it is astounding to hear
Wagnerians occasionally complain of modern Italian operas as
immoral--as if any librettos could be immoral in comparison with the
Nibelungen Cycle.
Wagner's first libretto, "The Wedding" (Die Hochzeit), horrified his
sister so, that he destroyed it at her request. His third, "Das
Liebesverbot," was based on Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," with
the slight distinction that where Shakespeare's play is a preachment
for virtue, Wagner himself said that his libretto was "the bold
glorification of unchecked sensuality." Years afterward, admirers of
his put the work in rehearsal, but gave it up as too licentious. This
apostle of unrestrained amours found himself most prosaically married
and involved in the most commonplace struggle for daily bread, when he
was only twenty-three.
In 1833, at the age of twenty, Wagner had taken up music
professionally, and got a position as chorus-master. In 1834, he became
musical director at the theatre in Magdeburg. The company, made up
principally of young enthusiasts, who worked day and night, rehearsed
Wagner's opera, "Das Liebesverbot." The first night there was a crowded
house, but the troupe went all to pieces. The next night was to be
Wagner's benefit. Fifteen minutes before the curtain rose, he found the
audience consisted of his landlady, her husband, and one Polish Jew. A
free fight broke out behind the scenes; the prima donna's husband smote
the second tenor, her lover, and every one joined in; even that small
audience was dismissed. In this company _die erste Liebhaberin_ was
Wilhelmine Planer, one of twelve children of a poor spindle-maker. When
the Magdeburg company went to pieces, Wagner went to Leipzig and
offered the opera to a manager, whose daughter was the chief singer.
The manager said that he could not permit his daughter to appear in
such a work. Eventually, Wagner drifted to Koenigsberg, where he became
director of the theatre, and where Wilhelmine had found a position. The
two had become engaged in Magdeburg, and they were married at
Koenigsberg, on November 24, 1836.
The theatre soon followed the example of that at Magdeburg and went
into bankruptcy. During the honeymoon year, Wagner had composed only
one work, an overture, based on "Rule Britannia." At that time "The Old
Oaken Bucket" had not been written. He then drifted to Riga, where he
became music-director and his wife a singer. Now his relentless
ambition seized him and he determined to consecrate the rest of his
life to glory. His wife found herself consecrated to poverty and the
fanatic ideals of a husband, to whom starvation was only a detail in
the scheme of his life,--a scheme and a life for which she had neither
inclination nor understanding.
Wilhelmine, or Minna, as she was called, is described as pretty by some
and as of a "pleasing appearance," by others. The painter Pecht called
her very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul.
Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understood
her husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reaching
ideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career by
anything. Wagner himself seems to have been genuinely fond of her,
though never, perhaps, deeply in love with her. He called her an
"excellent housewife," who lovingly and faithfully shared much sorrow
and little joy with him.
The young couple lived at Riga in an expensive suburb, whence it was
said they could reach the theatre only by means of a cab, though
Glasenapp denies this story. Minna brought to her husband not a penny
of dowry, and he brought to her a number of debts, and a hopeless lack
of economy. The first year he tried to get an advance of salary, and
offered to do anything, "except bootblacking and water-carrying, which
latter my chest could not endure at present." Then he decided that fame
and fortune awaited him, as they usually do, just over the horizon. The
only trouble with the horizon, as with to-morrow and the
will-o'-the-wisp, is that it is always just ahead.
When the Wagners applied for a passport, to leave Riga, they did so in
the face of certain suits for debt. They were told that they could have
the passport as soon as they showed receipts for their bills. That was
too ridiculous a condition to consider, so Minna disguised as a peasant
woman, and a friendly lumberman took her across the border as his wife.
The friends of Wagner took up a purse for him, and by elaborate
manoeuvres got him across the Russian border in disguise. He reached
the seaport of Pillau, found his wife and his dog there, and set sail
in a small boat.
Thus he embarked for the future, "with a wife, an opera and a half, a
small purse, and a terribly large and terribly voracious Newfoundland
dog." The composer, his wife, and the dog were all three outrageously
seasick. They arrived finally after violent storms in London, where the
chief event was the loss of the dog. When he came back, the three
decided that Paris offered a better chance, so thither they went.
Meyerbeer befriended them with letters of introduction and much
encouragement, on the receipt of which the cautious couple diluted
their few remaining pence in champagne.
Wagner began to write songs, which he offered to sell for prices
ranging from $2.50 to $4.00; he asked the publisher obligingly to grant
him the latter sum, "as life in Paris is enormously expensive"!
Wagner was so poor that about the only thing he could afford to keep
was a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abject
poverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used to
come into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by
1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner's
door-step. He wrote in his diary that he had invited a sick and
starving German workman to breakfast, and his wife informed him that
there was to be no breakfast, as the last pennies were gone.
In one of his moments of desperation, he brought himself to the depth
of asking Minna to pawn some of her jewelry. She told him that she had
long ago pawned it all. She faced their distress like a heroine. Wagner
used to weep when he told of her self-denial, and the cheerfulness with
which she, the pretty actress of former days, cooked what meals there
were to cook, and scrubbed what clothes there were to scrub. For
diversion, when they had no money for theatres and the opera, the
genius and his wife and the dog could always take a walk on the
boulevard.
Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he tried
for a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was not
found good enough for even that. His long sea voyage had given him an
idea for an opera, "The Flying Dutchman." He was driven to sell his
libretto for a hundred dollars to another composer.
It would not do to follow Wagner's artistic progress in this place;
that is an epic in itself. Finally, however, he managed to get his
"Rienzi" written and accepted in Dresden. He scraped up money enough to
go back to his Fatherland, and to take his wife to the baths at
Teplitz, her health having broken under the strain of poverty. It is at
this period that he closed an autobiographic sketch, with these words:
"In Paris I had no prospects for years to come, so in the spring of
1842 I left there. For the first time, with tears in my eyes, I saw the
Rhine; poor artist that I was, I swore eternal allegiance to my German
Fatherland."
But his German Fatherland seems to have sworn everything except
allegiance at him. From this moment he emerged into fame, or rather
into notoriety; he thrust his head through the curtain of obscurity, as
if he were a negro at a country fair, and with remarkable enthusiasm
the whole critical fraternity proceeded to hurl every conceivable
missile at him. It was well for him that his skull was hard.
"Rienzi" made an immediate success. But he was in his thirtieth year
before even this unwelcome success was achieved. It is typical of the
indomitable greatness of the man that even thus late in life, and after
all his trials, he could put away from him success of such a sort, and
turn back into the wilderness of exile and ignominy for years, until he
could find the milk and honey land of art, which only his own
magnificent fanaticism and the unsurpassed friendship of one man,
Liszt, inspired him with the hope of reaching.
To the woman, Minna Planer, who had cooked his meals, washed his
clothes, and darned his socks, this refusal of prosperity was a final
blow of disenchantment. She had understood him little enough before,
but now she lost track of him altogether. Her feelings were those of
Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania
for flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he
now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to
embrace his soul, she clasped thin air.
As for Wagner's heroism for his art, has there ever been anything like
it? Some of his operas he did not see performed for years and years. He
saw hardly the hope of winning his crusade this side the grave of
martyrdom. That he believed in presentiments will be understood in his
powerful feeling throughout the composition of "Tannhauser," that
sudden death would prevent his finishing it. The world knows the value
of these presentiments. Mendelssohn, too, in his letters tells of
receiving on one occasion a letter which he feared to open, so strong
was his feeling that it contained disastrous news. When at length he
found courage to rip the envelope, the news was of the best. If, by
chance, either of these presentiments had proved true, who would have
been satisfied with the explanation of mere coincidence? The value,
however, of Wagner's presentiment lies in the fact that, in spite of
his despairful misgivings, he persevered in his ideals, and, if there
has been never so great a triumph granted a musician, it is perhaps
largely because no other musician so relentlessly worshipped his
artistic ideals or sacrificed to them with such Druidic ruthlessness.
Carl Maria von Weber paid great heed to his wife's artistic advice, and
called her his "gallery." But there are wives and wives, and however
deeply our humanity may sympathise with poor Minna Planer, our love for
evolution can only rejoice that she was not permitted to tie her
husband down to the narrow-souled ideals of the good-hearted, stupid
little housewife she was. Wagner understood her far better than she
understood him. He sympathised with her even in her resistance to his
career. To the last it made him indignant to hear her spoken of
slightingly.
Wagner's appeals for money to his friends, who supported him in his
moneyless art, are constantly mingled with tender allusions to Minna.
When he would borrow Liszt's last penny, he usually wanted a large part
of it for Minna. I do not find him convicted of ever using rough
language to her. She was not so patient. Wagner's friend, Roeckel,
wrote to Praeger in reference to the agony Wagner suffered from the
gibes of criticism:
"I keep it always from him; Minna is not capable of withholding either
praise or blame from him, although I have tried hard to prove to her
that it deeply affects her husband, whose health is none of the
strongest."
When he was implicated in the revolution of 1849, and was forced to
flee for his life, he escaped in the disguise of a coachman, and
finally, with Liszt's ever-ready aid, reached Zurich. As soon as he
found himself there, he borrowed further money from Liszt, to send for
Minna, who had remained behind and "suffered a thousand disagreeable
things."
Wagner had been supporting her parents, and he borrowed sixty-two
thalers more to help them. When Minna did not come immediately, Wagner
wrote an anxious letter of inquiry to a friend.
Surely, there can be nothing tenderer than his allusion to her in
another letter to Liszt:
"As soon as I have my wife I shall go to work again joyfully. Restore
me to my art! You shall see that I am attached to no home, but I cling
to this poor, good, faithful woman, for whom I have provided little but
grief, who is serious, solicitous, and without expectation, and who
nevertheless feels eternally chained to this unruly devil that I am.
Restore her to me! Thus will you do me all the good that you could ever
wish me; and see, for this I shall be grateful to you! yes,
grateful!... See that she is made happy and can soon return to me!
which, alas! in our sweet nineteenth-century language, means, send her
as much money as you possibly can! Yes, that is the kind of a man I am!
I can beg, I could steal, to make my wife happy, if only for a short
time. You dear, good Liszt! do see what you can do! Help me! Help me,
dear Liszt!"
At last she came, and he wrote Heine a letter of rejoicing. But once
with him, she began again her opposition to his high-flying theories.
She wanted him to write a popular French opera for Paris. She was
humiliated at his borrowing for his self-support, and could not see
much glory in his creed: "He who helps me only helps my art through me,
and the sacred cause for which I am fighting." He seemed more than
afraid of her opinion, and wrote to Uhlig:
"She is really somewhat hectoring in this matter, and I shall no doubt
have a hard tussle with her practical sense if I tell her bluntly that
I do not wish to write an opera for Paris. True, she would shake her
head and accept that decision, too, were it not so closely related to
our means of subsistence; there lies the critical knot, which it will
be painful to cut. Already my wife is ashamed of our presence in
Zurich, and thinks we ought to make everybody believe that we are in
Paris."
At last, she nagged him into her theory, although he fairly loathed
writing a pot-boiler, and considered it the purest dishonesty. He went
to Paris, but returned, having been able to accomplish nothing. On his
return, he wrote in his "A Communication to My Friends," that a new
hope sprung up within him. His friend Liszt was then directing the
opera at Weimar.
"At the close of my last Paris sojourn, when I was ill, unhappy, and in
despair, my eye fell on the score of my 'Lohengrin,' which I had almost
forgotten. A pitiful feeling overcame me that these tones would never
resound from the deathly pale paper; two words I wrote to Liszt, the
answer to which was nothing else than the information that, as far as
the resources of the Weimar Opera permitted, the most elaborate
preparations were being made for the production of 'Lohengrin.'"
It was in "Lohengrin" that he first put in play his theory of the
marriage of poetry and music, his idea being their complete devotion,
with poetry as the master of the situation. He believed in independent
melodies no more than in strong-minded wives. He lived this artistic
theory in his own domestic relations, and it was not his fault that
Minna, his melody, found it impossible to live in the light upper air
of his poetry. He was so discouraged, however, by this time, by finding
no encouragement at home, and a frenzy of hostility from the
critics,--a frenzy almost incredible at this late day, in spite of the
monumental evidences of it,--that for six years, after the completion
of "Lohengrin," he wrote no music at all.
He felt that he must first prepare the soil of battle with the critics
in their own element--ink-slinging. On this fact Mr. Finck comments as
follows:
"Five years,--nay, six years, six of the best years of his life,
immediately following the completion of 'Lohengrin,'--the greatest
dramatic composer the world has ever seen did not write a note! Do you
realise what that means? It means that the world lost two or three
immortal operas, which he might have, and probably would have, written
in these six years had not an unsympathetic world forced him into the
role of an aggressive reformer and revolutionist."
He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as a
result of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism. Then he
took up the Nibelungen idea, planning to devote three years to the
work; "little dreaming that it would keep him with interruptions for
the next twenty-three years." For the accomplishment of this vast
monument he asked only a humble place to work. He wrote Uhlig:
"I want a small house, with meadow and a little garden! To work with
zest and joy,--but not for the present generation.... Rest! rest! rest!
Country! country! a cow, a goat, etc. Then--health--happiness--hope!
Else, everything lost. I care no more."
He found all in Zuerich, where he and his wife rowed about the lake, and
accumulated friends. He found special sympathy in the friendship of
Frau Elise Wille, a novelist. Perhaps she was more than a friend, for
one of his letters to her is superscribed "Precious."
But all the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, and
was occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, for
he was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the world
of music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify. He compared himself
to Beethoven:
"Strange that my fate should be like Beethoven's! he could not hear his
music because he was deaf.... I cannot hear mine because I am more than
deaf, because I do not live in my time at all, because I move among you
as one who is dead.... Oh, that I should not arise from my bed
to-morrow, awake no more to this loathsome life!"
Financial troubles and the discouragement of his wife were still among
the most faithful torments. His letters to Liszt are abundant with
alternations of artistic ecstasy and material misery. It is worth
recording that, "my wife has not scolded me once, although yesterday I
had the spleen badly enough." To add to his misery, Minna became
addicted to opium. In 1858 he wrote Liszt:
"My wife will return in a fortnight, after having finished her cure,
which will have lasted three months. My anxiety about her was terrible,
and for two months I had to expect the news of her death from day to
day. Her health was ruined, especially by the immoderate use of opium,
taken nominally as a remedy for sleeplessness. Latterly the cure she
uses has proved highly beneficial; the great weakness and want of
appetite have disappeared, and the recovery of the chief functions (she
used to perspire continually) and a certain abatement of her incessant
excitement, have become noticeable. The great enlargement of her heart
will be bearable to her if only she keeps perfectly calm and avoids all
excitement to her dying day. A thing of this kind can never be got rid
of entirely. Thus I have to undertake new duties, over which I must try
to forget my own sufferings."
The young pianist, Tausig, visits him, and he thinks of him as his son,
saying, "My childless marriage is suddenly blest with an interesting
phenomenon." But the young Tausig gives him unlimited cares, and
"devours my biscuits, which my wife doles out grudgingly even to me."
His allusions to Minna are always full of tender solicitude, though it
is evident that she wears upon him. His temper, peculiarly violent at
the slightest opposition, must have been a serious problem under her
open disbelief in his genius and his creeds; and yet he thought he
could not prosper without her.
In 1860 he is again borrowing money for her, and writing to Liszt:
"According to a letter; just received, D. thinks it necessary to refuse
me the thousand francs I had asked for, and offers me thirty louis d'or
instead. This puts me in an awkward position. On the one hand I am, as
usual, greatly in want of money, and shall decidedly not be able to
send my wife to Loden for a cure, unless I receive the subvention I had
hoped for."
These letters to Liszt make a remarkable literature. The two men were
bound together by such artistic sympathy, and Liszt was so much a
soldier for Wagner's crusade, and so ready with financial help, that he
was more than friend or brother. It was, in Wagner's own phrase, "the
gigantic perseverance of his friendship," that endeared him beyond
words to the struggler. Even Minna seems to have been extremely fond of
Liszt--what woman was not? It was to Liszt that she was indebted for
rescue from downright starvation. More than this, Minna's parents were
supported _via_ Liszt, and it somewhat beautifies the otherwise
unbeautiful spectacle of Wagner's splendid mendicancy that, when he
borrowed, it was as much for his wife and her parents as for himself.
Liszt was not the only friend in need. There was Frau Julie Ritter, who
sent him money from Dresden for several years.
This brings us to a time of stress when Minna began to suffer from the
fickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune. Wagner began to cast
meaning glances over the garden wall. As Mr. Henderson says: "He was as
inconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband. His misdoings
amounted to more than peccadilloes."
It was in Zuerich that Wagner gave Minna some other causes for
uneasiness than his habit of being late at meals. Hans Belart, in his
"Wagner in Zuerich," refers to Wagner's flirtation with Emilie Heim, the
wife of a conductor, who lived so near the Wagners that their
kitchen-gardens adjoined. Emilie was a beautiful blonde with a
beautiful voice, and she and Wagner were wont to sing duets together,
as he wrote them; and she was the soloist in a concert he gave. How
much cause Minna may have had for jealousy, we can hardly know, but it
seems certain that she felt she had a sufficiency, and that she made so
much ado about it that Wagner found it advisable to move. In later
years he and Emilie met again. Wagner gave her the pet name of
"Sieglinde," and told her that she should illumine his Walhalla as
Freia, the eternal, blue-eyed, gold-haired goddess of spring. According
to Belart, Minna was the inspiration for Wotan's virtuous but nagging
wife Fricka!
Frau Wille was another torment to Minna, but Frau Wesendonck was more.
Belart even implies that Minna grew so jealous of the Wesendonck that
she poured out her woes to a dancing-master named Riese, who revered
Meyerbeer. When Minna, who was at least, says Mr. Finck, as well
advanced as the eminent critics of the time, failed to understand the
music of "The Walkuere," when indeed she called it "immoral amorous
asininity,"--an opinion for which perhaps the duets with Frau Heim were
partly responsible,--Wagner used to slam on his hat and go for a walk,
while Minna would seek Herr Riese.
The affair with the Frau Wesendonck is something of mystery, that is,
if Wagner's word is good for anything. She died in 1902, and at her
death Mr. Huneker summed up her affair with Wagner as follows:
"Mathilde Wesendonck is dead. Who was she? Well, she was Isolde when
Wagner was Tristan down on the beautiful shores of Zurich in the years
of 1858 and 1859. When he was in sore straits and had not where to lay
his head, he went to Zuerich, and Mr. Wesendonck rented to him for next
to nothing a little chalet. There he dreamed out the second and third
acts of 'Tristan und Isolde,' and succeeded in deeply interesting Mrs.
Wesendonck in them. There had already been trouble between him and his
patient first wife, Minna, because of his attentions to this woman, and
in 1856 the Wagners were on the point of a separation. Richard wrote to
his friend Praeger in London: 'The devil is loose. I shall leave Zuerich
at once and come to you in Paris,' But this time the trouble was
smoothed over.
"In the summer of 1859 the attachment of Wagner and Mrs. Wesendonck had
reached such a stage that Wesendonck practically kicked the great
composer out of his paradise. In later years, when questioned about it,
Wesendonck admitted that he had forced Wagner to go. In 1865 Wagner
wrote to the injured husband:
"'The incident that separated me from you about six years ago should be
evaded; it has upset me and my life enough that you recognise me no
longer and that I esteem myself less and less. All this suffering
should have earned your forgiveness, and it would have been beautiful
and noble to have forgiven me; but it is useless to demand the
impossible, and I was in the wrong.'
"It is thoroughly characteristic of Wagner to regard his sufferings as
so much more important than those of the husband whom he wronged.
Wagner always thought well of himself. But poor Isolde is dead at last.
She must have been very old and very sorry for the past. Let the
orchestra play the 'Liebestod.'"
Judging from external evidences, there is reason enough to accept such
a theory of the relations of Wagner and this sympathetic, beautiful
woman. In fact, it stretches credulity to the bursting point to accept
any other opinion. And yet, it is only fair to say that Wagner put a
very different construction upon the friendship, and to confess that
stranger things have happened in real life than the purely artistic
wedlock, which Wagner claimed for the intimacy of the two. Mathilde was
a poet, and Wagner set to music some of her verses, notably his
beautiful "Traume." Besides, she was the inspiration of his Isolde, and
she gave him the sympathy Minna denied.
According to a recently published article in a German review, Wagner
wrote a long letter to his sister Clara, explaining why Minna had left
him, and making himself out to be as thoroughly misunderstood
domestically as he had always been musically. It is a long letter, but
quoteworthy, the italics being mine:
"MY DEAR CLARA:--I promised you further information regarding the
causes of the decisive step which you now see me taking. I communicate,
therefore, what is necessary to enable you to contradict various pieces
of gossip, to which indeed I am indifferent.
"What for six years has kept and comforted me, and especially has
strengthened me in remaining by Minna's side, in spite of the enormous
differences in our characters and natures, is the love of that young
lady who, at first and for a long time, timid, doubting, hesitating,
and bashful, finally more determinately and surely grew closer to me.
As there never could be any talk of a union between us, our profound
affection took the sadly melancholy character which keeps aloof all
that is common and base, and recognises its fount of happiness only in
the welfare of the other. From the period of our first acquaintance she
had displayed the most unwearied and most delicate care for me, and in
the most courageous way had obtained from her husband everything that
could lighten my life.
"He could not, in presence of the undisguised frankness of his wife, do
anything but soon fall into increasing jealousy. Her nobleness now
consisted in this, that she kept her husband informed of the state of
her heart and gradually led him to perfect renunciation of her. By what
sacrifices and struggles this was attained can be easily guessed; what
rendered her success possible, could only be the depth and sublimity of
her affection, devoid of every selfish thought, which gave her the
power to show it to her husband in such a light that he, when she
finally threatened him with her death, had to abstain from her and had
to prove his unshakable love for her only by supporting her in her
cares for me. Finally, he had to retain the mother of his children, and
for their sake--who invincibly separated us--he assumed his position of
renunciation. Thus, while he was devoured by jealousy she again
interested him for me so far that--as you know--_he often supported
me_. Lastly, when it came to providing me with what I wanted--a house
and garden--it was she who by the most unheard-of struggles induced him
to buy a pretty little property near his own.
"The most wonderful thing is, that I never had a suspicion of these
struggles; her husband, out of love for her, had always to show himself
friendly and unconcerned toward me. Not a dark look must he cast on me,
not a hair ruffled; the heavens must arch over me, clear and cloudless,
soft and smooth must be the path I trod. Such was the unheard-of result
of the glorious love of the purest, noblest woman, and _this love,
which always remained unspoken between us_, was compelled finally to
reveal itself when I composed and gave her 'Tristan,' Then, for the
first time her self-control failed, and she declared to me that now she
must die.
"Think, dear sister, what this love must have been to me after a life
of toil and suffering, of excitement and sacrifice, such as mine had
been. Yet we at once recognised that a union between us must never be
thought of, so we resigned ourselves, renounced every selfish wish,
suffered and endured--but loved each other.
"My wife with true woman's instinct seemed to understand what was going
on. She behaved indeed often in a jealous, scornful, contemptuous
manner, yet she tolerated _our mode of life, which otherwise was no
injury to morality_, but looked only to the possibility of knowing each
other at the present moment. Consequently I assumed that Minna would be
sensible and understand that she had nothing to fear really, that a
union between us could not even be thought of, and that therefore
forbearance on her side was the most desirable and the best. Now,
however, I learn that I have perhaps deceived myself on this point;
bits of gossip came to my ear; and she at last so far lost her senses
that _she intercepted a letter from me_ and--opened it. This letter, if
she had been in a position to understand it, would really have soothed
her in the most desirable way, for our resignation was its theme.
"She dwelt only on the confidential expressions and lost the sense. In
a rage she came to me and compelled me therefore to declare quietly and
decisively how matters stood; namely, that she had brought trouble on
herself by opening such a letter, and that if she could not restrain
herself, we must part. On this point we agreed; I calm, she passionate.
Another day I was sorry for her. I went to her and said: 'Minna, you
are very sick. Compose yourself and let us once more talk about the
matter.' We concluded with the idea of a Cure for her; she seemed to
quiet herself, and the day of her departure for the Cure was
approaching; previously, however, she would speak to Frau Wesendonck I
firmly forbade her to do so. All my efforts were to make Minna
gradually acquainted with the character of my relations to Frau
Wesendonck, in order to convince her that she had no need to fear about
the continuance of our marriage, and that, therefore, she should behave
herself sensibly, thoughtfully, and generously; reject any foolish
revenge and every kind of spying. Ultimately she promised this. Yet she
could not be quiet. She went behind my back and--without comprehending
it herself--insulted the gentle lady most grossly. She said to her:
'Were I like ordinary women, I would go with this letter to your
husband!' And thus _Frau Wesendonck, who was conscious of never having
any secrets from her husband_--a thing which a woman like Minna could
not understand--had nothing to do but at once to inform her husband of
this scene and its cause.
"Here, then, was an attack, in a rough and vulgar manner, an attack on
_the delicacy and purity of our relations_, and in many ways a change
was necessary. I succeeded only after some time in making it clear to
Frau Wesendonck that, for a nature like that of my wife, relations of
such elevation and unselfishness as those existing between us could
never be made intelligible, for I was struck by _her serious, deep
reproach that I had omitted this, while she had always made her husband
her confidant_. Whoever can comprehend what I have suffered since (it
was then the middle of April) must also comprehend in what state of
mind I am at last, since I must acknowledge that the uninterrupted
endeavours to continue our disturbed relations were absolutely
fruitless. I tended Minna at the Cure for three months with the utmost
care, and in order to quiet her, I, during this period, broke off all
intercourse with our neighbours; in my anxiety for her health I tried
everything in my power to bring her to reason and to hold views
befitting herself and her age. All in vain! She persisted in the most
trivial remarks, she said she was an injured woman, and she had
scarcely been quieted, before the old rage broke out again. Since Minna
returned a month ago, some conclusion had finally to be reached. The
close proximity of the two women was for the future impossible, for
Frau Wesendonck could not forget that her highest sacrifices and
tenderest consideration for me had been met on my side, through my
wife, so rudely and insultingly. _People, too, had begun to talk_.
Enough; the most unheard-of scenes and tormentings of me never ceased,
and out of regard for the one and the other, I was forced finally to
decide to give up the charming asylum which such tender love had
prepared for me.
"Now I needed quiet and perfect composure, for what I have to surmount
is great. Minna is unable to understand what an unhappy married life we
have led; she imagines the past to have been quite different from what
it was, and if I found consolation, distraction, and forgetfulness in
my art, she verily believes I had no need of them. Enough. I have come
to this resolution with myself: I can no longer bear this everlasting
squabbling and distrustful temper if I have to fulfil my life's task
courageously. Whoever has observed me sufficiently must wonder at my
patience, kindness, even weakness, and if I am condemned by superficial
judges I am quite indifferent to them. But never had Minna such an
opportunity to show herself more worthy of _the dignity (wuerde) of
being my wife_, than now, when it is necessary for me to keep what is
highest and dearest. It lay in her hands to show whether she really
loved me. But what such genuine love is, she never once conceived, and
her temper carried her away beyond everything.
"Yet I excused her on account of her sickness, although this sickness
would have taken another and milder character if she herself were other
and milder. The many disagreeable blows of fortune which she
experienced with me--which my inner genius (which unfortunately I could
not impart) easily raised me above, rendered me full of regard for her;
I wished to give her as little pain as possible, for I am very sorry
for her. Only I feel myself constantly incapable of enduring it by her
side; moreover, I can do her no good thereby. I shall become always
unintelligible to her and an object of her suspicion. So--separation!
But in all kindness and love, I do not desire _her disgrace_. I only
wished that she herself in time would see that it is better if we do
not see so much of each other. For the present I hold out to her the
prospect of returning to Germany as soon as the amnesty is proclaimed;
for this reason she will take with her all the furniture and things. I
purpose to make no slips of the tongue and to let everything depend on
my future resolutions. Do you therefore stick to it that _it is only a
temporary separation_. What ever you can do to make her quiet and
reasonable I beg you not to omit. For--as said above--she is
unfortunate; _with a smaller man she would have been happier_. Join
with me in pitying her. I will thank you from my heart for so doing,
dear sister!
"I shall wait here a bit in Geneva till I can go to Italy, where I
think of passing the winter, presumably in Venice. Already I feel
quickened by being alone and removed from all tormenting surroundings.
It was no use talking of work. As soon as I feel myself in a temper to
go on composing 'Tristan,' I shall regard myself as saved. In fact, I
must do the best for myself; I ask nothing from the world but that it
leave me in quiet for the works which one day will belong to it. So let
it judge me gently! The contents of this letter, dear Clara, you can
confidently use to give any explanations where they may be necessary.
On the whole, however, naturally I would not like to have much said of
the matter. Only very few people will understand what this is about, so
one must know well the persons introduced here.
"Now, farewell, dear sister. I thank you again from my heart for the
secret question which, as you can see, I answer confidentially. Treat
Minna with forbearance, but make her gradually understand how she now
stands with me.
"Your brother,
"RICHARD WAGNER."
This is Wagner's side of the affair, only recently made public. The
translation is from the _Musical Courier._ Whatever is discarded, there
remains enough to disprove Belart's statement that Otto Wesendonck only
learned of the affair from informants outside, and, finding Wagner and
Mathilde together, compelled Wagner to leave Zurich immediately.
Besides, even Belart admits that Wesendonck and his wife continued to
live together for the sake of the children, and that years after, when
he had learned to understand, he renewed his acquaintance with Wagner.
Amazing as this story is, both with regard to the strange things it
asks us to believe of the man and the woman and the husband, it is
certain that there was a pretty how-d'ye-do in Zurich. Minna became so
jealous that she drove Wagner, usually so tender in his allusions to
her, to use the expression of the ungallant Haydn, saying that, "she
was making a hell out of the home." Her outbursts of temper were so
violent, and her addiction to opium had become so great, that he began
to fear for her death by heart disease, and finally for her sanity. He
wrote of her to his friend Frau Ritter:
"Her condition of mind became such a torment to herself and her
surroundings, that a radical change of the situation had to be made,
unless we were all willing to wear ourselves out unreasonably.... The
state of her education, and her intellectual capacities, make it
impossible for her to find in me and my endowments the consolation
which she needed so much by way of compensation for the
disagreeableness of our material situation. If this is the source of
great anguish to me, it nevertheless makes me pity her with all my
heart, and it is my most cordial wish that I may some day be able to
afford her lasting consolation in her own way."
In 1856 she had left him for a time, ostensibly to take a cure. In 1859
there had been a short reunion, of which Wagner wrote again to Frau
Ritter:
"This period I have also chosen for a reunion with my poor wife. May
Heaven grant that I shall always feel able to carry out patiently my
firm and cordial determination of treating her in the most considerate
manner. I confess that my relation to this poor woman, who had so many
trials, and is now suffering so much, has always spurred me on to
preserve and develop my moral powers. In all my relations to her I am
guided only by the deepest pity with her condition, and I hope
confidently that it will always arm me with the persistent patience
with which I feel called upon not only to endure the consequences of
her illness, but personally to allay them."
Then he had gone to Venice to continue work on "Tristan," dreaming
there in loneliness of his Isolde, the Wesendonck, whose husband has
been well likened to King Mark. But Venice being within the sphere of
Saxon influence, he was afraid to remain long, for fear of arrest. In
1860 he was granted a partial amnesty, and went to Frankfort to meet
his wife, who had been taking treatment near Wiesbaden. Minna went with
him to Paris, and was there at the time of the violent riots, which put
an end to "Tannhaeuser," and doubtless to Minna's hopes of settling in
the Paris she was so fond of. She began again to vent her indignation
that he would not write for the gallery, and the storm grew fiercer and
fiercer. Wagner had written Liszt in 1861 with renewed hope and renewed
tenderness:
"For the present I spend all the good humour I can command on my wife.
I flatter her and take care of her as if she were a bride in her
honeymoon. My reward is that I see her thrive; her bad illness is
visibly getting better. She is recovering and will, I hope, become a
little rational in her old age. Just after I had received your 'Dante,'
I wrote to her that we had now got out of Hell; I hope Purgatory will
agree with her; in which case, we shall perhaps, after all, enjoy a
little Paradise."
But the hope was vain, and a friend of the family who wrote under the
name of the "Idealistin" describes the--
"almost daily trouble in the intercourse, increased by the fact that
the absence of children deprived them of the last element of
reconciliation. Nevertheless, Frau Wagner was a good woman, and in the
eyes of the world decidedly the better half and the chief sufferer. I
judged otherwise, and felt the deepest pity for Wagner, for whom love
should have built the bridge by which he might have reached others,
whereas now it was only making the bitter cup of his life bitterer. I
was on good terms with Frau Wagner, who often poured her complaints
into my ears, and I tried to console her, but of course in vain."
And now Minna, whose housewifely meekness had endured the Wesendonck
tempest and all the other multitudes of trials Wagner went through,
found herself unable to endure his fidelity to his artistic ideals. The
quarrels grew fiercer and fiercer, until finally she left Wagner for
ever, and went back to her people in Dresden, where she spent the rest
of her life.
Wagner's immortal hope was not even yet dead; as late as 1863 he wrote
to Praeger from St. Petersburg:
"I would Minna were here with me; we might, in the excitement that now
moves fast around me, grow again the quiescent pair of yore. The whole
thing is annoying. I am not in good spirits: I move about freely, and
see a number of people, but my misery is bitter."
Minna herself seems to have toyed with the idea of reconciliation, for
she wrote to Praeger, who told Wagner, and received the following
bitter complaint:
"And so she has written to you? Whose fault was it? How could she have
expected I was to be shackled and fettered as any ordinary cold common
mortal? My inspirations carried me into a sphere where she could not
follow, and then the exuberance of my heated enthusiasm was met by a
cold douche. But still there was no reason for the extreme step;
everything might have been arranged between us, and it would have been
better had it been so. Now there is a dark void, and my misery is
deep."
A year later, Wagner's regret is not yet dead, and he writes to Frau
Wille:
"Between me and my wife all might have turned out well! I had simply
spoiled her dreadfully, and yielded to her in everything. She did not
feel that I am a man who cannot live with wings tied down. What did she
know of the divine right of passion, which I announce in the
flame-death of the Walkuere who has fallen from the grace of the gods?
With the death-sacrifice of love the Dusk of the Gods (Gotterdammerung)
sets in."
And again he bewails his loneliness to Praeger:
"The commonest domestic details must now be done by me; the purchasing
of kitchen utensils and such kindred matters am I driven to. Ah! poor
Beethoven! now is it forcibly brought home to me what his discomforts
were with his washing-book and engaging of housekeepers, etc., etc. I
who have praised woman more than Frauenlob, have not one for my
companion. The truth is, I have spoiled Minna; too much did I indulge
her, too much did I yield to her; but it were better not to talk upon a
subject which never ceases to vex me."
Yet he was destined to know wedded happiness some years later. And he
showed that he could make happy a woman who could understand him. As
Mr. Finck comments:
"The world is apt to side with the woman in a case like this,
especially if her partner is of the _irritabile genus_, a man of
genius. No doubt, Minna had much to endure, and deserves all our pity;
but that her husband is not to blame in this matter, is shown by the
extremely happy and contented life he led with his second wife, Cosima,
the daughter of Liszt, who _did love_ and understand him."
It is a proverb that the woman who marries a genius marries misery, but
I think there are instances enough in this book to show that genius has
nothing to do with the case. Wedded happiness is a result of the lucky
meeting of two natures, one or both of which may be accidentally so
constituted as to be happy in the other's society without undue
restlessness. It would be just as easy to prove, by a multitude of
instances, that plumbers or bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, merchants,
or thieves make poor husbands as to prove the same of musicians,
artists, poets, architects, or geniuses of any kind.
The truth of the matter is always overlooked: the geniuses are revealed
to the public in an intimacy non-historical characters are not
subjected to. But if you will turn from reading the pages of history,
biography, or memoirs, and take up any newspaper of the day, you will
doubtless be astounded to find how small a percentage of the divorces,
the murders, and other domestic scandals are to be blamed to the
possession of genius, unless, as one might well, you recognise a
special and separate genius for trouble.
Patience conquers all things, if one lives long enough, and at length
even Wagner's innumerable woes were solved by the appearance of a
veritable _deus ex machina_ let down from heaven. But Wagner was over
fifty when the tardy god arrived. It was in 1864 that he became the
idol and the pet of the young king, Ludwig II. of Bavaria, who sent a
courier ransacking Europe almost in vain for the fugitive, and, at last
finding him, dumbfounded him with fairy promises, presented him with a
villa, and treated him to a splendour few musicians have ever known,
except perhaps Lully, and Farinelli, who became the vocal prime
minister of the truly good king Ferdinand VI. of Spain. Wagner's
relations with Ludwig were of a sort which Mr. Finck euphemises as
"Grecian." This was seemingly not the only instance in his career; but
it brought him furious enmity as soon as he had found friendship.
Poor Minna never shared with Wagner his period of luxury. But it was of
such magnificence that his envious foes accused him of aiming to
dethrone religion from its throne, and substitute art as the Pope!
Among the attacks made on Wagner at this time was the charge that,
while he was lolling on a silken couch which had cost him $12,000, his
neglected wife was starving to death in Dresden. Minna was honourable
enough to answer this attack with an open letter to those German
newspapers which, in 1866, outjaundiced that yellow journalism for the
invention of which New America has been blamed.
Minna wrote as follows:
"The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for some
time published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declare
that I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficient
for my maintenance. I take this opportunity with the more pleasure as
it enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnies
launched against my husband."
A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heart
disease. She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, without
ever tasting their sweets. To say whether or not she deserved to taste
the sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict upon
one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. The
marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who
could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more to
blame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a case of
connubial astigmatism.
While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young
king, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbow
furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made
Joseph's coat mere negligee, was not altogether his own, but showed the
unmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Buelow acted as a
sort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother
was the Comtesse d'Agoult, who wrote under the name of "Daniel Stern,"
and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years. Cosima had married Hans
von Buelow in 1857.
Von Buelow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and
by Wagner. In 1850, when Von Buelow was about twenty years old, Wagner
and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced,
begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, she
opposed music as a career, but Von Buelow persisted, and became Liszt's
pupil. Wagner was to Von Buelow a god. It was a pitiful practical joke
that Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper's
wife. But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense of
good form.
As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of Von
Buelow's misfortunes, and saying: "Add to this a tragic marriage; a
young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt's
wonderful image, but of superior intellect." Wagner persuaded the king
to make Von Buelow court pianist, and later court conductor. There are
very pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Buelows and
Wagner.
Then Wagner's popularity with the king eventually raised such hostility
that, at the king's request, he left the country to save his life. He
was again an exile. Cosima, with her two children, went with him, and
later Von Buelow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his living
as a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne. There exists a
letter from Wagner's cook, telling a friend of how the king came
incognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descent
of Cosima and her children. They had come to stay. At Triebschen, near
Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Buelow family, and began to know
contentment.
The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to
torment even the idolatrous Von Buelow. Riemann says: "Domestic
misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Buelow left the
city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth
of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage were
imperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desired
divorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religious
profession," to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who says
that Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Liszt
and Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics of
which this is not the place to discuss."
Von Buelow secured his divorce in the fall of 1869. He remarried, in
1882, the actress, Marie Schanzer. Wagner and Cosima were married
August 25, 1870. This was the twenty-fifth birthday of King Ludwig, and
Glasenapp comments glowingly upon the meaning of the marriage:
"To the artist, who in the first great rumblings of the war of 1870-71,
greeted the dawn of a new era for his people, the same hour proved to
be the beginning of a new chapter. On Thursday, the 25th of August,
1870, in the Protestant Church of Lucerne, in the presence of two
witnesses, one, the lifelong friend of the Wagner family, Hans Richter,
the other, Miss M.v.M., the wedding of Richard Wagner to Cosima, the
divorced wife of Hans von Buelow, was celebrated.
"There is no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. None
have ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higher
impersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who had
suffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciative
neglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friend
of her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement
_(mit theilnahmvollster Sorge_), until she as well as her husband
realised that she was the one chosen to heal the wounds which the
artist had suffered in his restless wanderings and through numberless
disappointments. The time had arrived when the hand of love prepared
the last and never-to-be-lost home.
"This knowledge gave the noble-minded woman the courage to sever the
ties, which in early youth had tied her to one of our most eminent
artists, and the best of men; to give up herself to her task, to
consecrate her life to him, to be the helpmeet of the man to whom
through friendship and the inner voice of her heart, and the knowledge
of noble duty, she had already belonged. The world did not hesitate to
malign this holiest act of fidelity. Only the small and the low are
overlooked, the high and the great are ever the victims."
Just two months before the marriage, Wagner had written to Frau Wille,
who had invited him and his wife-to-be to visit her, an account of his
feelings in the matter, which is beautiful enough and sincere enough to
quote at some length:
"Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shall
present ourselves as man and wife. To get into this state, great
patience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to be
brought about until all manner of suffering. Since last I saw you in
Munich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, has
also become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I could
well be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I 'could
not be helped' was false! She knew that I could be helped, and she
helped me: she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herself
every condemnation. She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful and
vigorous boy, whom I boldly call 'Siegfried': he is now growing,
together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last has
attained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which we
had retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of the
sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to
you the mother of my son as my wedded wife. This will soon be the case,
and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld."
A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner's life
is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed with
great secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll," that most royal musical welcome
that ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musical
conspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima's
birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house,
and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter,
Cosima's thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices,
the child being then a year old. The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says,
"is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love,
paternal and conjugal."
A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the
Bayreuth dream--the building with hands of a material castle in Spain.
Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own
works, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa at
Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret. For there he had
been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and
forethought of the devoted Cosima. His new villa at Bayreuth he called
"Wahnfried," setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures,
symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his
final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first
inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being
the portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the role, and the latter
being the child Siegfried Wagner. Beneath the frescoes he put the
words: "Hier wo mein Waehnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus von
mir benannt,"--which may be Englished: "Here, where my illusions
respite found, 'Illusion-Respite' let this house by me be crowned."
In this home, plain in its exterior, but full of richness within,
Wagner lived at ease with his wife and her four children. Von Buelow,
the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his first
beliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship with
the man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he had
regretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though not
for the same reasons. Once he broke forth in his dilemma: "If he were
only some one that I could kill, he would have been dead before this."
But he could not interfere with "the great cause," and even Liszt,
after some estrangement, was reconciled to Wagner.
Here Wagner's existence went tranquilly and busily on for twelve years,
till he was at the threshold of his three-score and ten. And now the
genius, whom we saw but lately juggling with starvation in the slums of
Paris, we find a figure of world-wide fame, with an annual income of
$25,000 and the ability to travel to Italy in a private car. But this
luxury was his last, for his health was on the ebb. And though he took
a suite of twenty-eight rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, with
his wife, his own two children, Siegfried and Eva, aged twelve and
fourteen years, Daniela and Isolde, Cosima's two children by her first
husband, and two teachers, four servants, and many guests, this was but
a splendid sarcophagus; for here Wagner had but less than half a year
to live. Those who would know more of the daily comforts and suffering
of this time, can read it in Perl's book, "Richard Wagner in Venedig."
He suffered constantly more and more from heart trouble and other
torments. One day his servant heard him calling, and, hastening to his
side, found him on a divan writhing in agony; his last words were:
"Call my wife and the doctor." Cosima flew to his aid, but could not
hold back the inevitable. When the doctor came and told her that Wagner
had finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed and
fainted. For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to take
any food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted from
exhaustion.
And now, the erstwhile exile, living on the pittances he could wheedle
from his few disciples, died in the fame of the world. Three kings sent
wreaths to his funeral, and the city of Venice twice asked for the
privilege of giving him a final pageant. But Cosima strangely would
have no ceremony at all, and no music. "She feared it would rend her
heart in twain," says Mr. Finck, "so the procession moved along the
canal in solemn silence, broken only by the tolling of the distant
bell."
The railroad station was guarded as for the funeral of a monarch. The
express-train was not stopped at the border of the three countries
through which it passed. When the coffin was taken to the grave in
Bayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as so
many of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart.
As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unwearied
in behalf of his glory. In her he had found that ideal of womankind
which he had so much upheld: instant and dauntless obedience to the
behest of the one great love. When he died he was even then at work
upon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowed
from his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women a
right to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone.
Once he had written: "Women are the music of life," and of his
"Bruennhilde" he had said: "Never has woman been so glorified as in this
poem." For the reward of this trust in womankind, he had also had the
privilege of saying, "In the hearts of women it has always gone well
with my art."
And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blonde
tresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with final
sacrifice, and as a last tribute, she had sacrificed to bury with him.
CHAPTER III.
TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER
Had his relations with music been as completely original as his
relations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius of
this man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German. He
was the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believed
in marriage and made three wives happy--in succession. The young
Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was
twenty-three before he took up instrumentation.
He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward,
and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended
himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate
women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on
morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps
fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended
as they did. And so he drifted--not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet
quite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointing
woman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men. Among his friends was
Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton.
Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marriage, and, after two years of
quarrels with his wife's relatives and doubtless with her, had forsworn
the other sex. Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled all
night; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation.
Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a menage together for a time.
Tschaikovski, however, had not learned that womankind was not his kind;
so he flirted a little with the beautiful niece of one Tarnovski, for
instance, and with an unknown at a masked ball. But he was chiefly
music-mad and undermined his health by his overwork.
Then in 1868, his father got after him to marry. As long before as
1859, when he was nineteen, he had suffered from an unrequited love.
Now at the age of twenty-eight he cared nothing for petticoats. He had
written his sister a year ago that he was tired of life, and marriage
did not tempt him; he was, said he, "too lazy to woo, too lazy to
support a family, too lazy to endure the responsibility of a wife and
children." But upon this ennui fell an electric spark--from the old
storage-batteries, woman's eyes.
There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who
was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly
beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of
dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter
Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's
lamb, followed her about.
One day he wrote: "She is a charmer; we are friends." Then _tempo
accelerate_; he copied music for her benefit performance; later he
apologised for not writing his brother--he was all monopolised by the
singer. So he went swirling into the current. He tried to keep away;
they met by accident; she reproached him; he promised to call; then his
inveterate timidity palsied him, till Anton Rubinstein had to drag him
to her rooms by force.
Eventually they became engaged. Just as in Weber's case, the composer
demanded that the singer give up her career for his, and she and her
mother objected. She did not want to be merely the wife of her husband;
nor he, merely the husband of his wife. He appealed to his father, who
wrote a nobly generous letter, pleading the woman's right to her own
career: a very gospel of artistic equality.
"You love her: she loves you: and that should settle it, if--Oh, this
wretched if! The beloved Desiree must be altogether noble, since my son
Peter has loved her. He has taste and talent, and would choose a wife
of his own nature. The few years difference in age are of no moment. If
your love is real and substantial, all else is nonsense. She would not
want you to play the servant, and you could compose even if you
travelled with her.
"I lived with your mother for twenty-one years and all that time loved
with the passion of youth, and respected and adored her as a saint. If
your desired one has the character of your mother, whom you so
resemble, there should be no talk of future coolness and doubt. You
know well that artists have no home; they belong to the whole world.
Why worry whether you live at Moscow or St. Petersburg? She should not
leave the stage, nor should you abandon your career. True, our future
is known only to God, but why should you foresee that you will be
robbed of your career? Be her servant, but an independent servant. Do
you truly love her and for all time? I know your character, my dear
son, but alas, I do not know you, dear sweetheart; I know your
beautiful soul and good heart through him. It might be well for you
both to test your love; not by jealousy--God forbid!--but by time. Wait
and ask each other, 'Do I really love him? Do I truly love her? Will he
(or she) share with me the joys and sorrows of life unto the grave?'"
Good father, good sage, gallant old man! But neither of the troubled
lovers proved worthy of such golden philosophy. Desiree's travels took
her away. Their parting must have been cold, for in January, 1869,
Tschaikovski wrote his brother a letter, excitedly referring to the
acceptance of his opera, and coldly hinting that his love affair would
probably come to nothing. We remember how calmly Mozart once wrote of
his operatic triumph and how passionately of his love.
The same month a telegram informed Tschaikovski that his fiancee had
very suddenly become engaged to a singer in her own troupe, the Spanish
baritone, Padilla y Ramos, who was two years younger even than
Tschaikovski. The singers were married at Sevres, September 15, 1869.
Tschaikovski, on receiving the first news, seemed "more surprised than
pained." He was still flirting desperately with grand opera. A year
later he heard that Desiree was returning to sing at Moscow. He wrote
pluckily:
"She is coming here and I cannot avoid meeting her. The woman has cost
me many a bitter hour, and yet I feel myself drawn toward her with such
inexplicable sympathy, that I wait her coming with feverish
impatience."
At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says
he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her
always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that
streamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for seven
years, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's office
in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom. After a time,
a lady came out. "Tschaikovski leaped to his feet and turned white. The
woman gave a little cry of alarm, and confusedly fumbled for the door.
Finding it at last, she fled without speaking."
In 1888 Tschaikovski went to Berlin. There Desiree was the idol of the
court and public. They met now as friends. He and Edvard Grieg called
at her house, and he wrote in his diary:
"This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my
sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as
irresistibly bewitching as ever."
_Requiescat in pace_! She had taught him the pangs of disprised love,
but she had escaped misery, and she seems to have lived happily ever
afterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer. As
for Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind--in worse
kind--upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once.
In the year 1875 Tschaikovski's nerves had gone to pieces from overwork
and his mode of life. For months he was not allowed to write down a
note. And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a cure
for his ills. There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as
late as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solution
was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be
opened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own
diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a
great portion of it before his death in 1893. In 1902, however, his
brother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and complete
biography, which partially clears the riddle. This is what we learn
from that:
In 1875 Tschaikovski was a wreck. In 1876 he suddenly wrote his
brother: "I have resolved to marry--the resolve is beyond recall;" and
again: "The result of my thought is the firm resolve to marry with
whomsoever it may be." His photograph at this time has a worn, hunted
look, and he has become addicted to cold baths, of which his new plan
was the coldest of all.
In May, 1877, his friend Kashkin suspected him of being engaged. In
July, Kashkin was amazed to find him married. Just once Kashkin saw the
couple together. Then Tschaikovski grew very distant to his friends and
eccentric in his manner; a little later he fled to Moscow, and in a few
days came word that he was dangerously ill. Later there were threats of
suicide, but it was all a mystery.
We know now that late in June, 1877, Tschaikovski announced definitely
to his brother Anatol, that he was engaged to, and would soon marry,
Antonina Ivanovna Miljukova. He said little of the girl, except that
she was not very young and was very poor; she was free from scandal,
however, and she loved him deeply. He hoped the marriage would be
happy; and he asked the father's blessing. The father's letter showed
an enthusiasm the son's lacked.
Before Anatol could reach Moscow, Tschaikovski was Benedick--July 6,
1877, he being then within three years of forty. The curious details of
the courtship are told by the composer himself in a letter to Frau von
Meek, a wealthy idolatress of his genius, with whom he had one of those
affairs called Platonic, and of whom more later. To her he wrote:
"One day I received a letter from a girl I had known for some time. I
learned from it that she loved me. The letter was couched in such warm,
frank terms that I concluded to answer it--something I have always
avoided doing in previous cases of this sort. Without rehearsing the
details of this correspondence I must mention that the result of the
letters was that I followed the wish of my future wife and called to
see her. Why did I do this? Now it seems to me that some invisible
power forced me to it. At our meeting I assured her that in return for
her love I could give her nothing but sympathy and gratitude. But later
I reproached myself for the carelessness of my action. If I did not
love her and did not wish to incite her further love for me, why did I
call on her and how could all this end? By the following letter I saw
that I had gone too far; that if I now turned from her suddenly it
would make her unhappy and possibly drive her to a tragic fate.
"So the weighty alternative posed itself: Either I got my liberty at
the cost of a life, or I married. The latter was my only possible
choice. So one evening I went to see her, declared openly that I could
not love her, but that I would always be her grateful friend; I
described minutely my character, the irritability, the unevenness of my
temperament, my diffidence--finally my financial condition. Then I
asked her if she wished to be my wife. Naturally her answer was 'yes.'
The fearful agonies which I have experienced since that night are not
to be expressed in words. This is only natural. To live for
thirty-seven years in congenital antipathy to marriage, and then
suddenly to be made a bridegroom through the sheer force of
circumstances, without being in the least charmed by the bride--that is
something horrible! In order to get back my senses and accustom myself
to the thought of the future, I decided to go to the country for a
month. This I did. I console myself with the thought that no one can
escape his fate, and my meeting with that girl was fatality. My
conscience is clear. If I marry without loving, it is because
circumstances have forced this upon me. I cannot do otherwise.
Carelessly I surrendered at her first confession of love. I should not
have answered her at all."
Under such auspices, the marriage took place. It is hard to say whom we
should pity the more, husband or wife; and which we should count the
more insane. That which is technically called a honeymoon lasted a week
in this case. In ten days the husband is writing his fellow-Platonist,
Frau von Meck, that he is uncertain about his happiness, but positive
that he cannot compose. He and his wife pay a little visit to her
mother; then they return "home," only to part. The unwilling bridegroom
must be alone to recuperate. He writes Frau von Meck:
"I leave in an hour. A few days more of this, and I swear I should have
gone mad."
In ten days he is strong enough to think of his wife again; in his
solitude he begins work on what he mentions to Frau von Meck as "our
symphony."
He goes hunting in the woods, while the lonely bride hunts furniture
for their home. By the middle of September, Tschaikovski is brave
enough to return; he is pleased to find a home of his own, with all
clean and neat. For a few days, even a robbery by servants, and the
necessity his wife is under to go to the police-court, do not disturb
him, or, at least, so he writes. But hardly more than a week can he
stand his wife's society. He determines to kill himself, and stands up
to his chin in the ice-cold river, afraid to drown himself, and yet
hoping to catch a fatal pneumonia.
His old frenzy seized him; insanity beckoned to him again. Alleging
that a telegram had called him to St. Petersburg, he fled from his
home, September 24, 1877.
His brother met him at the St. Petersburg station, and hardly knew him.
Taken to the nearest hotel, he went into hysterics, and was unconscious
for forty-eight hours. The doctor said travel was necessary. The wife
was provided for, and, leaving her forever, Tschaikovski fled to
foreign countries barely in time to save his sanity. To the last he
absolved the poor wretched woman of any slightest blame for his
behaviour. His brother, in a biography, completely frank up to this
point, now grows reticent, except to release the wife of all blame. So
you must satisfy your curiosity by imagining some abnormal state of
mind, which you will regard cynically or pityingly, as your manner of
mind impels.
The last touch to this tragedy was the sordid tinge of poverty. The
wretched man alone in Switzerland was without means. Now Frau von Meck,
with great secrecy, offered him an annual income of 6,000 rubles--about
$4,500--purely in payment, she said, of the delight his music had given
her. He accepted a gift so graciously and gracefully made. Tschaikovski
was thenceforth an institution fully endowed.
Modeste says that without this relief from anxiety Tschaikovski would
have died. He wrote to the benefactress: "Let every note from my pen
henceforth be dedicated to you."
This was not the first time she had aided him. A strange, notable
woman, she; a true phenomenon--or a phenomena, as one would be tempted
to say who had even less Greek than I or Shakespeare, if such an one
exist.
Nadeschda Filaretovna, being poor, had married a poor railway engineer;
they lived carefully, and raised eleven children. A railroad investment
brought them a sudden wealth, soaring into the millions. In 1876 she
lost her husband, but all of the children and the riches remained to
keep her busy. She lived in almost complete seclusion.
Tschaikovski's strenuous music penetrated her solitude and her heart.
The stories of his small income touched her. She planned schemes to
fill his purse, ordering arrangements of music and paying for them
munificently. Yet she would not receive the composer personally, and
when they met in public they did not speak or exchange a glance.
In Du Maurier's perfect romance, Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of
Towers lived their hearts out in a dream-world. So Frau von Meck and
Peter Iljitsch lived theirs in a letter-world.
In 1877, before his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, she
had offered to pay him well for a composition. He had said he could not
conscientiously degrade his art for a price. So she paid his debts to
the extent of three thousand roubles. This he could accept. These
theories of art!
It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild scheme of his
marriage. It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless letters
not yet publishable entire. Their life apart seems to have been
continued to the end. During his last years, after a period of travel,
he lived almost a hermit, dying in 1893, only three years over fifty.
Whatever posterity may do with his music, he has left a life-story of
strange perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy and
hysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall in
strange contrast with the temper of his music, which at its gentlest is
masculinely gentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of the
barbaric.
I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless to
keep silence in her love, and winning her bridegroom only to find, like
Elsa, that her Lohengrin could not give her his Heart. And almost more
harrowing is the vision of the composer, with womanish generosity,
giving himself to the one that asked, and finding that love cannot
follow the mere placing of a wedding-ring. So he stands in the icy
river, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair in
his own mad heart. It is Abelard and Heloise without the love of
Abelard or the joy Heloise knew for a while at least.
CHAPTER IV.
THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST
"From this did Paganini comb the fierce
Electric sparks, or to tenuity
Pull forth the inmost wailing of the wire?--
No catgut could swoon out so much of soul!"
--_Browning, "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_."
Many people have based their idea of the moral status of musicians and
the moral effects of music upon a certain work by Tolstoi, who is no
more eminent as a crusader in the fields of real life and real fiction,
than he is incompetent as a critic of art. His novel, "The Kreutzer
Sonata," is musically a hopeless fallacy. And Tolstoi's claim, that
Beethoven must have written it under the inspiration of a too amorous
mood, is pretty well answered by the fact that Beethoven, who was so
liberal of his dedications to women, whenever they had inspired him,
dedicated this work to two different violinists, both men.
It is said that he first inscribed it to George Augustus Polgreen
Bridgetower, a mulatto violinist, who, being lucky enough to be born in
Europe, was not ostracised from paleface society. This can be only too
well proved by the fact that Beethoven--who spelled the man's name
"Brischdower"--after dedicating the sonata to him, found that the
Africo-European had been his successful rival in one of those
numberless flirtations of his, in which Beethoven always came out
second. Indignant at his dusky rival's success, Beethoven erased his
name from the title-page and substituted that of Rudolphe Kreutzer. The
curious thing about this great piece of music, known to fame as the
"Kreutzer Sonata," is that Beethoven had never seen Kreutzer, and that
Kreutzer never played the sonata.
I have not discovered whether or no Kreutzer was married; he probably
was, for he died insane. A German composer, Conradin Kreutzer, with
whom he might be confused, had a daughter whom he trained as a singer.
As for Bridgetower, he married and had a daughter.
But speaking of violinists, what would become of them if there never
had been makers of violins, especially such luthiers as the Amati? Yet
all I know of the Amati is that they formed a dynasty, and doubtless
fell in love on occasion, though how, or when, I do not learn.
The great Antonio Stradivari, however, began his love-making like David
Copperfield, by falling in love with a woman ten years his senior, when
he was only seventeen. She was Francesca Capra; her husband had been
assassinated three years before, leaving her a child. The boy
Stradivari and the widow were married July 4, 1667, and on December
23d, a daughter named Julia was born. Francesca bore Stradivari six
children. Her second child was a son named after her, Francesco; but
Francesco died in infancy, and the name, in spite of the omen, was
given to the next son, who followed his father's profession, but never
married. The next child was a daughter, who died a spinster; the next
was a son, who became a priest, and the next a son, who died a
bachelor. The failure of all their children to marry does not indicate
a particularly happy home-life, but this is mere speculation. We only
know that Stradivari's first wife died, after a marriage lasting
thirty-four years.
A year and a half later Stradivari married a girl fifteen years his
junior; Antonia Zambelli was, indeed, born the very year Francesca's
first husband had been assassinated. Antonia bore Stradivari five
children: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in
infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and
lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child
of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one
who handed down the family name. How happy Antonia was with her
husband, we do not know. "As rich as Stradivari," became a proverb. She
died at the age of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less than
one year; this may have been because he was overcome with grief; or
because he was already nearly ninety years of age.
In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas
Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named
Pietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipated
genius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, "del Gesu." Of him
there is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, he
won over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and
implements with which he made the so-called "prison fiddles," of whose
curious shape Charles Reade said: "Such is the force of genius that I
believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they
are so full of chic." As Giuseppe called himself "Gesu," so there was
a member of the famous violin-making family of Guadagnini who was
called "John the Baptist," and of whom I only know that he belonged to
a large family.
TARTINI
But to turn from these unsatisfactory violin makers to violin players:
I know nothing of the great Corelli's personal history; his pupil
Geminiani is said to have led a life full of romance. Philidor spent
his years chiefly in the intrigues of chess-playing. The great Tartini,
whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his famous
Sonata del Diavolo, had a checkerboard career. As a young university
student he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and married
her in secret. Like Romeo, his romance brought him separation and
exile. His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe. He
fled from Padua, and took up the violin to save him from starvation.
"And some have greatness thrust upon them."
One day, as he was playing at the monastery where he was in retirement,
the wind blew aside a curtain just as a fellow townsman was passing. He
took home the news, and by this time resentment had died out so much,
that Tartini and his young wife were permitted to resume their romance.
They went to Venice. Later his ambition for the violin caused them to
separate, but finally they returned to Padua to live. Burney says that
his wife was "of the Xantippe sort." His love story somewhat suggests
that of Desmarets, who also had to flee for his life in consequence of
a secret marriage, and who was twenty-two years appeasing the wrath of
the aristocratic family.
A contemporary violinist and composer was Benedetto Marcello, whose
melodramatic affair has been described by Crowest and may be quoted
here, with full permission to believe as much of it as you please.
"Marcello was the victim of a hopeless passion for a beautiful lady,
Leonora Manfrotti, and on the occasion of her marriage to Paolo
Seranzo, a Venetian of high rank, Marcello was unwise enough to send
her a rose and a billet-doux containing words more complimentary to the
lady's beauty than to her taste in the choice of a husband. This
epistle, coming to Seranzo's notice, caused him so violent a fit of
jealousy that he tormented his young wife by supervision and suspicion
to such an extent that she actually sank under his ill-treatment and
died. Her body was laid out in state in the church 'Dei Frari,' and
here Marcello seeing it, learned the ill effects of his rash passion.
He fell into a state of melancholy madness, and at last, having with
the craft and ingenuity of a madman succeeded in stealing the body of
his love, he conveyed it to a ruined crypt in one of the neighbouring
islands, which, bearing the reputation of being haunted, was seldom
visited by any one. Here, watched only by a faithful old nurse, he sat
day and night watching the dead form of Leonora, singing and playing to
it as though by the force of music he would recall her to life.
"Long ere this, Venice, and indeed Italy, was full of excitement at the
composition of some unknown musician (no other than Marcello). Among
other admirers of this music was Eliade, twin sister of Leonora, and
resembling her so closely that even friends could scarcely distinguish
her. Eliade had even been effected to insensibility by the strain of
the unknown, and hearing one day a gondola pass, in which a voice was
singing one of the songs which was an especial favourite, in such a way
as she had never heard it sung before, she followed and traced the
gondola to the deserted island. A visit to this island resulted in a
meeting with the old nurse, and a few explanations. The ingenious woman
contrived to take advantage of a short absence of Marcello, and,
substituting the living sister for the dead one, awaited the mad
musician. This time, however, his usual invocation was not in vain: as
he called on Leonora to awake, a living image arose from the coffin,
and Marcello, restored to happiness by the delusion, was quite content
with the exchange when he found out that, although the lady was not
Leonora, she was a devoted admirer of his musical skill, and professed
an 'affinity of soul' for him, in which her sister had been wanting.
Their happiness was short-lived, for Marcello died a few years after
their marriage."
This has a faint resemblance to the romance of "The Quick or the Dead,"
with a certain vice-versation.
LOUIS SPOHR
To come back to earth: The eminent violinist, Spohr, and his pupil,
Francis Eck, made an extensive concert-tour together, in which they
rivalled each other almost more in their rapid series of amorous
adventures, than in their more legitimate concert work. While in St.
Petersburg, Eck met the daughter of one of the members of the Imperial
Orchestra, and began a flirtation, which she took so seriously that her
father gave him the alternative of matrimony or Siberia. After some
hesitation he chose matrimony. Had he foreseen the sequel, he would
doubtless have greatly preferred Siberia, for his wife was a virago,
and collaborated with his ill-health to guide him to the madhouse.
Spohr may have profited by Eck's experience, when some years later he
met the beautiful and brilliant Dorette Scheidler; she was eighteen
years old, and played that most becoming instrument, the harp, as well
as the piano and violin. They appeared together in a court concert, and
on the way to her home, in the carriage, he made the not particularly
original proposition: "Shall we thus play together for life?" She, with
hardly more originality, wept her consent upon his shoulder. They were
married without delay, and began a series of very successful
concert-tours. They seem to have been happy together for twenty-six
years, and they reared a large family. Her death in 1832 broke down his
health for several months. But two years later, he then being fifty, he
married the skilful pianist, Marianne Pfeiffer, over twenty years his
junior. They also made a brilliant concert-tour together.
PAGANINI, THE INFERNAL
Paganini, as everybody knows, sold his soul to the devil for fame. He
made the best of the gamble, as he usually did when he gambled; for the
poor, innocent Lucifer got only a fourth-rate soul, while Paganini
secured a fame that will not be surpassed while fiddlers fiddle.
Gambling was not Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that he
will always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for his
skill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was only
seventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held him
prisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technical
fame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical virtue
in being kidnapped thus? The fair Bolognese kept Paganini captive for
three years in this retreat, where he fed upon scenery, love, and
music. For her sake he practised her favourite instrument, the guitar,
and worked miracles with it as with the violin. At the age of twenty,
Paganini broke the spell and resumed his gipsying, persuading the
public, and not without reason, that he was aided by magic. He lived
for many years with the singer, Antonia Bianchi, who bore him a son,
Achille, whom he legitimised. Antonia was devotion itself, until she
was gradually driven to a jealousy that was almost fiendish, and led to
a separation. Paganini himself tells this story:
"Antonia was constantly tormented by the most fearful jealousy. One
day, she happened to be behind my chair when I was writing some lines
in the album of a great pianist, and, when she read the few amiable
words I had composed in honour of the artist, to whom the book
belonged, she tore it from my hands, demolished it on the spot. So
fearful was her rage, she would have assassinated me."
When he died, he left his son a fortune of $400,000. Surely this sum
alone proves the justice of the popular belief that he had sold himself
to the devil, and, knowing it, none can doubt the story Liszt quotes in
one of his essays concerning the G string of Paganini's violin: "It was
the intestine of his wife, whom he had killed with his own hands."
There is no record of the secret marriage, but there is record enough
of the superhuman power of the melodies he drew from that string.
DE BERIOT, SONTAG, AND MALIBRAN
Among the chief contemporaries of Paganini was De Beriot. When he was
not quite thirty, he found himself in Paris at the time of the deadly
vocal feud between Sontag and Malibran. The rivalry of the two singers
was ended by the influence of music. One night, singing together the
duet from "Semiramide," each was so overcome at the beauty of the
other's voice and art, that they embraced and became friends.
De Beriot had an equally strange experience with the two women. He fell
madly in love with Sontag, slight, blue-eyed and blonde as she was, and
then only twenty-five. But De Beriot paid his court in vain, because at
this time Sontag was engaged to the young diplomat, Count Rossi; as it
would have hurt his influence to be engaged to the child of strolling
players, the engagement was kept secret, until the count could persuade
the King of Prussia to grant her a patent of nobility. When they were
married, she gave up the stage, and travelled from court to court with
her husband, singing only for charity. As her brother said: "Rossi made
my sister happy, in the best sense of the word. To the day of their
death they loved each other as on their wedding-day."
But political troubles ruined the count's fortunes, and it seemed
necessary for the countess to return to the stage. Now again the court
wished to separate diplomacy from the drama played on the open stage.
Rossi was told that he might retain his ambassadorship if he would
formally separate from his wife, at least until she could again leave
the stage. But Rossi believed that it was his turn to make a sacrifice,
and could not bear a separation; so he resigned, and travelled with his
wife. They came to America, and in Mexico the cholera ended her
beautiful life at the age of forty-nine.
It was into this ideal romance that De Beriot had wandered unwittingly
in 1830. It was fortunate that he could not prevail against the noble
Count Rossi, even though his failure caused him pain. It almost cost
him his health, and he suffered so obviously that his friends were
alarmed. Among those endeavouring to console him was Madame Malibran,
whom people, who like exclusive superlatives, have been pleased to
select as the greatest singer in the history of music. Like Sontag, she
was the child of stage people, and, indeed, had made her first
appearance at the age of five.
In 1826 she, and that wonderful assembly, the Garcia family, had found
themselves in New York, where an old French merchant, supposed to be
rich, married her. It is certain that Malibran married the old merchant
for his money--a thing so common that one cannot stop to express
indignation. The horrible thing is that, as it turned out, the old man
had also an eye to the weather. He had hoped to stave off bankruptcy by
marrying the prosperous singer. He succeeded in getting neither her
money nor her heart, for she left him within a year and returned to
Paris.
Here, then, we find her again, with her rival Sontag out of the way,
and Sontag's lover to console. She furnished him with contrast enough,
for she differed from Sontag in these respects, that she was only
twenty-two, she was a contralto, dark and Spanish, and was known to be
married. Her consolation of De Beriot was complete. They lived together
the rest of her life, touring in concerts occasionally, with enormous
financial success, she creating an immortal name as an operatic singer,
and he as a violinist. In 1831 they built a palatial home in the
suburbs of Brussels, where they spent the time when they were not
travelling. She bore him a son and a daughter, the latter dying in
infancy.
Meanwhile, she was trying to divorce her husband, who was now living in
Paris. The freedom was a long while coming, and it was 1836 before the
Gordian knot was cut. On March 26th of the same year, she and De Beriot
were married. The very next month, in London, she was thrown from a
horse and more severely injured than she realised. As soon as she
could, she resumed her concerts; brain-fever attacked her. She died at
the age of twenty-eight.
Two hours after her death, De Beriot hastened away to make sure of the
possession of the wealth this young woman had already heaped up. He did
not wait for the funeral, and all Europe was scandalised. But it is
claimed in his defence that he had been devoted to her, and during her
illness had never left her side, and that his mercenary haste was due
to his fear that a moment's delay might give Monsieur Malibran a chance
to claim her property, and thus rob the child she had borne De Beriot
of his inheritance. Those who know the peculiar attitude the French law
takes toward the property of a wife, can understand the difficulty of
the situation.
In any case, the child was saved from poverty or from the necessity of
professionalism in later life, though he was a distinguished pianist.
As for De Beriot, after the success of his mission he returned to the
country home and remained in seclusion, not playing again in public for
one year. Two years later he married Fraeulein Huber, the daughter of a
Vienna magistrate and the adopted ward of a prince. De Beriot travelled
little after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died in
blindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years of
his life.
CHAPTER V.
AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
"Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little
ones."--HENRY T. FINCK, "_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_."
There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love
stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott,
but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and
creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such
other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.
In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little
or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be
purely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and the
chief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom to
neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of
immortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose
_magnum opus_ was some romance that still makes the heart-strings
tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, there
are two old crusading troubadours.
CERTAIN TROUBADOURS
You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms
of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of
Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty.
He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those
days. Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot know
to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipation
was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last
Tripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying. The countess had
heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be
permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath:
"Having seen thee, I die satisfied."
There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour's last words.
And so there was the other troubadour, the Chatelain Regnault de Coucy.
His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third
Crusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded
before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged
that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who had
owned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the
husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband
chose a most mediaeval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadour
cooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her what
sweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herself
to death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de
Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.
There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient
biographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, and
was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed
everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be."
But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling
how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband
took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.
MARTIN LUTHER
If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther,
whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others
deny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation: "Who loves not wine,
women, and song remains a fool his whole life long." No one claims that
Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained
musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played
upon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a
composer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domestic
romance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married a
runaway nun."
When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, or
were abducted, from a convent. One of them, Catherina von Bora, found
an asylum in Luther's own home. After looking about for a good husband
for her, at the end of a year he married her himself. She was then
twenty-six years old. The married life of the jovial reformer was
happy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged to
take in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that had
brought her marriage,--a runaway.
BRITISHERS
The earlier English composers have not been without their heart
interests. We have already pried into Purcell's romance. Old John Bull,
at the age of forty-four, could give up his professorship to marry
"Elizabeth Walker, of the Strand, maiden, being about twenty-four,
daughter of ---- Walker, citizen of London, deceased, she attending
upon the Right Honourable Lady Marchioness of Winchester." Four years
later, he became the chief of the prince's music, with the splendid
salary of L40 a year.
Sir William Sterndale loved a Mary Wood, and wrote an overture called
"Marie des Bois," and after this atrocious pun, married the poor girl
in 1844, and they lived happily ever after, or at least for thirty
years after.
Those other oldsters, Blow, Byrd, and Playford, were married men; and
Arne, the composer of "Rule Britannia," married, at the age of
twenty-six, Cecilia Young, an eminent singer in Haendel's company, and
the daughter of an organist. She continued to sing, and he to write
music for her. At the age of sixty-eight he died, singing a hallelujah.
Whether she echoed his sentiments we are not told, but she lived
seventeen years longer.
Balfe married a German singer, Rosen, who afterward sang in some of his
operas.
One of the few other British composers who attained distinction was
John Field, who, like Balfe, was Dublin-born. He was the inventor of
Chopin's Nocturne. The story is told that he had a pupil from whom he
could not collect his bills. Finally in sheer despair he proposed, and,
when she accepted him, found his only revenge in telling everybody he
met that he had only married her to escape the necessity of giving her
further lessons, which she would never pay for. The story seems to be,
however, neither true nor well-found, for in spite of his awkwardness
and the hard life he led at the hands of his teacher Clementi, who made
him serve as a combined salesman of pianos and a concert virtuoso, he
was said to have married a Russian lady of rank and wealth. She was
really a Frenchwoman named Charpentier whom he had met in Moscow. She
was a professional pianist, and bore him a son; then she left him, and
changed her name, as did even the son. He was one of the many composers
who should have been kept in a cage.
CLEMENTI, HUMMEL, STEIBELT
As for Clementi, he was chiefly notable for his miserly qualities, by
which he rendered miserable three successive wives.
The pianist Hummel, whom I always place with Clementi in a sort of
musical Dunciad, is credited with having won a courtship duel against
Beethoven, in which Clementi as the winner--or was it the
loser?--married the woman.
Another rival of Beethoven's in public esteem was Daniel Steibelt,
forgotten as a virtuoso, but not to be forgotten for his splendid vices
which range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish. He married a
young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we
are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. He
succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who
began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was
a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy
divorce law issued by the French Revolutionists.
BOIELDIEU AND GRETRY
The father married again, but with what success, I do not know. But at
any rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray,
a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible. It was said that he was
so wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that his
departure was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season. None
the less, though the flight may not have been surreptitious, it may
well be credited to domestic misery. He buried himself in Russia for
eight years, which may be placed in music's column of loss. Returning
to Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success that
followed. Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman who
bore him a son in 1816. Her tenderness to the composer is highly
praised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in
1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also a
worthy composer. At the age of fifty-four, consumption and the
bankruptcy of the Opera Comique, and the expulsion of the king who had
pensioned him, broke down his health. He lived five years longer.
All I know of the domestic affairs of the great French opera-writer
Gretry is that he left three daughters, one of whom, Lucille, had a
one-act opera successfully produced when she was only thirteen years
old, and who was precocious enough to make an unhappy marriage and end
it in death by the time she was twenty-three.
HEROLD AND BIZET
The Frenchman Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music
artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died
in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pre aux
Clercs," had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am going
too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage." He had married
Adele Elise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three
children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter,
married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father's
disease at twenty.
Bizet, like Herold, died soon after his masterpiece was done. Three
months after "Carmen's" first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of
a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease. Six years before
he had married Genevieve, the daughter of his teacher, the composer
Halevy. In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in
May, 1872: "J'attends un _baby_ dans deux ou trois semaines." His wife,
he said, was "marvellously well," and a happy result was expected--and
achieved, for in 1874 he sends Lacombe the greetings "des Bizet, pere,
mere, et enfant." He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of
"Sainte Genevieve," which his death interrupted. His widow told Gounod
that Bizet had been so devoted that there was not a moment of their six
years' life she would not gladly live over again.
Cesar Franck married and left a son. At his funeral Chabrier said, "His
family, his pupils, his immortal art: viola all his life!" But Auber,
though too timid to marry or even to conduct his own works, was brave
enough to earn the name of a "devotee of Venus."
THE PASSIONS OF BERLIOZ
Some of the most eminent musicians were strictly literary men, to whom
music was an avocation.
Thus Robert Schumann was an editor, who whiled away his leisure writing
music that almost no one approved or played for many years. Richard
Wagner was well on in life before his compositions brought him as much
money as his writing. Hector Berlioz was a prominent critic, whose
excursions into music brought him unmitigated abuse and ridicule. The
list might be multiplied.
The tempestuous Berlioz was in love at twelve. The girl was eighteen;
her name was Estelle, and he called her "the hamadryad of St. Eynard."
Years later she had grown vague in his memory, and he could only say,
"I have forgot the colour of her hair; it was black I think. But
whenever I remember her I see a vision of great brilliant eyes and of
pink shoes." When he was fifty-seven years old, he found her again and
his old love revived. But before that time there was much life to live.
And he lived it at a _tempo presto con fuoco_.
He went to Paris, which was a cyclone of conflict for him. At the age
of twenty-seven he won the Prix de Rome and went for three years to
Italy, not without the amorous adventures suitable to that sky.
Returning to Paris, he found the city in a spasm of enthusiasm over
Shakespeare, especially over the Irish actress Smithson, whom he had
worshipped from afar, before he had gone to Rome, thinking that he only
worshipped Shakespeare through the prophetess. The remembrance of her
had inspired him to write his "Lelio" in Italy. When he was again in
Paris, he gave a concert, played the kettle-drums for his own symphony,
and through a friend managed to secure the attendance of Miss Smithson.
She recognised in him the stranger who had dogged her steps in the
years before. The poet Heine was at the concert, and his description of
the scene is as follows:
"It was thus I saw him for the first time, and thus he will always
remain in my memory. It was at the Conservatoire de Musique when a big
symphony of his was given, a bizarre nocturne, only here and there
relieved by the gleam of a woman's dress, sentimentally white,
fluttering to and fro--or by a flash of irony, sulphur yellow. My
neighbour in my box pointed out to me the composer, who was sitting at
the extremity of the hall in the corner of the orchestra playing the
kettle-drums.
"'Do you see that stout English woman in the proscenium? That is Miss
Smithson; for nearly three years Berlioz has been madly in love with
her, and it is this passion that we have to thank for the wild symphony
we are listening to to-day.'
"Every time that her look met his, he struck his kettle-drum like a
maniac."
Then he married the plump enchantress and knew a brief happiness. But
he gradually woke to the fact that the dowry she brought him was mainly
ill-luck, bad temper, and a monument of debts which she acquired by a
new series of Shakespeare performances under her own management. By
this time Paris had forgotten the barbarian Shakespeare and ridiculed
the former queen of the stage. Then Madame Berlioz fell from a carriage
and broke her leg. This took her permanently from the stage, where she
was no longer a success. A few managerial ventures brought her a
handsome bankruptcy. Berlioz gave benefit concerts and wrote fiendishly
for the papers to pay her debts, and always provided for her. But there
was no more happiness for the two, though there was a child. I have
said that Miss Smithson brought Berlioz a dowry of bad luck and bad
temper. The worldly goods with which Berlioz had her endowed, were no
better. He had begun the marriage with "300 francs borrowed from a
friend and a new quarrel with my parents." He also contributed a temper
which is one of the most brilliant in history.
A few years after the birth of their child, his wife grew jealous, and
accused him of loving elsewhere. He reasoned that he might as well have
the game, if he must have the blame, and thereafter a travelling
companion attended him when he surreptitiously eloped with his music,
and his clothes. In his "Memoires," he paints a dismal picture of his
wife's ill health, her jealous outbreaks, the final separation, and her
eventual death. Then he married again. "I was compelled to do so," is
his suggestive explanation. His new experiment was hardly more
successful; but in eight years his wife was dead.
He found some consolation for his manifold troubles in Liszt's Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein, and wrote her many letters which La Mara published
under the title of "The Apotheosis of Friendship."
Then at Lyons he met again Her of the pink slippers, now Madame
Fournier, and a widow. He was fifty-seven and she still six years his
elder. He grew ferociously sentimental over her, and almost fainted
when he shook her hand. He tried to reconstruct from the victim of
three-and-sixty years the pink-slippered hamadryad who had haunted him
all his life. He wrote of the meeting:
"I recognised the divine stateliness of her step; but oh, heavens, how
changed she was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at the
sight of her my heart did not feel one moment's indecision; my whole
soul went out to its idol as though she were still in her dazzling
loveliness. Balzac, nay, Shakespeare himself, the great painter of the
passions, never dreamt of such a thing." [For that reason the
novelty-mad Berlioz tried it. He wrote to her:] "I have loved you. I
still love you. I shall always love you. I have but one aim left in the
world, that of obtaining your affection."
But it was not alone her physical self that had grown old; her
heart-beat, too, was _andante_. She consented to exchange letters; her
pen could correspond with him, but not her passion. She wrote him: "You
have a very young heart. I am quite old. Then, sir, I am six years your
elder, and at my age I must know how to deny myself new friendships."
So Berlioz went his way. His disapproval of Liszt and Wagner alienated
the friendship of even the princess, and his stormy career ended at the
age of sixty-six.
GOUNOD
Charles Gounod wrote as amorous music as ever troubled a human heart.
Like Liszt he was a religious mystic, and Vernon Blackburn has said
that the women who used to attend Gounod's concerts of sacred music
"used to look upon them as a sort of religious orgy."
The details of Gounod's picturesque affairs have been denied us. And
the translator of his "Memoires" regrets that he not only kept silence
on these points, but seems to have destroyed all the documents. His
"Memoires" are disappointing in every way. Even his references to his
marriage are about as thrilling as a page from a blue book. His account
of his love and his wedding are on this ground really worth quoting, as
a curiosity of literature, it being observed how little he has to say
of romance, how much of his relatives-in-law.
"_Ulysse_ was produced the 18th of June, 1852. I had just married a few
days before, a daughter of Zimmerman the celebrated professor of the
piano at the Conservatory, and to whom is due the fine school from
which have come Prudent, Marmontel, Goria, Lefebure-Wely, Ravina,
Bizet, and many others. I became by this alliance the brother-in-law of
the young painter Edouard Dubufe, who was already most ably carrying
his father's name, the heritage and reputation which his own son
Guilliaume Dubufe, promises brilliantly to maintain."
Even to his friend, Lefuel he wrote:
"I am going to be married the next month to Mlle. Anna Zimmerman. We
are all perfectly satisfied with this union which seems to offer the
most reliable assurances of lasting happiness. The family is excellent
and I have the good luck to be loved by all its members."
He mentions briefly in later pages that his father-in-law died a year
after his marriage, and that two years later he lost his sister-in-law,
to whom he gives several lines of a cordial praise, which he singularly
denies his wife, though he states that a year after the marriage she
bore him a girl child, who died at birth, and that four years later she
bore him a son. On the afternoon of this day he was to conduct a very
important concert; when he returned, he found himself a father. He is
here generous enough to say: "On the morning of the day when my son was
born, my brave wife had the force to conceal from me her sufferings."
When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Gounod took refuge in London,
and there wrote his "Gallia." The soprano role was taken by a certain
Georgina Thomas, who had married Captain Weldon of the 18th Hussars. When
she met Gounod, she was some thirty-three years old, having been born in
1837. She took up professional singing for the sake of charity, and
Gounod and she became romantically attached. She helped him train his
choir, established an orphanage at her residence for poor children with
musical inclinations, and published songs by Gounod and others,
including herself, the proceeds going to the aid of her orphanage. At
this time she claimed to have acquired the ownership of certain works
of his. Gounod thought, he said, that he had found in her "an apostle
of his art and a fanatic for his works," but he also found that her
charity had an excellent business foundation, for, when their love
affair came to an end, she claimed her property in his compositions.
He refused to acknowledge her right, and when she clung to his
"Polyeucte," he rewrote it from memory. She sued him for damages, and
the English courts ordered him to pay to his former hostess $50,000.
But he evaded payment by staying in France. Mrs. Weldon was also a
composer, and she had edited in 1875 Gounod's autobiography and certain
of his essays with a preface by herself. The lawsuit as usual exposed
to public curiosity many things both would have preferred to keep
secret, and was a pitiful finish generally to what promised to be a
most congenial alliance. The love affair began like a novel and ended
like a cash-book.
DIVERS ITALIANS
As for the Italians, we know that Paesiello, who was a famous intriguer
against his musical rivals, was a devoted husband whose wife was an
invalid and who died soon after her death. Cherubini married
Mademoiselle Cecile Turette, when he was thirty-five, and the marriage
was not a success. He left a son and two daughters. Spontini, one of
whose best operas was based on the life of that much mis-married
enthusiast for divorce, John Milton, took to wife a member of the Erard
family. In the outer world Spontini was famous for his despotism, his
jealousy, his bad temper, and his excessive vanity. None of these
qualities as a rule add much to home comfort, and yet, it is said that
he lived happily with his wife. We may feel sure that some of the bad
light thrown on his character is due purely to the jealousy of rivals,
when we consider his domestic content, his ardent interest in the
welfare of Mozart's widow and children, and the great efforts he made
to secure subscriptions for the widow's biography of Mozart.
Furthermore, Spontini in his later years, when deafness saddened his
lot, deserted the halls of fame and the palaces of royalty, where he
had been prominent, and retired with his wife to the little Italian
village where he had been born of the peasantry. And there he spent
years founding schools and doing other works for the public good. He
died there in the arms of his wife, at the age of seventy-five; having
had no children, he willed his property to the poor of his native
village.
It is strange how much wrong we do to the geniuses of the second rate,
when they happen to be rivals of those whom we have voted geniuses of
the first rate; for the Piccinnis and the Salieris and the Spontinis,
who chance to fight earnestly against Glucks, Mozarts, and others,
often show in their lives qualities of the utmost sweetness and
sincerity, equalling that of their more successful rivals in the
struggle for existence.
For instance, there is Salieri, who was accused of poisoning Mozart, a
monstrous slander, which Salieri bitterly regretted and answered by
befriending Mozart's son and securing him his first appointment. When
Salieri was young and left an orphan, he was befriended by a man, who
later died, leaving his children in some distress. Salieri took care of
the family and educated the two daughters as opera singers. His
generosity was shown in numberless ways, and if by mishap he did not
especially approve of Mozart, he was on most cordial terms with Haydn
and Beethoven. He gave lessons and money to poor musicians; he loved
nature piously; was exuberant; was devoted to pastry and sugar-plums,
but cared nothing for wine. All I know of his married life is that when
he was fifty-five he lost his son, and two years later his wife, and he
was never the same thereafter. It is a shame to slander him as men do.
THE GRAND ROSSINI
One of the most remarkably successful men of his century was Rossini,
son of a village inspector of slaughter-houses, and a baker's daughter.
Once, while the husband was in jail on account of his political
sympathies, the mother became a burlesque singer, and when the father
was released, he joined the troupe as a horn-player. Rossini was left
in the care of a pork-butcher, on whom he used to play practical jokes.
He always took life easily, this Rossini. At the age of sixteen he was
already a successful composer, and had begun that dazzling career which
mingled superhuman laziness with inhuman zeal. Among his first
acquaintances were the Mombelli family, of whom he said in a letter
that the girls were "ferociously virtuous."
In 1815, he then being twenty-three, he first met the successful prima
donna Isabella Colbran, who was then thirty years old and had been
singing for fourteen years on the stage. She was still beautiful,
though her voice had begun to show signs of wear. Rossini seems to have
fallen in love with her art and herself, and he wrote ten roles for
her. It was she who persuaded him away from comic to tragic opera. The
political changes of the period soon changed her from public favourite
to a public dislike, and Rossini, disgusted with his countrymen,
married her and left Italy. It was said that he married her for her
money, because she was his elder and was already on the wane in public
favour, and yet owned a villa and $25,000 a year income. However that
may be, it was a brilliant match for the son of the slaughter-house
inspector, and the wedding took place in the palace of a cardinal, the
Archbishop of Bologna. As one poet wrote, in stilted Latin:
"A remarkable man weds a remarkable woman. Who can doubt that their
progeny will be remarkable?"
It might have been, for all we know, had there been any progeny, but
there was not. It is pleasant to note that Rossini's ancient parents
were at the wedding. Then the couple went to Vienna, where Carpani
wrote of Colbran's voice: "The Graces seemed to have watered with
nectar each of her syllables. Her acting is notable and dignified, as
becomes her important and majestic beauty."
In 1824 they were called to London. Here they were on terms of great
intimacy with the king. In this one season the two made $35,000.
Rossini complained that the singer was paid at a far higher rate than
the composer; besides, she sang excruciatingly off the key and had
nothing left but her intellectual charms. From England Rossini went to
equal glory to France. At the early age of forty-three, he took a
solemn vow to write no more music, a vow he kept almost literally. In
1845, his wife, then being sixty years of age, died. Two years later he
married Olympe Pelissier, who had been his mistress in Paris and had
posed for Vernet's "Judith." Rossini was a great voluptuary, and was
prouder of his art in cooking macaroni than of anything else he could
do. But much should be forgiven him in return for his brilliant wit and
the heroism with which he kept his vow, however regrettable the vow.
BELLINI
Of Bellini, that great treasurer for the hand-organists, a story has
been told as his first romance. According to this, when he was a
conservatory student at Naples, he called upon a fellow student and
took up a pair of opera glasses, proceeding to take that interest in
the neighbours that one is prone to take with a telescope. On the
balcony of the opposite house he saw a beautiful girl; the
opera-glasses seemed to bring her very near, but not near enough to
reach. So, after much elaborate management he became her teacher of
singing, and managed to teach her at least to love him. But the family
growing suspicious that Bellini was instructing her in certain elective
studies outside the regular musical curriculum, his school was closed.
Then a little opera of his had some success, and he asked for her hand.
His proposal was received with Neapolitan ice, and the lovers were
separated, to their deep gloom. When he was twenty-four, another opera
of his made a great local triumph, and he applied again, only to be
told that "the daughter of Judge Fumaroli will never be allowed to
marry a poor cymbal player." Later his success grew beyond the bounds
of Italy, and now the composer of "La Sonnambula" and "Norma" was
worthy of the daughter of even a judge; so the parents, it is said,
reminded him that he could now have the honour of marrying into their
family. But he was by this time calm enough to reply that he was wedded
to his art.
This conclusion of the romance reminds one of Handel--a thing which
Bellini very rarely does. He died when he was only thirty-three years
of age, and at that age Handel had not written a single one of the
oratorios by which he is remembered. In fact, he did not begin until he
was fifty-five with the success which made him immortal. It was the
irony of fate that Bellini should have died so young, while a brother
of his who was a fourth-rate church composer lived for eighty-two
years.
VERDI'S MISERERE
The virtues of senescence are seen in the case of Verdi, who did some
of his greatest work at the age when most musicians are ready for the
old ladies' home. His first love affair has been the subject of an
opera, like Stradella's. In fact it has much of the garish misery of
the Punchinello story. Verdi was very poor as a child, and was educated
by a charitable institution. He was greatly befriended by his teacher,
Barezzi, in whose house he lived, and like Robert Schumann, he showed
his gratitude by falling in love with the daughter; Margarita was her
name. But Barezzi interpreted the role of father-in-law in a manner
unlike that of Wieck, and to the youth to whom he had given not only
instruction, but funds for his study and board and lodging while in
Milan, he gave also his daughter, when the time came in 1836, Verdi
being then twenty-three years old. Two years later, the composer left
his home town of Busseto with one wife, two children, and three or four
MSS. He settled in Milan. He was a long time getting his first opera
produced, and it was not until 1839 that it made its little success,
and he was engaged to write three more. He chose a comic libretto for
the first, and then troubles began not to rain but to pour upon him.
But let Verdi tell his own story:
"I lived at that time in a small and modest apartment in the
neighbourhood of the Porta Ticinese, and I had my little family with
me, that is to say my young wife and our two little children. I had
hardly begun my work when I fell seriously ill of a throat complaint,
which compelled me to keep my bed for a long time. I was beginning to
be convalescent, when I remembered that the rent, for which I wanted
fifty ecus, would become due in a few days. At that time if such a sum
was of importance to me, it was no very serious matter; but my painful
illness had not allowed me to provide it in time, and the state of
communications with Busseto (in those days the post only went twice a
week) did not leave me the opportunity of writing to my excellent
father-in-law Barezzi to enable him to send the necessary funds. I
wished, whatever trouble it might give to me, to pay my lodging on the
day fixed, and although much annoyed at being obliged to have recourse
to a third person, I nevertheless decided to beg the engineer Pasetti
to ask Merelli on my behalf for the fifty ecus which I wanted, either
in the form of an advance under the conditions of my contract, or by
way of loan for eight or ten days, that is to say the time necessary
for writing to Busseto and receiving the said sum.
"It is useless to relate here how it came about that Merelli, without
any fault on his part, did not advance me the fifty ecus in question.
Nevertheless, I was much distressed at letting the rent day of the
lodgings go by. My wife then, seeing my annoyance, took a few articles
of jewelry which she possessed, and succeeded, I know not how, in
getting together the sum necessary, and brought it to me. I was deeply
touched at this proof of affection, and promised myself to return them
all to her, which, happily, I was able to do with little difficulty,
thanks to my agreement.
"But now began for me the greatest misfortunes. My 'bambino' fell ill
at the beginning of April, the doctors were unable to discover the
cause of his ailment, and the poor little thing, fading away, expired
in the arms of his mother, who was beside herself with despair. That
was not all. A few days after my little daughter fell ill in turn, and
her complaint also terminated fatally. But this even was not all. Early
in June my young companion herself was attacked by acute brain fever,
and on the 19th of June, 1840, a third coffin was carried from my
house.
"I was alone!--alone! In the space of about two months, three loved
ones had disappeared for ever. I had no longer a family. And, in the
midst of this terrible anguish, to avoid breaking the engagement I had
contracted, I was compelled to write and finish a comic opera!
"'Un Giorno di Regno' did not succeed. A share of the want of success
certainly belongs to the music, but part must also be attributed to the
performance. My soul, rent by the misfortunes which had overwhelmed me,
my spirit, soured by the failure of the opera, I persuaded myself that
I should no longer find consolation in art, and formed the resolution
to compose no more! I even wrote to the engineer Pasetti (who since the
fiasco of 'Un Giorno di Regno' had shown no signs of life) to beg him
to obtain from Merelli the cancelling of my contract."
This story is sad enough, Heaven knows, without the melodramatic frills
that have been put upon it. You will read in certain sketches, and even
Mr. Elbert Hubbard has enambered the fable in one of his "Little
Journeys," that Verdi's wife was ill during the performance of the
opera, that the first act was a great success, and he ran home to tell
her. The second act was also successful, and he ran home again, not
noting that his wife was dying of starvation. The third act, and he was
hissed off the stage, and flew home, only to find his wife dead. The
chief objection to the story is the fact that his wife died on the 19th
of June, 1840, and the opera was not produced until the 5th of
September that same year. But it is tragic enough that he should have
been compelled to write a comic opera under the anguish that he felt at
the loss of his two children and his wife, and that his reward should
have been even then a dismal fiasco.
He was dissuaded from his vow to write no more, and it was in a driving
snow-storm that his friend Merelli decoyed him to a field, in which so
much fame was awaiting him.
This Merelli had first become interested in Verdi from overhearing the
singer Signora Strepponi praising Verdi's first opera. This was before
the failure of the comic opera and the annihilation of Verdi's family.
When Merelli had at length decoyed Verdi back to composition, his next
work, "Nabucco," was a decided success, the principal part being taken
by this same Strepponi. She had made her debut seven years before, and
was a singer of dramatic fire and vocal splendour, we are told. Her
enthusiasm for Verdi's work not only fastened the claim of operatic art
upon him, but won his interest in her charms also, and Verdi and she
were soon joined in an alliance, which after some years was legalised
and churched. She shortly after left the stage without waiting to "lag
superfluous" there. Thenceforward she shared with Verdi that life of
quiet retirement from the world in which he played the patriarch and
the farmer, breeding horses and watching the harmonies of nature with
almost more enthusiasm than the progress of his art.
So much for the Italian opera composers. How do the Germans compare?
VARIOUS GERMANS
The old composer Hasse, like Rossini, being himself the most popular
composer of the day, married one of the most popular singers of her
time, and scored a double triumph with her. This was the famous
Faustina.
Mendelssohn's friend, Carl Zelter, was a busy lover, as his
autobiography makes plain. One of his flirtations was with an artistic
Jewess, with whom he quarrelled and from whom he parted, because they
could not agree upon the art of suicide as outlined in Goethe's then
new work, "The Sorrows of Werther."
Albert Lortzing was married before he was twenty, and lived busily as
singer, composer, and instrumentalist, travelling here and there with a
family that increased along with his debts. It was not till after his
death, and then by a public subscription, that his family knew the end
of worry.
Similarly the public came to the aid of Robert Franz, before his death,
thanks to Liszt and others. For Franz, who had married the song
composer, Marie Hinrichs, lost his hearing and drifted to the brink of
despair before a series of concerts rescued him from starvation.
Heinrich Marschner was married three times, his latter two wives being
vocalists. Thalberg married a daughter of the great singer Lablache;
she was the widow of the painter Boucher, whose exquisite confections
every one knows. They had a daughter, who was a singer of great gifts.
Meyerbeer in 1825 lost his father, whom he loved to the depth of his
large heart. At the father's death-bed he renewed an old love with his
cousin, Minna Mosson, and they were betrothed. Niggli says she was "as
sweet as she was fair." Two years later he married her. She bore him
five children, of whom three, with the wife, survived him and inherited
his great fortune.
Josef Strauss, son of a saloon-keeper, married Anna Streim, daughter of
an innkeeper. After she had borne him five children, they were divorced
on the ground of incompatibility. How many children did they want for
compatibility's sake? Their son Johann married Jetty Treffy in 1863;
she was a favourite public singer, and her ambition raised him out of a
mere dance-hall existence to the waltz-making for the world. When she
died he paid her the exquisite compliment of choosing another singer,
before the year was over, for the next waltz. Her name was Angelica
Dittrich.
Joachim Raff fell in love with an actress named Doris Genast, and
followed her to Wiesbaden in 1856; he married her three years later,
and she bore him a daughter.
The Russian Glinka was sent travelling in search of health. He liked
Italian women much and many, but it was in Berlin that he made his
declarations to a Jewish contralto, for whose voice he wrote six
studies. But he married Maria Petrovna Ivanof, who was young, pretty,
quarrelsome, and extravagant. She brought along also a dramatic
mother-in-law, and he set out again for his health. His wife married
again, and the scandal of the whole affair preyed on him so that he
went to Paris and sought diversion recklessly along the boulevards.
His countryman, Anton Rubinstein, married Vera Tschekonanof in 1865.
She accompanied him on his first tour, but after that, not.
The Bohemian composer Smetana married his pupil, Katharine Kolar; he
was another of those whose happiness deafness ruined. He was
immortalised in a composition as harrowing as any of Poe's stories, or
as Huneker's "The Lord's Prayer in B," the torment of one high note
that rang in his head unceasingly, until it drove him mad.
FRANZ SCHUBERT
Among the beautiful figures, whom the critical historian tries to drive
back into that limbo, where an imaginary Homer flirts with a fabulous
Pocahontas, we are asked to place 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 too homely even for a housemaid, so in despair he
turned to the young countess and loved her--they say, till death. Once,
she jokingly demanded why he had never dedicated anything to her, and
the legend says he cried: "Why should I, when everything I write is
yours?"
The purveyors of this legend disagree as to the age of the young
countess; some say she was seventeen, and some that she was eleven,
while those who disbelieve the story altogether say that she was only
seven years old. But now you have heard the story, and you may take it
or leave it. There is some explanation for the belief that Schubert did
not dare to love or declare his love, and some reason to believe that
his reticence was wise and may have saved him worse pangs, in the fact
that he was only one inch more than five feet high, and yet fat and
awkward; stoop-shouldered, wild-haired, small-nosed, big-spectacled,
thick-lipped, and of a complexion which has been called pasty to the
point of tallowness. Haydn, however, almost as unpromising, was a great
slayer of women. But Schubert either did not care, or did not dare.
He reminds one of Brahms, a genial giant, who was deeply devoted in a
filial way to Clara Schumann after the death of Schumann, but who never
married, and of whom I find no recorded romance.
CHAPTER VI.
ROBERT SCHUMANN AND CLARA WIECK
"I am not satisfied with any man who despises music. For music is a
gift of God. It will drive away the devil and makes people cheerful.
Occupied with it, man forgets all anger, unchastity, pride, and other
vices. Next to theology, I give music the next place and highest
praise."--MARTIN LUTHER.
By a little violence to chronology, I am putting last of all the story
of Schumann's love-life, because it marks the highest point of musical
amour.
If music have any effect at all upon character, especially upon the
amorous development and activity of character, that effect ought to be
discoverable--if discoverable it is--with double distinctness where two
musicians have fallen in love with each other, and with each other's
music. There are many instances where both the lovers were musically
inclined, but in practically every case, save in one, there has been a
great disparity between their abilities.
The whimsical Fates, however, decided to make one trial of the
experiment of bringing two musicians of the first class into a sphere
of mutual influence and affection. The result was so beautiful, so
nearly ideal, that--needless to say--it has not been repeated. But
while the experiment has not been duplicated, the story well merits a
repetition, especially in view of the fact that the woman's side of the
romance has only recently been given to the public in Litzmann's
biography, only half of which has been published in German and none in
English.
There can surely be no dispute that Robert Schumann was one of the most
original and individual of composers, and one of the broadest and
deepest-minded musicians in the history of the art. Nor can there be
any doubt that Clara Wieck was one of the richest dowered musicians who
ever shed glory upon her sex. Henry T. Finck was, perhaps, right, when
he called her "the most gifted woman that has ever chosen music as a
profession."
Robert Schumann showed his determined eccentricity before he was born,
for surely no child ever selected more unconventional parents. Would
you believe it? It was the mother who opposed the boy's taking up music
as a career! the father who wished him to follow his natural bent! and
it was the father who died while Schumann was young, leaving him to
struggle for years against his mother's will!
Not that Frau Schumann was anything but a lovable and a most beloved
mother. Robert's letters to her show a remarkable affection even for a
son. Indeed, as Reissmann says in his biography:
"As in most cases, Robert's youthful years belonged almost wholly to
his mother, and indeed her influence chiefly developed that pure
fervour of feeling to which his whole life bore witness; this, however,
soon estranged him from the busy world and was the prime factor in that
profound melancholy which often overcame him almost to suicide."
Frau Schumann wished Robert to study law, and sent him to the
University at Leipzig for that purpose and later to Heidelberg. He was
not the least interested in his legal studies, but loved to play the
piano, and write letters, and dream of literature, to idolise Jean Paul
Richter and to indulge a most commendable passion for good cigars. He
was not dilatory at love, and went through a varied apprenticeship
before his heart seemed ready for the fierce test it was put to in his
grand passion.
In 1827, he being then seventeen years old, we find him writing to a
schoolfellow a letter of magnificent melancholy; the tone of its
allusions to a certain young woman reminds one of Chopin's early love
letters. How sophomoric and seventeen-year-oldish they sound!
"Oh, friend! were I but a smile, how would I flit about her eyes! ...
were I but joy, how gently would I throb in all her pulses! yea, might
I be but a tear, I would weep with her, and then, if she smiled again,
how gladly would I die on her eyelash, and gladly, gladly, be no more."
"My past life lies before me like a vast, vast evening landscape, over
which faintly quivers a rosy kiss from the setting sun."
He bewails two dissipated ideals. One, named "Liddy," "a narrow-minded
soul, a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea."
And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were "petrified," every
critic would pronounce her perfection. The boy sighs with that
well-known senility of seventeen:
"I think I loved her, but I knew only the outward form in which the
roseate tinted fancy of youth often embodies its inmost longings. So I
have no longer a sweetheart, but am creating for myself other ideals,
and have in this respect also broken with the world."
Again he looks back upon his absorbing passion for a glorious girl
called "Nanni," but that blaze is now "only a quietly burning sacred
flame of pure divine friendship and reverence."
A month after this serene resignation he goes to Dresden, and finds his
heart full of longing for this very "Nanni." He roves the streets
looking under every veil that flutters by him in the street, in the
hope that he might see her features; he remembers again "all the hours
which I dreamed away so joyfully, so blissfully in her arms and her
love." He did not see her, but later, to his amazement, he stumbles
upon the supposedly finished sweetheart "Liddy." She is bristling with
"explanations upon explanations." She begs him to go up a steep mountain
alone with her. He goes "from politeness, perhaps also for the sake of
adventure." But they are both dumb and tremulous and they reach the peak
just at sunset. Schumann describes that sunset more gaudily than ever
chromo was painted. But at any rate it moved him to seize Liddy's hand
and exclaim, somewhat mal-a-propos: "Liddy, such is our life."
He plucked a rose and was about to give it to her when a flash of
lightning and a cloud of thunder woke him from his dreams; he tore the
rose to pieces, and they returned home in silence.
In 1828, at Augsburg, he cast his affectionate eyes upon Clara von
Kurer, the daughter of a chemist; but found her already engaged. It was
now that he entered the University at Leipzig to study law. The wife of
Professor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs.
At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus
began an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power for
torment and delight.
Wieck, who was then forty-three, chiefly lived in the career of his
wonder-child, a pianist, Clara Josephine Wieck. She had been born at
Leipzig on September 13, 1819, and was only nine years old, and nine
years younger than Schumann, when they met. She made a sensational
debut in concert the same year. And, child as she was, she excited at
once the keenest and most affectionate admiration in Schumann. He did
not guess then how deeply she was doomed to affect him, but while she
was growing up his heart seemed merely to loaf about till she was ready
for it.
For a time he became Wieck's pupil, hoping secretly to be a pianist,
not a lawyer. He dreamed already of storming America with his
virtuosity.
In 1829, while travelling, he wrote his mother, "I found it frightfully
hard to leave Leipzig at the last. A girl's soul, beautiful, happy, and
pure, had enslaved mine." But this soul was not Clara's. A few months
later, he made a tour through Italy, and wrote of meeting "a beautiful
English girl, who seemed to have fallen in love, not so much with
myself as my piano playing, for all English women love with the head--I
mean they love Brutuses, or Lord Byrons, or Mozart and Raphaels."
Surely one of the most remarkable statements ever made, and
appropriately demolished by the very instances brought to substantiate
it, for, to the best of my knowledge, Mozart, Brutus, and Raphael had
affairs with other than English women; and so did, for the matter of
that, Lord Byron.
A week later Schumann wrote from Venice, whither he had apparently
followed the English beauty:
"Alas, my heart is heavy ... she gave me a spray of cypress when we
parted.... She was an English girl, very proud, and kind, and loving,
and hating ... hard but so soft when I was playing--accursed
reminiscences!"
The wound was not mortal. A little later, and he was showing almost as
much enthusiasm in his reference to his cigars. "Oh, those cigars!" We
find him smoking one at five A.M., on July 30th, at Heidelberg. He had
risen early to write, "the most important letter I have ever written,"
pleading ardently with his mother to let him be a musician. She decided
to leave the decision concerning her son's future to Wieck, who,
knowing Schumann's attainments and promise, voted for music. Schumann,
wild with delight and ambition, fled from Heidelberg and the law. He
went to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and he
writes his mother, "If ever I marry, it will be an English girl." He
did not know what was awaiting him in the home of Wieck, whose house he
entered as pupil and lodger, almost as a son.
Here he worked like a fiend at his theory and practice. He suffered
from occasional attacks of the most violent melancholy, obsessions of
inky gloom, which kept returning upon him at long intervals. But when
he threw off the spell, he was himself again, and could write to his
mother of still new amours:
"I have filled my cup to the brim by falling in love the day before
yesterday. The gods grant that my ideal may have a fortune of 50,000."
In 1830 he flirted with the beautiful Anita Abegg; her name suggested
to him a theme for his Opus I, published in 1831, and based upon the
notes A-B-E-G-G. He apologised to his family for not dedicating his
first work to them, but explained that it was not good enough. It is
published with an inscription to "Pauline, Comtesse d'Abegg," a
disguise which puzzled his family, until he explained that he himself
was the "father" of the "Countess" d'Abegg.
It was two years before he confessed another flirtation. In 1833, he
went to Frankfort to hear Paganini, and there it was a case of "pretty
girl at the willow-bush--staring match through opera-glasses--champagne."
The next year he was torn between two admirations. One, the daughter of
the German-born American consul at Liepzig,--her name was Emily List;
she was sixteen, and he described her "as a thoroughly English girl, with
black sparkling eyes, black hair, and firm step; and full of intellect,
and dignity, and life."
The other was Ernestine von Fricken, daughter--by adoption, though this
he did not know--of a rich Bohemian baron. Of her he wrote:
"She has a delightfully pure, child-like mind, is delicate and
thoughtful, deeply attached to me and everything artistic, and
uncommonly musical--in short just such a one as I might wish to have
for a wife; and I will whisper it in your ear, my good mother, if the
Future were to ask me whom I should choose, I would answer
unhesitatingly, 'This one,' But that is all in the dim distance; and
even now I renounce the prospect of a more intimate relationship,
although, I dare say, I should find it easy enough."
Ernestine, like Robert, was a pupil and boarder at the home of the
Wiecks. She and Robert had acted as godparents to one of Wieck's
children, possibly Clara's half-sister, Marie, also in later years a
prominent pianist and teacher.
The affair with Ernestine grew more serious. In 1834 he wrote a letter
of somewhat formal and timid devotion to her. A little later, with fine
diplomacy, he also wrote a fatherly letter to her supposed father,
praising some of the baron's compositions with certain reservations,
and adding, as a _coup de grace_, the statement that he himself was
writing some variations on a theme of the baron's own.
The same month Ernestine and Robert became engaged. He was deeply,
joyously fond of her, and he poured out his soul to her friend, who was
also a distinguished musician, Henrietta Voigt. To her he wrote of
Ernestine:
"Ernestine has written to me in great delight. She has sounded her
father by means of her mother; and he gives her to me! Henrietta, he
gives her to me! do you understand that? And yet I am so wretched; it
seems as though I feared to accept this jewel, lest it should be in
unworthy hands. If you ask me to put a name to my grief I cannot do it.
I think it is grief itself; but alas, it may be love itself, and mere
longing for Ernestine. I really cannot stand it any longer, so I have
written to her to arrange a meeting one of these days. If you should
ever feel thoroughly happy, then think of two souls who have placed all
that is most sacred to them in your keeping, and whose future happiness
is inseparably bound up with your own."
This Madame Voigt, who died at the age of thirty-one, once said that on
a beautiful summer evening, she and Schumann, after playing various
music, had rowed out in a boat, and, shipping the oars, had sat side by
side in complete silence--that deathlike silence which so often
enveloped Schumann even in the circles of his friends at the taverns.
When they returned after a mute hour, Schumann pressed her hand and
exclaimed, "Today we have understood each other perfectly."
It was under Ernestine's inspiration, which Schumann called "a perfect
godsend," that he fashioned the various jewels that make up the music
of his "Carneval," using for his theme the name of Ernestine's
birthplace, "Asch," which he could spell in music in two ways:
A-ES-C-H, or AS-C-H, for ES is the German name for E flat, while AS is
our A flat and H our B natural. He was also pleased to note that the
letters S-C-H-A were in his own name.
While all this flirtation and loving and getting betrothed was going on
in the home of Wieck, there was another member of the same household,
another pupil of the same teacher, who was not deriving so much delight
from the arrangement. Through it all, a great-eyed, great-hearted,
greatly suffering little girl of fifteen was learning, for the first
time, sorrow. This was Clara Wieck, who was already electrifying the
most serious critics and captivating the most cultured audiences by the
maturity of her art, already winning an encore with a Bach fugue,--an
unheard-of miracle. As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and his
daughter kept together, "This marked a new era in piano music." At the
age of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficult
music ever written.
But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching at
home the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved. Can't you
see her now in her lonely room, reeling off from under her fleet
fingers the dazzling arpeggios, while the tears gather in her eyes and
fall upon her hands?
Four years later she could write to Schumann:
"I must tell you what a silly child I was then. When Ernestine came to
us I said, 'Just wait till you learn to know Schumann, he is my
favorite of all my acquaintances,' But she did not care to know you,
since she said she knew a gentleman in Asch, whom she liked much
better. That made me mad; but it was not long before she began to like
you better and it soon went so far that every time you came I had to
call her. I was glad to do this since I was pleased that she liked you.
But you talked more and more with her and cut me short; that hurt me a
good deal; but I consoled myself by saying it was only natural since
you were with me all the time; and, besides, Ernestine was more
grown-up than I. Still queer feelings filled my heart, so young it was,
and so warmly it beat even then. When we went walking you talked to
Ernestine and poked fun at me. Father shipped me off to Dresden on that
account, where I again grew hopeful, and I said to myself, 'How pretty
it would be if he were only your husband,'"
From Dresden, Clara wrote to "Lieber Herr Schumann," a quizzical letter
advising him to drink "less Bavarian beer; not to turn night into day;
to let your girl friends know that you think of them; to compose
industriously, and to write more in your paper, since the readers wish
it."
Schumann, unconsciously to himself, had given Clara reason enough to
persuade a child of her years that he loved her more than he did, or
more than he thought he did. He thought he was interested only in the
marvellous child-artist. He found in the musical newspaper which he
edited an opportunity to promulgate his high opinion of her. It is
needless to say that the praises he lavished in print, would be no more
cordial than those he bestowed on her in the privacy of the home. For
he and she seemed to be as son and daughter to old Wieck, who was also
greatly interested in the critical ideals of Schumann, and joined him
zealously in the organisation and conducting of the _Neue Zeitschrift
fuer Musik_. This, Schumann made the most wonderfully catholic and
prophetic critical organ that ever existed for art; and in the editing
of it he approved himself to posterity as a musical critic never
approached for discriminating the good from the bad; for daring to
discover and to acclaim new genius without fear, or without waiting for
death to close the lifelong catalogue or to serve as a guide for an
estimate. For some time Wieck joined hands and pen with Schumann in
this great cause, till gradually his fears for the career of the
jealously guarded Clara caused a widening rift between the old man and
the young.
Clara was to Schumann first a brilliant young sister, for whom he
prophesied such a career as that of Schubert, Paganini, and Chopin, and
for whom he cherished an affectionate concern. Yet as early as 1832,
when she was only thirteen, and he twenty-two, he could write to his
"Dear honoured Clara," "I often think of you, not as a brother of his
sister, or merely in friendship, but rather as a pilgrim thinking of a
distant shrine." He began to dedicate compositions to her, and he took
her opinion seriously. His Opus 5, written in 1833, was based on a
theme by Clara, and, according to Reissman, showed a feeling of
"reverence for her genius rather than of love."
He began also to publish most enthusiastic criticisms of her concerts,
calling her "the wonder-child," and "the first German artist," one who
"already stands on the topmost peak of our time." He even printed
verses upon her genius. In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It is
easy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara." She
was still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used to
frighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his
"Doppelgaenger," a name, Clara afterwards took to herself. Child as she
was, he watched her with something of fascination, and wrote his
mother:
"Clara is as fond of me as ever, and is just as she used to be of old,
wild and enthusiastic, skipping and running about like a child, and
saying the most intensely thoughtful things. It is a pleasure to see
how her gifts of mind and heart keep developing faster and faster, and,
as it were, leaf by leaf. The other day, as we were walking back from
Cannovitz (we go for a two or three hours' tramp almost every day), I
heard her say to herself: 'Oh, how happy I am! how happy!' Who would
not love to hear that? On this same road there are a great many useless
stones lying about in the middle of the footpath. Now, when I am
talking, I often look more up than down, so she always walks behind me
and gently pulls my coat at every stone to prevent my falling; meantime
she stumbles over them herself."
What an allegory of womanly devotion is here!
Gradually Schumann let himself write to Clara a whit more like a lover
than a brother, with an occasional "Longingly yours." He begged her to
keep mental trysts with him, and, acknowledging a composition she had
dedicated to him, he hinted:
"If you were present, I would press your hand even without your
father's leave. Then I might express a hope that the union of our names
on the title-page might foreshadow the union of our ideas in the
future. A poor fellow like myself cannot offer you more than that....
Today a year ago we drove to Schleusig, how sorry I am that I spoiled
your pleasure on that occasion."
Of this last, we can only imagine some too ardent compliment, or
perhaps some subjection to one of his dense melancholies. In the very
midst of his short infatuation with Ernestine von Fricken, he is still
corresponding with Clara. Their tone is very cordial, and, knowing the
sequel, it is hard not to read into them perhaps more than Schumann
meant. The letters could hardly have seemed to him to be love letters,
since he writes to Clara that he has been considering the publication
of their correspondence in his "Zeitschrift," though he was probably
not serious at this, seeing that he also plans to fill a balloon with
his unwritten thoughts and send it to her, "properly addressed with a
favourable wind."
"I long to catch butterflies to be my messengers to you. I thought of
getting my letters posted in Paris, so as to arouse your curiosity and
make you believe that I was there. In short a great many quaint notions
came to my head and have only just been dispersed by a postilion's
horn; the fact is, dear Clara, that the postilion has much the same
effect upon me as the most excellent champagne."
Here is perhaps the secret of much of his correspondence; the pure
delight of letting his "fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase the
ink." The aroma of the ink-bottle has run away with how many brains.
He wants to send her "perfect bales of letters," he prefers to write
her at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and the
thirteenth. He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letter
which, he says, is written like a little sonata, "namely, a chattering
part, a laughing part, and a talking part."
Clara seemed from his first sight of her to exercise over him a curious
mingling of profound admiration and of teasing amusement. He portrays
her vividly to herself in such words as these:
"Your letter was yourself all over. You stood before me laughing and
talking; rushing from fun to earnest as usual, diplomatically playing
with your veil. In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double."
All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enough
for the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very same
letter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara's soul, Ernestine,
and speak of her as "your old companion in joy and sorrow, that bright
star which we can never appreciate enough."
A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine. Clara found her
taciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her,
Wieck himself wrote in the diary, "We have not missed her; for the last
six weeks she has been a stranger in our house; she had lost completely
her lovable and frank disposition." He compares her to a plant, which
only prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left to
itself. He concludes, "The sun shone too sharply upon her, _i.e._,
Herr Schumann."
But the sun seemed to withdraw from the flower it had scorched. During
her absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chiefly
remarkable for their poor style and their worse grammar. To a man of
the exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature so
earnestly, this must have been a constant torture. It humiliated his
own love, and greatly undermined the romance, which crumpled absolutely
when he learned that she was not the baron's own daughter, but only an
adopted child, and of an illegitimate birth at that. He had not learned
these facts from her; indeed she had practised elaborate deceptions
upon him. But the breaking of the engagement--a step almost as serious
as divorce in the Germany of that day--he seems to have conducted with
his characteristic gentleness and tact; for Ernestine did not cease to
be his friend and Clara's. Later, when he was accused of having severed
the ties with Ernestine, he wrote:
"You say something harsh, when you say that I broke the engagement with
Ernestine. That is not true; it was ended in proper form with both
sides agreeing. But concerning this whole black page of my life, I
might tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that had
befallen me earlier. It would take a long time, however, and it
includes the years from the summer of 1833 on. But you shall learn of
it sometime, and you will have the key to all my actions and my
peculiar manner."
That explanation, however, does not seem to be extant; all we can know
is that Ernestine and he parted as friends, and that six years later he
dedicated to her a volume of songs (Opus 13). Three years after the
separation she married, to become Frau von Zedtwitz; but her husband
did not live long, nor did she survive him many years.
Aside from the disillusionment that had taken the glamour from
Ernestine, Schumann had been slowly coming more and more under the
spell of Clara Wieck. The affair with Ernestine seemed to have been
only a transient modulation, and his heart like a sonata returned to
its home in the original key of "carissima Clara, Clara carissima."
Clara, who had found small satisfaction in her fame out-of-doors, since
she was defeated in her love in her home, had the joy of seeing the
gradual growth in Schumann's heart of a tenderness that kept increasing
almost to idolatry. Her increasing beauty was partly to blame for it,
but chiefly it was the nobility yet exuberant joy of her soul, and her
absolute sympathy with his ideals in music, criticism, literature, and
life.
To both of them, art was always a religion; there was no philistinism
or charlatanism in the soul or the career of either. At this time, when
Schumann found it difficult to get any attention paid to his
compositions, Clara, from childhood, was able both to conquer their
difficulties and to express their deep meanings. While Schumann was
earning his living and a wide reputation by publishing the praises of
other composers, by burrowing in all the obscure meaning of new
geniuses, and revealing their messages to the world, his own great
works were lying ignored and uncomprehended and seemingly forgotten. At
this time he found a young girl of brilliant fame, honoured by Chopin,
Liszt, by Goethe, by the king, by the public; and yet devoted to the
soul and the art of the fellow pupil of her father. Even before he
broke his engagement with Ernestine, he found Clara's charms
irresistible.
Chopin came to Leipzig in 1834, and in Schumann's diary after his name
stands the entry: "Clara's eyes and her love." And later, "The first
kiss in November."
It was on the 25th. He had been calling on Clara, and when it came time
to go home, she carried a lamp to light him down the steps. He could
keep his secret no longer from himself or from her; he declared his
love then and there. But she reminded him of Ernestine, and, with that
trivial perjury to which lovers are always apt, he informed her that
Ernestine was already engaged to some one else. There was no further
resistance, but nearly a serious accident. The kiss that set their
hearts afire came near working the same effect upon the house. As Clara
wrote afterward:
"When you gave me that first kiss, then I felt myself near swooning.
Before my eyes it grew black!... The lamp I brought to light you, I
could hardly hold."
Schumann writes a few days later in his diary: "Mit Ernestine
gebrochen." Schumann consoled himself later by saying that he did
Ernestine no wrong, for it would have been a greater and more terrible
misery had they married. "Earlier or later my old love and attachment
for you would have awakened again, and then what misery!... Ernestine
knew right well that she had first driven you out of my heart, that I
loved you before I knew Ernestine."
Ernestine herself wrote him often.
"I always believed that you could love Clara alone, and still believe
it."
In January, 1836, the engagement with Ernestine was formally broken.
Shortly after this, Robert's mother died. He was compelled to leave
Leipzig in dismal gloom. He said to Clara simply, "Bleib mir treu," and
she nodded her head a little, very sadly. How she kept her word! Two
nights later he wrote:
"While waiting for the coach at Zwickau,
"10 P.M., Feb. 13, 1836.
"Sleep has been weighing on my eyes. I have been waiting two hours for
the express coach. The roads are so bad that perhaps we shall not get
away till two o'clock. How you stand before me, my beloved Clara; ah,
so near you seem to me that I could almost seize you. Once I could put
everything daintily in words, telling how strongly I liked any one, but
now I cannot any more. And if you do not know, I cannot tell you. But
love me well; do you hear? ... I demand much since I give much. To-day
I have been excited by various feelings; the opening of mother's will;
hearing all about her death, etc. But your radiant image gleams through
all the darkness and helps me to bear everything better.... All I can
tell you now is, that the future is much more assured. Still I cannot
fold my hands in my lap. I must accomplish much to obtain that which
you see when by chance you walk past the mirror. In the meantime you
also remain an artist and not a Countess Rossi. You will help me; work
with me; and endure joy and sorrow with me.
"At Leipzig my first care shall be to put my worldly affairs in order.
I am quite clear about my heart. Perhaps your father will not refuse if
I ask him for his blessing. Of course there is much to be thought of
and arranged. But I put great trust in our guardian angel. Fate always
intended us for one another. I have known that a long time, but my
hopes were never strong enough to tell you and get your answer before.
"What I write to-day briefly and incompletely, I will later explain to
you, for probably you cannot read me at all. But simply realise, that I
love you quite unspeakably. The room is getting dark. Passengers near
me are going to sleep. It is sleeting and snowing outside. But I will
squeeze myself right into a corner, bury my face in the cushions, and
think only of you. Farewell, my Clara.
"Your ROBERT."
Close upon this letter, which must have been answered with no
hesitation and no inferiority of passion, came the summons to battle
for the prize. Wieck, who had been a cordial father, declined with
undue enthusiasm the role of father-in-law. He had viewed with hope
Robert's entrance into the career of music, had advised the mother to
let him make it his life; then the youth ruined his chances of earning
large moneys as a concert performer by practising until his right hand
was permanently injured and the third finger useless. As early as 1831
Wieck is quoted as objecting to Schumann's habits, and saying that, if
he had no money at all, he might turn out well; for Schumann, while
never rich, never knew poverty. But their friendship continued cordial
and intimate, and Wieck went into partnership with him in the _Neue
Zeitschrift fuer Musik_; he was a member of the famous Davids-buendler,
that mystical brotherhood of art, wherein Clara is alluded to as
"Chiara," perhaps also as "Zilia." None the less, or perhaps all the
more, Wieck objected to seeing his famous and all-conquering child
marry herself away to the dreamer and eccentric.
Wieck's own domestic affairs had not flowed too smoothly; he had
married the daughter of Cantor Tromlitz, who was the mother of Clara
and four other children, but the marriage, though begun in love, was
unhappy, and after six years was ended in divorce. Clara remained with
her father, while her mother married a music-teacher named Bargiel, and
bore him a son, Waldemar, well known as a composer and a good friend
and disciple of Robert Schumann. Wieck had married again, in 1828,
Clementine Fechner, by whom he had a daughter, Marie, who also attained
some prominence as pianist and teacher.
On February 13, 1836, we have seen Schumann write his love to Clara.
The number of the day, the stormy night, and the remembrance of his
mother's death were all appropriate omens. Wieck stormed about Clara's
head with rebuke and accusations, and threatened like another Capulet,
till he scared the seventeen-year-old girl into giving him Schumann's
letters. Then he threatened to shoot Schumann if she did not promise
never to speak to him again. She made the promise, and the manner in
which she did not keep it adds the necessary human touch to this most
beautiful of true love stories. Schumann was never underhanded by
choice, or at all, except a little on occasion in this love affair; so
now he called at once upon his old teacher, friend and colleague.
The interview must have been brief and stormy, for, on the 1st of
March, 1836, Schumann writes to August Kahlert, a stranger but a fellow
musical journalist, at Breslau, where Clara had gone:
"I am not going to give you anything musical to spell out today, and,
without beating about the bush, will come to the point at once. I have
a particular favour to ask you. It is this: Will you not devote a few
moments of your life to acting as messenger between two parted souls?
At any rate, do not betray them. Give me your word that you will not!
"Clara Wieck loves, and is loved in return. You will soon find that out
from her gentle, almost supernatural ways and doings. For the present
don't ask me the name of the other one. The happy ones, however, acted,
met, talked, and exchanged their vows, without the father's knowledge.
He has found them out, wants to take violent measures, and forbids any
sort of intercourse on pain of death. Well, it has all happened before,
thousands of times. But the worst of it is that she has gone away. The
latest news came from Dresden. But we know nothing for certain, though
I suspect, indeed I am nearly convinced, that they are at Breslau.
Wieck is sure to call upon you at once, and will invite you to come and
hear Clara play. Now, this is my ardent request, that you should let me
know all about Clara as quickly as possible,--I mean as to the state of
mind, the life she leads, in fact any news you can obtain. All that I
have told you is a sacred trust, and don't mention this letter to
either the old man or anybody else.
"If Wieck speaks of me, it will probably not be in very flattering
terms. Don't let that put you out. You will learn to know him. He is a
man of honour, but a rattle-brain (_Er ist ein Ehrenmann, aber ein
Rappelkopf_). I may further remark that it will be an easy thing for
you to obtain Clara's confidence and favour, as I (who am more than
partial to the lovers), have often told her that I correspond with you.
She will be happy to see you, and to give you a look. Give me your
hand, unknown one; I believe your disposition to be so noble that it
will not disappoint me. Write soon. A heart, a life depends upon it--my
own--. For it is I, myself, for whom I have been pleading."
Kahlert met Clara, but she was embarrassed and mistrustful of the
stranger's discretion. The next day Schumann wrote to his sister-in-law
Theresa still with a little hope: "Clara is at Breslau. My stars are
curiously placed. God grant it may all end happily."
In April, Clara and her father returned to Leipzig, but the lovers, now
reunited in the same town, were further removed than ever. Clara's
promise compelled her to treat Schumann as a stranger on the casual
meetings that happened to the torment rather than the liking of both.
The nagging uncertainty, the simulating of indifference, a stolen
glance, or a hasty clasp of the hand, in which one or the other seemed
not to express warmth enough, caused a certain impatience which Wieck
and his wife were eager enough to turn into mistrust.
Schumann's compositions no longer frequented Clara's programmes. He was
driven elsewhere for society, and when the taverns and the boisterous
humour of his friends wearied him, he turned again to Frau Voigt. In
March he had written to his sister:
"I am in a critical position; to extricate myself I must be calm and
clear-sighted; it has come to this, either I can never speak to her
again, or she must be mine."
By November such an estrangement had come between the lovers that he
could write his sister-in-law:
"Clara loves me as dearly as ever, but I am resigned. I am often at the
Voigts."
Since February of the year 1836, they had not spoken or exchanged any
letters. He never heard her beloved music, except at two concerts, or
when at night he would stand outside of her house and listen in secret
loneliness. In May he dedicated to her his Sonata in F Sharp Minor. It
was, as he expressed it: "One long cry of my heart for you, in which a
theme of yours appears in all possible forms." His Opus 6, dated the
same year, was his wonderfully emotional group, "The Davidsbuendlertaenze."
The opening number is based upon a theme by Clara Wieck, and in certain
of the chords written in syncopation, I always feel that I hear him
calling aloud, "Clara! Clara!"
His hope that this musical appeal might bring her to him was in vain,
and he began to doubt her faith. He passed through one of those
terrific crises of melancholia which at long intervals threatened his
reason. On the eve of the New Year, he wrote to his sister-in-law:
"Oh, continue to love me--sometimes I am seized with mortal anguish,
and then I have no one but you who really seem to hold me in your arms
and to protect me. Farewell."
To Clara, at a later time, he described this trial of his hope:
"I had given up and then the old anguish broke out anew--then I wrung
my hands--then I often prayed at night to God: 'Only let me live
through this one torment without going mad.' I thought once to find
your engagement announced in the paper--that bowed my neck to the dust
till I cried aloud. Then I wished to heal myself by forcing myself to
love a woman who already had me half in her net."
Love by act of Parliament, or by individual resolve, has never been
accomplished; and Schumann's efforts were foredoomed. In the meanwhile,
the Wiecks tried the same treatment upon Clara, whose singing-teacher,
Carl Banck, had been deceived by her friendship into thinking that he
could persuade her to love him. His ambition suited eminently the
family politics of Father Wieck. He made his first mistake by
slandering Schumann, not knowing the A B C of a woman's heart. For a
lover slandered is twice recommended. As Clara wrote later: "I was
astounded at his black heart. He wanted to betray you, and he only
insulted me."
One of the attempts to undermine Schumann was the effort to poison
Clara's mind against him; because when a piano Concerto of hers was
played (Opus 7), Schumann did not review it in his paper, but left it
to a friend of his named Becker. In the next number Schumann wrote an
enthusiastic criticism upon a Concerto by Sterndale Bennett. The
attempt failed, however, and Schumann's letter is in existence in which
he had asked Becker to review the Concerto, because, in view of the
publicity given to the estrangement with the Wiecks, praise from him
would be in poor taste.
Soon Clara at a public concert in Leipzig dared to put upon the
programme the F Sharp Minor Sonata, in which Schumann had given voice
to his heart's cry ("_Herzensschrei nach der Geliebten_"). Schumann's
name did not appear on the programme, but it was credited to two of his
pen-names, Eusebius and Florestan. Now, as Litzman notes, the answer to
that outcry came back to him over the head of the audience. Clara knew
he would be there, and that he would understand. Her fingers seemed to
be giving expression not only to his own yearning, but to her answer
and her like desire. It was a bold effort to declare her love before
the world, and, as she wrote him later: "Do you not realise that I
played it since I knew no other way to express my innermost feelings at
all. Secretly, I did not dare express them, though I did it openly. Do
you imagine that my heart did not tremble?"
The musical message renewed in Schumann's heart a hope and
determination that had been dying slowly for two years. His friend
Becker came to Leipzig, and took up the cause of the lovers with great
enthusiasm. He carried letters to and fro with equal diplomacy and
delight. He appeared in time to play a leading role in a drama Schumann
was preparing. Wieck's enmity to Schumann had been somewhat mitigated
after two years of meeting no opposition. Schumann was encouraged to
hope that, if he wrote a letter to Wieck on Clara's birthday, September
13, 1837, it might find the old bear in a congenial mood. He had
written to Clara the very morning after the concert at daybreak,
saying: "I write this in the very light of Aurora. Would it be that
only one more daybreak should separate us." He tells her of his plan,
asking only one word of approval. Clara, overcome with emotion when
Becker brought her the first letter she had received in so long a time
from Schumann, was so delighted at the inspiration that she wrote:
"Only a simple 'Ja' do you ask. Such a tiny little word ... so weighty
though ... could a heart, as full of unspeakable love as mine not speak
this tiny little word with the whole soul? I do it and my soul whispers
it for ever. The grief of my heart, the many tears, could I but
describe them ... oh, no! Your plan seems to me risky, but a loving
heart fears no obstacles. Therefore once more I say _yes_! Could God
turn my eighteenth birthday into a day of mourning? Oh, no! that were
far too gruesome. Ah, I have long felt 'it must be,' and nothing in the
world shall make me waver, and I will convince my father that a
youthful heart can also be steadfast. Very hastily,
"Your CLARA."
And now, letters began to fly as thickly as swallows at evening. She
found a better messenger than Becker, in her faithful maid, "Nanny,"
whom she recommended to complete confidence: "So Nanny can serve as a
pen to me." At last the lovers met clandestinely by appointment, as
Clara returned from a visit to Emily List. Both were so agitated that
Clara almost fainted, and Schumann was formal and cold. She wrote
later:
"The moon shone so beautifully on your face when you lifted your hat
and passed your hand across your forehead; I had the sweetest feeling
that I ever had; I had found my love again."
It was in this time of frenzied enthusiasm, of alternate hope and
despondency, that Schumann wrote the seventh of his "Davidsbuendlertaenze."
The birthday came, and with it the letter went to Wieck:
"It is so simple what I have to say to you--and yet the right words
fail me constantly. A trembling hand will not let the pen run
quietly.... To-day is Clara's birthday,--the day when the dearest being
in the world, for you as for me, first saw the light of the world."
He tells how through all the obstacles that had met their way he had
deeply loved her and she him.
"Ask her eyes whether I have told the truth. Eighteen months long have
you tested me. If you have found me worthy, true and manly, then seal
this union of souls; it lacks nothing of the highest bliss, except the
parental blessing. An awful moment it is until I learn your decision,
awful as the pause between lightning and thunder in the tempest, where
man does not know whether it will give destruction or benediction. Be
again a friend to one of your oldest friends, and to the best of
children be the best of fathers."
With this letter he enclosed one to Wieck's wife: "In your hands, dear
lady, I lay our future happiness, and in your heart--no stepmotherly
heart, I am sure."
The letter made a sensation in the Wieck home. Clara's father spoke no
word to her about it. He and his wife locked themselves up in a room to
answer it. Clara wept alone all the long birthday. Her father asked her
why she was so unhappy, and when she told him the truth, he showed her
Schumann's letter, and said: "I did not want you to read it, but, since
you are so unreasonable, read." Clara was too proud, and would not.
Schumann wrote to Becker concerning Wieck's answer, saying:
"Wieck's answer was so confused, and he declined and accepted so
vaguely, that now I really don't know what to do. Not at all. He was
not able to make any valid objections; but as I said before, one could
make nothing of his letter. I have not spoken to C. yet; her strength
is my only hope."
To Clara he wrote that an interview he had with her father was
frightful. "This iciness, ill-will, such confusion, such
contradictions. He has a new way to wound; he drives his knife to the
hilt into my heart. What next then, my dear Clara, what next? Your
father himself said to me the fearful words: 'Nothing shall shake me.'
Fear everything from him, he will compel you by force if he cannot by
trickery. _Fuerchten Sie Alles_!" Wieck consented to permit them to meet
publicly and with a third person, but not alone, and to correspond only
when Clara was travelling. His reasons were his ambition for her, her
youth. But Schumann knew better:
"There is nothing in this, believe me; he will throw you to the first
comer who has gold and title enough. His highest ambition then is
concert giving and travelling. Further than that he lets your heart
bleed, destroys my strength in the midst of my ambition to do beautiful
things in the world. Besides he laughs at all your tears.... Ah! how my
head swims. I could laugh at death's own agony!"
His only hope was now her steadfastness. Her message promised him that,
and warned him also to be true, or else "you will have broken a heart
that loves but once."
It is only now, strange to say, that they began to use the "Du," that
second person singular of intimacy which all languages keep except the
English, which has banished its "thee and thou" to cold and formal
usages.
It was typical of Clara's attitude throughout this whole long struggle
that she was always as true to her father's wishes as could humanly be
expected. She obeyed him always, until he became unreasonable and a
tyrant beyond even the endurance of a German daughter. So now, though
Robert begged her to write him secretly, she refused with tears. But,
fortunately for them both, she did not long remain in the town where
they were separated like prisoners in neighbouring cells. She could
soon write him from other cities. As for Schumann, he determined to
make the most of the new hope, and to establish himself socially and
financially in a position which Wieck could not assail.
Gradually, with that same justice which made him able to criticise
appreciatively the music of men who wrote in another style than his, he
was able to feel an understanding for the position of even his
tormentor Wieck.
"Now we have only to obtain the affection and confidence of your
father, to whom I should so love to give that name, to whom I owe so
many of the joys of my life, so much good advice, and some sorrow as
well--and whom I should like to make so happy in his old days, that he
might say: 'What good children!' If he understood me better he would
have saved me many worries and would never have written me a letter
which made me two years older. Well, it is all over and forgiven now;
he is your father, and has brought you up to be everything that is
noble; he would like to weigh your future happiness as in a pair of
scales, and wishes to see you just as happy and well-protected as you
have always been under his fatherly care. I cannot argue with him."
Schumann works with new fury at his compositions, and plans ever larger
and larger works; but through all his music there reigns the influence
of Clara in a way unequalled, or at least never equally confessed by
any other musician. He writes her that the Davidsbuendlertaenze were
written in happiness and are full of "bridal thoughts, suggested by the
most delicious excitement that I have ever remembered." Of his "Ende
vom Lied" he says:
"When I was composing it, I must confess that I thought: 'Well, the end
of it all will be a jolly wedding,' but towards the end, my sorrow
about you came over me again, so that wedding and funeral bells are
ringing together."
He plans how they shall write music together when they are married, and
says:
"When you are standing by me as I sit at the piano, then we shall both
cry like children--I know I shall be quite overcome. Then you must not
watch me too closely when I am composing; that would drive me to
desperation; and for my part, I promise you, too, only very seldom to
listen at your door. Well, we shall lead a life of poetry and blossoms,
and we shall play and compose together like angels, and bring gladness
to mankind."
He would have "a pretty cottage not far from town--you at my side--to
work--to live with me blissful and calm" (_selig und still_). And when
she wishes to tour: "We'll pack our diamonds together and go live in
Paris."
He writes her, complaining that her father called him phlegmatic, and
said that he had written nothing in the _Zeitschrift_ for six weeks. He
insists that he is leading a very serious life:
"I am a young man of twenty-eight with a very active mind, and an
artist, to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and
have been sitting still, saving my money without a thought of spending
it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way as usual. And
do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I
have done are quite lost upon your father?"
Sometimes the strain under which the two lovers lived caused a little
rift within the lute. Poor Clara, forced to defend Robert against her
father's contempt, and her father against Robert's indignation,
preserved her double and contradictory dignity with remarkable skill,
with a fidelity to both that makes her in the last degree both
admirable and lovable. When she advised patience or postponement, the
impatient Robert saw her father's hand moving the pen, and complained;
but in his next letter he was sure to return to his attitude of
tenderness for her in her difficulties, and determination to yield
everything to circumstances except the final possession of the woman of
his heart.
Musicians seem to be naturally good writers of letters. In the first
place, those whose fingers grow tired of playing notes or writing them,
seem to find recreation in the reeling off of letters. They have
acquired an instinctive sense of form, and an instinct for smoothing
over its rough edges, and modulating from one mood into another.
Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good
letter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, _ex
officio_, tend to write correspondence that is literary without trying
to be so, sincere without stupidity. But in the volumes and volumes of
musicians' letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have never
found any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbing
with longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramatic
with the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of Robert
Schumann and Clara Wieck.
The woes of the two lovers were as different as possible, though
equally balanced; and the honourableness of their undertaking was
equally high.
Clara was torn betwixt filial piety toward a father who could be ursine
to a miserable degree, and a lover who was not only eating his heart
out in loneliness, but who needed her personality to complete his
creative powers in music. While Schumann had no such problem to meet,
he lacked Clara's elastic and buoyant nature, and it must never be
forgotten that when he was sad, he was dismal to the point of absolute
madness. He would sit for hours in the company of hilarious
tavern-friends, and speak never a word.
Clara at length gave up her attempt to keep from writing to Schumann,
in the face of her father's actions; for in spite of the promises he
had given them, he could break out in such speeches as this: "If Clara
marries Schumann, I will say it even on my death-bed, she is not worthy
of being my daughter."
Now began that clandestine correspondence which seems to have
implicated and inculpated half the musicians of Europe. There were
almost numberless go-betweens who carried letters for the lovers, or
received them in different towns. There were zealous messengers ranging
from the Russian Prince Reuss-Koestriz, through all grades of society,
down to the devoted housemaid "Nanny." Chopin, and Mendelssohn, and
many another musician, were touched by the fidelity of the lovers, and
Liszt in one of his letters describes how he had broken off
acquaintance with his old friend Wieck, because of indignation at his
treatment of Schumann and Clara.
Schumann's works were now beginning to attract a little attention,
though not much, and even Clara was impelled to beg him to write her
something more in the concert style that the public would understand.
But while the musician Schumann was not arriving at understanding, the
critic Schumann was already famous for the swiftness of his discoveries
and the bravery of his proclamations of genius. As for Clara, though
already in her eighteenth year, she was one of the most famous pianists
in the world, and favourably compared, in many respects, especially in
point of poetical interpretation, with Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, and
Europe's brilliantest virtuosos. But Schumann had delighted her heart
by writing: "I love you not because you are a great artist; no, I love
you because you are so good." That praise, she wrote him, had rejoiced
her infinitely, and that praise any one who knows her life can echo
with Schumann.
Such fame the love-affair of the Schumanns had gained that to the
musical world it was like following a serial romance in instalments.
Doctor Weber in Trieste offered to give Schumann ten thousand
thalers--an offer which could not of course be accepted. At Easter,
1838, Schumann received one thousand thalers (about $760) from his
brothers Eduard and Carl.
But the lovers had agreed to wait two years--until Easter, 1840, before
they should marry--and the two years were long and wearisome in the
prospect and in the endurance. As Clara wrote:
"My sole wish is--I wish it every morning--that I could sleep two
years; could over-sleep all the thousand tears that shall yet flow.
Foolish wish! I am sometimes such a silly child. Do you remember that
two years ago on Christmas Eve you gave me white pearls and mother said
then: 'Pearls mean tears'? She was right, they followed only too soon."
Schumann busied himself in so many ways that again for a little while
he somewhat melted Wieck's wrath, and Clara hoped that some day he
could again be received at home as a friend. She was made the court
pianist at this time, and it was a quaint whimsy of fate that, in
connection with the award, Schumann was asked to give her father a
"character." It need hardly be said that he gave him extra measure of
praise.
Clara's new dignity stirred Schumann to hunt some honour for himself.
Robert decided, that while he was content "to die an artist, it would
please a certain girl to see 'Dr.' before his name." He was willing to
become either a doctor of philosophy or of music. He began at once to
set both of these schemes to work.
Now old Wieck returned to his congenial state of wrath. He declared
that Clara was far too extravagant ever to live on Schumann's earnings,
though she insisted that Schumann was assured of one thousand thalers a
year, and she could earn an equal sum with one concert a winter in
Dresden, where prices were so high. But just then the prosperity of
Schumann's paper began to slough off. It occurred to the lovers that
they would prefer to live in Vienna, and that the _Zeitschrift_ could
prosper there. There were endless difficulties, a censorship to pacify,
and many commercial schemes to arrange, but nothing must be left
untried. The scheme was put under way. Meanwhile, as usual, the Wiecks
were trying on their part; to separate the lovers. Schumann was accused
of infidelity to her, and he admitted that a Mrs. Laidlaw seemed to be
in love with him, but not he with her. They attacked his character, and
accused him of being too fond of Bavarian beer. On this charge, he
answered with dignity:
"Pooh!--I should not be worth being spoken to, if a man trusted by so
good and noble a girl as you, should not be a respectable man and not
control himself in everything. Let this simple word put you at ease for
ever."
Failing here, Wieck presented another candidate for Clara's heart, a
Doctor D----, who met the same fate as Banck. There were further hopes
that she would find some one in Paris or London, whither she was bound;
but she wrote Schumann that if the whole aristocracy of both places
fell at her feet, she would let them lie there and turn to the simple
artist, the dear, noble man, and lay her heart at his feet. ("Alle
Lords von London und alle Cavaliere von Paris, koennten mir zu Fuessen
liegen," etc.) Clara was also tormented by the persistent suit of Louis
Rackerman, of Bremen, who could not see how vain was his quest.
One rainy night, Schumann stood a half-hour before her house and heard
her play. And he wrote her: "Did you not feel that I was there?" He
could even see his ring glitter on her finger. Another day Clara saw
him taking his coffee with his sister-in-law, and she repeated his
query: "Did you not feel that I was there?"
Old Wieck stooped to everything, and even told Clara that he had
written to Ernestine to demand a statement that she fully released
Schumann from his former engagement to her--it being remembered that
among Germans a betrothal always used to be almost as difficult a bond
to sever as a marriage tie. This drove Clara to resolve a great
resolve, and she wrote Schumann:
"Twice has my father in his letters underlined the words: 'Never will I
give my consent.' What I had feared has come true. I must act without
my father's consent and without my father's blessing."
An elopement was seriously considered. It was planned that Clara was to
go to Schumann's sister-in-law. At this time also another friend
offered Schumann one thousand thalers (about $760) and he said: "Ask of
me what you will, I will do everything for you and Clara." But this
crisis did not arrive, though the two were kept under espionage. Even
now in November, 1838, a new and merely nagging attempt was made to
postpone the marriage till the latter part of 1840, but Clara wrote
that she would be with Robert on Easter, 1840, without fail. Then he
went to Vienna to establish his journal there, and from there he sent a
bundle of thirty short poems written in her praise. While he was in
Vienna, her father shipped her off to Paris, so sure now of cleaving
their hearts asunder that he sent her alone without even an elderly
woman for a companion. He little knew that he was putting her to the
test she had never yet undergone: that of living far from him and
depending solely upon herself. It is a curious coincidence that one of
her best friends in Paris was the same American girl, Emily List, who
had once been Ernestine's rival for Robert's heart.
The French people did not please Clara and she feared to go on to
London alone. She dreamed only of hurrying back to Leipzig and Schumann
and a home with him; in her letters the famous pianist seriously
discusses learning to cook.
Unhappy as she was in Paris, Robert was unhappier in Vienna, for the
_Zeitschrift_ made no success, and he was driven to the bitter
humiliation of taking it back to Leipzig in 1839. His brother died at
this time also, and their sympathies had been so close that the shock
was very heavy. Everything seemed to be going wrong. He could not even
find consolation in his music. At this gloomy moment Clara hoped to win
over her father by a last concession. She wrote from Paris that it
would be well to postpone the marriage a few months longer than they
had first intended, and Emily List wrote a long letter advocating the
same and explaining how much it grieved Clara to ask this. She advised
Robert to take up the book business of his brother, who had succeeded
his father's prosperous trade. Even while Clara's tear-stained appeal
was going to him, another letter of his crossed hers. It was full of
joy and told her how well they would get along on their united
resources. He gave them in detail and it is interesting to pry into the
personal affairs of so great a musician. He wrote: "Am I not an expert
accountant? and can't we once in a while drink champagne?"
Clara's letter provoked in Schumann a wild outcry of disappointment,
that after all these years he should accept as his dole only further
procrastination. He wrote her that his family were beginning to say
that if she loved him she would ask no further delay. Clara's letter
seems to have been only her last tribute to her father, for, at
Schumann's first protest, she hastened to write that she could endure
anything, except his doubt; that she would be with him on Easter, 1840,
come what would. This cheered him mightily, and he wrote that, while he
was still unable to compose, owing to his loneliness, a beautiful
future was awaiting him. He described his dreams of the life of art and
love they should lead, composing and making all manner of beautiful
music.
"Once I call you mine, you shall hear plenty of new things, for I think
you will encourage me; and hearing more of my compositions will be
enough to cheer me up. And we will publish some things under our two
names, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and
may not know which is yours and which is mine. How happy I am! From
your Romanze I again see plainly that we are to be man and wife. Every
one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my music
to you."
Now he sent for her decision a formidable document, an appeal to the
court, to compel the father's consent. Clara wrote her father an
ultimatum on the subject, and received a long letter in reply, in which
he consented to the marriage under such terms that they were better off
before. For his consent was to be made on the following six
stipulations: 1. That Robert and Clara, so long as Wieck lived, should
not make their residence in Saxony; but that Schumann must none the
less make as much money in the new home as his _Zeitschrift_ brought
him in Leipzig. 2. That Wieck should control Clara's property for five
years, paying her, during that time, five per cent. 3. That Schumann
should make out a sworn statement of his income which he had given
Wieck in Leipzig in September, 1837, and turn it over to Wieck's
lawyer. 4. That Schumann should not communicate with him verbally or by
letter, until he himself expressed the wish. 5. That Clara should
renounce all claims as to her inheritance. 6. That the marriage should
take place September 29, 1839.
This insolent and mercenary protocol drove Clara to bay. She wrote her
father from the depths of grief, and declared to him finally that she
would wed Schumann on the 24th of June. Schumann wrote a short note to
the old man, telling him that if he did not hear in eight days, silence
would be taken as the last refusal. The answer was simply a letter from
Frau Wieck, acknowledging Schumann's "impertinent letter," and saying
that Wieck would not hold any communication with him.
Then the lawsuit began. On the 16th of July he made his appeal and
wrote to Clara that she must be personally present in six or seven
weeks. She had written him a letter of great cheer and sent him from
Paris a portrait she had had painted and a cigar case she had made with
her own hands.
On her way home Clara stopped at Berlin, where her own mother lived as
the wife of Bargiel.
Clara's life under her father's guardianship had gradually drifted
almost out of the ken of her own mother. Her stepmother had done
everything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her and
making it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann a
letter. Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the woman whose flesh
she was; and she found there an immediate and passionate support.
From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris not
one penny of money and not a single trinket. They always wrote her:
"You have your own money." This grieved her deeply, and her father's
sending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing her
never a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphaned
her indeed. Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and Frau
Bargiel seized the moment. She wrote letters of greatest warmth and
sweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote an
invitation to come to Berlin. He accepted and spent several pleasant
days. Frau Bargiel wrote Clara how she had delighted in the talent and
person of Schumann, and Robert wrote her how fine a mother she had. On
the 14th of August, Clara and her friend Henrietta Reissman left Paris.
Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia.
The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the
family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friend
Becker: "I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of the
court." As soon as Clara left Paris he hastened toward her and met her
at Altenburg. It was a blissful reunion after a year of separation, and
they went together to Berlin, where they knew the bliss of sitting once
more at the piano together, playing Bach fugues. She found his genius
still what it was,--"_er fantasiert himmlisch_"--but his health was in
such serious condition that she was greatly frightened.
Now her father proceeded to destroy every claim he may ever have had on
her sympathy by his ferocity toward a daughter who had been so patient
and so gentle toward him. He not only neglected her in Paris, except to
write her merciless letters, but when she returned and he saw himself
confronted with the lawsuit for her liberty, he offered a revision of
his terms, which was in itself worse than the original. Clara describes
the new offer:
"I must surrender the 2,000 thalers (about $1,500) which I have saved
from seven years' concerts, and give it to my brothers.
"He would give back my effects and instruments, but I must later pay
1,000 thalers and give this also to my brothers.
"Robert must transfer to me 8,000 thalers of his capital, the interest
of which shall come to me, also the capital, in case of a
separation--What a hideous thought! Robert has 12,000 thalers, and
shall he give his wife two-thirds?"
Robert had already given her four hundred thalers in bonds. The new
terms being rejected, Wieck put everything possible in the way of a
speedy termination of the lawsuit. He made it impossible for Clara to
get back to Paris, as she wished, to earn more money before the
marriage. He demanded that she should postpone her wedding and take a
concert tour for three months with him for a consideration of six
thousand thalers. Clara declined the arrangement.
One day she sent her maid to the house of her father, and asked him for
her winter cloak. He gave this answer to the maid: "Who then is this
Mam'selle Wieck? I know two Fraeulein Wieck only; they are my two little
daughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill a
dissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig." He compares this exile of
the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. But
it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from
his home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to
Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara
suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant
a notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara had
always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieck
wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend
Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and
would ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King of
Prussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in public
concerts in Berlin. It need hardly be said that Clara was neither
forbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared in
person at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously. By a
curious chance at the end of her _piece de resistance_, a string broke
on the piano; but as a correspondent of Schumann's paper wrote, it came
"just at the end, like a cry of victory." After this, Wieck wrote to
Behrens protesting against his lending a hand to "a demoralised girl
without shame." Clara learned that such of her letters as had gone
through the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymous
letter which she knew must have been dictated by her father. Her
suspicions were later proved. The worst of the affair was the
diabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her hand
just before her chief Berlin concert.
Next, he announced that his reason for not granting his consent was
that Schumann was a drunkard. Robert found witnesses enough to be
sponsors for his high respectability, but the accusation was a
staggering blow in the midst of the deep melancholia into which the
endless struggle and the recent death of Henrietta Voigt had plunged
him. Clara had the rare agony of seeing him weep. It was now the turn
of the strong Clara to break down, and only with the doctor's aid she
continued her concerts. Her father's effort to undermine her good name
extended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side of
the story. But while certain old friends snubbed her, the lies that
were told against her met their truest answer in the integrity of her
whole career, and in the purity and honour of her life. This her own
father was the first and the last ever to slander.
It is noteworthy, in view of the lightness of so many of the love
affairs of the musicians, such as the case of Liszt, who twice eloped
with married women and discussed the formality of divorce afterward,
that through the long and ardent and greatly tormented love story of
the Schumanns there never appears a line in any of their multitudinous
letters which shows or hints the faintest dream of any procedure but
the most upright. Always they encouraged each other with ringing
beautiful changes on the one theme of their lives: Be true to me as I
am true to you. Despair not.
The lawsuit dragged on and on. Wieck exhausted all the devices of
postponement in which the law is so fertile. Schumann found himself the
victim of a pamphlet of direct assault and downright libel, but all
these things were only obstacles to exercise fidelity. The lovers felt
that no power on earth could cut them apart. They began to dream of
their marriage as more certain than the dawn. Schumann writes to
Clara--"_Mein Herzensbrautmaedchen_"--that he wishes her to study and
prepare for his exclusive hearing a whole concert of music, the bride's
concert. She responds that he too must prepare for her music of his
own, for a bridegroom's concert. He writes and begs her to compose some
music and dedicate it to him; he implores her not to ignore her genius.
She writes that she cannot find inspiration; that he is the family's
genius for original work. Always they mingled music with love.
The composer Hiller gave a notable dinner to Liszt, who, after toasting
Mendelssohn, toasted Schumann, "and spoke of me in such beautiful
French and such tender words, that I turned blood-red." January 31,
1840, Schumann had taken up his plan to gain himself a doctor's degree
to match Clara's titles. He had asked a friend to appeal to the
University of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him an
examination to pass; for his qualifications he mentioned modestly:
"My sphere of action as editor on a high-class paper, which has now
existed for seven years; my position as composer and the fact of my
having really worked hard, both as editor and musician."
He began an essay on Shakespeare's relation to music, but without
waiting for this the University of Jena granted him his doctorate on
February 24, 1840, a bit of speed which must have been marvellously
refreshing to this poor victim of so much delay.
The very day the degree was granted, he had decided to take legal steps
for libel against the attack of Wieck's, which had been printed in
pamphlet form and distributed. Toward Wieck he is still pitiful, "The
wretched man is torturing himself; let it be his punishment." The libel
suit was not prosecuted and his anger vanished in the rapture of being
made a doctor of philosophy in flattering terms. As he confesses:
"Of course the first I did was to send a copy to the north for my
betrothed; who is exactly like a child and will dance at being engaged
to a doctor."
In May he went to Berlin and visited Clara's mother for a fortnight;
here he had two weeks' bliss listening to Mendelssohn's singing to
Clara's accompaniment some of the manifold songs that were suddenly
beginning to bubble up from Schumann's heart. It was to his happiness
that he credited this lyric outburst, for he had hitherto written only
instrumental music.
"While I was composing them I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I
were not engaged to such a girl, I could not write such music."
Songs came with a rush from his soul, and he exclaims:
"I have been composing so much that it really seems quite uncanny at
times. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death like a
nightingale."
He begged Clara to come to him and drag him away from his music. Yet
all he wished was to be "where I can have a piano and be near you."
On July 4, 1840, he made her a present of a grand piano as a surprise,
taking her out for a long walk until the piano could be placed in her
rooms and hers taken to his.
It will not be possible to tell here in detail the story of the process
of law, or its many postponements or disappointments. Long ago they had
set their hearts upon marrying on Easter Day, 1840; they had determined
not to permit their father to drive them past this date. But they went
meekly enough under the yoke of the law and passed many a month until
it seemed to the litigants that the condition of waiting for a decision
was to be their permanent manner of life. But suddenly, as Litzmann
says, "there stood Happiness, long besought, on the stoop, and knocked
with tender fingers on the door."
On the 7th of July, 1840, Clara was told the good news that the father
had withdrawn the evidence upon which he based his opposition. The case
was not ended, but the lovers immediately began to hunt for a place to
live. On the sixteenth of July they found a little, but cosy, lodging
on the Insel Strasse. Grief had not yet finally done with them,
however, for Clara must write in her journal:
"I have not for my wedding what the simplest girl in town has, a
trousseau."
On the 1st of August the case reached a stage where the father had but
ten days more to make his final appeal. Worn out and lacking in further
weapons of any kind, he let the occasion pass, and rested on the
decision of the court. Clara went for one last concert tour as Clara
Wieck.
On the 12th of August, the super-deliberate court handed down its
awesome verdict. It was a verdict of reward for the lovers. Since Wieck
had withdrawn his evidence, the verdict was strongly worded in favour
of the lovers. Schumann wrote Clara, "On this day, Clara, three years
ago, I proposed for your hand."
There was no delay in crying the banns, and the lovers went about as in
a dream of rapture.
On September the 12th, between ten and eleven o'clock of a Saturday, at
Schoenefeld, a village near Leipzig, they were married by an old school
friend of Schumann's. On the 13th, a Sunday, and Clara's birthday--her
twenty-first--she was the wife of the man who had for four years made
her possession his chief ambition, and who had loved her better than he
knew, long years before that.
Thus the lovers gained only one day by their lawsuit, for Clara was now
of age. But who could estimate the value of the struggle in
strengthening and deepening their love for each other and their
worthiness for each other? It is the struggle for existence and the
battle with resistance that bring about the evolution of strength in
the physical world, and in the mental. Can we not say the same of the
sentimental?
Would it not be a great pity if there were never such a gymnasium as
parental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall we
not, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychical
culture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has only
this year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to the
first volume of Litzmann's new biography.
On Clara's marriage-day she wrote in her diary a little triumph song of
joy. The wedding had been very simple and--
"There was a little dancing. Though no hilarity reigned, still in every
face there was an inner content; it was a beautiful day, and the sun
himself, who had been hidden for many days, poured his mild beams upon
us in the morning as we went to the wedding, as if he would bless our
union. There was nothing disturbing on this day, and so let it be
inscribed in this book as the most beautiful and the most important day
of my life. A period in my existence has now closed. I have endured
very many sorrows in my young years, but also many joys which I shall
never forget. Now begins a new life, a beautiful life, that life which
one loves more than anything, even than self; but heavy
responsibilities also rest upon me, and Heaven grant me strength to
fulfil them truly and as a good wife. Heaven has always stood by me and
will not cease now. I have always had a great belief in God, and shall
always keep it."
As for the old Wieck, his bitterness must have been almost suicidal. He
did not forgive his daughter even after the birth of her first child,
on September 1, 1841, the year also of Schumann's first symphony. It
was only after a second child was born, in April, 1843, that Schumann
could write to a friend:
"There has been a reconciliation between Clara and old Wieck, which I
am glad of for Clara's sake. He has been trying to make it up with me
too, but the man can have no feelings or he could not attempt such a
thing. So you can see the sky is clearing. I am glad for Clara's sake."
But the cherishing of such a grudge even with such foundation was not
like Schumann, and a year later, from Petersburg, where he had
accompanied Clara on a triumphal tour and where they had the most
cordial recognition from the Czar and Czarina, he addressed old Wieck
as "Dear Father," and described to him with contagious pride the
immense success of his wife. A little later he reminded him that "It is
the tenth birthday Of our _Zeitschrift_, I dare say you remember." And
yet again he writes to him as "Dear Papa," adding "best love to your
wife and children, till we all meet again happily." And so ended the
feud between the two men.
The romance of Robert and Clara did not end at the little village
church, but rather they seemed to issue thence into a very Eden of love
and art commingled. The gush of song from his heart continued, he
dedicated to her his "Myrthen" and collaborated with her in the twelve
songs called "Love's Springtime." As Spitta, his biographer, writes:
"As far as anything human can be imagined, the marriage was perfectly
happy. Besides their genius both husband and wife had simple domestic
tastes and were strong enough to bear the admiration of the world,
without becoming egotistical. They lived for one another and for their
children. He created and wrote for his wife, and in accordance with
their temperament; while she looked upon it as her highest privilege to
give to the world the most perfect interpretation of his works, or at
least to stand as mediatrix between him and his audience, and to ward
off all disturbing or injurious impressions from his sensitive soul,
which day by day became more irritable. Now that he found perfect
contentment in his domestic relations, he withdrew from his intercourse
with others and devoted himself exclusively to his family and work. The
deep joy of his married life, produced the direct result of a mighty
advance in his artistic progress. Schumann's most beautiful works in
the larger forms date almost entirely from the years 1841-5."
He went with her on many of her tours. They even planned an American
trip. Once they were received with a public banquet; these two whom
Reissman calls "the marvellous couple." In his letters there are
always loving allusions to "my Clara," and though he could not himself
play because of his lame finger, she was to him his "right hand." Once
in referring to a prospective concert he even wrote, "We shall play"
such and such numbers.
In 1853 he and Clara went to the Netherlands, where he found his music
well known and himself highly honoured, though they say that the King
of Holland, after praising Clara's playing, turned to Robert and said:
"Are you also musical?" But then one does not expect much from a king.
The musicians knew Schumann's work, and he rejoiced at finding friends
of his art in a far-away country. "But," says Reissman, "this was
destined to be his last happiness."
For the dread affliction which throws a spell of horror across his life
and his wife's devotion, did not long delay in seizing upon him after
his marriage. As early as 1833, the ferocious onslaughts of melancholia
had affected him at long intervals. In 1845, on the doctor's advice, he
moved to Dresden. His trouble seems to have been "an abnormal formation
of irregular masses of bone in the brain." He was afraid to live above
the ground floor, or to go high in any building, lest he throw himself
from the window in a sudden attack. He was subject to moods of long,
and one might almost say violent, silence. In 1845 he described it as
"a mysterious complaint which, when the doctor tries to take hold of
it, disappears. I dare say better times are coming, and when I look
upon my wife and children, I have joy enough."
Later he wrote to Mendelssohn, that he preferred staying at home, even
when his wife went out.
"Wherever there is fun and enjoyment, I must still keep out of the way;
the only thing to be done is hope ... hope ... and I will!"
His wife was still "a gift from above," and his allusions to her were
affectionate to the utmost. In 1846, and again in the summer of 1847,
he suffered a violent melancholia. In these periods he experienced an
inability to remember his own music long enough to write it down. He
saw but few friends, among them the charming widow of Von Weber,
Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn, Joachim, and a few others. Wagner wrote
some articles for Schumann's journal and was highly thought of at
first, but Schumann soon lost sympathy with him; the final sign of the
break-up of his wonderful appreciation of other men's music.
His life was more and more his home, and that more and more a voluntary
prison. In 1853 he presented his wife on her birthday with a grand
piano, and several new compositions. He took great delight in his
family, and could even compose amid the hilarity and noise of his
children. Concerning children he had written in 1845 to Mendelssohn,
whose wife had presented him with a second child, "We are looking
forward to a similar event, and I always tell my wife, 'one cannot have
enough.' It is the greatest blessing we have on earth."
Clara bore him eight children, and at her concerts there was usually a
nurse with a babe in arms waiting for her in the wings. Schumann wrote
three sonatas for his three daughters, and other compositions for them.
His famous "Kinderscenen" were, however, composed before his marriage.
It was in 1853 that his old enthusiasm for new composers broke forth in
his ardent welcome to Brahms (who was then twenty years old), who
became a devoted friend and was of much comfort to Frau Schumann after
Schumann's death. This was not far off, but before life went, he must
suffer a death in life.
Worst of all in that final disintegration of his great soul was the
interest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism. He was even
duped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping. The bliss
of Robert Browning's home was broken up in this same form, of
all-encompassing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was the
spiritualist in this case and resisted Browning's sanity in the matter.
Schumann fancied that he heard spirit voices rebuking and praising him,
and he rose once in the night to write down a theme given him by the
ghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn, on which he afterward wrote
variations which were never finished and were the last pathetic
exercise of his magnificent mind.
He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in his
ears--the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he had
embodied the nightmare in one of his compositions. Clara herself in
later life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of
"sequences" in her head, and Bizet's early death was a release from two
notes that dinned his ears interminably.
Schumann's eccentricities became a proverb. Alice Mangold Diehl tells
of meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model of
meekness and patience. Poor Schumann realised his failings and his own
danger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum. But the idea was
too ghastly to endure.
On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment and
helpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away unobserved, and leaped
from a bridge into the Rhine. He was saved by boatmen and taken home.
He recovered, but it was now thought best that he should be placed
under restraint, and he passed his last two years in a private asylum,
near Bonn. Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends and
wrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair. Under the
weight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey's body in the
Salem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the age
of forty-six he died. Clara, who had been away on a concert tour to
earn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to give
him her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony.
After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live with
her mother. She found it necessary to travel as a performer and
to teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer.
She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as
Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest
ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been
also the perfect helpmeet to his art.
Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it
is to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann
to write this music, and gave him her support under the long
discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his
best ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated his
art, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she had
coaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and his
great messages.
She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memory
personally as well as artistically. She edited his works and published
his letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to make
him known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in his
artistic importance. As she had written in 1871, "the purity of his
life, his noble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never be
fully known except through the communication of his family and
friends."
In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse for
infidelity or selfishness. It seems actually and beautifully true, as
Reissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout as
those of the soul of a pure woman."
Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and
Clara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but those
as well of humanity.
CHAPTER VII.
MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
"Et le cortege chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et des
ah!"--ZOLA, _L'Assommoir_.
And now at the end of all this gossip, to see if it has served any
purpose, and if the multitude of experiences totals up into any
definite result:
Of course, as you were just going to say, he said, "If music be the
food of love." But then you must not fail to remember that in another
play he hedged by saying, "Much virtue in an 'if.'" For music is not
the food of love, any more than oatmeal or watermelons. And yet in a
sense, music is a love-food--in the sense I mean, that there is
love-nourishment in tubes of paint, which can perpetuate your beauty,
my fair readeress; or in ink-bottles all ebon with Portuguese sonnets
and erotic rondeaux; or in tubs of plaster of Paris, or in
bargain-counterfuls of dress goods to add the last word to a woman's
beauty. In such a sense, indeed, there is _materia amorofica_ in music,
for with music one can--or at least one did--show forth the very rhythm
of Tristanic desire, and another portrayed in unexpurgated harmonies
the garden-mood of Faust and Marguerite.
But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions
like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as
there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing
reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to
write fugues and five-finger exercises, and yet more settings of
"Hiawatha," or "_Du bist wie eine Blume_"
Now, there is only one thing easier than a generalisation, and that is
a generalisation in the opposite direction. You can prove anything by
statistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when you
want to. But statistics are like automobiles. Sometimes if you hitch
yourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who put
his fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer.
There was a time when I could have written you an essay on the moral
effect of music, and been convinced, if not convincing. A little later,
I could have done no worse with a thesis to the effect that music is an
immoral influence. But that time is gone now, after a time spent in
gathering material from everywhichway for this book on musicians' love
affairs. For, to repeat, with a few statistics you can prove anything;
with a complete array you can usually prove nothing, or its next-door
neighbour.
The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted to
it. To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count the
pulse of one of those "Oh-I'm-passionately-fond-of-music" maidens who
talk all through even dance-music. Nor would you take for your test one
of those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it reminds
them of the first time they heard it--"that night when Sally Perkins
sang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, now
Mrs. van Van,--or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two years
ago next Sunday."
These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to a
newsboy.
The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls of
the people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, play
it,--and what is worse,--work it.
To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned. What could
have been better for the purpose than to have made them parade before
us in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or in
their letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forth
endlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fetis, Grove, Riemann, and
from their biographies and memoirs innumerable?
A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to find
a unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they have
made, and the music that has made them. Let them pass again, only this
time as soldiers go by at a review--the second time at the
double-quick. Here they come--watch them well.
Leading the rout are those stately or capering figures, who, from being
the great virtuosi of their time, were finally idolised into gods in
the Golden Age, when musical critics had no columns to perpetuate their
iconoclasms in.
Mark him with the stately stride--Apollo, smiting his lyre with a
majesty hardly supported by the seven small notes he could get out of
it. The gossips said he loved Daphne, and madly withal, but she took to
a tree.--No, let the gods pass as they will. It is with men we deal,
not gods.
Note especially the cluster of those wonderful musickers, who, at the
end of the Middle Age, went from Flanders and thereabouts, into Italy
and all around Europe, weaving their Flemish counterpoint like a net
all over the world of music. They seem all to have been marrying men,
some of them super-romantical, others as stodgily domestic and workaday
as any village blacksmith. There is Marc Houtermann, called the Prince
of Musicians. He lived at Brussels, and died there aged forty, and the
same year he was followed to his grave by his musically named Joanna
Gavadia, who knew music well, and who, let us still hope, died of a
broken heart. Cipriano de Rore, De Croes, and Jacques Buus were all
married men, and begot hostages to fortune. Philippe de Monte may or
may not have married; we only know that a pupil of his wrote him a
Latin poem forty-six lines long, and we can only trust that he did not
marry her.
Orlando di Lasso, "one of the morning stars of modern times," whose
music was so beautiful that once at Munich a thunder-storm was
miraculously hushed at the first note of one of his motets, lived a
love-life much like Schumann's, save that he seems to have had no
hard-hearted parents to strengthen and purify his resolve. The only
court he went to, to win her, was the court at Munich, where his Regina
was a maid of honour. She bore him six children, and they lived
ideally, it seems. But his health gave way now and then before his hard
work, and finally, when he had reached his threescore and ten, his wife
came home to find him gone mad, and unable even to recognise her, who
had been at his side for thirty years. She guarded him tenderly, and
strove hard to cheer his last days, but melancholy surrendered him only
to death.
Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote many
wills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet,
yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself a
composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet's
country where her Flemish father took her.
How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wife
conspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger! When
he was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a lady
of the court of Ferrara. Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was a
poetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry and
his music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where she
outlived De Wert some twenty-seven years.
His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects of
music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived
ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part
of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against
poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his
family? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music as
Jacques de Wert?
De Wert had gone to Italy as a boy, and you might be after blaming
those soft Italian skies for his amorous troubles. But then you'll
encounter such a life as that of Palestrina spent altogether in Italy.
He married young. Her name was Lucrezia, and their life seems to have
been one of ideal devotion. She bore him four sons, and stood by him in
all his troubles, brightening the twilight of poverty, adorning that
high noon of his glory, when the Pope himself turned to Palestrina, and
implored him to reform and rescue the whole music of the Church from
its corruptions. It was well that Lucrezia could offer him solace, for
unwittingly she had once brought him his direst distress. When he was
recovered and well, a better post was offered him, and things ran
smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him
broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last
fourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressive
motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia's death.
The finest of them is his setting of the words:
"By the River of Babylon we have set us down and wept,
Remembering Thee, oh, Zion;
Upon the willows we have hung our harps,"
which, as E.H. Pember says, "may well have represented to himself, the
heart-broken composer, mourning by the banks of the Tiber, for the lost
wife whom he had loved so long."
Close upon so noble a life, artistic and personal, comes the career of
Georges de la Hele, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative benefice
to wed the woman he wished.
And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio de
Cotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and was
rebuked publicly for howling indecent refrains to the tunes in church.
Which of these is fairly typical as a musician?
Then comes the most notable man in all English music, Harry Purcell,
who wrote the best love-songs that ever melted the reserve of his race.
He must have been a good husband, and his married life a happy one,
seeing how ardent his wife was for his memory, and how she celebrated
him in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and how
eager she was that the two sons that survived out of their six
children, should be trained to music.
And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses,
bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach?
There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as
makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as
family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking
in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity. He was notoriously immoral,
and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had been
before him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by his
life and preeminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to any
theory about the immoral influences of the art. For surely, if he, who
is generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardly
equalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has an
unsettling effect upon society. And yet there are his great rivals,
Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possible
contrast.
It is neither here nor there, that "Father" Bach left little money and
many children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. and
drifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters to
live upon the charity of the town. It is unfortunate to have to include
among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach,
who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair
family man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed his
father's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He had
family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. So
much for the Bachs.
A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of
Cremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began his
life romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen or
eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who
had been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari,
and they were married on July 4, 1667. In the following December the first
of their six children was born. Two of his sons took up their father's
trade. Both of them died bachelors, and the third son became a priest.
At the age of fifty-eight Francesca died. After a year of widowerhood,
he wedded again; this time, a woman fourteen or fifteen years younger
than he. She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than a
year. His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame,
at Cremona.
The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were the
Guarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs,
though he who called himself "Jesus," was addicted to imprisonment, and
is said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by the
jailer's daughter. She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries.
But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous
and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of
one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg
Friedrich Haendel, who was born the very same year as the much-married
Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The first
snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post
of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years
before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had
left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon
his successor. Haendel could have got the job, if he would have had the
girl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another
musician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain
under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a
beautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he was
in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two
different women. The mother of the first objected to him as a mere
fiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, only
to be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady of
high degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to be
declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that
"rejection implied no lack of merit." Seeing that these things happened
in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic
enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully.
Whatever food music may have been to Haendel's greatness, there was
another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the
symphonic poetry of the cook. For Haendel was almost equally famous both
as a composer and a digester. In this he was rivalled by the father of
French opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that he
spent his early life as a kitchen boy. He led his wife a miserable
existence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excesses
in solid and liquid food. After him came Rameau, who, like Stradivari,
fell in love with a widow while he was still in his teens and she well
out of hers. He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, and
then he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very good
woman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy. But he was
taciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them
almost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time was
Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice,
rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather
sordid and unromantic group.
But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superb
figure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, with
Maria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, but
whose purse-proud father despised him for a musician. The lovers
accepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like a
playright, removed the stern parent in the next act. Gluck flew back
from Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, "with whom to his death he dwelt
in happiest wedlock." She went with him on his triumphal tours, and
spent her wealth in charities. They had no children of their own, but
adopted a niece. The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as he
sang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that she
should be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasure
whether or not his brothers and sisters should have anything at all.
Plainly we should be thinking that music has a purifying, ennobling,
and substantial effect upon society, if only Gluck's friend and
partisan, the successful composer and immortal writer, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, would not intrude upon the picture with his faun-like
paganisms and magnificently shameless "Confessions."
Jostling elbows with him comes Gluck's chiefest rival, Piccinni, one of
the most beautiful characters in history, a man who could wage a mortal
combat in art, without bitterness toward his bitter rivals. He could,
when Gluck died, strive to organise a memorial festival in his honour,
and when his other rival, Sacchini, was taken from the arena by death,
he could deliver the funeral eulogy. This Sacchini, by the bye, was a
reckless voluptuary, who seems never to have married.
Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband. He and his
wife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability,
gave little home concerts, which were events. They and their many
children went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot of
many musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, and
there always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswick
stumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni's door, and found him
rocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at his
coat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment.
Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was the
romance of Mozart.
This goldenhearted genius was a composer at an age when many children
have not commenced to learn their ABC's; he was a virtuoso before the
time when most boys can be trusted with a blunt knife. Kissed and
fondled by great beauties, from the age of five, it is small wonder
that Mozart began to improvise upon the oldest theme in the world
precociously. His first recorded love affair is found in his letters at
the age of thirteen. He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that he
gave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmost
frivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the
"Baesle," he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turn
aside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon the
fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took in
boarders. For this girl, Aloysia Weber, he wanted to give up his own
career as a concert pianist; he wanted to give up the conquest he had
planned of Paris, and devote himself to the training of her voice, to
writing operas for her exploitation, and to journeying in Italy for the
production of these operas and the promulgation of her talents. Yet
after breaking his heart, as he supposed, for the gifted and fickle
woman who became a successful prima donna,--after losing her, he did
that most impossible thing which could never happen in real fiction,
and sought his consolation in the arms and in the heart of Aloysia's
younger sister, who was not especially pretty, and was only modestly
musical. But her name was Constanze, and she lived up to it.
Constanze could always read to him, and tell him stories as he liked to
have her do while he composed, and she could cut up his meat for him
lest in his absent-mindedness he carve off one of his valuable fingers.
And when she was ill, as she frequently was, there could be no gentler
nurse than he. Besides, when winter was upon them, it was no winter of
discontent, for if the fire gave out and the fuel could not be
afforded, could they not always waltz together?
Twice Mozart must make concert tours for money, and twice he came home
poorer than he went, but at least he left the world some of the
gentlest and most hearty love-letters in its literature. When he was at
home, Vienna was busy with anecdotes of his devotion. He was indeed so
good a husband that Constanze could not even withhold forgiveness for
certain occasions when he strayed from the narrow path of absolute
fidelity; for she knew that his heart had its home with her. When he
died, supposedly of malignant typhus, she tried to catch his disease
and die with him, and her health broke so completely that she could not
attend his funeral; and when she was recovered enough to visit the
cemetery, she could not discover, what no man has since found out, in
just what three-deep pauper's grave Mozart was buried.
All in all, in spite of certain ficklenesses in which this immortal
musician has been surpassed by lovers of all walks of life, from
blacksmiths to bishops, music has created one of tenderest, most honest
of all romances.
But then there was a man whose life encompassed Mozart's, as a long
brace encompasses a stave of music. For Joseph Haydn was born
twenty-four years before Mozart, and died eighteen years after him. And
this man's love affairs were of altogether different fabric.
While Mozart died in his poverty at thirty-five, Haydn, dying at
seventy-seven, was worried over the endowment he should leave to a
discarded mistress, whose name, strangely enough, was also Aloysia. And
Haydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way by
proposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with results
how unlike!
Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been
kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest
she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the
priests, who clustered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home.
Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home,
seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan
singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli.
The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of
their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to
"die by request," as Artemus Ward has it.
After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married
again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made
years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension.
Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, _sub rosa_,
with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of
gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been
writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does
not shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity.
Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so
much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in
history.
We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and
deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so
largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the
world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew,
whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more
vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his
letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for
a homelife in a woman's heart.
But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are often
resolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which he
claims to be willing, and at times even glad, to pass his life alone.
We are not justified, then, in taking Beethoven as a man of domestic
inclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt,
and Beethoven had every qualification for driving a wife even madder
than he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswerving
friends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred and
maltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have endured
through the honeymoon.
And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy or
whim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him as
a great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried for
wedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs,--we meet a conflict
of authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder of
chastity, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt.
Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he could
easily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He has
perpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in the
furnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But how
shall we blame or praise music for its effect upon Beethoven's heart,
in the face of the antipodal life of such a fellow bachelor as Haendel?
And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor of
music, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even the
paltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countess
is dismissed by the cautious as a fable. Schubert was a pauper to the
_n_th degree. But he found his joy in the hilarity of the Vienna cafes
with boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimum
of food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never to
have truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them.
There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinction
between the womanless splendour of Haendel's life at court, and the
unilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a difference
also in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicated
thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who,
though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have
loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.
Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been
loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine
Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia
Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his
nocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn under
her feet. She married elsewhere. The Polish Maria Wodzinska was his
next flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons of
Paris at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-old
girl. Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterious
sphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as with
claws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood,
and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release from
the embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming with
her own clammy arms. Every one knows all there is to know about the
Chopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw from
it any inference as to the effect of music?
Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art. With her as nurse, his genius
accomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for a
time. To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment and
solace. But that he would have lived his life differently in any way
had he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or an
idler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner,
the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason to
believe. Is it not the man and the environment rather than the music
that makes such a life what it is?
There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a member
of a long line of musicians. At seventeen he had formed "a tender
connection with a lady of position," whom he lost sight of later and
forgot in the race with fast young noblemen, whose dissipation he
rivalled. A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, and
almost in career. His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishment
which sobered him with the abruptness of a plunge into a stream of ice.
But his gaiety was as irrepressible as Chopin's melancholy, and he gave
Germany some of its most cheerful music. His heart was restless, and
still at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation for
a worthless ballet-girl. Then his affection for a singer and soubrette,
Caroline Brandt, steadied him. After a long period of effort to
establish a firm position they married, and the soubrette became a
"Haus-frau." He was thirty-one, however, before this point was reached,
and the honeymoon consisted of a concert tour.
The glory of his later life fought against the gloom of his disease,
but the ferocious rake had made, as the proverb has it, an ideal
husband and father. His letters to his wife are full of ardour. It was
a tour through England that exhausted Chopin's last strength, and it
was Weber's fate to die alone in London in the midst of eager
preparations and vast hunger to reach his home. He was not quite forty
when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked
libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in the
latter half that he wrote his best music.
The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleaded
even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical home
than that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one in
which family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. Like
Mozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her death
indeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of the
utmost cheer and wholesomeness, revelling in dancing, swimming, riding,
sketching, and billiards; he was idolised in the circle around him,
though his life was not without its enmities. He had many slight
flirtations, but seems to have been even engaged but once, to Cecile
Jeanrenaud, whom he married. His home life was a repetition of that
ideal circle in his father's house. A busier life or a more pleasantly
respectable can hardly be found in the history of men, nor yet a more
truly musical.
A life of similar brilliance and similar musical immersion was that of
Liszt, whose domestic career was nevertheless as different as possible.
A soul of greater generosity, and more zealous altruism in many
respects, it would be hard to find, and yet his relations to women
were, in the conventional view, a colossal and multifarious scandal.
Have we any more right to blame his domestic outrages to the music that
was in him, than to the almost equally intense religious ardour that
fought for him, leading him again and again to seek to enter a
monastery, and finally actually to take orders? Abelard was a
sufficiently tempestuous and irregular lover, yet he was a priest, and
not a musician. Can we then blame harmony and melody for the
humming-bird "amours" of the Abbe Liszt,--for the many women he made
material love to from his early youth,--for the very dubious honesty of
his bearing toward the Comtesse d'Agoult and the Princess Wittgenstein,
with whom he debated the formalities of marriage without hesitating
over the actualities?
There is a strange cluster of domestic infelicities centring about
Liszt. The Comtesse d'Agoult loved him so ardently that she braved the
world for him, driving even her complacent husband to divorce her; but
even then, though they lived together, Liszt did not marry her. He even
brought George Sand, the ex-mistress of so many men, including Liszt
himself, to live at the house with the comtesse, who had borne him
three children out of wedlock. One of these children became the wife of
Hans von Buelow, who was driven to divorce her that she might marry his
teacher, Richard Wagner, whose first wife had endured twenty-five years
of his irregularities in everything, except poverty, and who separated
from him during the last five years of her life.
Shall we blame all this to music, and if so, shall we say that music
has atoned sufficiently in the devotion of Wagner and his second wife
to each other, and their lofty theories of art? And in any case, how
shall we explain the influence of music in the life of Wagner's rival
for supremacy, Johannes Brahms, a confirmed bachelor; or his other
contemporary, Tschaikovski, who, after a normal love affair with a
singer, Desiree Artot, who jilted him, eventually married a girl by
whom he seemed to have been deeply loved, without feeling any return?
He claimed to have explained to the enamoured girl that he would marry
her if she wished, but that he could not love her. On these terms she
accepted him, and the bridegroom endured all the agonies of heart
ordinarily ascribed to bartered brides. A burlesque honeymoon of a week
was soon followed by a separation. Tschaikovski regarded his wife with
a horror bordering on insanity, finding what little consolation life
had for him in the devotion of a widow, who furnished him liberally
with funds and admiration, with an affection which, for lack of better
information, we can only call, for lack of a better word, Platonic.
There are other musicians whose private affairs I need not repeat here,
and yet others' that I have not poked into. There is no lack of curious
entanglements, especially in the matter of the men and women who have
played upon the human voice, but we have surely collected enough
material for forming a judgment, especially when we have turned an
additional glance upon the life of one other composer.
Now, the influence of music might be modified beyond recognition by the
fact that one of the lovers might not be musical; but surely, when both
man and woman are professional musicians, there can be no doubt of the
governing power of music. In recent musical history there is one
eminent composer who married a woman also prominent in music. In fact,
Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took up
music as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a place
among the major gods of creative art. Every one knows how he began to
love Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and she
entering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Their fidelity through
the storm and stress of their courtship, their lifelong sympathy and
collaboration in conserving a humanly perfect home, and in achieving a
dual immortality, both as lovers and as musicians--these certainly
indicate music as a solidifying and enriching force in society.
And now, finally, in the procession that has filed past you, you have
seen almost every imaginable form of love and lover, of husband and
Lothario, or woman-hater. There have been cool-blooded bachelors like
Haendel, Schubert, and Brahms; there have been passionate pilgrims like
Chopin, Beethoven, and Liszt, who loved many women, and married none.
There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment,
such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck,
Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said
after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years'
honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live. There have been the
unhappily wed, who, through the fault of themselves, or their wives,
found and made misery at home, and sought nepenthe elsewhere, such as
Haydn, Berlioz, and Tschaikovski. There have been married lives of
mixed nature, neither failure nor success, such as the careers of
Lully, Rameau, Stradivari, and Wagner.
If any one lives who could extract from this medley a theory as to the
effect of music upon the human heart,--a theory that will satisfy
himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,--he is welcome
to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to
trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism:
if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on
life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in
domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a
moral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautiful
lives that have ever bloomed upon earth. It is, after all, a matter of
time, tide, and temperament. If a man of amorous nature happens to lead
a life of much leisure, his idle mind will turn one way; and if the
tide of opportunity concur, he will be dissipated, whether he be
composer, clergyman, business man, bravo, soldier, sailor, carpenter,
king, plumber, poet, pope, or peasant.
The long and the short of it is, perhaps, that music, being a universal
art, like a universal watch-key, will set going the complicated cogs
and springs of every soul and yet not regulate or assure its rhythm.
Music stimulates and satisfies the mind in any of its whims, and you
can tune it to a softly chanted prayer, or to a dance orgy; to a hymn
of exultation, or a tinkling serenade; a kindergarten song, to the
bloodthirst of armies; to voluptuous desires that cannot or dare not be
worded, or to raptures distilled of every human dross; to cynical
raillery, or the very throb of a young lover's heart; to the hilarity
of a drinking song, or the midnight elegies of ineffable despair. How
is such an art as this to compel, or to deny anything or anybody?
Musicians, then, are only ordinary clay, who happened to make music,
instead of other things of more or less beauty or value. They are
every-day puppets of circumstance and of inner and outer environment,
who might have been happier, and might have been unhappier, with the
women they wed or did not wed, had those women died younger, or lived
longer--or with other women, or with none at all.
THE END.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
_Of Books Consulted and Cited in This Work_
* * * * *
BAINI (GIUSEPPE).
Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di G. Pierluigi da
Palestrina. 2 vols. Rome, 1828.
BEAUFORT (RAPHAEL LEDOS DE).
Franz Lizst. The Story of his Life. Boston, 1887.
BEETHOVEN'S LETTERS. See Nohl.
BELART (HANS).
Richard Wagner in Zuerich (1849-1859). 2 vols. Leipzig. 1901.
BELLAIGNE (CAMILLE).
Portraits and Silhouettes of Musicians. Translated by Ellen Orr. New
York, 1897.
BELLASIS (Edward).
Cherubini. Memorials illustrative of his life. London. 1874.
BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).
Lettres entre de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur Haydn,
suivees d'une vie de Mozart et de considerations sur Metastasio. Pub.
1814, first under the pseudonym _L.A. Bombet_, and when exposed as a
steal from Carpani (_q. v_.) republished under the pseudonym Doctor
Stendahl in 1817. Published in English by W. Gardiner, 1820.
BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).
Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase. Par de Stendahl (Pseudonym).
Nouvelle ed. Paris, 1854.
BITTER (CARL II.).
Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brueder. 2
vols. Berlin, 1868.
BONNET (JACQUES).
Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'a
present. Paris, 1715.
BOURDELOT (Pierre), ABBE.
Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'a
present. Et en quoi consiste sa beaute. 4 vols. in 1. Amsterdam, 1725.
BRAY (MRS. ANNA ELIZA).
Handel, his life personal and professional. With thoughts on sacred
music. A sketch. 2 vols. London, 1857.
BUeLOW (M. VON).
The early correspondence of Hans von Buelow. Edited by his widow.
Translated by C. Bache. 5 vols. London, 1900.
BUSBY (MRS. THOS. D.).
Concert Room and Orchestra. Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient
and Modern. 4 vols. London, 1825.
CARPANI (GIUSEPPE).
Le Haydine. Lettere sur la vita e le opera del celebre Maestro Giuseppe
Haydn. Milano, 1812. Also in French, translated by Dominique Mondo, and
in English. Paris, 1837. See also Beyle, _supra_.
CHAMBERLAIN, HOUSTON STEWARD.
Richard Wagner. Translated from the German by G.A. Hight. London, 1900.
CHRYSANDER (FR.).
G.F. Haendel. 3 vols. 1858.
CLARKE (A. MASON).
Dictionary of Fiddlers. London, 1895.
CLAYTON (ELLEN CREATHORNE).
Queens of Song. Being memoirs of some of the most celebrated female
vocalists, who have appeared on the lyric stage, etc. 2 vols. London,
1863.
COXE (WILLIAM).
Anecdotes of George Frederick Haendel, and John C. Smith. With select
pieces of music composed by J.C. Smith, never before published.
Published anonymously. London, 1799.
CROWEST (FREDERICK).
A Book of Musical Anecdote from every available source. 2 vols. London,
1878.
CROWEST (FREDERICK).
Verdi; Man and Musician. London.
CUMMINGS (W.H.).
Purcell. London, 1881.
DEITERS (HERMANN).
Johannes Brahms. A biographical sketch. Translated, with additions, by
Rosa Newmarch. London, 1878.
DELMOTTE (H.).
Notice biographique sur Roland Delattre. Paris, 1836. Translated into
German by S.W. Dehn. Berlin, 1837.
DIEHL (ALICE MANGOLD).
Musical Memories. London, 1897.
DIETRICH (ALBERT) and J.V. WIDMANN.
Recollections of Johannes Brahms. Translated by Dora E. Hecht. London,
1893.
EDWARDS (H. SUTHERLAND).
The Life of Rossini. London, 1869.
ELLIS (WILLIAM ASHTON).
Richard Wagner. Letters to Wesendonck _et al_. London, 1899.
ELSON (L.C.)
Great Composers and Their Work. Boston, 1898.
ENGEL (CARL).
Musical Myths and Facts. 2 vols. London, 1876.
FETIS (F.J.)
Biographic universelle des Musiciens et Bibliographic generale de la
Musique. 8 vols. Paris, 1875, 2d ed.
FERRIS (GEO.T.)
The Great Violinists and Pianists. New York, 1888.
FINCK (HENRY T.).
Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. New York, 1887.
FINCK (HENRY T.).
Wagner and His Works. 2 vols. New York, 1893.
FINCK (HENRY T.).
Chopin and Other Musical Essays. New York, 1899.
GEHRING (FRANZ).
Mozart. London, 1883.
GINGUENE (PIERRE LOUIS).
Notice sur la vie et les oeuvrages de Nicolas Piccinni. Paris, 1800.
GLASENAPP (CARL FR.).
Richard Wagner's Leben und Wirken. 2 vols. Cassel, 1877. English
version (enlarged) by Wm. Ashton Ellis. 3 vols. London, 1900-1902.
GOUNOD, CHARLES.
Autobiographical Reminiscences. London.
GRIBBLE (FRANCIS).
Rousseau's First Love. _Cosmopolis Magazine_, N.Y., Nov., 1898.
GRIESINGER (GEORG AUGUST).
Biographische Notizen ueber Joseph Haydn. Leipzig, 1870.
GROVE, GEORGE.
A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 4 vols. London, 1890.
HARDY (E.J.).
The Love Affairs of Some Famous Men. By the author of "How to be Happy,
though Married." New York, 1897.
HAWEIS (REV. H.R.).
Music and Morals. London, 1871.
HAWEIS (REV. H.R.).
My Musical Life. London, 1884.
HAWKINS (SIR JOHN).
A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. London, 1776.
HEATH (CHARLES).
Beauties of the Opera and Ballet. London.
HENDERSON (W.J.).
Richard Wagner, His Life and His Dramas. New York, 1901.
HENSEL (SEBASTIAN).
The Mendelssohn Family, 1729-1847. Translated by C. Klingmann. 2 vols.
New York, 1882.
HOESICK (FERDINAND).
Chopin. Sein Leben und sein Schaffen. Warsaw, 1903.
HOLMES (EDWARD).
Life of Mozart, including his correspondence. New York, 1845.
HUBBARD (ELBERT).
Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians. In pamphlets. East
Aurora, N.Y., serially.
HUEFFER, FRANCIS.
The Troubadours. London, 1878.
HUNEKER (JAMES).
Mezzotints in Modern Music. New York, 1899.
HUNEKER (JAMES).
Chopin: The Man and His Music. New York, 1900.
HUNEKER (JAMES).
The Melomaniacs. New York, 1902.
IMBERT (HUGUES).
Portraits et Etudes. Lettres inedites de Georges Bizet. Paris, 1894.
JAHN (Otto).
Life of Mozart. Translated by P.D. Townsend. 3 vols. Original edition,
Leipzig, 1856.
JANSEN (F.G.).
The Life of Robert Schumann, told in his letters. Translated by May
Herbert. 2 vols. London, 1890.
JULLIEN (ADOLPHE).
Wagner in Paris. 1849. Article in Paris _Journal des Debats._
Translated in New York _Musical Courier_, 1902.
JULLIEN (ADOLPHE).
Richard Wagner. His Life and Works. Translated by Florence P. Hall. 2
vols. Boston, 1892.
KARAJAN (TH.G. VON).
J. Haydn in London. Vienna, 1861.
KARASOWSKI (MORITZ).
Frederic Chopin, His Life, Letters, and Works. Translated by Emily
Hill. 2 vols. London, 1879.
KARLOWICZ. See _Revue Musicale_.
KASHKIN (N.).
Reminiscences of Peter Iljitsch Tschaikovski. Moscow, 1897.
KOBBE (GUSTAVE).
Wagner's Life and Works. New York, 1890.
KREHBIEL (HENRY EDWARD).
Music and Manners in the Classical Period. New York, 1898.
LAHEE (HENRY C.)
Famous Singers of To-day and Yesterday. Boston, 1898.
LA MARA (Pseudonym of MARIE LIPSIUS).
Franz Liszt's Briefe. Baende. Leipzig, 1893-1899.
LA MARA (Pseudonym of MARIE LIPSIUS).
Letters of Franz Liszt. Collected and edited by "La Mara." Translated
by Constance Bache. 2 vols. London, 1894.
LENZ (W. VON).
The Great Piano Virtuosos of Our Time from Personal Acquaintance.
Translated by M.R. Baker. New York, 1899.
LERNE (EMMANUEL DE).
Amoureux et grands Hommes. Paris, 1854.
LISZT (FRANZ).
Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. See Wagner.
LISZT (FRANZ).
Life of Chopin. Translated by Martha Walter Cook. Philadelphia, 1863.
LITZMANN, BERTHOLD.
Clara Schumann, Ein Kuenstlerleben nach Tagebuechern und Briefen. 2 vols.
Vol. I., Leipzig, 1902.
MAINWARING (DOCTOR).
Memoirs of Haendel. Published anonymously. London, 1760.
MATTHEW (JAS. E.)
The Literature of Music. London, 1896.
MATTIEU.
Roland de Lattre. Mons, 1840.
MENDEL (HERMANN).
Giacomo Meyerbeer. Eine Biographie. Berlin, 1868.
MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY (FELIX).
Letters of. Edited by Paul and Carl Mendelssohn. Translated by Lady
Wallace. New York, 1864.
MILLS (CHARLES).
History of the Crusades. London.
MIROMENIL (M.C. DE).
Le genie de l'amour ou dissertation sur l'amour profane et religieux et
de son influence sur les sciences et les arts. Paris, 1807.
MOERIKE (EDWARD).
Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag. (A novel.) Stuttgart, 1856.
MOZART'S LETTERS. See Nohl.
NEWMARCH (ROSA).
Tschaikovski. London, 1880.
NIECKS (FREDERICK).
Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician. 2 vols. London, 1888.
NIGGLI (A.).
Robert Schumann. Sein Leben und Seine Werke. For this and other
biographies see Waldersee.
NISSEN (GEORG NIKOLAUS VON).
Biographie W.A. Mozart's. Nach dessen Tode herausgegeben von Constanze,
Witwe von Nissen, frueher Witwe Mozart. Leipzig, 1828.
NlEMTSCHEK (FRANZ).
Leben des K.K. Kapellmeister's Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. Prag, 1798.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Beethoven's Letters. Translated by Lady Wallace. 2 vols. London, 1867.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Beethoven Depicted by His Contemporaries. Translated by E. Hill.
London.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Life of Wagner. Translated by Geo. P. Upton. Chicago, 1892.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Life of Haydn. Translated by Geo. P. Upton. Chicago, 1883.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Musiker-Briefe. Translated by Lady Wallace, 2d ed. London, 1867.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
The Letters of W.A. Mozart. Translated by Lady Wallace. 2 vols. New
York, 1866.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Neue Briefe Beethovens. Stuttgart, 1867.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Ludwig Beethoven. Reminiscences of the Artistic and Home Life of the
Artist. Translated by A. Wood. London (undated).
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Life of Liszt. Translated by G.P. Upton. Chicago.
NOHL (LUDWIG).
Life of Mozart. Translated by G.J. Taylor.
NORTH (ROGER).
Memoirs of Musick. Edited by E.F. Rimbault. Extra illustrated. London,
1846.
NOTTEBOHM (GUSTAV).
Mozartiana. Leipzig, 1880.
PERL (HENRY).
Richard Wagner in Venedig. Augsburg, 1883.
POHL (C.F.).
Mozart und Haydn in London. 2 vols. in 1. Vienna, 1867.
POHL (C.F.).
Joseph Haydn. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1828.
POLKO (ELISE).
Musical Sketches. Translated by Fanny Fuller. Philadelphia, 1864.
POLKO (ELISE).
Reminiscences of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Translated by Lady
Wallace. New York, 1869.
PRAEGER (FERDINAND).
Wagner as I Knew Him. London.
RAMANN (L.).
Franz Liszt, Artist and Man. 1811-1840. Translated by E. Cowdrey. 2
vols. London, 1882.
RAU (HERBERT).
Mozart. Ein Kuenstlerleben. (A novel.) Frankfurt, 1858.
REISSMANN (AUGUST).
Joseph Haydn, sein Leben und seine Werke. Berlin, 1879.
REISSMANN (AUGUST).
Christoph Willibald von Gluck, sein Leben und seine Werke. Berlin,
1882.
REISSMANN (AUGUST).
The Life and Works of Robert Schumann. Translated by A.L. Alger.
London, 1886.
REVUE MUSICALE, LA.
Paris 1903. (F. Chopin. Souvenirs inedites, publies par M. Karlowicz.)
RIEMANN (HUGO).
Dictionary of Music. New edition. Translated by J.S. Shedlock. London
(undated).
RODET (EDOUARD).
Lully, homme d'affairs, proprietaire et musicien, Paris, 1891.
ROUSSEAU (JEAN JACQUES).
Les Confessions.
RUBINSTEIN (ANTON).
Autobiography, 1829-1889. Translated by A. Delano. London.
RUNCIMAN (JOHN F).
Old Scores and New Readings. London, 1899.
"SAND, GEORGE" (Pseudonym of AURORE DUDEVANT).
Histoire de ma Vie. Paris.
SATTLER (HEINRICH).
Mozart. Erinnerungen an sein Leben und Wirken nebst Bemerkungen uber
dessen Bedeutung fuer die Tonkunst. Lagenfalza, 1856.
SCHINDLER (A).
Life of Beethoven. Edited by Moscheles. 1841. Translated by H. Dowing.
London.
SCHMID (ANTON).
Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, dessen Leben und
tonkuenstlerisches Wirken. Leipzig, 1854.
SCHMIDT (LEOPOLD).
Joseph Haydn. Berlin, 1898.
SCHOELCHER (V.).
The Life of Handel. New York, 1875.
SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
Music and Musicians. Essays and Criticisms. Translated by Fanny R.
Ritter. 1st and 2d series. London, 1877-1880.
SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
Early Letters. Published by his wife in 1885. Translated by May
Herbert. London, 1888.
SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
The Life of Robt. Schumann, told in his Letters. Translated by May
Herbert. London.
SCHURE (EDOUARD).
Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner. Paris, 1900.
SPITTA (PHILIPP).
J.S. Bach. Translated by Clara Bell, and J.A. Fuller Maitland. 3 vols.
London, 1884.
SPOHR (Louis).
Autobiography. Translated from the German. London.
STRATTON (STEPHEN S.)
Mendelssohn. London, 1901.
TAYLOR (SEDLEY). The Life of J.S. Bach. Cambridge,
1897.
TENGER (MARIAM).
Recollections of Countess Theresa Brunswick (Beethoven's "Unsterbliche
Geliebte"). Translated by G. Russell. London, 1898.
TOWNSEND (PAULINE D.).
Joseph Haydn. New York, 1884.
TSCHAIKOVSKI (MODESTE).
Das Leben Peter Iljitsch Tschaikovski. Translated into German by P.
Juon. Leipzig, 1902-3.
ULUIBUISHEV, or ULIBISCHEFF (ALEXANDER).
Mozart's Leben und Werke. 4 vols. Stuttgart, 1859.
UPTON (GEORGE P.).
Woman in Music. Chicago, 1849.
VAN DAM.
Great Amours. 2 vols. New York.
VAN DER STRAETEN (EDMOND).
La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siecle. 8 vols. Brussels,
1867-88.
VAN DER STRAETEN (EDMOND).
Les Menestrels aux Pays-Bas du 13e-18e siecle. Brussels, 1878.
WAGNER.
Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. Translated into English by Francis
Hueffer. New York, 1889.
WALDERSEE (PAUL GRAF VON).
Sammlung Musikalischer Vortraege. 5 vols. Leipzig, 1879-1884.
WALDERSEE (PAUL GRAF VON).
Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, und die gesammte Ausgabe seiner Werke.
1884.
WASIELEWSKI (W.J. VON).
Life of Robert Schumann. Translated by A.L. Alger. Boston, 1871.
WEBER (BARON MAX MARIA VON).
Carl Maria von Weber. The Life of an Artist. Translated by J.P.
Simpson. 2 vols. London, 1865.
WILLEBY (CHARLES FRANCOIS).
Frederick Chopin. London, 1892.
WURZBACH.
Mozart-Buch. Wien, 1869.
INDEX
Abelard, Pierre
Adonis
AEsculapius
Agoult, Comte d'
Agoult, Marie Sophie, Comtesse d'
Amati, family of violin-makers
Anfossi, Pasquale
Anhalt-Koethen, Prince of
Anne, Queen
Aphrodite
Apollo
Arco, Count
Arion
Arne, Dr. Thomas
Arnim, Bettina Brentano von
Artignon, D'
Artot, Desiree
Auber, D.F.E.
Aurnhammer
Austen, Jane
Bacchylides
Bach, Johann Ambrosius
Bach, Johann Christoph
Bach, Johann Michael
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Bach, Karl Philip Emmanuel
Bach, Maria Barbara
Bach, Regina
Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann
Baillot, Pierre M.F.
Baini, Abbate Giuseppe
Balfe, Michael William
Banck, Carl
Baranius, Henrietta
Barcinska, Isabella
Barezzi, Margarita
Bargiel, Madame, mother of Clara Wieck
Bargiel, Woldemar
Barisani, Doctor
Barre, Leonardo
Bartalozzi, Madame
Beard, John
Beatrice (Portinari), Dante's muse
Becker, Konstantin J.
Beethoven, Ludwig von
Behrens, S.
Belart, Hans
Belderbusch, Count von
Bellington, Mrs.
Bellini, Vincenzo
Belonda, Fraeulein von
Bennett, Sterndale
Berenclow
Beriot, Charles Auguste de
Berlioz, Hector
Berlioz, Madame
Betz, Franz
Beyle, Marie Henri
Bianchi, Antonia
Bizet, Georges
Blackburn, Vernon
Blahetka, Leopoldine
Blow, John
Boetius, Anicius
Boehler, Christine
Boieldieu, Francois A.
Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas
Bonnet, J.
Bononcini, Giovanni M.
Bora, Catherina von
Boswell, James
Bourdelot
Boutmy, Josse _or_ Jodocus
Boutmy, Laurent
Brahms, Johannes
Brandt, Carolina
Bray, Mrs
Brebos, Gilles
Brebos, Jean
Brenner, Genofeva von
Breunig, Eleanora von
Breunig, Stephan von
Bridgetower, George Augustus Polgreen
Broschi, Carlo _(see_ Farinelli)
Browne, Countess von
Browning, Robert and Elizabeth
Brunetti, Theresa
Brunswick, Charlotte, Countess von
Brunswick, Therese von
Brutus, Marcus Junius
Bull, Dr. John
Buelow, Cosima von _(see also_ Wagner)
Buelow, Daniela von
Buelow, Hans von
Buelow, Isolde von
Buononcini _(see_ Bononcini)
Burney, Charles
Buus, Jacques
Buxtehude, Dietrich
Byrd, William
Byron, Lord
Cabestanh, Guillem de
Caccini, Francesca
Calina
Cannabich, Rosa
Capra, Francesca
Carlyle, Thomas
Carpani, G
Carus, Professor
Czetwertynska, Ludvika, Duchess
Charles X., King
Charpentier, Madame
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Cherubini, M.L.Z.C.S.
Chopin, Frederick
Chopin, Louise, his sister
Chrysander, Fr.
Cimarosa, Domenico
Clementi, Muzio
Cleopatra
Closset, Doctor
Colbran, Isabella
_Copperfield, David_
_Cordelia_
Corelli, Marie
Corey, Giles
Cornaro, Cardinal
Cornelius, Peter von
Coronis, nymph
Cotes, Ambrosio de
Coucy, Chatelain Regnault de
Couwenhoven, Adrien
Coxe, Dr. William
Cristofori, B.
Croes, H.J. de
Crowest, F.W.
Cummings, W.H.
Cupid
Custine, Countess de
Cuzzoni, Francesca
Dante
Daphne
David
David, Leah
Delmotte
Delorme, Marian
Desmarets, Henri
Despres, Josquin
Devrient, Wilhelmine Schroeder
Dickens, Charles
Diderot, Denis
Diehl, Alice Mangold
Dies, Albert K.
Droszdick, Baron von
Dubufe, Edward
Dubufe, Guillaume
"Duchess," The
Dudevant, Aurore (_see_ Sand, George)
Du Maurier, George
_Dunciad_
Eck, Francis
Egeria, nymph
"Eliot, George"
Erard, The family
Erdoedy, Countess Marie
Ertmann, Baroness
Espinosa, Juana de
Esterhazy, Prince
Esterhazy, Carolina
Estrades, Abbe d'
Farinelli (properly Carlo Broschi)
Faustina (_see_ Hasse)
Fechner, Clementine
Ferdinand VII. of Spain
Ferrabosco, Domenico
Fetis, Fr. J.
Field, John
Filaretovna, Nadeschda
Finck, Henry T.
Flavigny, Comte
Fleury, Duchesse de,
Flotow, Fr. von
Fontana
Fortini
Fournier, Madame
Franci, Luigi
Franck, Cesar
Franz, Robert
Fricken, Ernestine von
Fumaroli, Judge
Fumetti, Maria Anna
Fuerstenau, A.B.
Galatea
Galilei, Galileo
Gallenberg, Count
Garella, Lydia
Gastoldi, Doctor
Gautier, Theophile
Gavadia, Joanna
Geminiani, Francesco
Genast, Doris
Genzinger, Maria Anna Sabina von
Giannatasio
Giannatasio, Fanny del Rio
Ginguene, Pierre Louis
Giorgione, Giorgio
Gladovska, Constantia
Glasenapp, Karl Fr.
Gleichenstein, I.
Gleichenstein, Mathilde, Baroness
Glinka, Michail Ivanovitch
Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Gounod, Charles
Grabowski, Joseph
Gregorius
Grieg, Edvard
Griesinger, G.A.
Gretry, Andre E.M.
Gretry, Lucille
Grimm, Baron
Grob, Theresa
Grove, Sir George
Guabaelaraoen, Madalena
Guadagnini, J.B.
Guarnieri, Andreas, Pietro, and Giuseppe
Gublitz
Guicciardi, Giulietta
Halevy, Genevieve
Hamilton, Lady Emma
Haendel, Georg Friedrich
Hanmann, Fraeulein von
Haslinger, Tobias
Hasse, J.A. and Faustina
Hawkins, Sir John
Haydn, Joseph
Heim, Emilie
Heine, Heinrich
Helen of Troy
Heloise, Abbess
Henderson, W.J.
Hensel, Fanny
Herbert, Lady Henrietta
Herold, L.J.F.
Herschel, Fr. Wm.
Hiller, Ferdinand
Hinrichs, Marie _(see_ Franz)
Hodges, Mrs.
Hoesick, Ferdinand
Hofdaemmel
Hohenlohe, Cardinal
Honrath, Jeannette d'
Hortensia
Houtermann, Marc
Howard, Lady Elizabeth
Hubbard, Elbert
Huber, Fraeulein
Hueffer, Francis
Hugo, Victor and Madame
Hummel, J.N.
Humphries, Pelham
Huneker, James
Hunter, Mrs. John
_Ibbetson, Peter_
Irisi
Ivanof, Maria Petrovna
Ivanovska, Carolina von
Jahn, Otto
James, Henry
Jeanrenaud, Cecile Sophie Charlotte
Jeanrenaud, Madame
Jennings, Catherine
Joachim, Josef
Jonah
Julius III., Pope
Kablert, August
Karajan, T.G., Ritter von
Karasovski, M.
Karlovics
Kashkin, N.
Kayser, Hofrath von
Keats, John
Keglevitch, Babette, Countess von
Keiser, Reinhard
Keiserin, Mile
Keller
Keller, Anna
Kind, J.F.
Kinsky, Countess von
Klopstock, Fr. G.
Koch, Barbara
Koechel, Ludwig
Koerner, Th.
Koler, Katharina
Koschak, Frau Marie L. Pachler
Krause, Justice Counsellor
Krehbiel, Henry Edward
Kreisler, Reinhard
Kreutzer, Conradin
Kreutzer, Rudolphe
Kurer, Clara von
Lablache, Madame (widow of Boucher)
Lacombe, Paul
"La Mara," (_see_ Bibliography)
Laidlaw, Mrs.
Lambert, Madeline
Lamennais, Abbe
Lampi, painter
Lang, Margarethe
Lang, Peppi
Lange,
Laprunarede, Adele, Countess de
Lassus, Ferdinand de
Lassus, Orland di
Lattre, Roland de (_see_ Lassus)
_Lear, King_
Lefebure-Wely, Louis J.A.
Leitgeb, Madame
_Lelia_
_Leoni, Leone_
_Leporello,_
Lichnovsky, Prince Carl
Lichnovsky, Countess
Lichtenstein, Princess
Lichtenstein, Karl A. von
"Liddy"
Lincoln, Abraham
List, Emily
Liszt, Blandine
Liszt, Daniel
Liszt, Franz
Litzmann, Berthold
_Lorelei_
Lortzing, Albert
Lucifer
Ludvig, King of Bavaria
Lully, Jean Baptiste de
Luther, Martin
Mafleuray, Clotilda
Mainwaring, Doctor
Malfatti, Therese von
Malibran, Maria Felicita
Malibran, New York merchant
Manfrotti, Eliade
Manfrotti, Leonora
Marcello, Benedetto
Marcellus, Pope
Marie Antoinette, Queen
_Mark, King_
Marlborough, The Duchess of
Marmontel, Antoine Fr.
Marschner, Heinrich
Mattheson, Johann
Matuszinski
Maupin, Mile, de
Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria
Maximilian, Emperor
Maximilienne, Princess
Mary, Queen of Scots
Meck, Frau von
Medici family
Medici, Lorenzo dei
Mendelssohn, Carl
Mendelssohn, Felix Bartholdy
Mendelssohn, Marie
Mendelssohn, Paul
Mercury
Merelli
Mermann, Doctor
Meyerbeer, Giacomo
Meyers
Michelangelo
Milder, Anna
Miljukova, Antonina Ivanovna
Milton, John
Moliere
Molza, Tarquinia
Mombelli, family
Monteverde, Claudio
Montpensier, Mlle. de
Moretto, Count de
Moriolles, Countess Alexandra
Moscheles, Ignaz
Mosson, Minna
Mozart, Anna or "Nannerl"
Mozart, Carl
Mozart, Leopold
Mozart, Marianne
Mozart, Wolfgang
Mueller, Elise
Musset, Alfred de
"Nanni"
"Nanny"
Negri, Christine
Neimtschek
Nelson, Horatio, Admiral
Newmarch, Rosa
Newton, Sir Isaac
Niecks, Frederick
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nissen, George Nicolaus von
Nohl, Louis (or Ludvig)
Nossig, Alfred
Odeschalchi, Princess
Olivier, Emile
Orpheus
Pachler, Marie
Paderewski
Padilla y Ramos
Paer, Ferdinando
Paesiello, Giovanni
Paganini, Achille
Palestrina, Angelo
Palestrina, Doralice
Palestrina, Giovanni Pier Luigi
Palestrina, Igino
Palestrina, Lucrezia
Palestrina, Rodolfo
Palestrina, Silla
Pan
Pasetti
Paul IV., Pope
Pecht, painter
Pelissier, Olympe
Pember, E.H.
Pergin, Joseph
Pergin, Marie Anna
Pergolesi, G.B.
Peri, Jacopo
Perl, Henry
Pepys, Samuel
Peyermann, Frau
Pfeiffer, Marianne
Philidor, Fr., Andre Danican
Piccinni, Madame
Piccinni, Nicola
Pitoni, G.O.
Pius IX., Pope
Planer, Wilhelmine or Minna
Plater, Countess
Plato
Playford, John
Poe, Edgar Allen
Pohl, Louis
Pohl, Richard
Poliziano, Angelo
Polko, Elise
Polovna, Marie, Grand Duchess of Weimar
Polzelli, Anton
Polzelli, Luigia
Potocka, Countess
Praeger, Fd. C. Wm.
Prometheus
Prudent, Emile
Psyche
Purcell, Edw.
Purcell, Frances
Purcell, Henry
Purcell, Mary Peters
Pygmalion
Rackerman, Louis
Raff, Joachim
Ramann, Lina
Rameau, Jean Philippe
Rameau, Marie Louisa Mangot
Raphael, painter
Ravina, Jean Henri
Reade, Charles
Reinken, Johann Adam
Reissman, August
Reissman, Henrietta
Reynolds, Sir Joshua
Ricci or Rizzio, David
Richard III.
Richardson, Samuel
Richter, Hans
Richter, Jean Paul
Riemann, Hugo
Ries, Ferdinand
Riese, dancing master
Rinucini, Ottavio
Ritter, Julie
Rocheaud, De
Rochis
Rockstro, Wm. S.
Roeckel, Elizabeth, wife of Hummel
Roeckel, Joseph L.
Rollet, Adele Elise
_Romeo_
Rore, Ciprien de
Rossi, Count
Rossi, Countess (_see_ Sontag)
Rossini, Gioacchino A.
Roth
Rousseau, Jean Jacques
Rubinstein, Anton
Rubinstein, Nikolai
Rudel, Geoffrey
Rue, Pierre de la
Runciman, John F.
Ruskin, John
Sacchini, Antonio M.G.
Salieri, Antonio
"Sand, George"
Sarti, Giuseppe
Saul
Savoy, Duchess of
Sayn-Wittgenstein (_see_ Wittgenstein)
Scarlatti, Alessandro
Scarlatti, Domenico
Schanzer, Marie
Schauroth, Delphine von
Scheffer, Ary
Scheidler, Dorette
Schieferdecker, J.C.
Schiller, Friedrich
Schillingfurst-Hohenlohe, Prince Constantin
Schindler, Anton
Schmidt, Anton
Schober, Franz von
Schoelcher, Victor
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Schroeter, Corona
Schroeter, Johann Samuel
Schroeter, Mrs. R.
Schubert, Franz
Schumann, Clara (_see also_ Wieck)
Schumann, Robert
Schure, Edouard
Scott, Sir Walter
Sebald, Amalia
Senesino (rightly Francesco Bernardi)
Seranzo, Paolo
Seyfried, Ignaz X. von
Shakespeare
Sibilla, Vicenza (_see_ Piccinni)
Slovaki, Julius
Smetana, Friedrich
Smith, J.C.
Smithson, Miss
Socrates
Sontag, Henrietta
Souvaroff, Prince
Spaun, Baron
Spitta, Aug. Ph.
Spohr, Louis
Spontini, Gasparo L.P.
St. Criq, Caroline
Steibelt, Daniel
Stendahl, De (pen name of Beyle)
"Stern, Daniel"
Sterndale, Sir William
Stradella, Alessandro
Stradivari, Antonio
Stradivari, Francesco
Stradivari, Paolo
Stratton, S.S.
Strauss, D.F.
Strauss, Johann
Strauss, Josef
Streite, postmaster
Strepponi, Signora
Stuck, Franz
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Swift, Jonathan
Syrinx, nymph
_Tannhaeuser_
Tausig, Karl
Tenger, Miriam
Tesi, Vittoria
Thalberg, Sigismund
Thayer, Alexander W.
The de
Thomas, Georgina
Tolstoi, Leo
_Towers, Duchess of_
Townsend, Pauline D.
Treffy, Jetty
Tripoli, Countess of
Tromlitz, Johann G.
Tschaikovski, Anatol
Tschaikovski, Modeste
Tschaikovski, Peter Iljitsch
Tschekonanof, Vera
Turette, Cecile
"Twain, Mark"
Uhlig, Theodor
Upton, George P.
Vandam
Van der Straeten, Edmond
Van Quickelberg
Venus
Verdi, Giuseppe
Verocai
Vidal, Pierre
Vigitill, Elise
Villars, Marquis de
Villon, Francois
Vogler, Abbe
Voigt, Henrietta
Wagner, Eva
Wagner, Richard
Wagner, Siegfried
Waldegrave, Earl of
Walker, Elizabeth
Wallace, Lady Grace
"Ward, Artemus"
Weber, Aloysia
Weber, Carl Maria von (_see_ Mozart)
Weber, Constanze
Weber, Doctor
Weber, Franz Anton von
Weber, Josepha
Weber, Madame, mother of Constanze W.
Weber, Max Maria, Baron von
Weber, Sophia
Weckinger, Regina
Wert, Jacques de
Wegeler, Dr. Franz G.
Weimar, Grand Duke of
Weldon, Captain and Mrs
Wendling, Fraeulein
Wesendonck, Mathilde
Wesendonck, Otto
Westerhold, Fraulein
Wickerslot, Ana
Wieck, Carl
Wieck, Clara (_see also_ Schumann)
Wieck, Edouard
Wieck, Friedrich
Wieck, Marie
Wildeck, Christian
Wildeck, Magdalena
Willaert, Adrien
Willaert, Catherine
Willaert, Susanna
Wille, Frau Elise
William, Duke of Bavaria
Winchester, Lady Marchioness
Wittgenstein, Princess Caroline
Wittgenstein, Princess Marie
Wittgenstein, Prince Nicolaus Sayn
Wittgenstein, Prince Fuerst
Wodzinska, Maria
Wodzinski, Count
Wolf-Metternich, Countess von
Wood, Mary
_Wotan_
Wuelken, Anna Magdalena
Wuertemberg, Duchess
Xantippe
Young, Cecilia
Zambelli, Antonia
Zarlino, Gioseffo
Zelter, Carl
Zimmerman, Mlle. Anna
Zingarelli
Zola
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
Volume 2, by Rupert Hughes
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS ***
***** This file should be named 11419.txt or 11419.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/4/1/11419/
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Harry Jones, Sjaani and PG Distributed
Proofreaders
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
http://gutenberg.net/license).
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.net),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
http://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at
809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact
information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
page at http://pglaf.org
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
gbnewby@pglaf.org
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit http://pglaf.org
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
donations. To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
compressed (zipped), HTML and others.
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
the old filename and etext number. The replaced older file is renamed.
VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
new filenames and etext numbers.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
http://www.gutenberg.net
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
are filed in directories based on their release date. If you want to
download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
download by the etext year.
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext06
(Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)
EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
filed in a different way. The year of a release date is no longer part
of the directory path. The path is based on the etext number (which is
identical to the filename). The path to the file is made up of single
digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename. For
example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:
http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/2/3/10234
or filename 24689 would be found at:
http://www.gutenberg.net/2/4/6/8/24689
An alternative method of locating eBooks:
http://www.gutenberg.net/GUTINDEX.ALL
Livros Grátis
( http://www.livrosgratis.com.br )
Milhares de Livros para Download:
Baixar livros de Administração
Baixar livros de Agronomia
Baixar livros de Arquitetura
Baixar livros de Artes
Baixar livros de Astronomia
Baixar livros de Biologia Geral
Baixar livros de Ciência da Computação
Baixar livros de Ciência da Informação
Baixar livros de Ciência Política
Baixar livros de Ciências da Saúde
Baixar livros de Comunicação
Baixar livros do Conselho Nacional de Educação - CNE
Baixar livros de Defesa civil
Baixar livros de Direito
Baixar livros de Direitos humanos
Baixar livros de Economia
Baixar livros de Economia Doméstica
Baixar livros de Educação
Baixar livros de Educação - Trânsito
Baixar livros de Educação Física
Baixar livros de Engenharia Aeroespacial
Baixar livros de Farmácia
Baixar livros de Filosofia
Baixar livros de Física
Baixar livros de Geociências
Baixar livros de Geografia
Baixar livros de História
Baixar livros de Línguas
Baixar livros de Literatura
Baixar livros de Literatura de Cordel
Baixar livros de Literatura Infantil
Baixar livros de Matemática
Baixar livros de Medicina
Baixar livros de Medicina Veterinária
Baixar livros de Meio Ambiente
Baixar livros de Meteorologia
Baixar Monografias e TCC
Baixar livros Multidisciplinar
Baixar livros de Música
Baixar livros de Psicologia
Baixar livros de Química
Baixar livros de Saúde Coletiva
Baixar livros de Serviço Social
Baixar livros de Sociologia
Baixar livros de Teologia
Baixar livros de Trabalho
Baixar livros de Turismo
