THE LOVE AFFAIRS
OF
GREAT MUSICIANS
_By_ RUPERT HUGHES
Author of "Contemporary American Composers," "The Musical Guide", etc.
_ILLUSTRATED_
VOLUME II.
_1903_
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
DÉSIRÉE ARTÔT
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
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 grâce_ 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 Abbé 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 Adèle
Laprunarède, 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 château. 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
Tannhäuser, 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 "caméraderie" which was the
fashionable name for liaison in that time.
From her the Comtesse de Laprunarède 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 Cathérine 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 étions 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-König." 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 Fürst 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
Flügeln 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 château
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 château. 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-Schillingsfürst, 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 "Festklänge" 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 abbé.
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, Fétis, 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 klösterlich-künstlerische 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 Laprunarède, 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 Bülow (_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
Bülow 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."