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 Châtelain 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 mediæval 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 £40 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 Händel'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 GRÉTRY
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 Opéra 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
Grétry 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.
HÉROLD AND BIZET
The Frenchman Hérold, 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 Pré 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 Élise 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 Hérold, 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 Geneviève, the daughter of his teacher, the composer
Halévy. 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, père,
mère, et enfant." He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of
"Sainte Geneviève," 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.
César Franck married and left a son. At his funeral Chabrier said, "His
family, his pupils, his immortal art: violà 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 "Mémoires," 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 "Mémoires" regrets that he not only kept silence
on these points, but seems to have destroyed all the documents. His
"Mémoires" 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, Lefébure-Wély, 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 rôle 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 Cécile 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 Érard
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 rôle 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 début 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 Pétrovna 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 Esterházy. He first fell in
love with her maid, it is said, and based his "Divertissement à
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 Esterházy 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.