MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
"Et le cortège 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, Fétis, 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 Hèle, 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 preëminence 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 Händel, 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. Händel 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 Händel's greatness, there was
another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the
symphonic poetry of the cook. For Händel 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
"Bäsle," 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 Händel?
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 cafés
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 Händel'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 Cécile
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? Abélard 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 Bülow, 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, Desirée Artôt, 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
Händel, 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.
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INDEX
Abélard, Pierre
Adonis
Æsculapius
Agoult, Comte d'
Agoult, Marie Sophie, Comtesse d'
Amati, family of violin-makers
Anfossi, Pasquale
Anhalt-Köthen, Prince of
Anne, Queen
Aphrodite
Apollo
Arco, Count
Arion
Arne, Dr. Thomas
Arnim, Bettina Brentano von
Artignon, D'
Artot, Desirée
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
Barré, 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, Fräulein von
Bennett, Sterndale
Berenclow
Bériot, Charles Auguste de
Berlioz, Hector
Berlioz, Madame
Betz, Franz
Beyle, Marie Henri
Bianchi, Antonia
Bizet, Georges
Blackburn, Vernon
Blahetka, Leopoldine
Blow, John
Boëtius, Anicius
Böhler, Christine
Boieldieu, Francois A.
Boileau-Despréaux, 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
Bülow, Cosima von _(see also_ Wagner)
Bülow, Daniela von
Bülow, Hans von
Bülow, 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
Couçy, 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
Desprès, 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"
Érard, The family
Erdödy, Countess Marie
Ertmann, Baroness
Espinosa, Juana de
Esterhazy, Prince
Esterhazy, Carolina
Estrades, Abbé d'
Farinelli (properly Carlo Broschi)
Faustina (_see_ Hasse)
Fechner, Clementine
Ferdinand VII. of Spain
Ferrabosco, Domenico
Fétis, Fr. J.
Field, John
Filaretovna, Nadeschda
Finck, Henry T.
Flavigny, Comte
Fleury, Duchesse de,
Flotow, Fr. von
Fontana
Fortini
Fournier, Madame
Franci, Luigi
Franck, César
Franz, Robert
Fricken, Ernestine von
Fumaroli, Judge
Fumetti, Maria Anna
Fürstenau, 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
Ginguené, 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.
Grétry, André E.M.
Grétry, Lucille
Grimm, Baron
Grob, Theresa
Grove, Sir George
Guabaelaraoen, Madalena
Guadagnini, J.B.
Guarnieri, Andreas, Pietro, and Giuseppe
Gublitz
Guicciardi, Giulietta
Halévy, Geneviève
Hamilton, Lady Emma
Händel, Georg Friedrich
Hanmann, Fräulein von
Haslinger, Tobias
Hasse, J.A. and Faustina
Hawkins, Sir John
Haydn, Joseph
Heim, Emilie
Heine, Heinrich
Helen of Troy
Héloise, Abbess
Henderson, W.J.
Hensel, Fanny
Herbert, Lady Henrietta
Hérold, L.J.F.
Herschel, Fr. Wm.
Hiller, Ferdinand
Hinrichs, Marie _(see_ Franz)
Hodges, Mrs.
Hoesick, Ferdinand
Hofdämmel
Hohenlohe, Cardinal
Honrath, Jeannette d'
Hortensia
Houtermann, Marc
Howard, Lady Elizabeth
Hubbard, Elbert
Huber, Fräulein
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, Cécile 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
Köchel, 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, Abbé
Lampi, painter
Lang, Margarethe
Lang, Peppi
Lange,
Laprunarède, Adele, Countess de
Lassus, Ferdinand de
Lassus, Orland di
Lattre, Roland de (_see_ Lassus)
_Lear, King_
Lefébure-Wély, 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, Thérèse 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
Molière
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
Müller, 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
Paër, 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, Adèle 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
Schuré, 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
_Tannhäuser_
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, Cécile
"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, François
Vogler, Abbé
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, Fräulein
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 Fürst
Wodzinska, Maria
Wodzinski, Count
Wolf-Metternich, Countess von
Wood, Mary
_Wotan_
Wülken, Anna Magdalena
Würtemberg, Duchess
Xantippe
Young, Cecilia
Zambelli, Antonia
Zarlino, Gioseffo
Zelter, Carl
Zimmerman, Mlle. Anna
Zingarelli
Zola