years has associated with Chopin the famous pastel portrait of Countess
Potocka in the Royal Berlin Gallery. The Countess Potocka of that
portrait had a career that reads like a romance, but she was Sophie,
not Delphine Potocka. My discovery of a miniature of Countess Sophie
Potocka in Philadelphia, painted some fifteen or twenty years later
than the Berlin pastel, and of numerous references to her in the diary
of an American traveller who was entertained by her in Poland early in
the last century, were among the interesting results of my search for
information regarding Delphine, but they have no place here. Probably
the public, which clings to romance, still will cling to the pastel
portrait of Countess Potocka as that of the woman who sang to the dying
Chopin--and so the portrait is reproduced here.
Barrias, the French historical painter, who was in Paris when Chopin
lived there, painted "The Death of Chopin." It shows Delphine singing
to the dying man. As Barrias had his reputation as a historical
painter to sustain and as the likenesses of others on the canvas are
correct, it is not improbable that he painted Delphine as he saw or
remembered her. If so, this is the only known portrait of Chopin's
faithful friend, the Countess Delphine Potocka. Of course no one who
undertakes to write about Chopin (or only to read about him for that
matter) can escape the episode with Mme. Dudevant,--George Sand,--who
used man after man as living "copy," and when she had finished with him
cast him aside for some new experience. But the story has been
admirably told by Huneker and others and its disagreeable details need
not be repeated here. It may have been love, even passion, while it
lasted, but it ended in harsh discord; whereas Delphine, sweet and pure
and tender, ever was like a strain of Chopin's own exquisite music
vibrating in a sympathetic heart.
The Schumanns: Robert and Clara
Robert and Clara Schumann are names as closely linked in music as those
of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in literature. Robert
Schumann was a great composer, Clara Schumann a great pianist. In her
dual rôle of wife and virtuosa she was the first to secure proper
recognition for her husband's genius. Surviving him many years, she
continued the foremost interpreter of his works, winning new laurels
not only for herself but also for him. He was in his grave--yet she
had but to press the keyboard and he lived in her. Despite the fact
that tastes underwent a change and Wagner became the musical giant of
the nineteenth century, Clara, faithful to the ideal of her youth and
her young womanhood, saw to it that the fame of him whose name she bore
remained undimmed. Hers was, indeed, a consecrated widowhood.
Robert was eighteen years old, Clara only nine, when they first met;
but while he had not yet definitely decided on a profession, she, in
the very year of their meeting, made her début as a pianist, and thus
began a career which lasted until 1896, a period of nearly seventy
years! When they first met, Schumann was studying law at the Leipsic
University. Born in Zwickau, Saxony, in 1810, he showed both as a boy
and as a youth not only strong musical proclivities, but also decided
literary predilections. In the latter his father, a bookseller and
publisher, who loved his trade, saw a reflection of his own tastes, and
they were encouraged rather more sedulously than the boy's musical
bent. It was in obedience to his father's wishes that he matriculated
at Leipsic, although he composed and played the piano, and his desire
to make music his profession was beginning to get the upper hand. His
meeting with the nine-year-old girl decided him--so early in her life
did she begin to influence his career!
[Illustration: Robert Schumann.]
Schumann had been invited by his friends, Dr. and Mrs. Carus, to an
evening of music, and especially to hear the piano playing of a
wonder-child--a "musical fairy," his hostess called her. In the course
of the evening he accompanied Frau Carus in some Schubert songs, when,
chancing to look up, he saw a child dressed in white, her pretty face
framed in dark hair, her expressive eyes raised toward the singer in
rapt admiration. The song over, and the applause having died away, he
stepped up to the child, laid his hand kindly on her head, and asked,
"Are you musical, too, little one?"
A curious smile played around her lips. She was about to answer, when
a man came to her and led her to the piano, and the first thing
Schumann knew the shapely little hands struck into Beethoven's F-minor
Sonata and played it through with a firm, sure touch and fine musical
feeling. No wonder she had smiled at his question.
"Was I right in calling her a Musical fairy'?" asked Frau Carus of
Schumann.
"Her face is like that of a guardian angel in a picture that hangs in
my mother's room at home," was his reply. Little he knew then that
this child was destined to become his own good fairy and "guardian
angel." Had he foreseen what she was to be to him, he could not more
aptly have described her. The most important immediate result of the
meeting was that he became a pupil of her father, Friedrich Wieck,
whose remarkable skill as a teacher had carried his daughter so far at
such an early age. The lessons stopped when Schumann went to
Heidelberg to continue his studies, but he and Wieck, who was convinced
of the young man's musical genius, corresponded in a most friendly
manner.
Clara, who was born in Leipsic in 1819, became her father's pupil in
her fifth year. It is she who chiefly reflected glory upon him as a
master, but, among his other pupils, Hans von Bülow became famous, and
Clara's half-sister Marie also was a noted pianist. Wieck's system was
not a hard-and-fast one, but varied according to the individuality of
each pupil. He was to his day what Leschetizky, the teacher of
Paderewski, is now. Very soon after her meeting with Schumann, Clara
made her public début, and with great success. Among those who heard
and praised her highly during this first year of her public career was
Paganini.
In 1830, two years after the first meeting of Robert and Clara,
Schumann, his father having died, wrote to his mother and his guardian
and begged them to allow him to choose a musical career, referring them
to Wieck for an opinion as to his musical abilities. The mother wrote
to Wieck a letter which is highly creditable to her heart and judgment,
and Wieck's reply is equally creditable to him as a friend and teacher.
Evidently his powers of penetration led him to entertain the highest
hopes for Schumann. Among other things he writes that, with due
diligence, Robert should in a few years become one of the greatest
pianists of the day. Why Wieck's hopes in this particular were not
fulfilled, and why, for this reason, Clara's gifts as a pianist were
doubly useful to Schumann, we shall see shortly.
[Illustration: Robert and Clara Schumann in 1847. From a lithograph in
possession of the Society of Friends of Music, Vienna.]
Schumann entered with enthusiasm upon the career of his choice. He
left Heidelberg and took lodgings with the Wiecks in Leipsic. Clara,
then a mere girl, though already winning fame as a concert pianist,
certainly was too young for him to have fallen seriously in love with,
or for her to have responded to any such feeling. Even at that early
age, however, she exercised a strange power of attraction over him.
His former literary tastes had given him a great fund of stories and
anecdotes, and he delighted in the evenings to gather about him the
children of the family, Clara among them, and entertain them with tales
from the Arabian Nights and ghost and fairy stories.
Among his compositions at this time are a set of impromptus on a theme
by Clara, and it is significant of his regard for her that later he
worked them over, as if he did not consider them in their original
shape good enough for her. Then we have from this period a letter
which he wrote to the twelve-year-old girl while she was concertizing
in Frankfort, and in which the expressions certainly transcend those of
a youth for a child, or of an elder brother for a sister, if one cared
to picture their relations as such. Indeed, he writes to her that he
often thinks other "not as a brother does of a sister, nor as one
friend of another, but as a pilgrim of a distant altar-picture." He
asks her if she has composed much, adding, "In my dreams I sometimes
hear music--so you must be composing." He confides in her about his
own work, tells her that his theoretical studies (with Heinrich Dorn)
have progressed as far as the three-part fugue; and that he has a
sonata in B minor and a set of "Papillons" ready; then jokingly asks
her how the Frankfort apples taste and inquires after the health of the
F above the staff in the "jumpy Chopin variation," and informs her that
his paper is giving out. "Everything gives out, save the friendship in
which I am Fraulein C. W.'s warmest admirer."
For a letter from a man of twenty-one to a girl of twelve, the above is
remarkable. If Clara had not afterward become Robert's wife, it would
have interest merely as a curiosity. As matters eventuated, it is a
charming prelude to the love-symphony of two lives. Moreover, there
seems to have been ample ground for Schumann's admiration. Dorn has
left a description of Clara as she was at this time, which shows her to
have been unusually attractive. He speaks of her as a fascinating girl
of thirteen, "graceful in figure, of blooming complexion, with delicate
white hands, a profusion of black hair, and wise, glowing eyes.
Everything about her was appetizing, and I never have blamed my pupil,
young Robert Schumann, that only three years later he should have been
completely carried away by this lovely creature, his former
fellow-pupil and future wife." Her purity and her genius, added to her
beauty, may well have combined to make Robert, musical dreamer and
enthusiast on the threshold of his career, think of her, when absent,
"as a pilgrim of a distant altar-picture."
She was clever, too, and through her concert tours was seeing much of
the world for those days. In Weimar she played for Goethe, the great
poet himself getting a cushion for her and placing it on the piano
stool in order that she might sit high enough; and not only praising
her playing, but also presenting her with his likeness in a medallion.
The poet Grillparzer, after hearing her play in Vienna Beethoven's
F-minor Sonata, wrote a delightful poem. "Clara Wieck and Beethoven's
F-minor Sonata." It tells how a magician, weary of life, locked all
his charms in a shrine, threw the key into the sea, and died. In vain
men tried to force open the shrine. At last a girl, wandering by the
strand and watching their vain efforts, simply dipped her white fingers
into the sea and drew forth the key, with which she opened the shrine
and released the charms. And now the freed spirits rise and fall at
the bidding of their lovely, innocent mistress, who guides them with
her white fingers as she plays. The imagery of this tribute to Clara's
playing is readily understood. In Paris she heard Chopin and
Mendelssohn. All these experiences tended to her early development,
and there is little wonder if Schumann saw her older than she really
was.
In 1834 Schumann's early literary tastes asserted themselves, but now
in connection with music. He founded the "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,"
which under his editorship soon became one of the foremost musical
periodicals of the day. Among his own writings for it is the
enthusiastic essay on one of Chopin's early works, in which Schumann,
as he did later in the case of Brahms, discovered the unmistakable
marks of genius. The name of Chopin brings me back to Wieck's prophecy
regarding Schumann as a pianist. The latter in his enthusiasm devised
an apparatus for finger gymnastics which he practised so assiduously
that he strained one of his fingers and permanently impaired his
technique, making a pianistic career an impossibility. Through this
accident he was unable to introduce his own piano works to the public,
so that the importance of the service rendered him by Clara, in taking
his compositions into her repertoire, both before and after their
marriage, was doubled.
One evening at Wieck's, Schumann was anxious to hear some new Chopin
works which he had just received. Realizing that his lame finger
rendered him incapable of playing, he called out despairingly:
"Who will lend me fingers?"
"I will," said Clara, and sat down and played the pieces for him. She
"lent him her fingers;" and that is precisely what she did for him
through life in making his piano and chamber music compositions known.
Familiarity with Schumann's music enables us of to-day to appreciate
its beauty. But for its day it was, like Brahms' music later, of a
kind that makes its way slowly. Left to the general musical public, it
probably would have been years in sinking into their hearts. Such
music requires to be publicly performed by a sympathetic interpreter
before receiving its meed of merit. Schumann had hoped to be his own
interpreter. He saw that hope vanish, but a lovely being came to his
aid. She saw his works come into life; their creation was part of her
own existence; she fathomed his genius to its utmost depths; her whole
being vibrated in sympathy with his, and when she sat down at the piano
and pressed the keys, it was as though he himself were the performer.
She was his fingers--fingers at once deft and delicate. She played
with a double love--love for him and love for his music. And why
should she not love it? She was as much the mother of his music as of
his children. I have already indicated that Clara probably developed
early. At all events, there are letters from Schumann to her, at
fourteen, which leave no doubt that he was in love with her then, or
that she could have failed to perceive this. In one of these letters
he proposes this highly poetic, not to say psychological, method of
communicating with her. "Promptly at eleven o'clock to-morrow
morning," he writes, "I will play the _Adagio_ from the Chopin
variations and will think strongly--in fact only--of you. Now I beg of
you that you will do the same, so that we may meet and see each other
in spirit. . . . Should you not do this, and there break to-morrow at
that hour a chord, you will know that it is I."
[Illustration: Clara Schumann at the piano.]
However far the affair may or may not have progressed at this time,
there was a curious interruption during the following year. Robert
appears to have temporarily lost his heart to a certain Ernestine von
Fricken, a young lady of sixteen, who was one of Wieck's pupils. Clara
consoled herself by permitting a musician named Banck to pay her
attention. For reasons which never have been clearly explained,
Schumann suddenly broke with Ernestine and turned with renewed ardor to
Clara, while Clara at once withdrew her affections from Banck and
retransferred them to Schumann. We find him writing to her again in
1835:
"Through all the Autumn festivals there looks out an angel's head that
closely resembles a certain Clara who is very well known to me." By
the following year, Clara then being seventeen, things evidently had
gone so far that, between themselves, they were engaged. "Fate has
destined us for each other," he writes to her. "I myself knew that
long ago, but I had not the courage to tell you sooner, nor the hope to
be understood by you."
Wieck evidently had remained in ignorance of the young people's
attachment, for, when on Clara's birthday the following year (1837)
Schumann made formal application in writing for her hand, her father
gave an evasive answer, and on the suit being pressed, he, who had been
almost like a second father to Robert, became his bitter enemy. Clara,
however, remained faithful to her lover through the three years of
unhappiness which her father's sudden hatred of Robert caused them. In
1839 she was in Paris, and from there she wrote to her father:
"My love for Schumann is, it is true, a passionate love; I do not,
however, love him solely out of passion and sentimental enthusiasm,
but, furthermore, because I think him one of the best of men, because I
believe no other man could love me as purely and nobly as he or so
understandingly; and I believe, also, on my part that I can make him
wholly happy through allowing him to possess me, and that I understand
him as no other woman could."
This love obviously was one not lightly bestowed, but Wieck remained
obdurate and refused his consent. Then Schumann took the only step
that under the circumstances was possible. Wieck's refusal of his
consent being a legal bar to the marriage, Robert invoked the law to
set his future father-in-law's objections aside. The case was tried,
decided in Schumann's favor, and on September 12, 1840, Robert Schumann
and Clara Wieck were married in the village of Schönefeld, near
Leipsic. That year Schumann composed no less than one hundred and
thirty-eight songs, among them some of his most beautiful. They were
his wedding gift to Clara.
After their marriage his inspiration blossomed under her very eyes.
She was the companion of his innermost thoughts and purposes.
Meanwhile his musical genius and critical acumen ever were at her
command in her work as a pianist. Happily, too, a reconciliation was
effected with Wieck, and we find Clara writing to him about the first
performance of Schumann's piano quintet (now ranked as one of the
finest compositions of its class), on which occasion she, of course,
played the piano part.
Four years after their marriage the Schumanns removed to Dresden,
remaining there until 1850, when they settled in Düsseldorf, where
Robert had been appointed musical director. There was but one shadow
over their lives. At times a deep melancholy came over him, and in
this Clara discerned with dread possible symptoms of coming mental
disorder. Her fears were only too well founded. Early in February,
1854, he arose during the night and demanded light, saying that
Schubert had appeared to him and given him a melody which he must write
out forthwith. On the 27th of the same month, he quietly left his
house, went to the bridge across the Rhine and threw himself into the
river. Boatmen prevented his intended suicide. When he was brought
home and had changed his wet clothes for dry ones, he sat down to work
on a variation as if nothing had happened. Within less than a week he
was removed at his own request to a sanatorium at Endenich, where he
died July 29, 1856.
[Illustration: The Schumann Monument in the Bonn Cemetery.]
Clara survived him forty years, wearing a crown of laurels and
thorns--the laurels of a famous pianist, the thorns of her widowhood.
It was a widowhood consecrated, as much as her wifehood had been, to
her husband's genius. She died at Frankfort, May 19, 1896, and is
buried beside her husband in Bonn.
Franz Liszt and his Carolyne
In the famous Wagner-Liszt correspondence, Liszt writes from Weimar,
under date of April 8, 1853, "Daily the Princess greets me with the lines
'Nicht Gut, noch Geld, noch Göttliche Pracht.'" The lines are from
"Götterdämmerung," the whole passage being--
"Nor goods, nor gold, nor godlike splendor;
Nor house, nor home, nor lordly state;
Nor hollow contracts of a treach'rous race,
Its cruel cant, its custom and decree.
Blessed, in joy and sorrow,
Let love alone be."
The lady who according to Liszt daily greeted him with these significant
lines was the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. Since 1848 she and
her young daughter Marie had been living with Liszt at the Altenburg in
Weimar. She remained there until 1860, twelve years, when she went to
Rome, whither, in due time, Liszt followed her, to make the Eternal City
one of his homes for the rest of his life. His last letter to her is
dated July 6, 1886, the year and month of his death, so that for a period
of nearly forty years he enjoyed the personal and intellectual
companionship of this remarkable woman. Their relations form one of the
great love romances of the last century.
[Illustration: Franz Liszt. Painting by Ary Scheffer.]
Liszt's letters to the Princess, written in French and still
untranslated, are in four volumes. They were published by the Princess's
daughter, Princess Marie Hohenlohe, as a tribute to Liszt the musician
and the man. They teem with his musical activities--information
regarding the numerous celebrities with whom he was intimate, the
musicians he aided, his own great works. But their rarest charm to me
lies in the fact that from them the careful reader can glean the whole
story of the romance of Liszt and Carolyne, from its very beginnings to
his death.
We know the fascinating male figure in this romance--the extraordinary
combination of unapproached virtuoso, great composer, and man of the
world; but who was the equally fascinating woman?
Carolyne von Iwanowska was born near Kiew, Russian Poland, in February,
1819. When she still was young her parents separated, and she divided
her time between them. Her mother possessed marked social graces,
travelled much, was a favorite at many courts, and, as a pupil of
Rossini's in singing, was admired by Spontini and Meyerbeer, and was
sought after in the most select salons, including that of Metternich, the
Austrian chancellor. From her Carolyne inherited her charm of manner.
Intellectually, however, she was wholly her father's child; and he was
her favorite parent. He was a wealthy landed proprietor, and in the
administration of his estates, he frequently consulted her. Moreover he
had an active, studious mind, and he found in her an interested companion
in his pursuits. Often they sat up until late into the night discussing
various questions, and both of them--smoking strong cigars!
In 1836 her hand was asked in marriage by Prince Nicolaus von
Sayn-Wittgenstein. She thrice refused, but finally accepted him at her
father's instigation. The prince was a handsome but otherwise
commonplace man, and not at all the husband for this charming, mentally
alert and finely strung woman. The one happiness that came to her
through this marriage was her daughter Marie.
Liszt came to Kiew on a concert tour in February, 1847. He announced a
charity concert, for which he received a contribution of one hundred
rubles from Princess Carolyne. He already had heard other, but she had
been described to him as a miserly and peculiar person. The gift
surprised him the more for this. He called on her to thank her, found
her a brilliant conversationalist, was charmed with her in every way, and
concluded that what the gossips considered peculiarities were merely the
evidences of an original and positive mentality. Upon the woman, who was
in revolt against the restraints of an unhappy married life, Liszt, from
whose eyes shone the divine spark, who was as much _au fait_ in the salon
as at the piano, and who already had been worshipped by a long succession
of women, made a deep impression. Thus they were drawn to each other at
this very first meeting.
When, a little later, Liszt took her into his confidence regarding his
ambition to devote more time to composition, and communicated to her his
idea of composing a symphony on Dante's "Divine Comedy" with scenic
illustrations, she offered to pay the twenty thousand thalers which these
would cost. Liszt subsequently changed his mind regarding the need of
scenery to his "Dante," but the Princess's generous offer increased his
admiration for her. It was a tribute to himself as well as to his art,
and an expression of her confidence in his genius as a composer (shared
at that time by but few) which could not fail to touch him deeply. It at
once created a bond of artistic and personal sympathy between them. She
was carried away by his playing, and the programme of his first concert
which she attended was treasured by her, and after her death, forty years
later, was found among her possessions by her daughter.
[Illustration: Liszt at the piano.]
If it was not love at first sight between these two, it must have been
nearly that. Liszt came to Kiew in February, 1847. The same month
Carolyne invited him to visit her at one of her country seats, Woronince.
Brief correspondence already had passed between them. To his fifth note
he adds, as a postscript, "I am in the best of humor . . . and find, now
that the world contains Woronince, that the world is good, very good!"