Rest? “Who ne’er distressful nights upon his bed has sat in tears,” runs
the well-known poem; but whoever has not through a long night, awaking
every ten minutes, kept tossing from one side of the bed to the other,
with a beloved name upon his lips, a glowing beatitude in his heart,—he
also “knows you not, ye heavenly powers.”
A hundred times I started up from my slumber, and if I was not at once
conscious why I was so utterly happy and whom I loved so very dearly,
the sandalwood fan, which lay close to me on the stand, quickly told the
story. Its fragrance played the _Morgenblätter_, poured out the hot
light of the ballroom chandelier, and pressed a sleeve of black cloth
gently and tremblingly against a sleeve of white muslin. Then I would
deliciously go to sleep again, only to be reawakened soon by a powerful
heart-throb. And so it went till morning.
Once again, just as when I was enamored of Friedrich von Hadeln, I was
seized at waking by the consciousness of the rapturous “I love,” and
with it the still more rapturous “I am loved.” Warm, almost tangible, it
gushes from the heart, sweet, tender, full of yearning and yet glad in
possession—for even yearning is a possession. Thus there is on earth
something which yesterday was still unknown, still not in existence, and
which to-day, so to speak, fills the world,—the unspeakably precious
treasure, which is so wholly and completely the “one important thing.”
I was not to see him for three days; he had gone to Paris for that time.
I filled these days with studies regarding the Caucasus and its history.
Not only what the Dedopali could tell me, but also what I found in the
encyclopedia and in Dumas’s book _Le Caucase_, gave me a glimpse into
the distant, fabulous realm whose throne should by right have belonged
to my Prince Heraclius.
On the second day I received from Paris a package and a letter. The
package contained a full bonbonnière from Boissier, the accompanying
letter a few polite lines. There was nothing out of the ordinary in it,
but it intoxicated me outright, for it was signed with the name of
Heraclius of Georgia, and from its thick paper adorned with a princely
crown there exhaled a faint, but peculiarly sweet, fragrance. This
letter-sheet and the sandalwood fan—both told me untranslatable things.
On the third day I went over to the Dedopali’s with quick-beating heart.
I found her in her usual place in the little drawing-room.
“Ah, _bon jour_, Contessina—I have a greeting to transmit to you. My
cousin writes me from Paris.... He was to be here to-day himself, but—I
am not surprised at it in him, he is a man of moods—instead of coming,
he writes to bid me farewell for this year; he left Paris yesterday to
go direct to Tiflis.”
And I—silly thing—I burst into tears.
“For God’s sake, what is the matter, Contessina?”
“Oh, Dedopali,—it is too cruel!”
“What?... that my cousin has gone home? So you are in love with him?...
Perhaps it may be your fate after all,—he may come back again; don’t
cry. No man deserves to have a girl cry for him if he is capable of
passing by his own good luck like that. Besides, all may yet turn out as
your heart desires.”
These words were a balm to me. Merely the right to hope,—that is all
that youth desires. And so I hoped that Heraclius would write me from
Georgia. But he did not.—
VIII
NOVITIATE IN ART
Back to Baden · Singing lessons · Great hopes · A test before Madame
Viardot
However, it was not an inordinately long time before the image of the
Georgian prince had grown dim in my memory. And gradually, once more,
something quite new became the object of my life, the “one important
thing.”
We returned to Baden greatly disappointed—my mother in her great hopes
of gain, which had to be exchanged for no inconsiderable certainty of
loss, and I in my exploded dream of love; and there we proposed to live
very quietly and frugally in our country house, and spend the winter too
in seclusion there.
We had a lodger in our house, an old music teacher, who had been an
orchestra conductor. One day he asked to see us.
“Pardon me, Frau Gräfin, and pardon me, Komtesse,[15] if I permit myself
to make this call; but I consider it my duty—it is perhaps a question of
something great and rare—something extraordinary in the Komtesse’s fate,
something which—” He struggled to find words.
“Well, what do you mean?” asked my mother, and I too was keyed up to a
high pitch. (“Something great and rare”—those who are hungry for life
are always looking for that with yearning eyes.)
“I have often heard the Komtesse sing. She has had no training at all,
but she has a voice such as comes only once in a hundred years, such as
I have not heard since Jenny Lind, and it really quite reminds one of
Jenny Lind’s. The same meltingness, the same power, that same
something,—in short, the Komtesse has millions in her throat, she has a
glorious career before her if she wishes—this I had to say.”
So, then, it might be that glory and fortune were to be mine—I did not
at all distrust the artistic judgment of the music teacher and
experienced orchestra conductor. My mother was likewise entranced. Her
old predilection for the profession of a great singer, the profession
which in youth she had so longed to have as her own, caused her now to
grasp with delight the hope that her old-time dreams might be fulfilled
in her daughter. And the millions which she had had to let dry up in her
throat, the confidently expected millions which the abominable
trente-et-quarante table had denied her, should come flowing to our
house after all! She immediately arranged with the music teacher to give
me lessons every day.
Professor Beranek had in fact been a singing-teacher at the
conservatory, and had trained several important operatic artists; so the
formation of my voice could be intrusted to him. He wanted to instruct
me for a year, make me thoroughly musical, give my voice the right
position and fluency; after that I should have to study a year or two
more with an Italian maestro, and then I might rise above the musical
horizon as a star of the first magnitude. I must take up the Italian
career, that was settled; my mother herself insisted upon that, for the
names of Pasta and Grisi and Malibran still filled her head, and only by
traveling from Paris to London, from Milan to Madrid, from St.
Petersburg to America, could one win the aforesaid millions and that
world-wide reputation which makes artists in song into half-queens.
Ah yes, crowns,—that was what my young ambition craved. Nothing had come
of the royal crown of Georgia; that had faded into air together with the
dream of love; in its place glory should now crown me, and instead of
love should be Art! One can burn as passionately for Art as for a
beloved. Whoever loves Art and is loved by Art—that is, whoever loves it
with the power of achievement—may find life perfectly satisfying.
Now came for me a time, a whole year, when I lived for only one
object,—Song; that had now become the “one important thing.” On the very
day after our interview the instruction began. In order that it might
make rapid progress, and I might in a year advance as far as others did
in a conservatory course of several years, the lessons were fixed at
four hours a day,—two hours in the forenoon and two in the afternoon,
with the requisite interval of rest between. Scalesinging, vocal
exercises, score-reading, the science of harmony: I was to become a
thorough musician; as phenomenal in artistic schooling as in vocal
talent,—simply the greatest cantatrice of the century. Herr Beranek went
into ecstasies every day, and thus kept us fancying that the marvelous
had really come to pass, that an enormous prize had fallen to me in the
lottery of life. Or rather that a treasure-trove was assuredly within
sight, but that it must be dug for. And I dug and dug with a diligence,
a perseverance, a joy, that was unique of its kind. From morning till
night, through the long months of the autumn, of the winter, of the
spring, nothing but notes,—sung, played, read, written notes,—and yet it
was a whole world, full of sweetness and beauty, full of inspiration,
full of proud satisfaction. I do not know (seeing that I never attained
to it) whether a successful career as a prima donna really carries with
it as much happiness as is to be experienced in the preparation for it,
when the time is occupied with study, and triumph seems sure.
As material for study we ordered a whole little music library: Garcia’s
“Method” in two large volumes; the scores of all the operas that were to
form my future repertory—all with Italian text. That was by no means a
monotonous life. On the contrary, it was full of the tragic, of passion,
of ebullient joy, of the tenderest devotion, of the most heroic uplift,
of funereal horror, of epithalamial bliss; in short, of all the feelings
and fates which belonged to the heroines of my operas. Norma, Amina, La
Traviata, Lucia, Linda, I myself was—one after the other, as I sat at
the piano and memorized the text and melody in which were expressed all
the sadness and the joy, the sweetness and the horror, which I tried
with all my might to realize so that I might one day carry it
triumphantly into the souls of my listeners. And the Edgardos and
Manricos, Gennaros and Alfredos, who were destined to accompany my
soprano in harmonious trios and sextets,—these also I saw before me; I
simply _loved_ them. Do not take it that I was imagining the
singers,—they were to remain a matter of indifference to me,—but the
forms created by the dramatist and composer, and all their heroism, all
their poetry. In just the same manner the young girl reading her
Schiller becomes enraptured by the Don Carloses and Posas, the
Ferdinands and Karl Moors,—only in the study of the operas there is
added the ineffable something that wells forth from the magic tones of
the music. Music says things which are not contained in any language.
What can now and then stream forth from a sequence of tones, from a
chord, from a rhythmical crescendo, is as little to be repeated in words
as is the fragrance of flowers, the taste of a fruit. There are melodies
which tell a story, arpeggios which caress, chords which burn; in many
measures one feels as if—now I am endeavoring, after all, to find words
for that of which I have just said that it lies outside of language; it
is in vain. But a hundred times more powerful yet is the enjoyment of
the charm of music when one is filled with it not only as a recipient
but also as a giver, as a creator; when one is himself the transmitter
of this mysterious and ineffable something to the souls of others; when
one feels that thousands of auditors are seized by the same waves of
passion, of rapture, of exultation, or of pain.
To be sure, I experienced all this not as a reality, but only as the
foretaste of a thing to come—but a thing whose coming I did not doubt,
which seemed to me like a boundless wealth that was not indeed in my
hands in the form of gold, but I had in my possession well-secured
drafts for it. Not only did the study of the rôles afford me this
enjoyment, but even the mere practice of scales and the composition of
roulades, the dry work of the technic of my art, gave me gladdening and
enlivening sensations. For the concept “Art” had taken hold of me with
all the power that is inherent in it, that results from the worship of
art in books on the history of art, and from the worship of artists by
the public. When studying for the chosen calling, one feels—at least I
felt—intrusted with a mission which carried with it something priestly,
something holy.
The question arises, Was not vanity also involved? Was I not gloating
rather over the prospect of arousing admiration, of enjoying a
world-wide fame (for I was not expecting anything small, thanks to my
master’s indefatigable praise and expressions of wonder), or else over
the thought that the heroine whom I should represent would be so
graciously personified in me, that the brilliant satin train in the
first acts would make my tall, slender figure so effective, and that my
loosened hair in the tragic final scene would fall down below my knees
in billowy natural abundance? Should I not—apart from the might of
song—also as a woman set all hearts afire?
Oh, but nothing, nothing should or could turn me from my art; all homage
I would put away from me, every discreditable demand the proud lady in
me would spurn, and every enticement to renounce the stage and enter
wedlock would leave the proud artist unmoved. Whoever stands on the
highest pinnacle of Art belongs henceforth and forever to its temple
service.
Such were my thoughts and intentions as I practiced solfeggios or wrote
out my harmony exercises; and I was happy in it.
We lived in absolute retirement; my guardian visited us only once or
twice a month, and nothing of these musical plans was divulged to him.
The first that he should learn was to be the _fait accompli_, when I had
made my appearance in a great theater with overwhelming success. We had
no intercourse with the families that wintered in Baden, and we never
went to Vienna. It was a rigorous novitiate in art; nothing was to
divert me from my studies, nothing else but learn, learn, learn, was to
fill my time. I was no longer so young, and I had to make up in a single
year what other pupils accomplish in four or five years.
There was only a single family which we met socially from time to time;
this was two old ladies, daughters of a general, and their brother, a
retired first lieutenant of hussars, also well on in years, who had a
barytone voice and had missed his calling,—that of an opera singer,—to
his deep regret. I sang Italian duets with him, but without letting him
guess my plans of the future. I should properly say, a duet; he had no
more in his repertory. It was the scene between the brother and the
sister in _Lucia di Lammermoor_. We performed the piece dramatically,
singing by heart and putting in all the action, I carrying myself
forward into my beckoning future and my partner going back to the past
that he had let slip. He was convinced that he would have made a great
singer, exactly as I was convinced of my coming greatness, and most
likely his melancholy conviction was just as fallacious as my joyful one
was.
I remember that our duet cost us much study before we could do it
together. The lieutenant was not especially musical, and did not keep
time well, and I too was very prone to slip, for I had not yet begun to
sing arias at all with my teacher—he insisted strictly on my practicing
nothing but scales and arpeggios; the _Lucia_ duet, which was performed
in the house of the Cortesi sisters, was basely kept a secret from my
master.
After about a year and a half of this preparatory course, Professor
Beranek made the announcement that it was now time for me to finish my
studies under a famous singing-teacher. Our choice fell on Pauline
Viardot-Garcia. Many artists had gone forth from her instruction; and
anyhow, Garcia’s two-volume “Method” having been my gospel, in whom
could I have felt greater confidence than in the daughter of that
incomparable master?[16] So off went a letter to Baden-Baden.
It must have been an exuberant letter. I knew that Madame Viardot was
very particular and refused many who wished to take lessons of her. To
be received by her was an especial favor granted only to those who had
real talent. I tried, therefore, to prejudice her in my behalf by my
letter itself. I could not well speak of my talent (although, resting on
my teacher’s assurances, I felt no doubt of it), so I must have written
all the more of enthusiasm for art, of ardor in my vocation, and such
trite things, and naturally intimated also that I desired to put myself
under none but the foremost teacher in the world. At any rate, Madame
Viardot answered that I might come and let her test me.
My mother and I went to Baden-Baden without delay. On the appointed day
and at the appointed hour we presented ourselves at the Villa Viardot.
We were shown into a small ground-floor salon and told to wait a little
while. I still see the piano in the corner at the right by the window.
There were several music cabinets with scores; on the walls, pictures
and photographs of artists; through the open balcony door a glimpse of
the garden. In the background of this was a pavilion, presumably the
dwelling of Ivan Turgénief, Madame Viardot’s friend of many years.
In this waiting time I was seized by a horrible panic. Something that I
had never yet felt in my life. Something that actually took away my
breath and tortured me. Is this, then, what is called stage fright, _le
trac_? Why, that is not at all unlike what one must feel at going to the
guillotine! How can one—God have mercy!—sing in such a state?
“Mamma,” I wailed, “I shan’t be able to sing a note!”
“Don’t be childish! Who’d be worried, when you have such a voice? Madame
Viardot will consider herself fortunate to get such a pupil.”
The door of the next room opened and in came the dreaded one. A lively,
elegant woman of forty, with features not beautiful but interesting.
There was a little introductory conversation which I do not remember,
and then I was dragged to the block—I mean the piano.
“Have you brought any music? What will you sing for me?”
“All I can do is scales and exercises.”
“One can judge of your voice by those, no doubt, but not of your talent,
not of your degree of ability.”
“Then, please, the duet with the barytone from _Lucia_.”
“A duet?”
“Yes, madame; so far I have not sung any pieces at all; it only happens
that I know this one.”
“Very well.” She found the score and played the introduction.
My throat was utterly choked. I started in a tremble. But after a while
my voice grew firmer, and after a few measures it went to my own
satisfaction. Mother nodded approvingly. I believed that I had given of
my best.
But the great teacher shut up the score in the middle of a measure and
said, “The truth of the matter is, you can do nothing at all.”
It was as if I had been given a box on the ear and a dagger-thrust both
at once.
“Let us have another trial, then, with _notes filées_—in order to see
what might be made of the material—there is certainly voice there—”
And she struck low C. This test was easier for me. Still I could not
give all that I had—the tones were hoarse and my breath was short. After
the two octaves up to high C were tested, she stood up.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Past twenty,” I replied with a half lie, for I was already twenty-two.
“That is too late to start from the beginning. At twenty, one ought to
be already trained. And tell me, why do you really want to go on the
stage? You have social standing—your name shows it.”
In reply I said something about ambition and love for art.
“That is all very pretty, but I can only advise you not to give up your
position. Your voice is not bad, but it is not extraordinary, and it is
questionable whether you could learn anything.”
“Madame, she has talent,” insisted my mother. “And under your
instruction it would most certainly develop.”
“But I cannot tell to-day whether I will undertake to give her this
instruction. The young lady must first take a few lessons, and then I
will decide whether I will go on with her—yes or no. According to my
impression of to-day, there is little chance for yes.”
“Oh, do not judge by to-day’s test; the poor girl was so nervous—I
really did not know her.”
“If one suffers from nervousness, one is not fitted for the career of an
artist; an additional reason for giving it up.”
“Her timidity will disappear when she gets used to it,” urged my mother.
“Very well, then; come next Monday at the same hour.” And we were
dismissed.
We returned to the hotel, and there I gave vent to my suppressed anguish
in a burst of tears.
“Never, never again will I set foot in that Viardot villa! Let us go
away, mamma; I will never let myself be seen in that woman’s presence
again! It is over—it is all over!” My world lay in ruins. The “one
important thing” was annihilated.
IX
THE YEAR 1866
Return · Elvira’s death · Fürstenberg’s death · The war · Homburg once
more · Back to Baden · Baron Koller
We journeyed back to our Baden villa. Professor Beranek was indignant at
Madame Viardot. For a long time I would sing no more. But at length he
brought me to it.
“You will not have been the first,” he said consolingly, “who has failed
of recognition at a trial and has then put the false prophets to shame
through greatness fairly won.”
But my self-confidence was too completely crushed. It did not so quickly
wake to new force. At the same time a hard sorrow befell me. Word came
from Venice that my cousin Elvira was very ill, that her lung trouble
had taken a turn for the worse, and that she was confined to her bed.
Not many days later there came the news of her death. For the first time
in my life I learned how it feels to lose a dear one. An
incomprehensible emptiness, an unintelligible shuddering....
The bereaved mother came to us. She was on the verge of despair. Now of
course all singing was hushed in the house.
The year 1866 brought me still another severe loss, that of my
much-loved paternal friend Fürstenberg. He departed this life after a
brief illness at his residence in Vienna. And one thing more that
unblest year brought,—war.
I am ashamed to say it again, but this event made no impression upon
me—none at all. I took knowledge of it just as one learns by hearsay
that somewhere in the distance floods have set in, or fires broken
out,—elemental events, of a very lamentable nature, but they will pass
by. And at bottom the thing is not uninteresting—it is something
historical. The Prussians will of course get a thrashing; and if we
should lose the game, there would be peace again after it anyhow. We had
no one dear to us in the army, so we were not anxious. I read no
newspaper; and the stories that they told,—victories of the Prussians in
Hannover, at Frankfurt, later also in Bohemia (but not much of it came
to our ears, and if anything did I have forgotten it),—nothing of all
that has remained imprinted on my memory: a proof that it was heartily
indifferent to me.
To-day I cannot understand how I could be so stupid. Even apart from my
future ardent sentiments in behalf of peace, which ought at that time to
have been already dormant in the young woman of twenty-three and to have
been awakened on this occasion, such a tremendous event should at any
rate, even from the ordinary point of view, have stirred me, should have
filled me with some kind of emotion, either patriotic enthusiasm or
tingling human sympathy or, if nothing more, anxiety and terror; but
there was nothing, nothing.
It would not be necessary to set down in these reminiscences the
confession of such a fact, doubly humiliating for a future opponent of
war, but the incongruity that is here apparent is a thing that
distinctly deserves scrutiny. The most interesting thing for the reader
of memoirs, I think, is always the opportunity to observe how and
whereby certain destinies, talents, or deeds, which are known to pertain
to the writer of the memoir, have been prepared for and developed; one
wishes to trace out what inner aptitudes, and what outer influences,
have contributed to the formation of the total product. From this there
always result useful lessons and bits of knowledge. Provided, of course,
that the autobiographer is entirely sincere: useful lessons are to be
drawn only from unfalsified facts.
Here, in bringing to my present consciousness the conception of war that
I then had, I myself find occasion for an interesting observation, an
instruction worth taking to heart. Human society as a whole passes
through just such stages of shifting ideas, knowledges, conceptions, and
judgments, as does an individual man. Should not I to-day fully
understand, and fully pardon, the fact that the generality of men in
their preponderating mass take as cold and unconcerned an attitude
toward war (when it does not lay hold directly of their own lives) as
did I myself a few decades ago? Should I be amazed that this same
generality regards the occasional breaking out of wars as a matter of
course, a thing involved in natural law, which one may possibly sigh
over, but which one cannot condemn and cannot antagonize? Against the
inevitable one raises no voice of blame, strikes no blow.
And as the individual (in the case in hand, I myself) may under the
influence of experiences and considerations come to have quite altered
views, so may and will the generality obtain new insights and act
accordingly.
When to-day in certain circles I meet with case-hardened misconception
of the peace movement, when they try to show me the obvious naturalness
and historical necessity of the scourge of war by arguments at which
wrath and discouragement threaten to take possession of me, all I need
to do, that my wrath may subside and my courage rise, is to think back
to my own past. Moreover, in the matters of war and peace the generality
is not even in such a state of stupidity any longer, for by this time
almost every one has at least heard something of the movement, and the
number of those who sympathize with it or even take an active part in it
is growing every day. A greater and greater number of people are taking
sides on the issue, either for it or against it; but at the time of
which I am now talking the fact was that no one knew anything about the
peace movement, because there was none; for the sporadic emergence of
individual minds who took a stand for the abolition of war cannot be
called “a movement.”
We spent the summer of 1886 once more in Homburg vor der Höhe, and
although the war penetrated into our very near neighborhood there were
no indications of it to be detected in the life of the bathers and
gamblers at that cosmopolitan watering-place. The official band played;
Patti sang; the Spaniard Garcia, who had become famous for his luck at
gambling, continued to make his harvest of a hundred thousand francs a
day at the trente-et-quarante table—until one fine morning he did begin
to lose, and gradually put in all the millions he had won, and something
of his own besides.
The Princess of Mingrelia was there again with her family, and I spent
many hours of the day in her company. Her daughter, Princess Salomé, was
by this time eighteen and released from the nursery, and I now kept up
as lively an intercourse with her as with her mother. In age we two
girls were actually better mates; an additional point was that we took
riding lessons together, and every morning we used to go for a ride side
by side in the roads of the park, under the oversight of the
riding-master. That was a fine occasion for chatting, and we soon formed
a cordial friendship.
Salomé was to be presented at court at St. Petersburg the following
winter, and to be introduced into society there—she looked out into the
future with joyous hopes and plans; I, on the other hand, assumed rather
a melancholy and resigned aspect, as one who no longer expected much
from life. The two deaths by which dear ones were taken from me had
really made me low-spirited; and the collapse of my artistic dreams had
left me in a bad frame of mind, but of this matter I told her nothing. I
confided to my new friend only the fact that two years before I had been
in love with her uncle Heraclius—now, indeed, I had got the unhappy
passion out of my mind, but yet there remained a certain dejection.
Salomé only laughed at me for it.
“How could one ever fall in love with such a sallow, bilious old man!
No, no, Contessina, you will yet find a much better one.”
The Dedopali’s two sons also had now grown up into tall, handsome young
men. Prince Niko, the older, once caused us all a fine fright. He was to
have a duel. He had been pursuing a little lady from Paris too ardently,
and a rival had got into a rage over it; ugly words were exchanged, and
the other man announced that on the following day he should send his
seconds. The scene had had witnesses, and the old princess learned of
it. Weeping and trembling she told me about the misfortune that had
befallen, and I wept and trembled with her. Nothing was to be done about
it: duels also belong to the unavoidable dispensation of things in this
world—what young nobleman could refuse to take part in them?
It was a sad business, of course, but no one in our circle dreamed of
such a thing as harboring a mutinous thought against the absurdity of
it. There was at that time as little talk of an anti-dueling league as
of a league in opposition to duels between nations. To be exposed to
murdering and being murdered was simply one of the chivalric and
patriotic necessities that life brings to men. And when that is the case
women can do nothing else but weep in timid admiration.
But the duel did not come off: I cannot recall now whether the opponent
had left town or whether the witnesses had succeeded in effecting a
reconciliation. I only know that the threatening cloud passed over, and
that we were all very happy. My really deep-felt and spontaneously shown
sympathy had brought me much closer yet to the Mingrelian family; and
especially Prince Niko himself, as long as he lived, never forgot that I
had so taken to heart the danger to which he had been exposed.
When we went home that autumn the war was a thing of the past. We took
still another lodger in our Baden villa, a Saxon officer. He most
courteously came to make us a call. I do not think that we talked much
about the campaign just ended, for I remember only that at the Herr
Lieutenant’s second visit, which was his visit of farewell, I sang
something for him; I can also remember what it was,—the adagio from the
grand aria in _La Sonnambula_, “Ah non credea.” The Saxon officer was
enraptured.
“Oh, most gracious countess, you sing like Patti!”
“That young man has a great appreciation of art,” remarked my mother,
when the lieutenant had taken his departure.
“And are you really going to stick to your decision that you will
renounce an artistic career,” she added after a while; “is that
reasonable, is it courageous?”
“But Madame Viardot’s decision—” I opposed hesitatingly.
“Madame Viardot is not infallible; and if you had only kept on with her
for a while—”
“Not for the world would I have come into her sight again!”
“But there are other great singing-teachers; we will ask Beranek.”
Herr Beranek was still our lodger, and naturally he was ready at once to
take up the proposition of resuming the musical plans. He spoke of
Lamperti in Milan, Duprez in Paris, and Marchesi in Vienna as among the
greatest teachers. I would not hear of Vienna, but in the very act of
pronouncing this limitation I had already tacitly acknowledged that
perhaps I would be content, either in Milan or in Paris, to pick up the
thread which had been so abruptly broken off in Baden-Baden.
And to that it gradually came. I no longer gave a decided “no” when any
one spoke to me of an artistic future, and I resumed my singing lessons
with Beranek. The old love of song, the old ambitious plans, the old
self-confidence awoke and gathered strength once more. The resolve to
persevere in my studies, and to continue them under some famous master,
matured in my mind. I wrote to Maître Duprez in Paris to ask him if he
would be willing to accept an ambitious, enthusiastic pupil; he replied
that he would, and so it came to pass that my life had once more found
the “one important thing.”
There was living at that time in Baden an old bachelor, a former
ambassador, with whom we constantly associated. His name was Baron
Koller. He was tall and very thin, closely shaven, extremely correct and
elegant in his attire. He owned a house near the Kurpark, externally
insignificant, but furnished in exquisite taste within. Here he
frequently gave us little dinners.
The contemplation of the beautiful mementos which he had gathered about
him in his rooms was a great pleasure to me. I “turned the leaves” in
these rooms as in an interesting book of memoirs. All those fabrics,
weapons, trinkets, female portraits, had stories to tell of distant
journeys, of high life at courts and in society, and of intimate love
affairs. And the master of the house himself: _ancien régime_ in his
manners, sparkling with wit in his conversation.
There developed between the old gentleman and me a sort of—what shall I
call it?—_esprit_-flirtation, a tossing back and forth of conversational
shuttlecocks. He took special delight in my mastery of the elegances of
the French language, and, because I realized this, I wrote in that
language a whole booklet about his home, associating with the various
trinkets and pictures imaginary stories and all sorts of observations. I
copied it neatly, tied it with a blue ribbon, and sent it to him. He
then gave it back to me, as a loan, with his marginal notes. He wanted
me to see what keen pleasure the reading of it had given him,—a pleasure
which was expressed in underlinings, exclamation marks, and a few brief
sentences.
One time he honored me by the gift of a cup of old porcelain with the
inscription _Respice finem_. To this I made answer in a few rhymed
lines, the text of which I find jotted down in the diary which I was
keeping at that time: