THE ANCIENTS
The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a god, he was
denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
another woman, was soon blasé of divine courtship, and, for variety,
turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
claimed.
Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second
wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to
be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
more open than that of hearing."
The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of
Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.
The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs--a fact which
should not be cherished against him--seems to have loved no one except
himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
Jonah's adventure turned inside out.
Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
violinists at the hands of the matinée Bacchantes.
The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
his poesy.
The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
to be monks. This banishes them from a place here--not by any means
because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
because it greatly prevented a record of most of them--though happily
not all. Abélard, for instance, was a monk, and his Héloise became a
nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
an abbé? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hèle, who about 1585
gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Très-Haut, ministre du
Christ, il sut garder la chastété et se preserver du contact de l'amour
sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
necessarily so.
Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
children of Lorenzo dei Medici.
"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who passed for the
finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
couplet."
Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
died.