“At last!” my readers will exclaim. “All these reminiscences about
musicians are well enough, but it is their love-affairs that we are
interested in. Think of Beethoven and the Countess Giucciardi, of
Berlioz and Miss Smithson, of Liszt and the Countess d’Agoult, of Wagner
and Madame Wesendonck. Musicians are so romantic, so different from
ordinary men. They wear their hair longer; they affect delightful
eccentricities of conduct and of clothes; the ordinary humdrum of life
does not touch them, and they live only in the higher and rarer
atmosphere of art and poetry.” Therefore woman, who is so much more
spiritual than man, sometimes thinks in her unguarded moments that true
happiness can only be found by falling in love with an artist or, better
still, having him fall in love with her.
Without venturing to place myself in the same category as the great
musicians mentioned above, I nevertheless propose in this chapter to
give a full and detailed account of all my love-affairs—all, or at
least of as many as can be crowded into the confines of a chapter. I
have lived a great many years and my life, like that of other artists,
has been full to the brim of all kinds of interesting and fascinating
happenings, and in order that my readers may gain a true picture I shall
begin at the very beginning, promising to tell the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth.
Terrible as it may seem, I have to confess at the outset that I began my
life as a gay _Lothario_ at the tender age of eight. My family were then
living in Breslau, Silesia, and the rear of the house in which our
apartment was situated opened on a large courtyard, upon which several
other houses faced. This courtyard naturally became the playground of
all the children who lived around it. We were particularly intimate with
one family, the children of which consisted of an elder brother, already
in the university, who affected the appearance and manner of the great
German poet, Friedrich Schiller. He was supposed to have great poetical
talents, and it was darkly rumored that he had already written two
tragedies. I was greatly in awe of him, but his younger brother, who was
a boy of my own age, was my classmate in school—the gymnasium, as it
was called. And then there was a sister, little Lorchen, seven years of
age, with blue eyes and many blond curls. I had played with her and her
brother for several months before I suddenly discovered that her curls
were beautiful, like spun gold, and that there was something
particularly ingratiating in the blue of her eyes. I had an intense
desire to put my arms around her, but, strange to say, the consciousness
of this filled me with such anger that instead of giving way to it I
took the first opportunity to slap this darling little child most
unmercifully. To this day I cannot explain my unnatural depravity, and I
wish that I could now—over fifty years later—meet little Lorchen again
to tell her that this slap was my only way of letting her know how much
I loved her. Alas, she never knew, and as we emigrated to America soon
thereafter, I never had the time nor the opportunity to overcome my
shyness and to place my love at her feet in proper fashion.
I cannot remember any new passions from then on until my sixteenth year.
Lorchen’s picture soon and completely faded from my memory. I was
tremendously taken up, first with learning English, New York school
life, my musical studies, playing marbles, flying kites, and building
ships to sail on the pond in Central Park. But when I was fifteen a
little Frenchman came to New York and presented himself to my father
with his two little daughters, Louise and Jeanne, who were both pianist
prodigies. Louise was fifteen and little Jeanne only twelve. The latter
was truly remarkable, and her playing made quite a stir in New York at
the time. But I was singularly drawn toward the older sister, Louise.
Their mother had died when the children were very young and Louise had
quite taken the mother’s place and watched over Jeanne with a maternal
solicitude and tenderness truly remarkable in so young a girl. She
played exquisitely herself, and I can still hear the velvety touch of
her fingers in the A Flat Etude of Chopin, but in her adoration for her
younger sister’s more brilliant talent she completely effaced herself,
and it was only with difficulty that one could get her to play if her
sister was present. They lived in a little French boarding-house and I
used to love to go there in the evening, and while Jeanne would play for
us in most brilliant fashion Louise would sit at a table in the centre
of the room and, under the mellow light of a centre lamp, would darn
stockings or deftly refashion some dress which Jeanne was to wear at her
next concert. Louise had the gentlest of brown eyes, and her face and
bearing breathed a tranquillity and sweetness rarely found in the
agitating nervous life of to-day. She was not talkative, but when she
spoke her eyes would smile and crinkle up in very ingratiating fashion.
I had certainly outgrown the slapping age, but had not yet developed the
courage to declare my adoration. I seem to have been quite content to
sit next to Louise, and to look into her gentle eyes, or watch her deft
fingers as they pleated and sewed and did all those clever things which
women’s fingers alone know how to do. That spring, alas, the father and
his daughters returned to France and I have never seen them again.
But so inconstant is youth that the following year I fell madly in love
with Madame Teresa Carreno, of whom I have already written in an earlier
chapter. I was sixteen and she was twenty-four, radiantly beautiful,
brilliantly educated, and a remarkable linguist, speaking English,
German, French, Spanish, and Italian with equal fluency. But for me her
eyes spoke a language even more eloquent than her tongue, and it was
small wonder that I was bowled over completely. On my first concert
tour, her beauty, her exquisite playing, and the languorous
half-tropical charms of the South through which we were touring was a
combination I could not withstand.
But my schoolboy adoration received a severe shock when, on the last day
of our tour, a handsome and very robust Italian barytone, by the name of
Tagliapietra, came to meet her and I found that she was madly in love
with him. They were married a short time after.
She, too, seems to have been unconscious of my adoration. Thirty-two
years later, at a dinner given at the Hotel Plaza in honor of my
twenty-fifth anniversary as a conductor, she was present and in my
speech of thanks I humorously referred to her as the _grande passion_ of
my early youth. She afterward told my sister: “I never knew that Walter
had felt like that about me!”
To proceed with my confessions. The following year I met—but, alas,
this chapter is already overcrowded and I shall have to continue the (to
me) so fascinating recital of my various romances in my next book of
memoirs, which I expect to publish in about twenty years.