MUSICAL PAINTERS
Ingres was famous for his violin. A single wall separated the apartment
where I lived during my childhood and youth from the one where the
painter Granger, one of Ingres's pupils, with his wife and daughter,
lived. Granger painted the _Adoration of the Wise Men_ in the church of
Notre Dame de Lorette. I have played with the gilt paper crown which his
model wore when posing as one of the three kings. My mother and Mlle.
Granger (who later became Madame Paul Meurice) both loved painting and
became great friends. They copied together Paul Delaroche's _Enfants
d'Edouard_ at the Louvre, a picture which was the rage at that time. My
mother's paintings, in an admirable state of preservation, may be seen
at the museum at Dieppe.
I was introduced to Ingres when I was five years old through the
Granger family. The distance from the Rue du Jardinet, where we lived,
to the Quai Voltaire was not far, and we often went like a
procession--the Grangers, my great-aunt Masson, my mother and I--to call
upon Ingres and his wife, a delightfully simple woman whom everyone
loved.
Ingres often talked to me about Mozart, Gluck, and all the other great
masters of music. When I was six years old, I composed an Adagio which I
dedicated to him in all seriousness. Fortunately this masterpiece has
been lost. As I already played, and rather nicely for my years, some of
Mozart's sonatas, Ingres, in return for my dedication, presented me with
a small medallion with the portrait of the author of Don Juan on one
side, and this inscription on the other: "To M. Saint-Saëns, the
charming interpreter of the divine artist."
He carelessly omitted to add the date of this dedication, which would
have increased its interest, for the idea of calling a knee-high
youngster of six "M. Saint-Saëns" was certainly unusual.
[Illustration: Ingres, the painter famous for his violin]
In addition to the calls I paid him, when I was older I often met the
great painter at the house of Frederic Reiset, one of his most ardent
admirers. They made much of music in that household and we often heard
there Delsarte, the singer without a voice, whom Ingres admired very
much. Delsarte and Henri Reber were, in fact, his musical mentors, and,
in spite of his pretence of being a great connoisseur, he was in reality
their echo. He affected, for example, the most profound contempt for all
modern music, and would not even listen to it. In this respect he
reflected Reber. Reber used to say quietly in his far-away nasal voice,
"You've got to imitate somebody, so the best thing to do is to imitate
the ancients, for they are the best." However, he undertook to prove the
contrary by writing some particularly individual music, when he thought
he was imitating Haydn and Mozart. Some of his works, in their
perfection of line, their regard for details, their purity and their
moderation remind one of Ingres's drawings which express so much in such
a simple way. And Ingres, as well, although he tried to imitate Raphael,
could only be himself. Reber would have been worthy of comparison with
the painter, if he had had the power and productiveness which
distinguish genius.
What about Ingres's violin? Well, I saw this famous violin for the first
time in the Montaubon Museum. Ingres never even spoke to me about it. He
is said to have played it in his youth, but I could never persuade him
to play even the slightest sonata with me. "I used to play," he replied
to my entreaties, "the second violin in a quartet, but that is all."
So I think I must be dreaming when I read, from time to time, that
Ingres was more appreciative of compliments about his violin-playing
than those about his painting. That is merely a legend, but it is
impossible to destroy a legend. As the good La Fontaine said:
"Man is like ice toward truth;
He is like fire to untruth."
I do not know whether Ingres showed talent for the violin in his youth
or not. But I can state positively that in his maturity he showed none.
Gustave Doré was also said to be famous on the violin, and his claims to
consideration were far from inconsiderable. He had acquired a valuable
instrument, on which he used to play Berlioz's _Concertos_ with a really
extraordinary facility and spirit. These superficial works were enough
for his musical powers. The surprising things about his execution was
that he never worked at it. If he could not get a thing at once, he gave
it up for good and all.
He was a frequent attendant at Rossini's salon, and he belonged to the
faction which supported melody and opposed "learned scientific music."
His temperament and mine hardly seem compatible, but friendship, like
love, has its inexplicable mysteries, and gradually we became the best
of friends. We lived in the same quarter and we visited each other
frequently. As we almost never were of the same opinion about anything,
we had interminable arguments, entirely free from rancor, which we
thoroughly enjoyed.
I finally became the confidant of his secret sorrows, and his innermost
griefs. He was endowed with a wonderful visual memory, but he made the
mistake of never using models, for in his opinion they were useless for
an artist who knew his _metier_. So he condemned himself to a perpetual
approximation, which was enough for illustrations demanding only life
and character, but fatal for large canvasses, with half or full sized
figures. This was the cause of his disappointments and failures which he
attributed to malevolence and a hostility, which really did exist, but
which took advantage of this opportunity to make the painter pay for the
exaggerated success of the designer that had been extravagantly praised
by the press from the beginning. He laid himself open to criticism
through his abuse of his own facility. I have seen him painting away on
thirty canvasses at the same time in his immense studio. Three seriously
studied pictures would have been worth more.
At heart this great overgrown jovial boy was melancholy and sensitive.
He died young from heart disease, which was aggravated by grief over the
death of his mother from whom he had never been separated.
I dedicated a slight piece written for the violin to Doré. This was not
lost as the one to Ingres was, but it would be entirely unknown had not
Johannes Wolf, the violinist of queens and empresses, done me the favor
of placing it in his repertoire and bringing his fine talent to its aid.
Hébert was the most serious of the painter-violinists. Down to the end
of his life he delighted in playing the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven,
and, from all accounts, he played them remarkably. I can say this only
from hearsay, for I never heard him. The few times that I ever saw him
at home in my youth, I found him with his brush in hand. I saw him after
that only at the Académie, where we sat near each other, and he always
greeted me cordially. We talked music from time to time, and he
conversed like a connoisseur.
Henri Regnault was the most musical of all the painters whom I have
known. He did not need a violin--he was his own. Nature had endowed him
with an exquisite tenor voice. It was alluring in its timbre and
irresistible in its attractiveness, just as he was himself. He was no
"near musician." He loved music passionately, and he was unwilling to
sing as an amateur. He took lessons from Romain Bussine at the
Conservatoire. He sang to perfection the difficult arias of Mozart's
_Don Juan_. He also liked to declaim the magnificent recitative of
Pilgrimage in the third act of _Tannhauser_.
As we were friendly and liked the same things, the sympathy which
brought us together was quite natural. At the beginning of the war in
1870 I wrote _Les Melodies Persanes_ and Regnault was their first
interpreter. _Sabre en main_ is dedicated to him. But his great success
was _Le Cimitière_. Who would have thought as he sang:
"To-day the roses,
To-morrow the cypress!"
that the prophecy would be realized so soon?
Some imbeciles have written that the loss of Regnault was not to be
regretted; that he had said all he had to say. In reality he had given
only the prologue of the great poem which he was working out in his
brain. He had already ordered canvasses for great compositions which,
without a doubt, would have been among the glories of French art.
I saw him for the last time during the siege. He was just starting for
drill with his rifle in his hand. One of the four watercolors which were
his last work, stood uncompleted on his easel. There was a shapeless
spot at the bottom. He held a handkerchief in his free hand. He
moistened this from time to time with saliva and kept tapping away on
the spot on the picture. To my great astonishment, almost to my fright,
I saw roughed out and finished the head of a lion.
A few days afterwards came Buzenval!
When the question of publishing Henri Regnault's letters came up, some
phrases referring to me and ranking me above my rivals were found in
them. The editor of the letter got into communication with me, read me
the phrases, and announced that they were to be suppressed, because they
might displease the other musicians.
I knew who the other musicians were, and whose puppet the editor was. It
would have been possible, it seems to me, without hurting anyone, to
include the exaggerated praise, which, coming from a painter, had no
weight, and which would have proved nothing except the great friendship
which inspired it. I have always regretted that the public did not learn
of the sentiments with which the great artist, whom I loved so much,
honored me.
THE END