The perennial interest of the world in the friendships of famous men and
women is proved by the never-ceasing publication of books concerning
them. Of George Sand and her lovers how much has been written. George
Eliot and Lewes, Madame de Recamier and Chateaubriand, Goethe and his
affinities, Chopin and George Sand, Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult,
Wagner and Mathilde--a voluminous index might be made of the classic and
romantic _liaisons_ that have excited curiosity from the time when the
memory of man runneth not to the contrary down to yesteryear. Although
Franz Liszt, great piano virtuoso, great composer, great man, has been
dead since 1886, and the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein since 1887,
volumes are still written about their friendship. Indeed, in any
collection of letters written by Liszt, or to him, the name of the
princess is bound to appear. She was the veritable muse of the
Hungarian, and when her influence upon him as a composer is considered
it will not do to say, as many critics have said, that she was a
stumbling-block in his career. The reverse is the truth.
The most recent contributions to Liszt literature are the letters
between Franz Liszt and Carl Alexander, Archduke of Weimar; Aus der
Glanzzeit der Weimarer Altenburg, by the fecund La Mara; and Franz
Liszt, by August Goellerich, a former pupil of the master. To this we
might add the little-known bundle of letters by Adelheid von Schorn,
Franz Liszt et la Princesse de Sayn-Wittgenstein, (translated into
French), a perfect mine of gossip. Miss von Schorn remained in Weimar
after the princess left the Athens-on-the-Ilm for Rome and corresponded
with her, telling of Liszt's doings, never failing to record new
flirtations and making herself generally useful to the venerable
composer. When attacked by his last illness at Colpach, where he had
gone to visit Munkacszy, the painter, Miss von Schorn went to Bayreuth
to look after him. There, at the door of his bed-chamber, she was
refused admittance, Madame Cosima Wagner, through a servant, telling her
that the daughter and grand-daughters of Franz Liszt would care for him.
The truth is that Madame Wagner had always detested the Princess
Wittgenstein and saw in the Weimar lady one of her emissaries. Miss Von
Schorn left Bayreuth deeply aggrieved. After Liszt's death her
correspondence with the princess abruptly ceased. She tells all this in
her book. Even Liszt had shown her his door at Weimar several years
before he died. He detested gossips and geese, he often declared.
The interest displayed by the world artistic has always centred about
the episode of the projected marriage between the princess and Liszt.
A dozen versions of the interrupted ceremony have been printed.
Bayreuth, which never loved Weimar--that is, the Wagner family and the
Wittgenstein faction--has said some disagreeable things, not hesitating
to insinuate that Liszt himself was more pleased than otherwise when
Pope Pius IX forbade the nuptials. Liszt biographers side with their
idol--who once said of his former son-in-law, Hans von Buelow, that he
had no talent as a married man. He might have lived to repeat the
epigram if he had married the princess. Decidedly, Liszt was not made
for stepping in double-harness.
Liszt, the most fascinating pianist in Europe, had been the most
pursued male on the Continent, and his meeting with the Princess
Sayn-Wittgenstein at Kieff, Russia, in February, 1847, was really his
salvation. He was then about thirty-six years old, in all the glory of
his art and of his extraordinary virility. The princess, who was born in
1819, was living on her estate at Woronice, on the edge of the Russian
steppes. She was nevertheless of Polish blood, the daughter of Peter von
Iwanowski, a rich landowner, and of Pauline Podoska, an original,
eccentric, cultivated woman and a traveller. In 1836 she married the
Prince Nikolaus Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Russian millionaire and adjutant to
the Czar. It was from the first a miserable failure, this marriage. The
bride, intellectual, sensitive, full of the Polish love of art, above
all of music, could not long endure the raw dragoon, dissipated gambler
and hard liver into whose arms she had been pushed by her ambitious
father. She made a retreat to Woronice with her infant daughter and
spent laborious days and nights in the study of philosophy, the arts,
sciences, and religion. The collision of two such natures as Carolyne
and Liszt led to some magnificent romantic and emotional fireworks.
We learn in reading the newly published letters between Liszt and the
Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar that the pianist had visited Weimar
for the first time in 1841. The furore he created was historic. The
reigning family--doubtless bored to death in the charming, placid little
city--welcomed Liszt as a distraction. The Archduchess Maria Pawlovna,
the sister of the Czar of Russia and mother of the later Kaiserin
Augusta, admired Liszt, and so did the Archduke Carl. He was covered
with jewels and orders. The upshot was that after a visit in 1842 Liszt
was invited to the office of General Music Director of Weimar. This
offer he accepted and in 1844 he began his duties. Carl Alexander had
married the Princess Sophie of Holland, and therefore Liszt had a strong
party in his favour at court. That he needed royal favour will be seen
when we recall that in 1850 he produced an opera by a banished
socialist, one Richard Wagner, the opera Lohengrin. He also needed court
protection when in 1848 he brought to Weimar the runaway wife of Prince
Wittgenstein. The lady placed herself under the friendly wing of
Archduchess Maria Pawlovna, who interceded in vain with the Czar in
behalf of an abused, unhappy woman. Nikolaus Wittgenstein began divorce
proceedings. His wife was ordered back to her Woronice estate by
imperial decree. She refused to go and her fortune was greatly curtailed
by confiscation. She loved Liszt. She saw that in the glitter of this
roving comet there was the stuff out of which fixed stars are fashioned,
and she lived near him at Weimar from 1848 to 1861.
This was the brilliant period of musical Weimar. The illusion that the
times of Goethe and Schiller were come again was indulged in by other
than sentimental people. Princess Carolyne held a veritable court at the
Altenburg, a large, roomy so-called palazzo on the Jena post-road, just
across the muddy creek they call the River Ilm. The present writer when
he last visited Weimar found the house very much reduced from its former
glories. It looked commonplace and hardly like the spot where Liszt
wrote his symphonic poems, planned new musical forms and the
reformation of church music; where came Berlioz, Thackeray, George
Eliot, and George Henry Lewes, not to mention a number of distinguished
poets, philosophers, dramatists, composers, and aristocratic folk.
Carolyne corresponded with all the great men of her day, beginning with
Humboldt. The idea of the Goethe Foundation was born at that time. It
was a veritable decade of golden years that Weimar lived; but there were
evidences about 1858 that Liszt's rule was weakening, and after the
performance of his pupil's opera, The Barber of Bagdad, by Peter
Cornelius, December 15, 1858, he resigned as Kapellmeister. Dinglested's
intrigues hurt his unselfish nature and a single hiss had disturbed him
into a resignation. The daughter of Princess Wittgenstein married in
1859 Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, and in 1861 the Altenburg was
closed and the princess went to Rome to see the Pope.
At the Vatican the princess was well received. She was an ardent
Catholic and was known to be an author of religious works. Pius IX bade
her arise when she fell weeping at his feet asking for justice. She
presented her case. She had been delivered into matrimony at the age of
seventeen, knowing nothing of life, of love, of her husband. Wouldn't
his Holiness dissolve the original chains so that she could marry the
man of her election? The Pope was amiable. He knew and admired Liszt. He
had the matter investigated. After all it was an enforced marriage to a
heretic, this odious Wittgenstein union; and then came the desired
permission. Carolyne, Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, born Ivanovska,
was a free woman. Delighted, she lost no time; Liszt was told to reach
Rome by the evening of October 21, 1861, the eve of his fiftieth
birthday. The ceremony was to take place at the Church of San Carlo, on
the Corso, at 6 A. M. of October 22.
What really happened the night of the 21st after Liszt arrived no one
truly knows but the principals. Lina Ramann tells her tale, La Mara
hers, Goellerich his; Eugen Segnitz in his pamphlet, Franz Liszt und Rom,
has a very conservative account; but they all concur if not in details
at least in the main fact, that powerful, unknown machinery was set in
motion at the Vatican, that the Holy Father had rescinded his permission
pending a renewed examination of the case. The blow fell at the twelfth
hour. The church was decorated and a youth asked the reason for all
the candles and bravery of the altars. He was told that Princess
Wittgenstein was to marry "her piano player" the next morning. The news
was brought by the boy to his father, M. Calm-Podoska, a cousin of
Carolyne, who, with the aid of Cardinal Catarani and the Princess
Odescalchi, begged a hearing at the Vatican. Cardinal Antonelli sent the
messenger bearing the fatal information. The princess was as one dead.
It was the end of her earthly ambitions.
How did Liszt bear the disappointment? At this juncture the fine haze of
legend intervenes. His daughter Cosima has said (in a number of the
_Bayreuther Blaetter_) that he had left Weimar for Rome remarking that he
felt as if going to a funeral. Other and malicious folk have pretended
to see in the melodramatic situation the fine Hungarian hand of Liszt.
He was glad, so it was averred, to get rid of the marriage and the
princess at the same stroke of the clock. Had she not been nicknamed
"Fuerstin Hinter-Liszt" because of the way she followed him from town to
town when he was giving concerts? But Antonelli was a friend of the
princess as well as an intimate of Liszt. We doubt not that Liszt came
to Rome in good faith. In common with the princess he accepted the
interruption as a sign from on high, and even when in 1864 Prince
Wittgenstein died the marriage idea was not seriously revived. Carolyne
asked Liszt to devote his genius to the Church. In 1865 he assumed minor
orders and became an abbe.
Pius IX, a lover of music, had on July 11, 1863, visited Liszt at the
Dominican cloister of Monte Mario, and to the Hungarian's accompaniment
had sung in his sweet-toned musical voice. Liszt was called his
Palestrina, but alas! in the churchly music of Liszt Rome has
never betrayed more than a passing interest; and to-day Pius X is
ultra-Gregorian. Liszt, like a musical Moses, saw the promised land but
did not enter it.
The friendship of the princess and Liszt never abated. He divided his
days between Weimar, Rome, and Budapest (from 1876 in the latter
city), and she wrote tirelessly in Rome books on theology, mysticism,
and Church history. She was a great and generally good force in the life
of Liszt, who was, she said, a lazy, careless man, though he left over
thirteen hundred compositions. Women are insatiable.
[Illustration: The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein]