The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 - Rupert Hughes
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
By Rupert Hughes
Illustrated
Volume I.
[Illustration]
1903
NOTE
Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in _The
Criterion_, and the last chapter was published in _The Smart Set_.
While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the
letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
misunderstood.
Love it is an hatefulle pees,
A free acquitaunce without re lees.
An hevy burthen light to here,
A wikked wawe awey to were.
It is kunnyng withoute science,
Wisdome withoute sapience,
Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,
Right eville savoured good savour;
A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,
And feblenesse fulle of myght.
A laughter it is, weping ay;
Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.
Also a swete helle it is,
And a soroufulle Paradys.
Romaunt of the Rose.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. THE OVERTURE
II. THE ANCIENTS
III. THE MEN OF FLANDERS
IV. ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
V. HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
VI. THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
VII. GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
VIII. BACH, THE PATRIARCH
IX. PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
X. THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
XI. GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR,
AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
XII. A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY
--PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL
XIII. MOZART
XIV. BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
XV. VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
XVI. THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
XVII. THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)
DAPHNE
HELOISE
MARY STUART
ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)
HENRY PURCELL
JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH
MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH
JOSEPH HAYDN
MRS. BILLINGTON
GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL
CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
NICOLA PICCINNI
JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY
WOLFGANG MOZART
MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA "DON JUAN" FOR THE FIRST TIME
LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN
BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM
COUNTESS THERESE VON BRUNSWICK
CARL MARIA VON WEBER
FELIX MENDELSSOHN
FREDERICK CHOPIN
GEORGE SAND
COUNTESS POTOCKA
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
VOLUME I.
CHAPTER I.
THE OVERTURE
Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the
inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
music's very own.
So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And
if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
corner.
Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
tune.
But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.
If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
incidentally--to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
skipped--let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.
In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
without frankly branding it as such.
Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
tell their own stories in their own words.
For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
reader could consult with pleasure.
It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
wholesale blame--"_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_." So, without
pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
of fame, or of amorous experience.
As a last chapter to this series of "true stories," I have ventured to
sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
collected.
And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."
CHAPTER II.
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 blase 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 matinee 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. Abelard, for instance, was a monk, and his Heloise 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 abbe? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hele, 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 Tres-Haut, ministre du
Christ, il sut garder la chastete 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.
CHAPTER III.
THE MEN OF FLANDERS
The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siecle,"
with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537--1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels.
All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
died--so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
twenty-six at the time--so we can imagine how young and lithely
beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia--a sweet
name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good
and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.
Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.
Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
(1680--1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,--which
was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
a pitiful letter still preserved.
"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.
"The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
work, prevent me from gaining my own living."
Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.
Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
Flanders with her children.
The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
they were famous marriers, too,--but one of them met his match, Jean,
called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
naively points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
married with three of his Majesty's servants. (_Casada con tres criados
de V.M._) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
achieved.
Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin
Despres (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
marriage).
We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.
As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man
vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard."
Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
disinherited.
One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
the year 1566.
CHAPTER IV.
ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the "Belgian Orpheus," "_le Prince des
Musiciens_." There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a "false
moneyer," had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.
Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.
He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
described her children as _elegantissimi_.
There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
As his biographer Delmotte says, "His life indeed had been the most
toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
alert, had _enfante_ a multitude of compositions so great that their
very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.
"Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'"
While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
Lassus) that "his _Altesse Serenissime_ be pleased not to heap on the
poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
deserved through his _fantaisies bizarres_, the result of too much
thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
court chapel would be to kill him."