The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 11

When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:

"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"

Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the door, begging her, for G.o.d's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.

After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5, 1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling pa.s.sion!

Crowds, the next day, pa.s.sed the house of Mozart and wept before his windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease, thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a pauper's grave, three corpses deep.

It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.

She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old s.e.xton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new and ignorant s.e.xton that greeted the anxious Constanze.

There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.

Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure, speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."

For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician, there is a superfluity of proof.

After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he granted. Her n.o.bility of character can be seen also in the concert of her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children he left fatherless and penniless.

For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her affections.

There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."

She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:

"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"

Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius, and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828."

What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?

When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was, according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband--an eminent musician--both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had pa.s.sed, Frau Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.

"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one in heaven now."

Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.

Taken in the entirety, in s.h.i.+ne and shade, footlights and firelights, for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.

CHAPTER XIV.

BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT b.u.mBLEBEE

"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of it, his success and his immortality."

So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young Spanish-Italian woman, f.a.n.n.y Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet in utter disregard."

Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.

He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but roared or moaned his demiG.o.dlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.

A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.

Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Handel, despised the pleasures of the table; he subst.i.tuted a pa.s.sion for nature. "No man on earth can love the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.

Three years before, he had succ.u.mbed, at the age of twenty, to the charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the cafe where Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.

Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch, whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love ditties. Then came Fraulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the Wertherlike fas.h.i.+on.

Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna, at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know, each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."

To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend, Beethoven."

There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.

An army captain cut him out with Fraulein d'Honrath; his good friend Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schone und hochgebildete"

Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged; she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fraulein Therese von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the "volatile Therese who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von Droszd.i.c.k. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my dearest Therese; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.

Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fraulein Roeckel.

The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdody (_nee_ Countess Niczky) is listed among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a menage could not last, as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as "Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Grafin," showing that she was his dearie to the fourth power.

Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge in 1812, Beethoven says:

"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of grat.i.tude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her companions.h.i.+p sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and to Amalie a right ardent kiss--if n.o.body there can see."

In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the alb.u.m of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie").

The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:

"Ludwig van Beethoven: Who even if you would Forget you never should."

In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a ma.s.s of short notes from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent pa.s.sion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:

"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wis.h.i.+ng that my presence may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to pa.s.s a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give me of your attachment to your friend,

"BEETHOVEN."

There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.

Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.

It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the far-away love" _[An die ferne Geliebte],_ according to Thayer; and of her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."

Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he could never get her out of his mind.

In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.

Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Muller. And there was a poetess who also annoyed him.

In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in 1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her, inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817--he being then forty-seven years old--the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler, who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son later a.s.serted that it was only a kins.h.i.+p of "artistic sympathy,"--in fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's life, "a happy circ.u.mstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty, her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."