The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume II Part 15

Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the priests, who cl.u.s.tered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home.

Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home, seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli.

The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of their ill-favoured spouses would pa.s.s away. But they both declined to "die by request," as Artemus Ward has it.

After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension.

Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, _sub rosa_, with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does not s.h.i.+ne as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity.

Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in history.

We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew, whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more vain than Beethoven's. Among the mult.i.tudinous agonies that throng his letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for a homelife in a woman's heart.

But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are often resolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which he claims to be willing, and at times even glad, to pa.s.s his life alone.

We are not justified, then, in taking Beethoven as a man of domestic inclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt, and Beethoven had every qualification for driving a wife even madder than he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswerving friends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred and maltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have endured through the honeymoon.

And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy or whim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him as a great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried for wedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs,--we meet a conflict of authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder of chast.i.ty, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt.

Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he could easily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He has perpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in the furnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But how shall we blame or praise music for its effect upon Beethoven's heart, in the face of the antipodal life of such a fellow bachelor as Handel?

And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor of music, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even the paltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countess is dismissed by the cautious as a fable. Schubert was a pauper to the _n_th degree. But he found his joy in the hilarity of the Vienna cafes with boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimum of food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never to have truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them.

There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinction between the womanless splendour of Handel's life at court, and the unilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a difference also in the busy, promiscuous courts.h.i.+p of Beethoven, who dedicated thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who, though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.

Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his nocturnes, wis.h.i.+ng that after his death his ashes might be strewn under her feet. She married elsewhere. The Polish Maria Wodzinska was his next flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons of Paris at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-old girl. Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterious sphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as with claws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood, and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release from the embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming with her own clammy arms. Every one knows all there is to know about the Chopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw from it any inference as to the effect of music?

Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art. With her as nurse, his genius accomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for a time. To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment and solace. But that he would have lived his life differently in any way had he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or an idler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner, the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason to believe. Is it not the man and the environment rather than the music that makes such a life what it is?

There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a member of a long line of musicians. At seventeen he had formed "a tender connection with a lady of position," whom he lost sight of later and forgot in the race with fast young n.o.blemen, whose dissipation he rivalled. A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, and almost in career. His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishment which sobered him with the abruptness of a plunge into a stream of ice.

But his gaiety was as irrepressible as Chopin's melancholy, and he gave Germany some of its most cheerful music. His heart was restless, and still at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation for a worthless ballet-girl. Then his affection for a singer and soubrette, Caroline Brandt, steadied him. After a long period of effort to establish a firm position they married, and the soubrette became a "Haus-frau." He was thirty-one, however, before this point was reached, and the honeymoon consisted of a concert tour.

The glory of his later life fought against the gloom of his disease, but the ferocious rake had made, as the proverb has it, an ideal husband and father. His letters to his wife are full of ardour. It was a tour through England that exhausted Chopin's last strength, and it was Weber's fate to die alone in London in the midst of eager preparations and vast hunger to reach his home. He was not quite forty when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in the latter half that he wrote his best music.

The domestic and home-establis.h.i.+ng influences of music might be pleaded even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical home than that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one in which family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. Like Mozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her death indeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of the utmost cheer and wholesomeness, revelling in dancing, swimming, riding, sketching, and billiards; he was idolised in the circle around him, though his life was not without its enmities. He had many slight flirtations, but seems to have been even engaged but once, to Cecile Jeanrenaud, whom he married. His home life was a repet.i.tion of that ideal circle in his father's house. A busier life or a more pleasantly respectable can hardly be found in the history of men, nor yet a more truly musical.

A life of similar brilliance and similar musical immersion was that of Liszt, whose domestic career was nevertheless as different as possible.

A soul of greater generosity, and more zealous altruism in many respects, it would be hard to find, and yet his relations to women were, in the conventional view, a colossal and multifarious scandal.

Have we any more right to blame his domestic outrages to the music that was in him, than to the almost equally intense religious ardour that fought for him, leading him again and again to seek to enter a monastery, and finally actually to take orders? Abelard was a sufficiently tempestuous and irregular lover, yet he was a priest, and not a musician. Can we then blame harmony and melody for the humming-bird "amours" of the Abbe Liszt,--for the many women he made material love to from his early youth,--for the very dubious honesty of his bearing toward the Comtesse d'Agoult and the Princess Wittgenstein, with whom he debated the formalities of marriage without hesitating over the actualities?

There is a strange cl.u.s.ter of domestic infelicities centring about Liszt. The Comtesse d'Agoult loved him so ardently that she braved the world for him, driving even her complacent husband to divorce her; but even then, though they lived together, Liszt did not marry her. He even brought George Sand, the ex-mistress of so many men, including Liszt himself, to live at the house with the comtesse, who had borne him three children out of wedlock. One of these children became the wife of Hans von Bulow, who was driven to divorce her that she might marry his teacher, Richard Wagner, whose first wife had endured twenty-five years of his irregularities in everything, except poverty, and who separated from him during the last five years of her life.

Shall we blame all this to music, and if so, shall we say that music has atoned sufficiently in the devotion of Wagner and his second wife to each other, and their lofty theories of art? And in any case, how shall we explain the influence of music in the life of Wagner's rival for supremacy, Johannes Brahms, a confirmed bachelor; or his other contemporary, Tschaikovski, who, after a normal love affair with a singer, Desiree Artot, who jilted him, eventually married a girl by whom he seemed to have been deeply loved, without feeling any return?

He claimed to have explained to the enamoured girl that he would marry her if she wished, but that he could not love her. On these terms she accepted him, and the bridegroom endured all the agonies of heart ordinarily ascribed to bartered brides. A burlesque honeymoon of a week was soon followed by a separation. Tschaikovski regarded his wife with a horror bordering on insanity, finding what little consolation life had for him in the devotion of a widow, who furnished him liberally with funds and admiration, with an affection which, for lack of better information, we can only call, for lack of a better word, Platonic.

There are other musicians whose private affairs I need not repeat here, and yet others' that I have not poked into. There is no lack of curious entanglements, especially in the matter of the men and women who have played upon the human voice, but we have surely collected enough material for forming a judgment, especially when we have turned an additional glance upon the life of one other composer.

Now, the influence of music might be modified beyond recognition by the fact that one of the lovers might not be musical; but surely, when both man and woman are professional musicians, there can be no doubt of the governing power of music. In recent musical history there is one eminent composer who married a woman also prominent in music. In fact, Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took up music as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a place among the major G.o.ds of creative art. Every one knows how he began to love Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and she entering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Their fidelity through the storm and stress of their courts.h.i.+p, their lifelong sympathy and collaboration in conserving a humanly perfect home, and in achieving a dual immortality, both as lovers and as musicians--these certainly indicate music as a solidifying and enriching force in society.

And now, finally, in the procession that has filed past you, you have seen almost every imaginable form of love and lover, of husband and Lothario, or woman-hater. There have been cool-blooded bachelors like Handel, Schubert, and Brahms; there have been pa.s.sionate pilgrims like Chopin, Beethoven, and Liszt, who loved many women, and married none.

There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment, such as Willaert, Orlando di La.s.so, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck, Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years'

honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live. There have been the unhappily wed, who, through the fault of themselves, or their wives, found and made misery at home, and sought nepenthe elsewhere, such as Haydn, Berlioz, and Tschaikovski. There have been married lives of mixed nature, neither failure nor success, such as the careers of Lully, Rameau, Stradivari, and Wagner.

If any one lives who could extract from this medley a theory as to the effect of music upon the human heart,--a theory that will satisfy himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,--he is welcome to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism: if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a moral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautiful lives that have ever bloomed upon earth. It is, after all, a matter of time, tide, and temperament. If a man of amorous nature happens to lead a life of much leisure, his idle mind will turn one way; and if the tide of opportunity concur, he will be dissipated, whether he be composer, clergyman, business man, bravo, soldier, sailor, carpenter, king, plumber, poet, pope, or peasant.

The long and the short of it is, perhaps, that music, being a universal art, like a universal watch-key, will set going the complicated cogs and springs of every soul and yet not regulate or a.s.sure its rhythm.

Music stimulates and satisfies the mind in any of its whims, and you can tune it to a softly chanted prayer, or to a dance orgy; to a hymn of exultation, or a tinkling serenade; a kindergarten song, to the bloodthirst of armies; to voluptuous desires that cannot or dare not be worded, or to raptures distilled of every human dross; to cynical raillery, or the very throb of a young lover's heart; to the hilarity of a drinking song, or the midnight elegies of ineffable despair. How is such an art as this to compel, or to deny anything or anybody?

Musicians, then, are only ordinary clay, who happened to make music, instead of other things of more or less beauty or value. They are every-day puppets of circ.u.mstance and of inner and outer environment, who might have been happier, and might have been unhappier, with the women they wed or did not wed, had those women died younger, or lived longer--or with other women, or with none at all.

THE END.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_Of Books Consulted and Cited in This Work_

BAINI (GIUSEPPE).

Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di G. Pierluigi da Palestrina. 2 vols. Rome, 1828.

BEAUFORT (RAPHAEL LEDOS DE).

Franz Lizst. The Story of his Life. Boston, 1887.

BEETHOVEN'S LETTERS. See Nohl.

BeLART (HANS).

Richard Wagner in Zurich (1849-1859). 2 vols. Leipzig. 1901.

BELLAIGNE (CAMILLE).

Portraits and Silhouettes of Musicians. Translated by Ellen Orr. New York, 1897.

BELLASIS (Edward).

Cherubini. Memorials ill.u.s.trative of his life. London. 1874.

BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).

Lettres entre de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur Haydn, suivees d'une vie de Mozart et de considerations sur Metastasio. Pub.

1814, first under the pseudonym _L.A. Bombet_, and when exposed as a steal from Carpani (_q. v_.) republished under the pseudonym Doctor Stendahl in 1817. Published in English by W. Gardiner, 1820.

BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).

Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase. Par de Stendahl (Pseudonym).

Nouvelle ed. Paris, 1854.