The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 7

Though it sounds strange to speak of the "invention" of opera, that is the word which may be applied to the work of Jacopo Peri and his friends. They, however, thought of it rather as a revival of the manner of the ancient Greek tragedy, which was, in a sense, a crude form of Wagnerian recitation, with musical accompaniment.

As the English novel owes its origin to the commission given to Mr.

Samuel Richardson to prepare a Ready Letter Writer, which he decided to put in the form of a story told in letters, so grand opera, which has almost rivalled the novel in the world's favour, found its origin in a conference among certain aristocratic gentlemen, of the city of Florence, concerning the possibility of reviving part of Greek tragedy.

As an experiment, they prepared a small work called "Dafne" for private presentation at the palace of the Corsi. Rinuccini was the first of a long and usually incompetent lineage of librettists. The music was written by Peri and Caccini. It was appropriate that they should have chosen the love affairs of the first musician Orpheus and the coy Daphne, seeing what a vast amount of love-making, pretended and real, the school of opera has handed down upon the world. Reissman has reckoned it out that twenty thousand lovers are joined or are parted every night in the world's theatres.

Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-G.o.d by his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fetis, Peri was very avaricious. Of n.o.ble birth himself, he grew rich on the favour of the Medicis, and added to his wealth by marrying a daughter of the house of Fortini, who incidentally brought with her a very handsome dot. She bore him a son, who won an early fame by his mathematics, his temper, and his dissipations, which led his tutor, the famous Galileo, to call him his demon. And this is all I know of the love affairs of the father of modern opera.

His collaborator, Caccini, who was more famous among his contemporaries than Peri, states in the preface to a book of his, that he was married twice, both times to pupils. His former wife was a well-known singer, and his daughters were musicians, the elder, Francesca, being also a composer.

The name of Monteverde is immortal in the history of music, because, although no one sings his songs now, or hears his operas, even the strictest composers make constant use of certain musical procedures, which were in his time forbidden, and which he fought for tooth and nail. Irisi says that he entered the Church after the death of his wife, and as he entered the priesthood in 1633, it would seem that she died when he was about sixty-five years of age. He had two sons, the elder of whom became a priest, and a tenor in his father's church; the younger son became a physician--a good division of labour, for those patients whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.

Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Schutz, a great revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German opera, was "Dafne," written to a libretto by Rinuccini, possibly the same one used by Peri. When he was thirty-four, he married on June 1, 1619, a girl named Magdalena, who is described as "Christian Wildeck of Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter," which description Hawkins compares to that of "Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's sister's hat." She died six years later, having borne him two daughters.

He lived the rest of his eighty-seven years as a widower, and joined the pathetic line of musicians who have gone deaf.

LULLY THE IMP

French opera, which was reformed by the Austrian Gluck, had been created by the Italian Signor Lulli, who later, as Monsieur Lully, became most French of the French. Though he was the son of a gentleman of Florence, he was not gifted with wealth, and was taken to France to serve in the kitchen of Mlle. de Montpensier, the chief princess of the French court.

The impishness which characterised his whole career inspired him to turn a highly improper couplet on an accident that happened in public to Mademoiselle,--and worst of all, he set it to music. She did not see the fun of the joke, and dismissed him, but the king laughed so much at his wit, that he had him presented, and interested himself in his musical career.

The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the "atmosphere of pa.s.sion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora." He was always a very dissipated man, but in July, 1662, "regularised" his life by marrying Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court. "The honour of the new family, and the dot of twenty thousand francs which he received, made Lully a personage, and the second phase of his life commenced." His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent monument.

It was a brilliant circle Lully moved in. He had the honour of being hated by Boileau and La Fontaine, and of being first the friend and collaborator, and later the enemy, of Moliere. His contract of marriage was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage, Fetis says: "Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and the economy that reigned in her house. Lully reserved for his _menus plaisirs_ only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted annually to seven or eight thousand francs."

His dissipations, like those of Handel, were chiefly confined to excesses in eating and drinking, but for all his doubtful fidelity to his wife, he cannot have been an ideal husband, for he was of a miserly disposition, and his temper was enforced by a ruthless brutality. On one occasion the singer Rochis, being in a condition that compelled a postponement of "Armide," he demanded, angrily, "_Qui t'a fait cela_?"

and gave her a kick _qui lui fit faire une fausse couche_. This poor woman was revenged upon him by his own temper, for at the age of fifty-four, while conducting his orchestra, he grew indignant, and in wildly brandis.h.i.+ng his baton struck his own foot so fierce a blow that gangrene set in and he died of the wound. While he was on his death-bed, he was called upon by one of his old friends, whom his wife reproached with having been the last to get him drunk. Whereupon the dying man spoke up with the gaiety for which he was famous, "That's true, my dear, and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again."

In his will he named his wife as executrix, and took great care that she and the children should preserve the royal monopoly in the Academy of Music. Lully had been reconciled only eight days before his death, with his son, whom he had previously disinherited. His wife outlived him twenty-three years, and died May 3, 1720, at the age of seventy-seven.

When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown poet, who hated him for his _moeurs infames_, scrawled on his tomb these terrific lines:

"Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau, Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire D'un libertin, indigne de memoire, Peut-etre meme indigne du tombeau."

It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain roles were sung by Mlle. de Maupin, whose incredibly wild, scandalous, and ambiguous love affairs, and duels in male costume, made the material for Gautier's famous romance.

THE TACITURN RAMEAU

The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683--1764), who resembled Lully in his stinginess, but not in his brilliant social qualities. As a boy he neglected his lessons in language for his music-books. His parents' efforts were in vain, and his teachers gave him up as hopeless; but at the age of sixteen or seventeen he fell in love with a young widow, who was a neighbour of his. His letters to her, brought from her the crus.h.i.+ng statement:

"You spell like a scullion."

This rebuke woke him to his senses as far as orthography was concerned, but his father did not approve of the widow as a teacher, and sent him to Italy to break off the relation. Some years later he returned to the town, but as he remained only a short time, he evidently did not reillumine his first flame.

He did not wed until he was forty-three years old, and then on February 25, 1726, he married the eighteen-year-old Marie Louise Mangot. Of her Maret says: "Madame Rameau is a virtuous woman, sweet and amiable, and she has made her husband very happy. She has much talent for music, a very pretty voice, and good taste in song." They had three children, one a son, who became equerry to the king, a daughter who became a nun, and another who married a musketeer.

Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being "a savage, a stranger to every sentiment of humanity." The great Diderot, in a book called "The Nephew of Rameau," referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in acoustics, and added:

"He is a philosopher in his way; he thinks only of himself, and the rest of the universe is as the puff of a bellows. His daughter and his wife have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones, all will be well."

Fetis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister. "Sombre and unsociable he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost absolute." I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him.

PERGOLESI

In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony. This brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six. It was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love of his. The saccharine romance-monger, Elise Polko, has a rather mawkish story which she connects with his name, though on what authority, I am ignorant. As Lincoln said, "For those that like that sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like."

KEISER

A contemporary of his was Reinhard Keiser, who died three years later at the age of sixty-six, and who wrote one hundred and sixteen operas for the German stage. Like his contemporary, Handel, he attempted management, and like Handel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but quite unlike the woman-hater Handel, he married his way out of poverty.

In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partners.h.i.+p with the daughter of an aristocratic town musician of Oldenburg, Hamburg. She was a distinguished singer, and her talent brought new charm to the production of his works, and restored prosperity. She seems to have died before him, for twenty years after his marriage he went to Moscow with his daughter, who was a prominent singer, and had an engagement there.

She married a Russian violinist, Verocai, and her father spent his last years at her home.

BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS

Of that exquisite and elegant scamp Bononcini, who was the great rival of Handel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though Hawkins says he was the favourite of the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, who gave him a pension of 500 per year, and had him live in her home until he was compelled to leave London, by various scandals attached to his repute as an honest gentleman. He had been in his youth a great admirer of the style of Alessandro Scarlatti, an eminent composer, both in opera and sacred music, of whom little is known, except his work; he left a son, Domenico, who was hardly less famous. But he was a confirmed gambler, and left his family in great dest.i.tution, from which the famous artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.

CHAPTER XIII.

MOZART

As we come nearer to our own day, the doc.u.ments concerning the personal lives of composers begin to multiply. Of the love of Bach we have only that tantalising allusion to the "stranger maiden." Of Haydn we have amorous doc.u.ments enough to make a brochure. When we reach Mozart, his letters alone fill two comfortable volumes. Of Beethoven there are still more numerous possessions. By Wagner and Liszt we are fairly overwhelmed.

Search not for the artist's self in his works of art. This is good cautious advice. But there are occasional exceptions, and of these Mozart is the most radiant. The qualities of eternal youth and of juventine gaiety; of intimate tenderness; of swagger that winks while it swaggers; of love that is ever deep but sunlit to the depth; and of tragedy with a touch of fatalistic horror,--all those qualities that are found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various operas--all the qualities that are combined in "Don Giovanni," are the qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and the fanatic libertinism of his Don Juan.

Schopenhauer says that the genius is he who never quite outgrows the childhood of his att.i.tude toward the world. Mozart was always the sublime child.

All the qualities of youth give life and personality to his letters, and place them consequently among the most delightful letters in existence.

Ludwig Nohl collected most of them into two volumes, and Lady Wallace has translated them into English, with a certain amount of inaccuracy, but a surprising amount of spirit withal. They may be picked up without much difficulty, though they are out of print; and any one interested in musicians or in lovers or in letters, should make haste to add these two golden volumes to his library.

As the first letter was written in his thirteenth year and the last in the thirty-fifth and final year of his life, and as they const.i.tute two volumes of the size of this one, it is manifest that I am here empowered only to make a skimming summary of his heart-history--woe's me!

The human affections grow by exercise. Mozart was so devoted and so enthusiastic in his fondness for his father and mother and his sister that his heart was graduated early for any demand. The most unmusical people know that Mozart stands unrivalled among infant prodigies, that he was a pocket-Paderewski, at a period when most children cannot even trundle a hoop, and that he was deep in composition before the usual child is out of kilts. Everybody has seen the pictures of the littler Mozart and his little sister perched like robins on a piano stool and giving a concert before crowned heads, with the a.s.sistance of the father and the mother, themselves musicians.

The elder Mozart made a life-work out of the career of his children, though he was a gifted musician and a shrewd and intelligent man on his own account. He was in no sense one of your child-beating brutes who make an easy livelihood by turning their children into slaves. He believed that his son was capable of being one of the world's greatest musicians, and he gave a splendid and permanent demonstration of his theory. Through all his vicarious ambition he kept his son's love and kept it almost to the point of idolatry. Indeed the boy once wrote, "Next to G.o.d comes papa."

The domestic relations of the family were indeed as happy as they well could be. Mozart's letters to his sister, Maria Anna, who was nicknamed "Nannerl," are brimful of cheerful affection and of sprightly interest in her own love affairs. His relations with his mother and father were full, not only of filial piety, but of that far better proof of real affection, a playful humour.

Mozart's mother died in Paris when her son and she were there alone together. He wrote the news of her death to a friend of his father's and bade him tell the father only that she was seriously ill but would probably recover, and gradually to prepare him for the worst. This letter he wrote at two o'clock in the morning; the same night he wrote his father a long letter full of news, incidentally saying that his mother was very ill, but that he hoped for the best, and that, in any case, resignation to the will of G.o.d was imperative. A few days later he wrote another letter telling the bitter truth, and telling it with most devout concern for his father's health and reconciliation with the divine dispensation. In this letter he seems rather the father to his own father than the young gallant of twenty-two. It was a good heart the boy had.

Mozart had been so much caressed and flattered by court beauties as a child that he was precocious in flirtation. His sister was the confidante and messenger of all sorts of boyish amours. There is a fine mysteriousness in the letters he wrote his mother while he was making a musical conquest of Milan like a veteran musician, and betraying his fourteen-year-old boyishness only in such phrases as this: "I kiss your hand a thousand times, and have a great deal to say to my sister; but what? That is known only to G.o.d and myself. Please G.o.d I hope soon to be able to confide it to her verbally."

This does not sound like the writing of a composer who was adding in a letter a few days later, "Pray to G.o.d that my opera may be successful."