The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 by Rupert Hughes
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Rupert Hughes >> The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2
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14 THE LOVE AFFAIRS
OF
GREAT MUSICIANS
_By_ RUPERT HUGHES
Author of "Contemporary American Composers," "The Musical Guide", etc.
_ILLUSTRATED_
VOLUME II.
_1903_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. FRANZ LISZT
II. RICHARD WAGNER
III. TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER
IV. THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST
V. AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
VI. ROBERT SCHUMANN AND CLARA WIECK
VII. MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
MISS SMITHSON _Frontispiece_
FRANZ LISZT
GEORGE SAND, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY L. COLAMATTA
PRINCESS CAROLYNE VON SAYN-WITTGENSTEIN AND CHILD
RICHARD WAGNER
RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER
RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
DESIREE ARTOT
LOUIS SPOHR
NICOLO PAGANINI
HENRIETTA SONTAG
MADAME MALIBRAN
GEOFFREY RUDEL
MARTIN LUTHER AND CATHERINA VON BORA
MUZIO CLEMENTI
HECTOR BERLIOZ
CHARLES GOUNOD
GIOACCHINO A. ROSSINI
OLYMPE PELISSIER, AS "JUDITH" IN THE PAINTING BY VERNET
GIUSEPPE VERDI
FRANZ SCHUBERT
ROBERT SCHUMANN
CLARA WIECK, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN
CLARA AND ROBERT SCHUMANN
CLARA (WIECK) SCHUMANN
THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
VOLUME II.
CHAPTER I.
FRANZ LISZT
"Liszt, or the Art of Running after Women."--NIETSCHE.
Liszt's life was so lengthy and so industriously amorous, that it is
possible only to float along over the peaks, to touch only the high
points. Why, his letters to the last of his loves alone make up four
volumes! And yet, for a life so proverbially given over to flirtations
as his, the beginnings were strangely unprophetic. He had reached the
mature age of six before he began to study the piano; compared with
Mozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert--namely,
nine years. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of his
father found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and he
was sent to Vienna to study. When he was eleven years old, after one of
his concerts, Beethoven kissed him. He survived. Then on to Paris and
duchesses and princesses galore. Here he became a proverb of popularity
as "Le petit Litz"--the French inevitably gave some twist to a foreign
name, then as to-day, when two of their favourite painters are
"Wisthler" and "Seargent."
Liszt's childhood was therefore largely fed upon the embraces and
kisses of rapturous women, even as was the young Mozart's, the
difference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Even then he
used to throw money among the gamins, as later he scattered it in how
many directions, with what liberality, and with what princeliness, and
from what a slender purse!
The father and mother had gone to Paris with him; but soon the mother
went back to Austria--she was a German, the father alone being
Hungarian. With his father the lad remained, and found him a severe and
domineering master. But in 1827 he died, leaving his sixteen-year-old
son alone in Paris. That stalwart self-reliance and sense of honour,
which gave nobility to so much of Liszt's character, now showed itself;
he sold his grand piano to pay the debts his father had left him, and
sent for his mother to come to Paris, where he supported her by giving
piano lessons. Then, as later, he found plenty of pupils, the
difference being that then, as not later, he took pay for his lessons,
though not even then from all.
Here he was at sixteen, tall and handsome, and with a face
of winsomeness that never lost its spell over womankind.
Sixteen-year-older that he was, he was a man of great fame, and the
grind of acquiring technic was all passed. Moscheles had already said
of him in print: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses everything yet heard,
in power and the vanquishing of difficulties." Here he was, then,
young, beautiful, famous, a dazzling musician, and Hungarian. What do
you expect?
It makes small difference what you expect, for the reality was that his
heart was eager for the seclusion of a monastery; his soul pined for
religious excitement only! At fourteen he had begun to rebel against
his nickname, "Le petit Litz." It was with the utmost difficulty that
his father had been able to keep him from making religion his career,
and giving up his already glittering fame. Never in his life did he
cease to thrill with an almost hysterical passion for churchly affairs
and ceremonies.
At fourteen he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It
was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella,
a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his
first love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his
mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really
his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior,
had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. The young
comtesse' mother gave her into Liszt's charge for musical education.
The young comtesse was, they say, of slender frame and angelic beauty,
and deeply imbued with that religious ardour which, as in Liszt's case,
often modulates as imperceptibly into love, as an organist can
gradually turn a hymn into a jig, or an Italian aria into a hymn.
The mother was fond of presiding at the music lessons, and of leading
the young teacher to air his views about religion and life, and she
watched with pleasure the gradual development of what was inevitable, a
more than musical sympathy between the daughter and the teacher. But
the romance seemed to win her approval, and when suddenly she saw that
she was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that he
should not refuse the young lovers their happiness. He allowed his wife
to die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without the
faintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of his
daughter with an untitled musician. His business affairs, however, kept
him away from home, and from thought upon the subject. After the death
of the mother, the comtesse and the pianist met and wept together; then
resumed their music lessons, reading much between the lines, and far
preferring dreamy duets to difficult solos.
Liszt had read little but music and religion; the slim, fair comtesse
had read much verse and romance. So she was his teacher in that
literature which would most interest a brace of young lovers. There was
no one at home to note how late he stayed of evenings, and one night he
returned to his own house to find it locked and his mother asleep.
Rather than disturb her, he spent the night on the steps. Another
evening, Franz and Caroline found parting such sweet sorrow, that when
he reached her outer door, he found it locked for the night. He was
compelled to call the porter from those slumbers which only doorkeepers
know, and this man was doorkeeperishly wrathful at having his
beauty-sleep broken; he growled his rage. This is the only time
recorded when Franz Liszt failed to respond to a hint for money. His
head was too high in the clouds, no doubt. The servant, thus suddenly
awakened to the impropriety of affairs, hastened the next morning to
inform the comte that his daughter was studying the music of the
spheres as well as that of the piano, and that her lessons were
prolonged till midnight.
The next time Franz came to teach, the ghoulish porter gleefully
informed him that his master wished to speak to him. The comte was most
politely firm, and murdered the young love with most suave apologies
for the painful amputation. The difference in rank, it went without
saying, put marriage out of the question, and, therefore, all things
considered, he could not derange monsieur to the giving of more music
lessons,--for the present, at least.
The young musician took the _coup de grace_ bravely; without a word he
gave the comte his hand in mute acceptance of his fate, and bowed
himself out. The true bitterness of his loss he sought to hide by
fleeing to the Church. His love had been pure and ardent. It had been
found impossible. His hopes had been put to death; therefore an end to
the world. He bent his burning head low upon the cold steps of Saint
Vincent de Paul, and resolved to renounce the world. He wrote ten years
later, and still with suffering: "A female form chaste and pure as the
alabaster of holy vessels, was the sacrifice I offered with tears to
the God of Christians. Renunciation of all things earthly was the only
theme, the only word of that day."
Caroline, too, sank under the bitterness of the loss. She fell
dangerously ill, and when she recovered she thought only of the
convent; but her father, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew how
to persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madame
d'Artigou; they say she gave her husband no affection, and that her
heart was still, and always, Liszt's; while in his heart she was for
ever niched as the young Madonna of his life.
For the present the shock of sacrifice threatened his whole career, and
his life and mind as well. Again the monastery beckoned him, and now it
was his mother's turn to oppose the Church in its effort to engulf this
brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a
time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his
health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary
eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself:
"The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated."
When Liszt gave up all hope of entering the Church, he began a restless
orgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foibles
allured him.
As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all
the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where
the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another
form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and
compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up
with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he
fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris
and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with
his unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to
the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next
Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the
twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up
their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the
most artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the Polish
Countess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and the
two cronies:
"I would choose Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband, Liszt for
my lover."
There seems to have been a snow-storm of love affairs at this period.
It is impossible even to name the flakes. Gossip of course gathered
into the catalogue every woman whom Liszt saw more than once; but we
need not pay this tribute to malice by mentioning the names of all of
Liszt's hostesses. Among those who may be more definitely suspected of
being made victims by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse Adele
Laprunarede, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as De
Beaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful." Her home was
lonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was a
musician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him to
spend the winter months at his chateau. For a whole winter Liszt was
kept there in her castle a prisoner, with fetters of silk. The old
comte seems never to have suspected. When Liszt eventually, like
Tannhaeuser, mutineered against the charms of the Venusberg and returned
to Paris, he wrote many letters to the comtesse, in which, as he
himself said, he gained his "first practice in the lofty French style."
But this intrigue was followed by his appearance in the procession of
George Sand's lovers. Ramann, in his biography, writes of the curious
state of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women were
beginning to demand freedom and to experiment with the writing of
perfervid romances, which questioned the very foundation principles of
marriage and made a religion of Affinity."
George Sand was a chief crusader against the curse of monogamy. She
practiced this anarchy in the guise of religion, as the old crusaders
out-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisation in the name of
the Cross. George Sand's gospel, summed up briefly by Ramann, is as
follows:
"'Love,' says the authoress, 'is Christian compassion concentrated on a
single being. It belongs to the sinner, and not to the just; only for
the former it moves restlessly, passionately, and vehemently. When
thou, O noble and upright man,' she continues, with deceitfully
fantastic warmth, 'when thou feelest a violent passion for a miserable
fallen creature, be reassured that is genuine love; blush not
therefore! so has Christ loved who crucified him.' According to this
view, the love that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely be
alarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the more
genuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steeped
in passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty,
exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you have
never loved my personal self.' It also appears to correspond with this
casuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, of
sky-storming earnestness, but adorned with all unnatural qualities,
give themselves up to the latter as to an intoxicating spell, and in
the delirium of self-delusion hold sin for virtue, and the unnatural
for higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was a
logical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressive
stubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself,' said Sand in 'Lelia';
'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man should
therefore be transitory.'"
If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand was
the most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large and
roomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only. It was in
1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caught
in the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry." Alfred de
Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to
Chopin--or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as
later the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite as
true. Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of George
Sand. But soon he was entangled in that "cameraderie" which was the
fashionable name for liaison in that time.
From her the Comtesse de Laprunarede had borrowed him for her
snow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was another
woman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off. This was the Comtesse
Marie Catherine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in
1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in
1834. It was not till six years later that the comtesse took up
literature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an art
critic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine and
English pen-name, "Daniel Stern."
The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was
signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost
equal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems
to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion
in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time she
seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with
her own fascinations.
Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the more
strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramann
has thus pictured her:
"The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:
slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in
her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair
tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular,
classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with
the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her
countenance; these were the general features which rendered it
impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or
the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the
elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the
Faubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the
purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft
melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that
her connection with the young artist began."
Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as the
mainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquest
that made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she
captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were
hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of
passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each
other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his
constitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, death
entered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. For
awhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems to
have had a moment's pause, but only to return.
Now, however, it had for Liszt something of unfreshness and monotony.
He determined to break loose, and in the spring of 1835 told the
comtesse that he was going to leave her. She, however, would not
consent. He yielding as gracefully as he could, took a lodging in a
quiet part of the city, where his life consisted of music, literature,
and the comtesse, who visited him incessantly. Her love had quite
infatuated her, to take the tone of the time; nowadays we might say
that she found it so serious that she desired to make it honest. The
means she hit upon were such as might strike a foolish woman as an
inspiration. Believing that the long way round was the short way home,
she thought to atone for her past foibles by casting them into sudden
insignificance--to clear the sultry air by a thunder crash.
When Liszt heard that the comtesse planned to leave her husband, and
even her children, and go into foreign exile with him, he felt that the
comtesse was taking the bit into her teeth with a vengeance, but saw as
he would on the lines, and cry "whoa" as he would, the runaway
comtesse still insisted on running away.
Liszt called on her mother to interfere; she was run over. He appealed
to her former confessor; his staying hand was shaken loose. He called
on the venerable family notary; the old man was upset by the
roadside--as I shall be also if I do not release this runaway metaphor.
The comtesse's mother persuaded the daughter to leave Paris for Basle,
hoping that a change of scene would bring a change of mind; Liszt
followed. It seems to me, however, more probable that the mother,
learning that her daughter was determined to leave Paris with Liszt,
went with her in the desperate effort to save appearances. But, however
that may be, we find the comtesse and the mother at one hotel, and
Liszt at another. A few days later, Liszt returned to his hotel to find
his room choked with the comtesse' trunks, and to learn that the mother
had gone back to Paris in despair. The comtesse had, as they say,
"brought her knitting" and come to stay.
Paris is not easily excited over an intrigue conducted according to the
established codes by which the intriguers bury their heads in the sand,
as a form of pretence that nobody knows that they are billing and
cooing beneath the sand, though of course everybody knows it, and they
know that everybody knows it, except possibly the one other person most
interested. But Paris was dumbfounded that a very prominent and
beautiful comtesse should leave her husband and her children in broad
daylight, and go visiting the most famous pianist in the world. The
pianist was to blame, of course, in the public eye, and the whole
affair was branded as a flagrant case of abduction. But, as we know
now, it was the pianist who was the victim of this Sabine procedure.
Liszt's actions in this affair seemed, as usual, to be an outrage upon
the ordinary laws of decency, but when the truth was learned, we find,
as the world found--as usual, too late to change its opinion of
him--that he did everything in his power to undo the evil into which
his passion had hurried him, and to set himself right with the usual
standards of society. And, as usual, he failed absolutely, because of
the curious and insane stubbornness of the woman.
Some years later, even the Comte d'Agoult, as well as the comtesse'
brother, the Comte Flavigny, confessed that Liszt had acted as a man of
honour. The comte had obtained a legal separation from his wife,
retaining their daughter. Liszt now proposed marriage. Both being
Catholics, it was necessary to experience a change of heart and become
Protestants. He exclaimed one day: "_Si nous etions Protestants"_ but
the comtesse crushed this hope with a sharp "_La Comtesse d'Agoult ne
sera jamais Madame Liszt_."
Liszt bowed to the inevitable, and kept together his many patches of
honour as well as he was permitted. The comtesse had a personal income
of four thousand dollars a year, which was as nothing. According to
Liszt's secretary, during the time of her stay with Liszt, she spent
sixty thousand dollars, the most of which Liszt earned himself by his
concerts. The pianist and the comtesse soon left Basle for Geneva,
where they remained till 1836, with the exception of one journey to
Paris, which Liszt made for a concert. But he returned rather to
literature than to music, as on another occasion did Wagner.
For five years Liszt and the comtesse travelled about Switzerland and
Italy, he occasionally being convinced that he was seriously in love
with the woman who had been so imperious and unreasonable. A few
conservatives outlawed him, but there were people enough who forgave
him, or approved him, to give him an abundance of society of the
highest and most aristocratic sort.
In 1836 his old flame, George Sand, visited Liszt and the comtesse.
They toured Switzerland on mules. George Sand has described the
wanderings in her "Lettres d'un Voyageur," where _Franz_ represents
Liszt, _Arabella_, the comtesse, and where one may read a poetic
description of the comtesse' beauty even after being drenched with
rain. Beauty that is water-proof is beauty indeed!
It is in this book of hers that Sand prints such illuminating epigrams
as these:
"There are great errors which are nearer the truth than little truths."
"The most beautiful creations of genius are those which succeed to the
epoch of the passions. The experience of life ought to precede art; art
requires repose, and does not suit with the storms of the heart. The
finest mountains of our globe are extinguished volcanoes."
"If you wish to arrive at truth, be reconciled to what is contrary; the
white light only results from the union of the coloured rays of the
spectrum."
"The oyster boasts and says: 'I have never gone astray,' Alas, poor
oyster! thou hast never walked."
When Liszt had made his concert trip to Paris, the comtesse had awaited
him at Sand's home. Then, after his famous duel with Thalberg--the
weapons being pianos--he joined the group at Nohant, where Chopin and
Sand, and Liszt and D'Agoult, and such guests as they gathered there,
led a life of elaborate entertainment which made Nohant as famous as
another Trianon. Meanwhile, there was going on a duel, the weapons of
which were not pianos, but those invisible stilettos with which two
women conduct a deadly feud, and politely tear each other's eyes out.
George Sand was famous then beyond her present-day esteem, and she was
a woman of vigour almost masculine and of a straightforwardness which
was almost an affectation. She loved to go about in boots and blouse,
and to ride bareback; she smoked cigars, and wrote at night. The
Comtesse d'Agoult was eminently feminine. She would rather have spent
one thousand francs on a gown than on anything else under heaven,
except another gown. She had in her certain literary capabilities, not
very marvellous, to be sure, but strong enough to provoke jealousy of
the overpraised Sand, who had also, incidentally, been on very intimate
terms with the present lover of the comtesse.
Unhappy is the lover who tries to play peacemaker between two of his
mistresses. This is enough to bring lava from any "extinguished
volcano." Liszt, after almost vain efforts to avoid downright
hair-pulling, decided to take the comtesse away from Nohant. He seems
to have sided with her against Sand, and said afterward: "I did not
care to expose myself to her insolence" (_sottise_). Chopin, however,
took sides with Sand, and it is said that his heart chilled toward
Liszt, who spoke bitterly of this estrangement, but on Chopin's death
wrote a biographical sketch full of affection, and of an admiration
better balanced than the over-flowery style which marks all of Liszt's
writings.
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