The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 by Rupert Hughes

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A year later, Wagner's regret is not yet dead, and he writes to Frau
Wille:

"Between me and my wife all might have turned out well! I had simply
spoiled her dreadfully, and yielded to her in everything. She did not
feel that I am a man who cannot live with wings tied down. What did she
know of the divine right of passion, which I announce in the
flame-death of the Walkuere who has fallen from the grace of the gods?
With the death-sacrifice of love the Dusk of the Gods (Gotterdammerung)
sets in."

And again he bewails his loneliness to Praeger:

"The commonest domestic details must now be done by me; the purchasing
of kitchen utensils and such kindred matters am I driven to. Ah! poor
Beethoven! now is it forcibly brought home to me what his discomforts
were with his washing-book and engaging of housekeepers, etc., etc. I
who have praised woman more than Frauenlob, have not one for my
companion. The truth is, I have spoiled Minna; too much did I indulge
her, too much did I yield to her; but it were better not to talk upon a
subject which never ceases to vex me."

Yet he was destined to know wedded happiness some years later. And he
showed that he could make happy a woman who could understand him. As
Mr. Finck comments:

"The world is apt to side with the woman in a case like this,
especially if her partner is of the _irritabile genus_, a man of
genius. No doubt, Minna had much to endure, and deserves all our pity;
but that her husband is not to blame in this matter, is shown by the
extremely happy and contented life he led with his second wife, Cosima,
the daughter of Liszt, who _did love_ and understand him."

It is a proverb that the woman who marries a genius marries misery, but
I think there are instances enough in this book to show that genius has
nothing to do with the case. Wedded happiness is a result of the lucky
meeting of two natures, one or both of which may be accidentally so
constituted as to be happy in the other's society without undue
restlessness. It would be just as easy to prove, by a multitude of
instances, that plumbers or bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, merchants,
or thieves make poor husbands as to prove the same of musicians,
artists, poets, architects, or geniuses of any kind.

The truth of the matter is always overlooked: the geniuses are revealed
to the public in an intimacy non-historical characters are not
subjected to. But if you will turn from reading the pages of history,
biography, or memoirs, and take up any newspaper of the day, you will
doubtless be astounded to find how small a percentage of the divorces,
the murders, and other domestic scandals are to be blamed to the
possession of genius, unless, as one might well, you recognise a
special and separate genius for trouble.

Patience conquers all things, if one lives long enough, and at length
even Wagner's innumerable woes were solved by the appearance of a
veritable _deus ex machina_ let down from heaven. But Wagner was over
fifty when the tardy god arrived. It was in 1864 that he became the
idol and the pet of the young king, Ludwig II. of Bavaria, who sent a
courier ransacking Europe almost in vain for the fugitive, and, at last
finding him, dumbfounded him with fairy promises, presented him with a
villa, and treated him to a splendour few musicians have ever known,
except perhaps Lully, and Farinelli, who became the vocal prime
minister of the truly good king Ferdinand VI. of Spain. Wagner's
relations with Ludwig were of a sort which Mr. Finck euphemises as
"Grecian." This was seemingly not the only instance in his career; but
it brought him furious enmity as soon as he had found friendship.

Poor Minna never shared with Wagner his period of luxury. But it was of
such magnificence that his envious foes accused him of aiming to
dethrone religion from its throne, and substitute art as the Pope!
Among the attacks made on Wagner at this time was the charge that,
while he was lolling on a silken couch which had cost him $12,000, his
neglected wife was starving to death in Dresden. Minna was honourable
enough to answer this attack with an open letter to those German
newspapers which, in 1866, outjaundiced that yellow journalism for the
invention of which New America has been blamed.

Minna wrote as follows:

"The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for some
time published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declare
that I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficient
for my maintenance. I take this opportunity with the more pleasure as
it enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnies
launched against my husband."

A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heart
disease. She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, without
ever tasting their sweets. To say whether or not she deserved to taste
the sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict upon
one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. The
marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who
could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more to
blame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a case of
connubial astigmatism.

While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young
king, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbow
furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made
Joseph's coat mere negligee, was not altogether his own, but showed the
unmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Buelow acted as a
sort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother
was the Comtesse d'Agoult, who wrote under the name of "Daniel Stern,"
and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years. Cosima had married Hans
von Buelow in 1857.

Von Buelow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and
by Wagner. In 1850, when Von Buelow was about twenty years old, Wagner
and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced,
begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, she
opposed music as a career, but Von Buelow persisted, and became Liszt's
pupil. Wagner was to Von Buelow a god. It was a pitiful practical joke
that Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper's
wife. But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense of
good form.

As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of Von
Buelow's misfortunes, and saying: "Add to this a tragic marriage; a
young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt's
wonderful image, but of superior intellect." Wagner persuaded the king
to make Von Buelow court pianist, and later court conductor. There are
very pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Buelows and
Wagner.

Then Wagner's popularity with the king eventually raised such hostility
that, at the king's request, he left the country to save his life. He
was again an exile. Cosima, with her two children, went with him, and
later Von Buelow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his living
as a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne. There exists a
letter from Wagner's cook, telling a friend of how the king came
incognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descent
of Cosima and her children. They had come to stay. At Triebschen, near
Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Buelow family, and began to know
contentment.

The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to
torment even the idolatrous Von Buelow. Riemann says: "Domestic
misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Buelow left the
city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth
of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage were
imperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desired
divorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religious
profession," to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who says
that Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Liszt
and Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics of
which this is not the place to discuss."

Von Buelow secured his divorce in the fall of 1869. He remarried, in
1882, the actress, Marie Schanzer. Wagner and Cosima were married
August 25, 1870. This was the twenty-fifth birthday of King Ludwig, and
Glasenapp comments glowingly upon the meaning of the marriage:

"To the artist, who in the first great rumblings of the war of 1870-71,
greeted the dawn of a new era for his people, the same hour proved to
be the beginning of a new chapter. On Thursday, the 25th of August,
1870, in the Protestant Church of Lucerne, in the presence of two
witnesses, one, the lifelong friend of the Wagner family, Hans Richter,
the other, Miss M.v.M., the wedding of Richard Wagner to Cosima, the
divorced wife of Hans von Buelow, was celebrated.

"There is no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. None
have ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higher
impersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who had
suffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciative
neglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friend
of her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement
_(mit theilnahmvollster Sorge_), until she as well as her husband
realised that she was the one chosen to heal the wounds which the
artist had suffered in his restless wanderings and through numberless
disappointments. The time had arrived when the hand of love prepared
the last and never-to-be-lost home.

"This knowledge gave the noble-minded woman the courage to sever the
ties, which in early youth had tied her to one of our most eminent
artists, and the best of men; to give up herself to her task, to
consecrate her life to him, to be the helpmeet of the man to whom
through friendship and the inner voice of her heart, and the knowledge
of noble duty, she had already belonged. The world did not hesitate to
malign this holiest act of fidelity. Only the small and the low are
overlooked, the high and the great are ever the victims."

Just two months before the marriage, Wagner had written to Frau Wille,
who had invited him and his wife-to-be to visit her, an account of his
feelings in the matter, which is beautiful enough and sincere enough to
quote at some length:

"Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shall
present ourselves as man and wife. To get into this state, great
patience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to be
brought about until all manner of suffering. Since last I saw you in
Munich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, has
also become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I could
well be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I 'could
not be helped' was false! She knew that I could be helped, and she
helped me: she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herself
every condemnation. She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful and
vigorous boy, whom I boldly call 'Siegfried': he is now growing,
together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last has
attained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which we
had retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of the
sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to
you the mother of my son as my wedded wife. This will soon be the case,
and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld."

A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner's life
is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed with
great secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll," that most royal musical welcome
that ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musical
conspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima's
birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house,
and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter,
Cosima's thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices,
the child being then a year old. The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says,
"is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love,
paternal and conjugal."

A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the
Bayreuth dream--the building with hands of a material castle in Spain.
Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own
works, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa at
Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret. For there he had
been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and
forethought of the devoted Cosima. His new villa at Bayreuth he called
"Wahnfried," setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures,
symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his
final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first
inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being
the portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the role, and the latter
being the child Siegfried Wagner. Beneath the frescoes he put the
words: "Hier wo mein Waehnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus von
mir benannt,"--which may be Englished: "Here, where my illusions
respite found, 'Illusion-Respite' let this house by me be crowned."

In this home, plain in its exterior, but full of richness within,
Wagner lived at ease with his wife and her four children. Von Buelow,
the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his first
beliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship with
the man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he had
regretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though not
for the same reasons. Once he broke forth in his dilemma: "If he were
only some one that I could kill, he would have been dead before this."
But he could not interfere with "the great cause," and even Liszt,
after some estrangement, was reconciled to Wagner.

Here Wagner's existence went tranquilly and busily on for twelve years,
till he was at the threshold of his three-score and ten. And now the
genius, whom we saw but lately juggling with starvation in the slums of
Paris, we find a figure of world-wide fame, with an annual income of
$25,000 and the ability to travel to Italy in a private car. But this
luxury was his last, for his health was on the ebb. And though he took
a suite of twenty-eight rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, with
his wife, his own two children, Siegfried and Eva, aged twelve and
fourteen years, Daniela and Isolde, Cosima's two children by her first
husband, and two teachers, four servants, and many guests, this was but
a splendid sarcophagus; for here Wagner had but less than half a year
to live. Those who would know more of the daily comforts and suffering
of this time, can read it in Perl's book, "Richard Wagner in Venedig."
He suffered constantly more and more from heart trouble and other
torments. One day his servant heard him calling, and, hastening to his
side, found him on a divan writhing in agony; his last words were:
"Call my wife and the doctor." Cosima flew to his aid, but could not
hold back the inevitable. When the doctor came and told her that Wagner
had finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed and
fainted. For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to take
any food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted from
exhaustion.

And now, the erstwhile exile, living on the pittances he could wheedle
from his few disciples, died in the fame of the world. Three kings sent
wreaths to his funeral, and the city of Venice twice asked for the
privilege of giving him a final pageant. But Cosima strangely would
have no ceremony at all, and no music. "She feared it would rend her
heart in twain," says Mr. Finck, "so the procession moved along the
canal in solemn silence, broken only by the tolling of the distant
bell."

The railroad station was guarded as for the funeral of a monarch. The
express-train was not stopped at the border of the three countries
through which it passed. When the coffin was taken to the grave in
Bayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as so
many of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart.

As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unwearied
in behalf of his glory. In her he had found that ideal of womankind
which he had so much upheld: instant and dauntless obedience to the
behest of the one great love. When he died he was even then at work
upon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowed
from his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women a
right to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone.

Once he had written: "Women are the music of life," and of his
"Bruennhilde" he had said: "Never has woman been so glorified as in this
poem." For the reward of this trust in womankind, he had also had the
privilege of saying, "In the hearts of women it has always gone well
with my art."

And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blonde
tresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with final
sacrifice, and as a last tribute, she had sacrificed to bury with him.

CHAPTER III.

TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER

Had his relations with music been as completely original as his
relations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius of
this man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German. He
was the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believed
in marriage and made three wives happy--in succession. The young
Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was
twenty-three before he took up instrumentation.

He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward,
and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended
himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate
women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on
morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps
fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended
as they did. And so he drifted--not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet
quite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointing
woman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men. Among his friends was
Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton.

Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marriage, and, after two years of
quarrels with his wife's relatives and doubtless with her, had forsworn
the other sex. Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled all
night; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation.
Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a menage together for a time.
Tschaikovski, however, had not learned that womankind was not his kind;
so he flirted a little with the beautiful niece of one Tarnovski, for
instance, and with an unknown at a masked ball. But he was chiefly
music-mad and undermined his health by his overwork.

Then in 1868, his father got after him to marry. As long before as
1859, when he was nineteen, he had suffered from an unrequited love.
Now at the age of twenty-eight he cared nothing for petticoats. He had
written his sister a year ago that he was tired of life, and marriage
did not tempt him; he was, said he, "too lazy to woo, too lazy to
support a family, too lazy to endure the responsibility of a wife and
children." But upon this ennui fell an electric spark--from the old
storage-batteries, woman's eyes.

There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who
was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly
beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of
dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter
Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's
lamb, followed her about.

One day he wrote: "She is a charmer; we are friends." Then _tempo
accelerate_; he copied music for her benefit performance; later he
apologised for not writing his brother--he was all monopolised by the
singer. So he went swirling into the current. He tried to keep away;
they met by accident; she reproached him; he promised to call; then his
inveterate timidity palsied him, till Anton Rubinstein had to drag him
to her rooms by force.

Eventually they became engaged. Just as in Weber's case, the composer
demanded that the singer give up her career for his, and she and her
mother objected. She did not want to be merely the wife of her husband;
nor he, merely the husband of his wife. He appealed to his father, who
wrote a nobly generous letter, pleading the woman's right to her own
career: a very gospel of artistic equality.

"You love her: she loves you: and that should settle it, if--Oh, this
wretched if! The beloved Desiree must be altogether noble, since my son
Peter has loved her. He has taste and talent, and would choose a wife
of his own nature. The few years difference in age are of no moment. If
your love is real and substantial, all else is nonsense. She would not
want you to play the servant, and you could compose even if you
travelled with her.

"I lived with your mother for twenty-one years and all that time loved
with the passion of youth, and respected and adored her as a saint. If
your desired one has the character of your mother, whom you so
resemble, there should be no talk of future coolness and doubt. You
know well that artists have no home; they belong to the whole world.
Why worry whether you live at Moscow or St. Petersburg? She should not
leave the stage, nor should you abandon your career. True, our future
is known only to God, but why should you foresee that you will be
robbed of your career? Be her servant, but an independent servant. Do
you truly love her and for all time? I know your character, my dear
son, but alas, I do not know you, dear sweetheart; I know your
beautiful soul and good heart through him. It might be well for you
both to test your love; not by jealousy--God forbid!--but by time. Wait
and ask each other, 'Do I really love him? Do I truly love her? Will he
(or she) share with me the joys and sorrows of life unto the grave?'"

Good father, good sage, gallant old man! But neither of the troubled
lovers proved worthy of such golden philosophy. Desiree's travels took
her away. Their parting must have been cold, for in January, 1869,
Tschaikovski wrote his brother a letter, excitedly referring to the
acceptance of his opera, and coldly hinting that his love affair would
probably come to nothing. We remember how calmly Mozart once wrote of
his operatic triumph and how passionately of his love.

The same month a telegram informed Tschaikovski that his fiancee had
very suddenly become engaged to a singer in her own troupe, the Spanish
baritone, Padilla y Ramos, who was two years younger even than
Tschaikovski. The singers were married at Sevres, September 15, 1869.

Tschaikovski, on receiving the first news, seemed "more surprised than
pained." He was still flirting desperately with grand opera. A year
later he heard that Desiree was returning to sing at Moscow. He wrote
pluckily:

"She is coming here and I cannot avoid meeting her. The woman has cost
me many a bitter hour, and yet I feel myself drawn toward her with such
inexplicable sympathy, that I wait her coming with feverish
impatience."

At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says
he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her
always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that
streamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for seven
years, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's office
in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom. After a time,
a lady came out. "Tschaikovski leaped to his feet and turned white. The
woman gave a little cry of alarm, and confusedly fumbled for the door.
Finding it at last, she fled without speaking."

In 1888 Tschaikovski went to Berlin. There Desiree was the idol of the
court and public. They met now as friends. He and Edvard Grieg called
at her house, and he wrote in his diary:

"This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my
sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as
irresistibly bewitching as ever."

_Requiescat in pace_! She had taught him the pangs of disprised love,
but she had escaped misery, and she seems to have lived happily ever
afterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer. As
for Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind--in worse
kind--upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once.

In the year 1875 Tschaikovski's nerves had gone to pieces from overwork
and his mode of life. For months he was not allowed to write down a
note. And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a cure
for his ills. There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as
late as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solution
was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be
opened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own
diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a
great portion of it before his death in 1893. In 1902, however, his
brother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and complete
biography, which partially clears the riddle. This is what we learn
from that:

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