The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume II Part 7

Here, then, we find her again, with her rival Sontag out of the way, and Sontag's lover to console. She furnished him with contrast enough, for she differed from Sontag in these respects, that she was only twenty-two, she was a contralto, dark and Spanish, and was known to be married. Her consolation of De Beriot was complete. They lived together the rest of her life, touring in concerts occasionally, with enormous financial success, she creating an immortal name as an operatic singer, and he as a violinist. In 1831 they built a palatial home in the suburbs of Brussels, where they spent the time when they were not travelling. She bore him a son and a daughter, the latter dying in infancy.

Meanwhile, she was trying to divorce her husband, who was now living in Paris. The freedom was a long while coming, and it was 1836 before the Gordian knot was cut. On March 26th of the same year, she and De Beriot were married. The very next month, in London, she was thrown from a horse and more severely injured than she realised. As soon as she could, she resumed her concerts; brain-fever attacked her. She died at the age of twenty-eight.

Two hours after her death, De Beriot hastened away to make sure of the possession of the wealth this young woman had already heaped up. He did not wait for the funeral, and all Europe was scandalised. But it is claimed in his defence that he had been devoted to her, and during her illness had never left her side, and that his mercenary haste was due to his fear that a moment's delay might give Monsieur Malibran a chance to claim her property, and thus rob the child she had borne De Beriot of his inheritance. Those who know the peculiar att.i.tude the French law takes toward the property of a wife, can understand the difficulty of the situation.

In any case, the child was saved from poverty or from the necessity of professionalism in later life, though he was a distinguished pianist.

As for De Beriot, after the success of his mission he returned to the country home and remained in seclusion, not playing again in public for one year. Two years later he married Fraulein Huber, the daughter of a Vienna magistrate and the adopted ward of a prince. De Beriot travelled little after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died in blindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years of his life.

CHAPTER V.

AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER

"Pa.s.sions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little ones."--HENRY T. FINCK, "_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_."

There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.

In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be purely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and the chief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom to neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of immortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose _magnum opus_ was some romance that still makes the heart-strings tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, there are two old crusading troubadours.

CERTAIN TROUBADOURS

You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty.

He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those days. Whether antic.i.p.ation was better than realisation, we cannot know to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least antic.i.p.ation was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last Tripoli was reached, he was carried ash.o.r.e dying. The countess had heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath: "Having seen thee, I die satisfied."

There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour's last words.

And so there was the other troubadour, the Chatelain Regnault de Coucy.

His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third Crusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who had owned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband chose a most mediaeval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadour cooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her what sweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herself to death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.

There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient biographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, and was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be."

But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.

MARTIN LUTHER

If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther, whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others deny his claim to that magnificent e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n: "Who loves not wine, women, and song remains a fool his whole life long." No one claims that Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played upon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a composer, no one can deny him either a pa.s.sion for music or a domestic romance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married a runaway nun."

When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, or were abducted, from a convent. One of them, Catherina von Bora, found an asylum in Luther's own home. After looking about for a good husband for her, at the end of a year he married her himself. She was then twenty-six years old. The married life of the jovial reformer was happy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged to take in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that had brought her marriage,--a runaway.

BRITISHERS

The earlier English composers have not been without their heart interests. We have already pried into Purcell's romance. Old John Bull, at the age of forty-four, could give up his professorship to marry "Elizabeth Walker, of the Strand, maiden, being about twenty-four, daughter of ---- Walker, citizen of London, deceased, she attending upon the Right Honourable Lady Marchioness of Winchester." Four years later, he became the chief of the prince's music, with the splendid salary of 40 a year.

Sir William Sterndale loved a Mary Wood, and wrote an overture called "Marie des Bois," and after this atrocious pun, married the poor girl in 1844, and they lived happily ever after, or at least for thirty years after.

Those other oldsters, Blow, Byrd, and Playford, were married men; and Arne, the composer of "Rule Britannia," married, at the age of twenty-six, Cecilia Young, an eminent singer in Handel's company, and the daughter of an organist. She continued to sing, and he to write music for her. At the age of sixty-eight he died, singing a hallelujah.

Whether she echoed his sentiments we are not told, but she lived seventeen years longer.

Balfe married a German singer, Rosen, who afterward sang in some of his operas.

One of the few other British composers who attained distinction was John Field, who, like Balfe, was Dublin-born. He was the inventor of Chopin's Nocturne. The story is told that he had a pupil from whom he could not collect his bills. Finally in sheer despair he proposed, and, when she accepted him, found his only revenge in telling everybody he met that he had only married her to escape the necessity of giving her further lessons, which she would never pay for. The story seems to be, however, neither true nor well-found, for in spite of his awkwardness and the hard life he led at the hands of his teacher Clementi, who made him serve as a combined salesman of pianos and a concert virtuoso, he was said to have married a Russian lady of rank and wealth. She was really a Frenchwoman named Charpentier whom he had met in Moscow. She was a professional pianist, and bore him a son; then she left him, and changed her name, as did even the son. He was one of the many composers who should have been kept in a cage.

CLEMENTI, HUMMEL, STEIBELT

As for Clementi, he was chiefly notable for his miserly qualities, by which he rendered miserable three successive wives.

The pianist Hummel, whom I always place with Clementi in a sort of musical Dunciad, is credited with having won a courtship duel against Beethoven, in which Clementi as the winner--or was it the loser?--married the woman.

Another rival of Beethoven's in public esteem was Daniel Steibelt, forgotten as a virtuoso, but not to be forgotten for his splendid vices which range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish. He married a young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. He succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy divorce law issued by the French Revolutionists.

BOIELDIEU AND GReTRY

The father married again, but with what success, I do not know. But at any rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray, a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible. It was said that he was so wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that his departure was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season. None the less, though the flight may not have been surrept.i.tious, it may well be credited to domestic misery. He buried himself in Russia for eight years, which may be placed in music's column of loss. Returning to Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success that followed. Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman who bore him a son in 1816. Her tenderness to the composer is highly praised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in 1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also a worthy composer. At the age of fifty-four, consumption and the bankruptcy of the Opera Comique, and the expulsion of the king who had pensioned him, broke down his health. He lived five years longer.

All I know of the domestic affairs of the great French opera-writer Gretry is that he left three daughters, one of whom, Lucille, had a one-act opera successfully produced when she was only thirteen years old, and who was precocious enough to make an unhappy marriage and end it in death by the time she was twenty-three.

HeROLD AND BIZET

The Frenchman Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pre aux Clercs," had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am going too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage." He had married Adele elise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter, married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father's disease at twenty.

Bizet, like Herold, died soon after his masterpiece was done. Three months after "Carmen's" first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease. Six years before he had married Genevieve, the daughter of his teacher, the composer Halevy. In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in May, 1872: "J'attends un _baby_ dans deux ou trois semaines." His wife, he said, was "marvellously well," and a happy result was expected--and achieved, for in 1874 he sends Lacombe the greetings "des Bizet, pere, mere, et enfant." He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of "Sainte Genevieve," which his death interrupted. His widow told Gounod that Bizet had been so devoted that there was not a moment of their six years' life she would not gladly live over again.

Cesar Franck married and left a son. At his funeral Chabrier said, "His family, his pupils, his immortal art: viola all his life!" But Auber, though too timid to marry or even to conduct his own works, was brave enough to earn the name of a "devotee of Venus."

THE Pa.s.sIONS OF BERLIOZ

Some of the most eminent musicians were strictly literary men, to whom music was an avocation.

Thus Robert Schumann was an editor, who whiled away his leisure writing music that almost no one approved or played for many years. Richard Wagner was well on in life before his compositions brought him as much money as his writing. Hector Berlioz was a prominent critic, whose excursions into music brought him unmitigated abuse and ridicule. The list might be multiplied.

The tempestuous Berlioz was in love at twelve. The girl was eighteen; her name was Estelle, and he called her "the hamadryad of St. Eynard."

Years later she had grown vague in his memory, and he could only say, "I have forgot the colour of her hair; it was black I think. But whenever I remember her I see a vision of great brilliant eyes and of pink shoes." When he was fifty-seven years old, he found her again and his old love revived. But before that time there was much life to live.

And he lived it at a _tempo presto con fuoco_.

He went to Paris, which was a cyclone of conflict for him. At the age of twenty-seven he won the Prix de Rome and went for three years to Italy, not without the amorous adventures suitable to that sky.

Returning to Paris, he found the city in a spasm of enthusiasm over Shakespeare, especially over the Irish actress Smithson, whom he had worshipped from afar, before he had gone to Rome, thinking that he only worshipped Shakespeare through the prophetess. The remembrance of her had inspired him to write his "Lelio" in Italy. When he was again in Paris, he gave a concert, played the kettle-drums for his own symphony, and through a friend managed to secure the attendance of Miss Smithson.

She recognised in him the stranger who had dogged her steps in the years before. The poet Heine was at the concert, and his description of the scene is as follows:

"It was thus I saw him for the first time, and thus he will always remain in my memory. It was at the Conservatoire de Musique when a big symphony of his was given, a bizarre nocturne, only here and there relieved by the gleam of a woman's dress, sentimentally white, fluttering to and fro--or by a flash of irony, sulphur yellow. My neighbour in my box pointed out to me the composer, who was sitting at the extremity of the hall in the corner of the orchestra playing the kettle-drums.

"'Do you see that stout English woman in the proscenium? That is Miss Smithson; for nearly three years Berlioz has been madly in love with her, and it is this pa.s.sion that we have to thank for the wild symphony we are listening to to-day.'

"Every time that her look met his, he struck his kettle-drum like a maniac."