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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10957 ***
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+By Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrated
+
+Volume I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+1903
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in _The
+Criterion_, and the last chapter was published in _The Smart Set_.
+
+While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
+subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
+advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
+the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
+revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the
+letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
+have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
+friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
+publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
+life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
+that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
+Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
+love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
+paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
+misunderstood.
+
+  Love it is an hatefulle pees,
+  A free acquitaunce without re lees.
+  An hevy burthen light to here,
+  A wikked wawe awey to were.
+  It is kunnyng withoute science,
+  Wisdome withoute sapience,
+  Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,
+  Right eville savoured good savour;
+  A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,
+  And feblenesse fulle of myght.
+  A laughter it is, weping ay;
+  Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.
+  Also a swete helle it is,
+  And a soroufulle Paradys.
+
+  Romaunt of the Rose.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I. THE OVERTURE
+
+    II. THE ANCIENTS
+
+   III. THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+    IV. ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+     V. HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+    VI. THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+   VII. GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+  VIII. BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+    IX. PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+     X. THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+    XI. GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR,
+        AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+   XII. A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY
+        --PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL
+
+  XIII. MOZART
+
+   XIV. BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+    XV. VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+   XVI. THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+  XVII. THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)
+
+DAPHNE
+
+HÉLOISE
+
+MARY STUART
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)
+
+HENRY PURCELL
+
+JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+JOSEPH HAYDN
+
+MRS. BILLINGTON
+
+GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL
+
+CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+NICOLA PICCINNI
+
+JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY
+
+WOLFGANG MOZART
+
+MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA "DON JUAN" FOR THE FIRST TIME
+
+LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN
+
+BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM
+
+COUNTESS THÉRÈSE VON BRUNSWICK
+
+CARL MARIA VON WEBER
+
+FELIX MENDELSSOHN
+
+FREDERICK CHOPIN
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+COUNTESS POTOCKA
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+
+
+VOLUME I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+THE OVERTURE
+
+Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
+amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
+that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
+he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the
+inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
+youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
+dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
+and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
+melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
+music's very own.
+
+So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
+wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
+expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And
+if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
+corner.
+
+Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
+that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
+conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
+sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
+know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
+existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
+tune.
+
+But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
+world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
+and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
+tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
+begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.
+
+If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
+I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
+condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
+incidentally--to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
+skipped--let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
+to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.
+
+In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
+fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
+hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
+be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
+aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
+so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
+imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
+without frankly branding it as such.
+
+Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
+tell their own stories in their own words.
+
+For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
+the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
+the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
+have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
+at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
+subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
+catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
+reader could consult with pleasure.
+
+It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
+necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
+matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
+verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
+marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
+heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
+wholesale blame--"_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_." So, without
+pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
+have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
+and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
+And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
+think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
+and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
+blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
+of fame, or of amorous experience.
+
+As a last chapter to this series of "true stories," I have ventured to
+sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
+compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
+on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
+had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
+warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
+dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
+saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
+clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
+lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
+true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
+collected.
+
+And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
+Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE ANCIENTS
+
+The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
+certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
+god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
+hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
+ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a god, he was
+denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
+knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
+another woman, was soon blasé of divine courtship, and, for variety,
+turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
+son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
+claimed.
+
+Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second
+wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
+influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
+mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to
+be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
+corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
+gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
+corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
+suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
+more open than that of hearing."
+
+The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
+instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
+turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
+that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
+his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
+frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
+from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
+and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
+a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
+personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
+Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of
+Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
+pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
+on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
+filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
+charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
+But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
+seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
+wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.
+
+The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs--a fact which
+should not be cherished against him--seems to have loved no one except
+himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
+effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
+mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
+Jonah's adventure turned inside out.
+
+Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
+life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
+that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
+violinists at the hands of the matinée Bacchantes.
+
+The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
+married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
+her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
+can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
+his poesy.
+
+The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
+much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
+the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
+to be monks. This banishes them from a place here--not by any means
+because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
+because it greatly prevented a record of most of them--though happily
+not all. Abélard, for instance, was a monk, and his Héloise became a
+nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
+literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
+an abbé? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hèle, who about 1585
+gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
+Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
+sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
+epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
+century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Très-Haut, ministre du
+Christ, il sut garder la chastété et se preserver du contact de l'amour
+sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
+necessarily so.
+
+Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
+tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
+flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
+children of Lorenzo dei Medici.
+
+"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who passed for the
+finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
+criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
+became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
+family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
+the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
+disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
+the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
+with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
+himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
+in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
+couplet."
+
+
+Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
+Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
+compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
+died.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
+shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siècle,"
+with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
+minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
+old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
+fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
+Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537--1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels.
+All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
+died--so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
+twenty-six at the time--so we can imagine how young and lithely
+beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia--a sweet
+name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
+she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good
+and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
+like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.
+
+Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
+interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
+frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
+charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
+these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
+for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
+sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
+ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
+man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
+chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
+servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
+marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
+or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.
+
+Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
+(1680--1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,--which
+was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
+twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
+ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
+pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
+asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
+a pitiful letter still preserved.
+
+"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
+thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
+Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
+cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
+indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
+gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
+succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.
+
+"The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
+go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
+absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
+have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
+for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
+circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
+The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
+work, prevent me from gaining my own living."
+
+Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
+Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
+pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
+wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
+his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
+poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
+eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
+because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
+support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
+is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.
+
+Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
+Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
+Flanders with her children.
+
+The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
+they were famous marriers, too,--but one of them met his match, Jean,
+called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
+widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
+Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
+ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
+he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
+compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
+naïvely points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
+married with three of his Majesty's servants. (_Casada con tres criados
+de V.M._) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
+navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
+organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
+achieved.
+
+Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
+(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
+Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin
+Desprès (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
+Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
+his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
+marriage).
+
+We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
+happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
+preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
+never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
+of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
+bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.
+
+As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man
+vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
+approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard."
+
+Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
+daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
+daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
+disinherited.
+
+One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
+one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
+music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
+Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
+upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
+managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
+Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
+He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
+became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
+odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
+dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
+the year 1566.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
+his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
+Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the "Belgian Orpheus," "_le Prince des
+Musiciens_." There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
+the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
+at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
+changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
+father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a "false
+moneyer," had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.
+
+Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
+this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
+esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.
+
+He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
+honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
+court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
+Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
+daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
+court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
+was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
+described her children as _elegantissimi_.
+
+There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
+thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
+As his biographer Delmotte says, "His life indeed had been the most
+toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
+alert, had _enfanté_ a multitude of compositions so great that their
+very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
+almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
+soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
+this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
+aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.
+
+"Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
+state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
+sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
+William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
+Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
+reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
+in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
+and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'"
+
+While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
+imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
+bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
+In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
+and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
+resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
+poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
+Lassus) that "his _Altesse Sérénissime_ be pleased not to heap on the
+poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
+deserved through his _fantaisies bizarres_, the result of too much
+thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
+continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
+court chapel would be to kill him."
+
+He was left undisturbed in his post, but, before long, death forced the
+acceptance of his resignation. Over his grave was placed a tomb on which
+besides the effigy of himself, are shown also his devoted wife and some
+of their children.
+
+Regina two years later founded a perpetual annual funeral service for
+him. By a later intercession, she secured for her son, Ferdinand, the
+succession to his father's dignities at the court of Bavaria. She died
+June 5, 1600, and on her tomb she is named, "la noble et vertueuse dame
+Regina de Lassin, veuve de feu Orland de Lassus." She had been a good
+wife to a good husband. The sadness of her latter years with her beloved
+and demented husband reminds one of the pathetic fate of Robert Schumann
+and his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell
+deserved the name his "loveing wife Frances Purcell" gave him when she
+published after his death a collection of his songs under the name of
+"Orpheus Britannicus." The analogy holds good also in the devotion of
+these married couples, for Henry willed to Frances the whole of his
+property absolutely.
+
+Yet the legend of the cause of his death would verify the old theory
+about the joltiness of the course of true love. For Sir John Hawkins
+passes along the gossip that Purcell met his death by "a cold which he
+caught in the night waiting for admittance into his own house. It is
+said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders
+to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came
+home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that
+prescribed him, and, through the inclemency of the weather, contracted
+a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little
+honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of
+his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her
+dear lamented husband which she makes use of to Lady Elizabeth Howard in
+the dedication of the "Orpheus Britannicus". It seems probable that the
+disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one,
+perhaps a consumption; and that, for some time at least, it had no way
+affected the powers of his mind, since one of the most celebrated of his
+compositions, the song 'From Rosy Bowers,' is in the printed book said
+to have been the last of his works, and to have been set during that
+sickness which put a period to his days."
+
+Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of
+twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own
+house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the
+favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his
+pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in
+Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: "Here
+lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that
+blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded."
+
+We now know that Purcell's marriage was either in 1680 or 1681, when he
+was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. August 2d, 1682, Purcell's
+father, a venerable and distinguished musician and a friend of Pepys,
+the diarist, was buried in Westminster Abbey, where later his more
+distinguished son was laid. A few days after the elder Purcell's burial,
+Henry and his wife came to Westminster Abbey again, for the baptism of a
+son new-born. He died in a few months and a third time they came to the
+sad old abbey to lay their child in the cloisters there.
+
+The next year, 1683, a second son died, and in 1687 a third boy two
+months old was buried in the cloisters of the abbey. This monotonous
+return of the hand of death must have embittered the life of these two,
+who seem to have remained lovers always. But in May, 1688, a daughter
+was born, named Frances after her mother; and she outlived both parents.
+She married a poet, when she and her lover were each nineteen, and named
+a child Frances after the grandmother. On Sept. 6th, 1689, Henry
+Purcell's son Edward was baptised, and he also lived to attain some
+distinction as an organist. In 1693 a daughter, Mary Peters, was born.
+
+Two years later, on May 21st, 1695, the young father died--on the eve of
+St. Cecilia's Day. At his bedside were his old mother, his young wife,
+and the two little children. Purcell was buried under the organ of
+Westminster Abbey and the anthems he had composed for the funeral of
+Queen Mary were sung at his own. And there he rests near his fellow
+musician, Pelham Humphries, who lies, as Runciman says, "by the side of
+his younger wife in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey."
+
+Purcell's will, made the very day of his death, was as follows:
+
+"In the name of God, Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the Citty of Manchester,
+gent., being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in
+good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God), doe by these
+presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament.
+
+"And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving Wife, Frances Purcell,
+all my Estate both reall and personall of what nature and kind soever,
+to her and to her assigns for ever. And I doe hereby constitute and
+appoint my said loveing Wife my sole Executrix of this my last Will and
+Testament, revokeing all my former Will or Wills. Witnesse my hand and
+scale this twentieth first day of November, Annoq. Dni. One thousand six
+hundred ninety-five, and in the seventh yeare of the Raigne of King
+William the Third, &c.
+
+H. PURCELL."
+
+As to Hawkins's theory that Purcell left his wife in needy
+circumstances, Cummings, his biographer, believes the thought refuted by
+the will left by the widow herself, who outlived her husband by eleven
+years, and on St. Valentine's Day, 1706, was buried at his side. In her
+will she says that: "According to her husband's desire she had given
+her deare son (Edward) a good education, and she alsoe did give him all
+the Bookes of Musicke in generall, the Organ, the double spinett, the
+single spinett, a silver tankard, a silver watch, two pair of gold
+buttons, a hair ring, a mourning ring of Dr. Busby's, a Larum clock, Mr.
+Edward Purcell's picture, handsome furniture for a room, and he was to
+be maintained until provided for. All the residue of her property she
+gave to her said daughter Frances."
+
+Cummings also assails Hawkins's story that Purcell was dissipated and
+caught his death from being locked out. But Runciman objects that if
+Purcell had not been dissipated in those days, he would have been called
+a Puritan, and says: "I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman,
+a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of
+men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to excel every
+one of his time."
+
+The love Frances Purcell bore her husband was kept green by her anxiety
+for his fame. She was, in her littler way, a Cosima Wagner. In 1696 she
+published a collection of harpsichord lessons by her husband; three
+editions being sold quickly. The next year she issued ten sonatas and a
+"Collection of Ayres." In 1698 she issued (or reissued) the "Orpheus
+Britannicus." In all of these she wrote dedications breathing devotion
+to her husband. In an ode printed in the second volume of the "Orpheus,"
+in 1704, Purcell's personality is thus limned:
+
+  "Nor were his Beauties to his Art confin'd
+  So justly were his Soul and Body join'd
+  You'd think his Form the Product of his Mind.
+  A conquering sweetness in his Visage dwelt,
+  His Eyes would warm, his Wit like lightning melt.
+  But those must no more be seen, and that no more be felt.
+  Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye,
+  Himself as Humble as his Art was High."
+
+Purcell died at the age of thirty-seven--being granted only two years
+more of life than Mozart and only six years more than Schubert. He is
+the moon of English music and his melodies are as exquisite and as
+silvery and as full of enamoured radiance as the tintinnabulations of
+the moonbeams themselves. But unfortunately for English music this
+beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers
+England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding
+glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the
+east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from
+dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of Händel as a lover, we
+must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious
+morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have
+affected Purcell very deeply.
+
+The story concerns the strenuous career of Alessandro Stradella, and
+when you read it you will not wonder that it should have made a great
+success as an opera, or that it gave Flotow his greatest popularity next
+to "Martha," even though its conclusion was made tamely theatrical.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the
+truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his
+"Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets," but they cannot offer us any
+satisfactory substitute in its place, and without troubling to give
+their merely destructive complaints, and without attempting to improve
+upon the pompously fascinating English of old Sir John Hawkins, I will
+quote the story for your delectation.
+
+Certain it is that there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was
+an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer
+upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in
+musical history of some importance. The following story of his
+adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily
+newspapers--and surely no one could question the credibility of the
+daily newspapers. But here is the story as Hawkins tells it. As the
+cook-books say, salt it to your taste.
+
+"His character as a musician was so high at Venice, that all who were
+desirous of excelling in the science were solicitous to become his
+pupils. Among the many whom he had the instruction of, was one, a young
+lady of a noble family of Rome, named Hortensia, who, notwithstanding
+her illustrious descent, submitted to live in a criminal intimacy with a
+Venetian nobleman. The frequent access of Stradella to this lady, and
+the many opportunities he had of being alone with her, produced in them
+both such an affection for each other, that they agreed to go off
+together for Rome. In consequence of this resolution they embarked in a
+very fine night, and by the favour of the wind effected their escape.
+
+"Upon the discovery of the lady's flight, the Venetian had recourse to
+the usual method in that country of obtaining satisfaction for real or
+supposed injuries: he despatched two assassins, with instructions to
+murder both Stradella and the lady, giving them a sum of money in hand,
+and a promise of a larger if they succeeded in the attempt. Being
+arrived at Naples, the assassins received intelligence that those whom
+they were in pursuit of were at Rome, where the lady passed as the wife
+of Stradella. Upon this they determined to execute their commission,
+wrote to their employer, requesting letters of recommendation to the
+Venetian embassador at Rome, in order to secure an asylum for them to
+fly to, as soon as the deed should be perpetrated.
+
+"Upon the receipt of letters for this purpose, the assassins made the
+best of their way toward Rome; and being arrived there, they learned
+that on the morrow, at five in the evening, Stradella was to give an
+oratorio in the church of San Giovanni Laterano. They failed not to be
+present at the performance, and had concerted to follow Stradella and
+his mistress out of the church, and, seizing a convenient opportunity,
+to make the blow. The performance was now begun, and these men had
+nothing to do but to watch the motions of Stradella, and attend to the
+music, which they had scarce begun to hear, before the suggestions of
+humanity began to operate upon their minds; they were seized with
+remorse, and reflected with horror on the thought of depriving of his
+life a man capable of giving to his auditors such pleasure as they had
+just then felt.
+
+"In short, they desisted from their purpose, and determined, instead of
+taking away his life, to exert their endeavours for the preservation of
+it; they waited for his coming out of the church, and courteously
+addressed him and the lady, who was by his side, first returning him
+thanks for the pleasure they had received at hearing his music, and
+informed them both of the errand they had been sent upon; expatiating
+upon the irresistible charms, which of savages had made them men, and
+had rendered it impossible for them to effect their execrable purpose;
+and concluded with their earnest advice that Stradella and the lady
+should both depart from Rome the next day, themselves promising to
+deceive their employer, and forego the remainder part of their reward,
+by making him believe that Stradella and his lady had quitted Rome on
+the morning of their arrival.
+
+"Having thus escaped the malice of their enemy, the two lovers took an
+immediate resolution to fly for safety to Turin, and soon arrived there.
+The assassins being returned to Venice, reported to their employer that
+Stradella and Hortensia had fled from Rome, and taken shelter in the
+city of Turin, a place where the laws were very severe, and which,
+excepting the houses of embassadors, afforded no protection for
+murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two
+persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their
+engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of
+allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found
+means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various
+arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of
+his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent and vindictive
+than himself, the Venetian associated two ruffians, and dispatched them
+all three to Turin, fully inspired with a resolution of stabbing
+Stradella and the old man's daughter wherever they found them. The
+Venetian also furnished them with letters from Mons. l'Abbé d'Estrades,
+then embassador of France at Venice, addressed to the Marquis of
+Villars, the French embassador at Turin. The purport of these letters
+was a recommendation of the bearers of them, who were therein
+represented to be merchants, to the protection of the embassador, if at
+any time they should stand in need of it.
+
+"The Duchess of Savoy was at that time regent; and she having been
+informed of the arrival of Stradella and Hortensia, and the occasion of
+their precipitate flight from Rome; and knowing the vindictive temper of
+the Venetians, placed the lady in a convent, and retained Stradella in
+her palace as her principal musician. In a situation of such security as
+this seemed to be, Stradella's fears for the safety of himself and his
+mistress began to abate, till one evening, walking for the air upon the
+ramparts of the city, he was set upon by the three assassins above
+mentioned, that is to say, the father of Hortensia, and the two
+ruffians, who each gave him a stab with a dagger in the breast, and
+immediately betook themselves to the house of the French embassador as
+to a sanctuary.
+
+"The attack on Stradella having been made in the sight of numbers of
+people, who were walking in the same place, occasioned an uproar in the
+city, which soon reached the ears of the duchess: she ordered the gates
+to be shut, and diligent search to be made for the three assassins; and
+being informed that they had taken refuge in the house of the French
+embassador, she went to demand them. The embassador insisting on the
+privileges which those of his function claimed from the law of nations,
+refused to deliver them up. In the interim Stradella was cured of his
+wounds, and the Marquis de Villars, to make short of the question about
+privilege, and the rights of embassadors, suffered the assassins to
+escape.
+
+"From this time, finding himself disappointed of his revenge, but not
+the least abated in his ardour to accomplish it, this implacable
+Venetian contented himself with setting spies to watch the motions of
+Stradella. A year was elapsed after the cure of his wounds; no fresh
+disturbance had been given to him, and he thought himself secure from
+any further attempts on his life. The duchess regent, who was concerned
+for the honour of her sex, and the happiness of two persons who had
+suffered so much, and seemed to have been born for each other, joined
+the hands of Stradella and his beloved Hortensia, and they were married.
+
+"After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the
+port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin: the
+assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at
+their heels. Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the
+morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into
+their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart. The murderers had taken
+care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and
+made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.
+
+"Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella's assassination
+reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive
+to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great
+merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that
+kind; which, adds the relater, 'those who remember how lovingly Mr.
+Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to
+him, may understand without farther explication.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
+Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
+his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
+That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
+his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
+at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
+fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
+it seems, just getting into print for the first time.
+
+The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
+Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
+was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
+all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
+appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
+from 1544 to 1551.
+
+Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
+married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
+him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, "his
+equal and an honest damsel" (_donzella onesta e sua para_), according to
+the biographer Baini, who adds:
+
+"With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the
+first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait
+penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions
+of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow: yet
+with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time
+to his glory and to his gain. And so they passed together, these two
+faithful consorts, nearly thirty years."
+
+Lucrezia bore him four children, all sons, Angelo, Ridolfo, Silla, and
+Igino. The first three died in early manhood, after showing themselves
+in some sort heirs of their father's genius: in the second book of his
+motets Palestrina has included some of their compositions. The last son,
+Igino, outlived his parents and his own welfare; he was "_un' anima
+disarmonica"_ After his father's death he attempted to complete and
+market an unfinished and rejected composition of his father's, but he
+was legally restrained. He lost some of his father's unpublished works,
+while certain noddings of genius, better lost, and refused even by the
+Pope, Palestrina dedicated them to, still remain, with a dedication to
+yet another Pope, put on them by the scapegrace Igino.
+
+A certain writer Pitoni, by a bit of careless reading, multiplied
+Palestrina's wives by two, and divided his sons by the same number,
+claiming that Lucrezia, the first wife of Palestrina, was the mother of
+Angelo, that after her death he married one Doralice, and that she was
+the mother of Igino. But Baini exposes Pitoni's carelessness, proves the
+existence of Ridolfo and Silla by the inclusion of their works in the
+father's book, and shows that Doralice was the wife of Palestrina's son
+Angelo.
+
+It being established, then, that Palestrina was married but once, and it
+being assumed that he was happily married, it is strange to see how this
+happy marriage came near proving fatal to him. Palestrina, who was, like
+Michelangelo, intimate with various Popes, dedicated in 1554 his first
+printed book of masses to Pope Julius III. As a reward, the careless
+pontiff made him one of the singers of his Sistine Chapel, omitting the
+usual severe examination, and overlooking as a small matter the fact
+that Palestrina was so far from being a priest that he was very much
+married and very much the father, and furthermore had no voice. But
+Palestrina resigned his post as maestro at Saint Peter's and entered
+the chapel. The Pope died shortly afterward and was succeeded by a
+cardinal who was a patron of Palestrina's and continued his favour as
+Pope Marcellus II. Three weeks later this Pope also died, and was
+followed by Paul IV.
+
+Unfortunately for Palestrina, the new Pope was a strict constructionist,
+and he found it "indecent that there should be married men
+(_ammogliati_) interfering in holy offices." In spite of the action of
+the two previous pontificates, he determined to expel the three
+Benedicks who had entered the choir, Leonardo Barè, Domenico Ferrabosco,
+and Palestrina, "uomini ammogliati, e chi con grandissimo scandalo, ed
+in vilipendio del divin culto, contro le disposizioni dei sagri canoni,
+e contro le costituzioni e le consuetudini della cappella apostolica
+cantano i medesimi tre ammogliati imitamente ai capellani cantori." He
+then declares that, after mature deliberation, "cassiamo, discacciamo, e
+togliamo" from the list of chappellary singers these three, and that
+they ought to be "cassati, discacciati, e tolti dalla cappella," and
+that after the present order they "cassino, discaccino, e tolgano." And
+excommunication was threatened if any more married men (_uxorati_) were
+received in the chapel.
+
+This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had
+resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a
+family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous
+thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever
+and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found
+another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October,
+1555, he was maestro. Eleven years later, a year after he had written
+his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of
+his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his
+resignation. They gave him the acceptance. Again he found another post,
+and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his
+many wanderings and vicissitudes.
+
+In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old
+friend, Pope Marcellus II. The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had
+marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history
+of religious music.
+
+The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending
+of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to
+which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and
+often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or
+cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did
+in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the
+Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets. The
+trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the
+original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of
+the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would
+not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an
+all-hearing ear.
+
+I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a
+musician, a contemporary of Palestrina's mentioned by Van der Straeten;
+his name was Ambrosio de Cotes. He was the Maestro de Capilla of the
+King's Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth,
+and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a
+mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de
+Espinosa. Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets
+at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs. In 1591 he was
+officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to
+sacred music (_y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes_).
+
+So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that
+contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely. It was given a
+last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and
+capable of redemption. He composed three masses, and the third of them,
+dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as
+the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final
+word and ultimate model for future church music.
+
+Some years later, at the very height of his glory, Palestrina's heart
+suffered its final blow. In the words of Baini, "Lucrezia, _la sua dolce
+consorte_, after having piously accompanied the solemn procession for
+the transport of the body of Saint Gregory Nazianzeno from the church of
+the monks of S. Maria Campa Marzo to the Vatican the fourth of June,
+1580, was assailed by a most oppressive malady."
+
+The attentions of her husband and the remedies of the medical art of
+that day kept her alive up to the first of July. Then the sickness began
+anew and "neither the tears nor the voice of the loving companion
+prevailed against the inexorable scythe of death." On the 21st of July
+Lucrezia died. The next day her body was received at the Vatican,
+Giovanni watching in the schoolroom of the chapel.
+
+It is easy to picture the wild grief of this man, whom a previous
+anxiety had thrown into an almost mortal fever. Yet he lived fourteen
+busy years, and in his old age he felt both fatigue and want, and was
+compelled to join the long list of those musicians who have appealed to
+their patrons for charity. But at least his life, like Bach's and that
+of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily
+a failure when set to music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of
+marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific.
+
+Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a
+twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and
+manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly
+together. Their wives, it is said--_horresco referens_!--could not tell
+them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom
+he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but
+tired of. The Consistory ordered him to marry her, but he appealed to a
+higher court and was absolved from the tenacious woman whom he said he
+"hated so that he could not bear the sight of her." He married another
+woman four years later.
+
+The great Bach, Johann Sebastian, was the youngest of six children. His
+mother died when he was nine years old, but with Bachic haste his
+father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit
+of it, for she buried J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
+Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.
+
+At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt--at twenty-one he went on foot
+fifty miles to Lübeck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
+been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
+for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
+they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
+variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
+rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
+waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
+adding, that they "furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
+latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
+in the choir." His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
+to the parson. Further explanation we have none.
+
+Spitta speculates on the identity of this "stranger maiden." In the
+older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
+occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
+opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
+cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
+friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
+be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
+young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach "spoke to
+the parson," he confessed his love and his betrothal.
+
+Further Spitta comments: "The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
+family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
+which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
+conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
+relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
+certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
+at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
+race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
+its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
+marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
+cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
+may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
+reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
+further improvement, and attracted him to his own race. His second wife,
+indeed, was not allied with him in blood, but that with the first he
+found, in some respects, his more natural development may perhaps be
+concluded from the fact that the most remarkable of his sons were all
+the children of his first marriage."
+
+Upton says that Bach loved Maria Barbara when he was only eighteen and
+they agreed to wait till he got a better post. This was not till three
+years had passed and then his salary was only eighty-five gulden (about
+£7, or $35) besides a little corn and wood and some kindling-wood.
+
+It was on October 17, 1707, that, according to the record, "the
+respectable Herr J.S. Bach, the surviving lawful son of the late most
+respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician
+of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria Barbara Bach, the
+youngest surviving unmarried daughter of the late very respectable and
+famous artist Herr Johann Michael Bach."
+
+A little inheritance of fifty gulden (£4 or $20) aided the new couple.
+But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: "Modest as is my
+way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable
+articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live." A year after his
+marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of
+Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with
+the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his
+prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his
+wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he
+stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to
+success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed. She had borne
+him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm
+Friedemann, the father's favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the
+world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times
+spitefully underrate.
+
+The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach's powers,
+and his next cantata with the suggestive title, "He that exalteth
+himself shall be abased," shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In
+the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the
+high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson
+accused of being "a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted
+to the wine-cellar of the Council").
+
+For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach's first wife's
+children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more
+congenial and appreciative helpmeet. Bach's father had remarried after
+seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited
+from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years
+more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of
+whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical
+than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought
+it time to take the name out of the rut.
+
+Anna Magdalena Wülken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the
+ducal band at Weissenfels. She was twenty-one years old while Bach was
+thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and
+together stood sponsor to the child of the prince's cellar-clerk. The
+wedding took place at Bach's own house.
+
+The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.
+She made the Bach home a little musical circle. It is evident that she
+kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, "They
+are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already
+form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family,
+particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest
+daughter joins in bravely."
+
+Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical
+book together. Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband's
+cheery note that it was "_Anti-Calvinismus_ and _Anti-Melancholicus_."
+In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and
+other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There
+are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an
+unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, "Edifying Reflections of a
+Smoker" in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own
+hand--doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed
+contentment in uxorious ease. Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly
+beginning,
+
+  "Irh Diener, werthe Jungfer Braut
+  Viel Glücke zur heutgen Freude!"
+
+and exclaiming that at the sight of her in her garland and wedding-garb
+the heart laughs out in rapture;--and what wonder that lips and breast
+overflow with joy. There are rules he wrote out for her instruction in
+thorough-bass with a note that others must be taught orally, and there
+is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge
+from the words, "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken." Upton declares this
+song to have been written during and for their first courtship. A
+portrait of this ideal wife was painted by Cristofori and passed into
+the keeping of her stepson, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but alas, it is
+lost while so many a less interesting face is repeated in endless
+pictures.
+
+Twenty-eight years after her marriage this faithful woman stood by her
+husband's side in his blindness and through the two operations by the
+English surgeon in Leipzig. How must she have rejoiced when on July 18,
+1750, he suddenly found that he could see and endure with delight the
+blessed sunshine! How her heart must have sunk when a few hours later he
+was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more
+days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his
+youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as
+Spitta says, "floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and
+perfect it." The original name had been, "When we are in the highest
+need," but he changed the name by dictation now to "Before thy throne
+with this I come" (_Vor deiner Thron tret ich hiemit_). The preacher
+said he had "fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God," and he was
+buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of,
+and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.
+
+It is a dismal task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and
+death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy
+and aided him with hand and voice and heart,--what had she done to
+deserve the dingy aftermath of her fidelity?
+
+Bach left no will, and his children seized his manuscripts; what little
+money remained from his salary of 87 thalers a year (£13 or $65) they
+divided with the widow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was
+continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns,
+some of them to considerable success. The mother and three daughters
+were left to shift for themselves. Two years later they must sell a few
+musical remains and the town must aid them out of its funds.
+
+In the winter ten years after her husband's death, on Feb. 27, 1760,
+Anna Magdalena died, an alms-woman. Her only mourners were her daughters
+and a fourth of the public school children, who were forced by the
+custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In
+1801 Bach's daughter Regina was still living, a "good old woman," who
+would have starved had there not been a public subscription, to which
+Beethoven contributed the proceeds of a composition.
+
+Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated
+almost from man's memory. Half a century of oblivion was followed by the
+great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some
+radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he
+owed so much of his life's delight and his art's inspiration, to whom
+also he dedicated his life and his music--Anna Magdalena.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+"Such music by such a nigger!" exclaimed one prince. Another called him
+a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized
+and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly
+reached the ground. His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with
+nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and
+unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days,
+when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague. He
+always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, "for the
+sake of cleanliness"! and continuing to the day of his death, even when
+wigs were out of style.
+
+This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in
+his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the
+hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet
+this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but
+strangely naïf; a revolutionist of childlike directness.
+
+Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the
+twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a
+shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.
+
+Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating
+suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so
+heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly
+thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his
+friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven
+he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became
+disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably
+unsophisticated nature.
+
+A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty
+that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters
+of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to
+Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an
+ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an
+elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the
+convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously
+suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.
+
+As Louis Nohl says, "Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude,
+ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at
+once--whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely
+suffered for it."
+
+Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led
+the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more
+of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her
+husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as
+Haydn could afford or endure.
+
+An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend
+Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of
+unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his "Le Haydine" in the form of
+letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one
+Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original
+series of "Letters written from Vienna." He published these under the
+pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later
+the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the
+name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is
+commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his
+account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a
+honeymoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"But soon the caprices of Mrs. Anna turned the knot to a chain, the
+bliss to torment, and affairs went so far that, after suffering many
+years, this new Socrates ended by separating from his Xantippe. Mrs.
+Anna was not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her manners were immaculate, but she
+had a wooden head, and when she had fixed on a caprice, there was no way
+to change it. The woman loved her husband but was not congenial. An
+excess of religious piety badly directed came to disturb this happy
+harmony. Mrs. Anna wanted the house always full of priests, to whom she
+furnished good dinners, suppers, and luncheons. Haydn was a bit
+economical; but rather for cause than desire. At this time he had hardly
+enough to live on discreetly, and he began to look with evil eye on this
+endless procession of holy grasshoppers (_locuste_) who ravaged his
+larder. Nor was it appropriate to the house of a studious man, this
+ceaseless clatter of a numerous, genial, and lazy society; therefore,
+solidly religious as he was, he could not enjoy these sacred repasts and
+he had to close the door of the refectory. After that the deluge (_inde
+iræ_). Mrs. Anna had a religious brother. Haydn couldn't keep him from
+visiting his sister.
+
+"Monks are like cherries; if you lift one from the basket, ten come
+along with it. Haydn's convent was not depopulated. Nor did the demands
+decrease. Every now and then Mrs. Anna had a new request; to-day a
+responsory, to-morrow a motet, the day after a mass, then hymns, then
+psalms, then antiphons; and all _gratis_. If her husband declined to
+write them, there appeared on the scene the great confederates of
+capricious women; the effects of hysteria, spleen (_gli insulti di
+stomaco_), spasms; then shrieks, then criminations, weepings, quarrels,
+and bad humour unceasing. Haydn ended with having to appease the woman,
+to lose his point, and pay the doctor and the druggist to boot. He had
+always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true
+miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful
+works that all the world knows.
+
+"It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted
+that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in
+the service of Prince Esterházy. This friendship, rousing jealous
+suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable.
+The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's
+marriage." [On this point Haydn once opened his heart to Griesinger,
+saying: "My wife was incapable of bearing children, and therefore I was
+less indifferent to the charms of other womankind."] "Lacking its most
+solid link, the marital chain could not stand such shocks, and grew
+fatally weaker. The pair ceased to live together, and only that
+sacramental knot remained indissoluble and strong, which Haydn had
+contracted at the age of twenty-seven. Mrs. Anna lived to seventy years
+on a sufficient pension which her husband faithfully paid, and she died
+in 1800. These vicissitudes in great part explain why Haydn, though he
+earned much, could not for a long while put aside a penny and make
+himself a little ease."
+
+It is not a pretty picture that Carpani draws of this home life, and
+Anna is made out to be far from a lovable creature. She is compared to
+the patron saint of shrews, Xantippe. But even Xantippe had her side of
+the story to tell; and with all possible admiration for that man
+Socrates, of such godlike wisdom and such great heart, it must be
+remembered that Socrates had many habits which would not only cause
+ostracism from society to-day, but would have tried the temper of even
+such a wife as the meek Griselda of Chaucer's poem.
+
+We constantly meet these husbands who are seemingly rich in geniality
+and yet are mysteriously unhappy at home. It is the custom of the
+acquaintances of these fellows to put all the blame on the wife. But
+there is a distinct type of mind which always enjoys dining abroad and
+appreciates a few herbs in a stranger's house more than a stalled ox at
+home. These people are gentle and genial and tender only out-of-doors.
+You might call them extra-mural saints.
+
+I have a strong suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul
+that he was commonly called "Papa" by his friends and disciples, was one
+of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never
+be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked
+inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of
+her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger wished to
+make Haydn's wife a present, Haydn forbade him, saying:
+
+"She does not deserve anything! It is little matter to her whether her
+husband is an artist or a cobbler."
+
+As he passed in front of a picture of her once, he seized the violinist
+Baillot by the arm, and pointing to the picture said, "That is my wife.
+Many a time she has maddened me."
+
+In 1792 he wrote to his mistress from London:--"My wife, the infernal
+beast" (_bestia infernale_--Pohl translates this _höllische Bestie_)
+"has written so much stuff that I had to tell her I would not come to
+the house any more; which has brought her again to her senses."
+
+This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes
+again:
+
+"My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable
+temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer. There will sometime
+be an end of this torment."
+
+Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful
+tone! As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to
+see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for
+the unhappiness upon the husband. Anna Keller had a remarkably long and
+sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her
+husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case
+he died suddenly. He pointed to a series of canons which he had written
+and framed. When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him
+a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little
+house she had set her heart on, naïvely adding that it was just a cosy
+size for a widow.
+
+Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a
+widower. Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of
+Haydn's life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how
+various composers composed: Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and
+the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at
+night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the
+streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on
+a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and
+children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends;
+Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the
+floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy
+fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming
+sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.
+
+"But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his
+chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of
+Angelica. When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends
+divided his time. For thirty years he led this life, _monotona ma
+dolcissima_, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving
+Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy. Then Boselli died and he began
+to feel the ennui (_le noje_) of a void in his days. It was then that he
+went to London."
+
+This mistress of Haydn's, whom Carpani and Fétis call Boselli and whom
+Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the
+spelling in Haydn's own handwriting. The pleasant legend Carpani gives
+of Haydn's life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her
+death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.
+Pohl, closely followed by Haydn's recent biographer, Schmidt, describes
+Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged to
+sing at the theatre of the Prince Esterházy. She was the wife of Anton
+Polzelli, an insignificant and sickly violinist, with whom she was
+apparently not in love. Luigia is pictured--doubtless by guesswork--as
+not beautiful, but of a pleasing appearance, showing the indications of
+her Italian birth in "her small slim face, her dark complexion, her
+black eyes, her chestnut-coloured hair; her body of medium height and
+elegant form."
+
+"To this woman," says Schmidt, "Haydn fetched his own deep and lasting
+sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily
+with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be
+known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good
+nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by
+the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout
+twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she
+was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London
+the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their
+correspondence shows, only postponed their union, till the day when
+'four eyes shall be closed,'
+
+"Yet when finally both were free, Time had worked his almighty
+influence; Haydn had grown gray; outwardly as well as spiritually an
+estrangement had widened between them, and of their once so dear a
+desire there is no more word. Yet Haydn never ceased to provide for his
+friend, as well as to care for the education and the success of her
+sons. The elder, Pietro, Haydn's favourite, on whom he hung with his
+whole heart, died early." [Pohl quotes many allusions to him in Haydn's
+letters.] "The younger, Anton, who was reported without proper
+foundation to be Haydn's natural son, later became musical director of
+the prince's chapel, but then gave up music and turned farmer, finally
+dying of the plague in sad circumstances."
+
+Pohl is somewhat fuller upon this alliance than Schmidt, who, in fact,
+merely condenses and paraphrases him. He says that Polzelli's maiden
+name was Moreschi [which, being interpreted, is "Moor," a name once
+given to Haydn]; she was a mezzo-soprano, who played secondary rôles in
+the operas. She earned the same salary as her husband, 465 gulden a
+year. The letters Haydn wrote her were always in Italian, and in one of
+them he wishes her better rôles, and "a good master who will take the
+same interest as thy Haydn." Haydn had come to her for sympathy, since,
+as Pohl says and we have seen, "thanks to his wife he had hell at home"
+[_die Holle im House_].
+
+When increasing fame took Haydn by the hand and led him away to royal
+triumphs in London, he did not take jealousy along with his other
+luggage. He seems to have heard that his place was promptly filled in
+Polzelli's heart, but with all his geniality, he could write of the
+rumoured rival as "this man, whose name I do not know, but who is to be
+so happy as to possess thee." Then there was a recrudescence of the old
+ardour:
+
+"Oh, dear, dear Polzelli, thou lingerest always in my heart; never,
+never shall I forget thee (_O cara Polzelli, tu mi stai sempre nel
+core, mal, mal scordeo di te_)."
+
+When some one in London told him that Polzelli had sold the piano he had
+given her, he could not believe it, and only wrote her, "See how they
+tease me about you" (_vedi come mi seccano per via di te_). Still less
+will he believe that she has spoken ill of him, and he writes:
+
+"May God bless thee, and forgive thee everything, for I know that love
+speaks in thee. Be careful for thy good name, I beg thee, and think
+often of thy Haydn, who cherishes and tenderly loves thee and to thee
+will always be true."
+
+Even to Bologna, whither Polzelli went with her two sons, says Pohl,
+"followed Haydn's love--and his gold." He intended after his first
+London visit to go to Italy to visit her, and wrote further:
+
+"I cherish thee and love thee as on that first day, and am always sad
+that I cannot do more for you. Yet have patience. Surely the day will
+come when I can show thee how much I love thee."
+
+Loisa's choice of a spouse had been unhappy, as so many marriages have
+been where the wife is a singer on the stage, and the husband a fiddler
+in the band. Haydn seems to have sympathised with Loisa in her unhappy
+domestic affairs, as cordially as she had sympathised with him in his.
+He had sympathy, too, for her similarly ill-matched sister, Christine
+Negri, for he writes of her as--
+
+"Already long separated from her husband, that beast, she has been as
+unhappy as even you, and awakes my sympathy."
+
+Also in March, 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner
+implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have
+him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being
+Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of
+celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish
+husband and his shrewish wife--"when four eyes shall close." Loisa's
+husband was the first to oblige, for in August, 1791, his death wrings a
+charitable word from even Haydn:
+
+"Thy poor husband! I tell thee that Providence has managed well in
+freeing thee from thy heavy burden, for it is better to be in the other
+world, than useless in this one. The poor fellow has suffered enough."
+
+Later he writes:
+
+"DEAR POLZELLI:--Probably that time will come which we have so often
+longed for. Already two eyes are closed. But the other two--ah, well, as
+God wills!" Eight years more, and the reluctant and wide-eyed Anna
+Haydn was foiled of her desire to be a widow in the snug cottage of her
+choice. The lovers at last were both single. But now, freed of their
+shackles, why do they not rush to each other's arms? The only answer we
+receive is this chill and shocking document found long after Haydn's
+death; it is written in Italian and dated shortly after Frau Haydn's
+death:
+
+"I, the undersigned, promise Signora Loisa Polzelli (in case I shall be
+disposed to marry again) to take no other for wife than the said Loisa
+Polzelli; and if I remain a widower, I promise the said Loisa Polzelli
+after my death to leave her a life pension of 300 gulden, that is 300
+florins in Vienna money. Valid before every court. I sign myself,
+
+"JOSEPH HAYDN,
+
+"_Maestro di Cappella of his Highness, the Prince Esterhazy_.
+
+Vienna, May 23, 1800."
+
+On this sad and icy postscript to the ardent love affair, Schmidt
+comments: "The form of this writing leaves the conclusion plain, that
+Haydn was forced to this act by the Polzelli. This throws a poor light
+on her character, and we dare not evade the conclusion that, for twenty
+years in this love affair for life, she had in mind a business
+arrangement with the master."
+
+Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years
+occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to
+heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little
+later, the genial master himself was not above reproach, and Loisa's
+anxiety was not unfounded, for her Joseph was casting amorous glances
+elsewhere. Thus after the long ardour, the love letters have frozen into
+a hard and fast negative betrothal in which Haydn promises to marry no
+one else. This, Schmidt says, was dragged out of Haydn. But, if such a
+bond were necessary, it speaks surely as ill for Haydn as for the woman
+who had given her life and her good name to brighten his joyless heart.
+
+Yet, dead as his love was, honour remained with him, though it was a
+rather close-reckoning honour. Three months later he answered with money
+her request for house-rent, and in a will dated May 5, 1801, occurs this
+clause, cancelling his former agreement, and making new provisions:
+
+"To the widow Aloysia Polzelli, formerly singer at Prince Nikolaus
+Esterházy's, payable in ready money six months after my death, 100
+florins, and each year from the date of my death, for her life ... 150
+florins. After her death her son, Anton Polzelli, to receive 150 florins
+for one year, having always been a good son to his mother and a grateful
+pupil to me. N.B.--I hereby revoke the obligation in Italian, signed by
+me, which may be produced by Mme. Polzelli; otherwise so many of my poor
+relations with greater claims would receive too little. Finally Mme.
+Polzelli must be satisfied with the annuity of 150 florins." Two years
+later we find him writing to her (and, rumour said, his) son: "I hope
+thy mamma finds herself well." In a new will, dated 1809, the year of
+his death, Haydn withdraws the cash gift to Loisa, and leaves her only
+150 florins annuity. She still remains, however, his chief heir.
+Meanwhile, without waiting for his death, she had married again to Luigi
+Franci, like herself a singer and an Italian. She outlived him and Haydn
+also, only to die in poverty and senility, far away in Hungary. Poor,
+eighty-two year old Loisa! Her affairs had been sadly mismanaged.
+
+Why had Loisa given up all hope of marrying Haydn, even when his wife
+was dead and she was possessed of his agreement, signed, sealed, and
+delivered, to marry no one but her? Awhile ago I stooped to repeating
+the scandal that during Signora Polzelli's life, Haydn had been casting
+sheep's eyes elsewhere. But it is such a pretty scandal! Besides, these
+old contrapuntists were trained from youth to keep two or more tunes
+going at once.
+
+I am not referring to Haydn's friendship with Frau von Genzinger. It was
+Karajan who discovered and published this pleasant correspondence with
+her. She was the wife of a very successful physician, a "ladies' doctor"
+(_Damen Doktor_). She was the daughter of the Hofrath von Kayser; her
+name was Maria Anna Sabina; she was born Nov. 6th, 1750, and had been
+married some seventeen years, and was the mother of five children when
+Haydn began taking his every Sunday dinner with the family. Karajan says
+that she was an _ausgezeichnete_ singer and pianist.
+
+A deep friendship sprang up at once between them and they corresponded
+freely. Haydn's letters to her were published by Nohl, and you may read
+them in Lady Wallace's translation. They are full of the most
+interesting lights upon Haydn's life and experiences, and are brimful of
+affection for Frau von Genzinger. But the husband and the children are
+almost always referred to in the letters, and the friendship seems to
+have been entirely and only a friendship,--as Schmidt calls it, "_eine
+tiefe und zugleich respectvolle Neigung_."
+
+Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as "honourable," finds in Frau von
+Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for
+composition. "We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and
+truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best
+work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any
+benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally."
+
+But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with
+Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many
+a billet-doux fragrant with charm.
+
+It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's
+supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata
+and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his
+canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called
+"the loveliest woman I ever saw." Nor yet again the fascinating actress,
+Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he
+went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him
+painting Mrs. Billington as "Saint Cecilia listening to the angels," and
+protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels
+listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a
+fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The
+skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790,
+a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good
+and famous story.
+
+The true woman in the case makes her _entrée_ in this innocent style:
+
+"Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
+that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him
+whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.
+
+"James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791."
+
+This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
+preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
+lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
+light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
+oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
+personage. May we be there to see!
+
+Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
+was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
+to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
+Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
+made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
+as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English
+Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
+London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
+son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
+aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
+according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
+that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
+pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
+notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
+consumption.
+
+Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
+London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
+by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
+becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
+whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
+Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.
+
+Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, "In London, I fell in love with
+a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time." But Mr. Krehbiel
+shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
+To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not "though
+she was sixty years old," but "though I was sixty years old." I think we
+are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
+thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
+as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
+of their most potent beauty.
+
+Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline
+D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter
+that she was "an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a
+somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no
+disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to
+Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have
+not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer
+in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him
+and Frau Haydn in Vienna." We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do
+with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the
+charge of "vulgarity."
+
+The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an
+Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on "Mozart
+und Haydn in London" quoted from them. But for their complete
+publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's
+"Music and Manners in the Classical Period." This captivating work
+contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with
+amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the
+time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of
+Pepys.
+
+I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through
+such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in
+all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain
+themselves. M.L. is "my love," D.L. is "dear love," M.D. is "my dear,"
+and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to
+the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied
+into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may
+have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.
+
+Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs.
+Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor
+her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she
+encloses him "the words of the song you desire." This letter is dated
+February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792,
+and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased
+to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being
+suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.
+
+  "Io vi mando questo foglio
+  Dalle lagrime rigato,
+  Sotto scritto dal cordoglio
+  Dai pensieri sigillato
+  Testimento del mio amore
+  (Io) vi mando questo core."
+
+Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate
+that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give
+them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets
+that they must be incomplete.
+
+"Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.
+
+"M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish
+much to know _how you do_ to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure
+of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come
+tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not
+fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and
+best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity
+M.D. your &c."
+
+"March the 7th 92.
+
+"My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night,
+our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand
+affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of
+_tenderness_ for you but no language can express _half_ the _Love_ and
+_Affection_ I feel for you. you are _dearer_ to me _every Day_ of my
+life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my
+_Dearest_ it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned
+my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am
+truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had
+happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with
+the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you
+will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the
+Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best
+wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and
+invariable Regard my D,
+
+"Your truly affectionate--
+
+"my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when
+you will come."
+
+"April 4th 92.
+
+"My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons
+for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse
+me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be
+happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to
+you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your
+Concert. may all _success_ attend you my ever D H that Night and always
+is the sincere and hearty wish of your "Invariable and Truly
+affectionate--"
+
+"James St. Thursday, April 12th
+
+"M.D. I am so _truly anxious_ about _you_. I must write to beg to know
+_how you do_? I was very sorry I _had_ not the pleasure of Seeing you
+this Evening, my thoughts have been _constantly_ with you and my D.L. no
+words can express half the tenderness and _affection I feel for you_. I
+thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always
+remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the
+most perfect sympathy in _all your sensations_ and my regard is
+_Stronger every day_. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my
+D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc."
+
+"M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were
+indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday,
+indeed _my D.L._ I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have
+already produced So many _wonderful_ and _Charming_ compositions Still
+fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your
+health let me prevail on you my _much-loved_ H. not to keep to your
+Studys so long at _one time_, my D. love if you could know how very
+precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to
+preserve it for my sake as well as _your own_. pray inform me how you do
+and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and
+on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time
+my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with
+the _tenderest_ regard your most &c.
+
+"J.S. April the 19th 92"
+
+"April 24th 1792.
+
+"My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my
+thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably
+attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the
+March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I
+hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you
+the _Dear_ original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write
+Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the
+occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of
+your _health_. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday
+to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours
+etc."
+
+"M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I
+shall be very happy to see you and _particularly_ wish for the pleasure
+of _your_ company _my Dst Love_ before our other friends come. I hope to
+hear you are in _good Health_. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are
+your constant attendants and I _ever_ am with the _firmest_ Attachment
+my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,
+
+"R.S."
+
+"James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d."
+
+"M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten
+thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from _your
+ever Enchanting_ compositions and your _incomparably Charming_
+performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among _all_ your numerous
+admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can
+have Such high veneration for your most _brilliant Talents_ as I _have_,
+indeed my D.L. no tongue _can express_ the gratitude I _feel_ for the
+infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted
+thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that
+I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the
+_Chief_ Blessings of my life, and it is the _Sincer_ wish of my heart to
+preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you
+are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you _can_
+come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be
+particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come.
+God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect
+attachment your &c.
+
+"Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792."
+
+"My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me
+and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of
+them, pray inform me _how you do_, and let me know my _Dst L_ when you
+will dine with me; I shall be _happy_ to _See_ you to dinner either
+tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am _truly
+anxious_ and _impatient_ to _See you_ and I wish to have as much of
+_your company_ as possible; indeed _my Dst H_. I _feel_ for you the
+_fondest_ and _tenderest_ affection the human Heart is capable of and I
+ever am with the _firmest_ attachment my Dst Love
+
+"most Sincerely, Faithfully
+
+"and most affectionately yours
+
+"Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792"
+
+"M.D.
+
+"I was _extremely sorry_ I had not the pleasure of _seeing you to-day,_
+indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every
+moment of your company is _more_ and _more precious_ to me now your
+_departure_ is so near. I hope to hear you are _quite well_ and I shall
+be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one
+o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of
+Seeing _you_ on _Monday_. You will receive this letter to-morrow
+morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home
+and I _wish_ to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more
+I repeat let me See you as _Soon_ as possible. I _ever_ am with the most
+_inviolable attachment_ my Dst and most beloved H.
+
+"most faithfully and most
+
+"affectionately yours
+
+"R.S."
+
+
+"I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with
+your _delightful_ and enchanting _Compositions_ and your Spirited and
+interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the
+great pleasure I _always_ receive from your _incomparable_ Music. My D:
+I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any _Sleep_ to
+Night. I am _extremely anxious_ about your health. I hope to hear a good
+account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be
+happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the
+tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate
+
+"Friday Night, 12 o'clock."
+
+
+This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the
+barbarous word "yearnful," once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to
+London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the
+acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious
+guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old
+lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.
+
+This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the
+considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought
+him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes
+through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St.
+James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the
+house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to
+letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind
+him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady,"
+probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn
+dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly
+she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies
+probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was
+asked what the letters were. "They are letters from an English widow in
+London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty
+years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have
+married had I then been single."
+
+Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded
+affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing
+to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes
+that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian
+woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius
+so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the
+enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?
+
+When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to--even the fable
+that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl,
+who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in
+Haydn's will.
+
+Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that
+Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson--and that points to us as a by-path,
+which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of
+Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art,
+that pet of artists.
+
+As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement
+in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of
+now as a musician.
+
+"On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I
+saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in
+diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can
+put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of
+which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The
+king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He
+gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor
+Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven
+years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many
+years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned,
+however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary
+instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and
+studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with
+him, married him, and gave him a dowry of £100,000. Besides this he has
+£500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him
+with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is
+of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits
+from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and
+the other eighteen, strike the town of Lübeck in 1703. They are drawn
+thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition
+is to be friendly.
+
+Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Lübeck as soon as can
+be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the
+daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the
+pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see,
+and her years were thirty-four--just six years less than the total years
+of the two young candidates.
+
+Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship
+suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing
+"Cleopatra," an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing
+the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and
+presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is
+another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For
+it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to
+come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.
+
+But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years,
+and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to
+yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that
+narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is
+postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a
+duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor;
+he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove
+fatal,--but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves
+its wearer for a better fate.
+
+By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is
+healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting
+with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way
+toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of
+versatility--which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a
+writer than aught else.
+
+The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their
+wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann
+Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
+compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
+son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
+had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
+candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
+J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
+and "got the pretty job" ("_erhielt den schönen Dienst_").
+
+The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681--1764), a sort
+of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
+daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
+That is all of his story that belongs here.
+
+The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
+whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
+and Handel--the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
+somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glück." It is not
+needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
+it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
+friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
+of deafness. Händel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
+year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
+having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
+men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
+of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
+bachelorhood.
+
+Händel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
+he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.
+
+The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
+occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
+the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
+threatened to throw her out, thundering, "I always knew you were a
+devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils."
+
+Händel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
+memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
+the author says that Händel was "always habituated to an uncommon
+portion of food and nourishment," and accuses him of "excessive
+indulgence in this lowest of gratifications."
+
+"He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
+it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution,
+so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him
+to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he
+hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have
+been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous."
+
+A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.
+Noting that the servant dawdled about, Händel demanded why; the servant
+answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Händel
+stormed, in his famous broken English, "Den pring up der tinner
+prestissimo. I am de gombany."
+
+In his later years Händel was not so beautiful as he might have been,
+and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and
+his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that "in his youth he was the
+most handsome man of his time."
+
+Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of
+the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography
+states "that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long
+career of his life." And yet contradicts himself in his very next
+sentence, for he adds:
+
+"When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with
+him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes
+Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess
+Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the
+part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that
+period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and
+princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.
+Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a
+young man twenty-four years old; but Händel disdained her love. All the
+English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment
+which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never
+prudent."
+
+This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring
+says that Händel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great
+biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and
+represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that
+Vittoria was "an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany"--which gives a decidedly different look to Händel's
+"prudence."
+
+Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the
+famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, "a contralto of masculine strength," as
+one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her
+chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave
+higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen
+years old when Händel's "Roderigo" was produced there in 1707. That she
+should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be
+mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the
+time of her immortal amour. Love _à l'Italienne_ is precocious.
+
+Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom
+Händel never brought to London among all his importations--and with
+good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger
+account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar
+method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her
+to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong
+prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious
+appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man
+she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from
+dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money
+she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to
+the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.
+
+In London Händel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He
+is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical
+independence.
+
+He was a lordly man in his day was Händel; and dared to cut that
+terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of
+all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: "I admire Händel
+principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such
+perfection." This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the
+dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other
+man's straight; or that Händel was really more of a flirt than
+tradition makes him out.
+
+Rockstro said that Händel was engaged more than once; once to the
+aforementioned Vittoria Tesi--this in spite of the tradition that woman
+proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases
+this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book,
+"Anecdotes of Händel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith."
+This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to
+have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith _(né_ Schmidt) was Händel's
+secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on
+his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every
+emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy,
+in due time she married him.
+
+Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that Händel lacked
+social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first
+would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a
+fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles
+were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she
+fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second
+woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry Händel if he
+would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and
+died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.
+
+In his will Händel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and
+one other woman.
+
+He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances
+would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance,
+the creator of "Samson." He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady
+Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died
+fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later
+he married the daughter of a harlequin.
+
+Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain
+were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of
+vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers
+would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+While Händel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
+visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
+revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
+To the lordly Händel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
+people who know nothing else of either genius, know that Händel said,
+"Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook."
+
+Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
+both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
+that resulted in a determination to "reform it altogether." From London
+he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
+moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
+the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
+banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
+with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
+not particularly novel expression, "passionately fond of music." Gluck
+was soon made thoroughly at home there.
+
+"Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
+daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
+her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
+which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
+turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
+man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
+only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
+promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
+accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
+themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
+unbroken fidelity."
+
+Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
+the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
+himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna--as Schmid puts
+it--"_auf dem Flügeln der Liebe nach Wien zurück_" On the 15th of
+September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he
+dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
+journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
+Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
+strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protégé
+of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.
+
+No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
+niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.
+
+"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
+whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
+in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
+appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
+Gluck, _née_ Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
+may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
+or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
+to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
+previous bequests,'"
+
+None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
+married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
+operatic warfare.
+
+Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
+niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
+Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
+by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played,
+_con amore_, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
+his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of
+November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
+home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
+take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
+sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
+Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
+leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
+carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
+before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
+when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
+wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
+compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand _Fine_. But now
+he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.
+
+On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
+the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
+at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
+back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
+the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
+farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
+him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
+hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
+whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
+have procured,--indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
+eleven thousand florins,--outlived him less than three years, dying
+March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
+her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:
+
+"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
+Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
+the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."
+
+
+ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR
+
+During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
+partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
+wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and
+other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
+notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
+not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
+curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
+"Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
+book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
+ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
+frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's
+first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who
+kiss and tell."
+
+
+THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
+upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
+the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.
+
+The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
+way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
+the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
+his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
+consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
+made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
+mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
+not a genius of the first order.
+
+But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
+intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
+beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
+been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
+inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
+Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
+biographer Ginguené says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
+beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
+study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
+and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
+for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
+which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
+He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
+the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
+every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
+the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
+husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and
+I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara
+Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art,
+so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."
+
+In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support
+of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protégé,
+Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like
+Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and
+kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of
+Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
+happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
+Piccinni's home life.
+
+"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
+tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born
+that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him
+tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in
+dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene
+himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
+indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
+a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter"
+[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"
+
+The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling
+conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely
+than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December
+day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest
+daughter, aged eighteen. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
+to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
+country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
+quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
+to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
+work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
+these intrigues."
+
+In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
+"Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
+He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
+and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
+perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
+so good a man merited.
+
+Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
+his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered
+the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna,
+Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.
+
+He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must
+be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution
+broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
+the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
+where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
+everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
+had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
+whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
+brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
+dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.
+
+In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
+gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with
+pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
+Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
+without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
+as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
+eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
+Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested."
+So says Ginguené of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
+so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
+believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
+old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguené has this last picture
+of him:
+
+"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
+home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
+the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
+They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
+expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' _Lasciami, o ciel pietoso_!
+composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
+and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
+eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
+forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
+Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
+daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
+accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
+so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
+had animated him when he produced those sublime works."
+
+Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
+said that he was "_Cher aux Arts et à l'Amitie_." He left to his widow
+and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
+Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
+purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
+assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
+sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
+a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.
+
+Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
+to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
+but I do not find that he married. Salieri--whom Gluck assisted in the
+most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
+operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
+it was a success--was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
+him much affection. Méhul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
+married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
+a nephew.
+
+It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
+take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
+the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
+should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
+Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY--PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.
+
+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-god by
+his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fétis, Peri was
+very avaricious. Of noble 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 Schütz, 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
+passion, 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 Molière. His contract of marriage
+was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage,
+Fétis 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 Händel, 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 brandishing his bâton 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-être même indigne du tombeau."
+
+It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain rôles 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 crushing 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."
+
+Fétis 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, Händel, he attempted
+management, and like Händel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
+quite unlike the woman-hater Händel, he married his way out of poverty.
+In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership 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 Händel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
+Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess 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 destitution, from which the famous
+artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+MOZART
+
+As we come nearer to our own day, the documents 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 documents 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 attitude 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 constitute 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 assistance 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 God 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 God 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 God and myself. Please God 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 God that my opera may be successful."
+The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
+only fourteen years old!
+
+Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
+as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
+messages as these:
+
+"Don't, I entreat, forget about _the one other_, where no other can ever
+be."
+
+"Say to Fraulein W. von Mölk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg,
+in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the
+minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all
+about it."
+
+"Carissima Sorella,--Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi
+già sapete."
+
+"My dearest Sister,--I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to
+perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my
+reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in
+the most impressive and tender manner,--the most tender; and, oh,--but I
+need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to
+drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to
+Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before
+my eyes in her fascinating _négligé_. I have seen many pretty girls
+here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers." The
+daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his
+heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was "the magnet." And Wendling's
+daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.
+
+These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the
+father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous
+activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When,
+therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest
+in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing,
+and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was
+Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little
+ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.
+
+There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this
+letter to his father, dated 1777--he was born in 1756:
+
+"As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all
+this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and
+finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time
+known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the
+matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father
+on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the
+convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg."
+
+Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Bäsle, or
+cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a
+concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the
+daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with
+certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his
+father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation
+of visiting the town. He found her "pretty, intelligent, lovable,
+clever, and gay," and, like him, "rather inclined to be satirical."
+
+They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.
+His letters are full of that _possenhaften Jargon_ with which he
+sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name
+of Bäsle, with which he rhymes "Häsle," a colloquial word for "rabbit."
+His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes,
+puns, and quibbles, such as:
+
+"Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief--trief, welchen
+ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben--schaben.
+Desto besser, besser desto!"
+
+Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense
+if not literally the sense. This is a sample:
+
+"My dear Coz-Buzz:--I have safely received your precious
+epistle--thistle, and from it I perceive--achieve, that my
+aunt--gaunt, and you--shoe, are quite well--bell. I have
+to-day a letter--setter, from my papa--ah-ha, safe in my
+hands--sands."
+
+A week later he writes her a letter beginning:
+
+"My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!--Potz
+Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz
+Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
+Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans,
+Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons
+regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and
+villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls,
+and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such
+a packet and no portrait!"
+
+It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and
+it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have
+a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds,
+"Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing." It is certain that
+in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his
+kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this
+very letter, "love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease
+loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?
+
+"Je vous baise vos mains,--vôtre visage--afin, tout ce que vous me
+permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.
+
+His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
+met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy
+farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Bäsle."
+
+His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
+was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
+more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
+Aloysia Weber--of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
+him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
+dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:
+
+"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
+intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
+it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."
+
+A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
+letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:
+
+"You may think or believe that I have croaked (_crepirt_)
+or kicked the bucket (_verreckt_). But I beg you not to think
+so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"
+
+Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
+her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.
+
+In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
+Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
+frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
+absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
+should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I
+would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
+deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
+him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
+inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
+drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.
+
+And yet his flirtation with the Bäsle certainly went past mere bantering
+and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
+Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
+Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
+writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as--
+
+"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
+by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."
+
+With her name he puns on _Bäsle_ and _Bass_, thence, "_Bäschen oder
+Violoncellchen_"--a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
+says, to appease her "alluring beauty (_visibilia et invisibilia_)
+heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes
+her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
+circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
+neither beauty on her part nor art on his.
+
+This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
+business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
+which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
+mood. Biographer Jahn says:
+
+"The Bäsle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
+least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
+there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
+neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
+have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
+and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
+life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
+in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
+eighty-three."
+
+So much for the Bäsle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
+bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
+serious--for Mozart a very serious--affair, was his infatuation with
+Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
+heart.
+
+When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
+Bäsle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
+the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
+copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
+hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
+of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.
+
+The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
+Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
+gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
+was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
+Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
+Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:
+
+"He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she
+is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not
+for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a
+downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very
+reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,--five girls and
+a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the
+last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already
+done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer
+for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis
+she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages."
+
+He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who
+had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a
+disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The
+deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, "Friends
+who have no religion cannot long be our friends." Then, with man's usual
+consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break
+off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he
+wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter
+Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has
+written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy
+principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says,
+because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him
+greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial
+friend for Nannerl.
+
+Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his
+father he declares:
+
+"I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish
+is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be
+answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my
+recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty
+zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I
+don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what
+is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans."
+
+How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the
+postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying
+a slight touch of motherly jealousy:
+
+"No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang
+makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she
+does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own
+interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I
+don't wish him to know it."
+
+Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend
+who married for money and commenting:
+
+"I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but
+not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from
+love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other
+considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife
+after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his
+property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a
+wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a
+one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the
+contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife,
+for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can
+deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing
+more."
+
+Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the
+Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for
+fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to
+pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought
+of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame
+the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!
+
+Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and
+tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He
+asks him to decide whether he wishes to become "a commonplace artist
+whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom
+posterity will read years after in books,--whether, infatuated with a
+pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and
+children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian
+life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided
+for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of
+really great people. _Aut Caesar ant nihil_."
+
+Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in
+the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that
+his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother
+went to Paris.
+
+He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.
+Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.
+For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone
+there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in
+Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply
+concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure
+her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this,
+however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the
+star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.
+
+What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.
+The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's
+tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.
+But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the
+favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be
+held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence
+she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It
+was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other
+who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to
+love elsewhere.
+
+When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and
+dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with
+black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of
+her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal
+German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake
+once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself
+upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, "Ich
+lass das Mädel gern das mich nicht will,"--which you might translate,
+"Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me." It was on Christmas Day
+that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the
+Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took
+it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend
+he locked himself in a room and wept for days.
+
+Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair
+before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and
+his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have
+answered with rebuking him for his foolish "dreams of pleasure." To this
+ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:
+
+"What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up
+dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not
+often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure--peaceful dreams, sweet,
+cheering dreams, if you will--dreams which, if realised, would have
+rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable."
+
+In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his
+cousin the Bäsle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich,
+followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.
+
+As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the
+greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She
+married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to
+Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after,
+Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The
+lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least,
+Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, "Otherwise
+he would hardly have taken the rôle of Pierrot in the pantomime in which
+his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin."
+
+Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: "Neither happiness nor riches
+brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from
+the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman,
+and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she
+liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the
+brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to
+revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any
+intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her
+freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her
+readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion
+of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into
+her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years
+of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from
+her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto
+regarded her was no longer the same."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth,
+there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so
+sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her
+youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his
+readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities
+belong exclusively to the historian.
+
+The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a
+prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the
+part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop
+was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious
+Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a
+declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long
+in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at
+the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to
+present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally
+kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but
+seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation
+only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that
+it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count
+Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count
+went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.
+
+The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the
+humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken
+heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of
+course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that
+the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to
+punch the critic's head.
+
+Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that
+he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was
+so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those
+who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit
+to the artist and his art.
+
+Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The
+emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the
+composition of his "Die Entführung aus dem Serail." In the first moment
+of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and
+sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the
+household of the Webers?--now more than ever in poverty since the good
+father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new
+engagement.
+
+The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
+series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
+gentleness.
+
+"What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
+fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
+love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
+indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
+is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
+opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
+is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
+kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so."
+
+A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
+a strange hand as follows:
+
+  "Your good son has just been summoned by Countess
+  Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear
+  father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you
+  know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be
+  without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.
+  I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable
+  to you as what your son would have written. I beg
+  my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your
+  obedient friend,
+
+  "CONSTANZE WEBER."
+
+
+This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
+Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
+or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
+fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
+fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
+improvisations.
+
+The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
+friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
+alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
+Wolfgang should move at once.
+
+Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
+gossip that he is to marry Constanze--ridiculous gossip, he calls it.
+
+"I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
+whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
+I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
+(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
+morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
+house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
+I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives."
+
+Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
+daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
+According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
+Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
+predicament--a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:
+
+"She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,--I am
+to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But,
+worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was
+a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it--by her
+beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came
+later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things--I was
+obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth
+in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more
+loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she
+began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she
+took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what
+you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are
+to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a
+face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always
+laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms
+it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage
+me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take
+advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but
+only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is
+nothing but an amorous fool."
+
+Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from
+prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved
+frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved
+the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he
+was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with
+Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and
+this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything
+but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a
+well-behaved and conscientious man.
+
+He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his
+father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze.
+But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon
+tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he
+plighted his troth with her.
+
+He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news
+to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint
+of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was
+satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:
+
+"My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the
+closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have
+opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded,
+from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although
+merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at
+present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with
+what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live--and to marry! You
+are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father,
+to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you
+must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very
+well-grounded reasons they are.
+
+"My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do.
+In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love
+for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive
+any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to
+domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been
+in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I
+think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am
+forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I
+possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a
+wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous
+expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only
+half of life.
+
+"But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat
+you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,--not
+Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with
+such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle,
+coarse, and deceitful--crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange
+(Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is
+still too young to have her character defined,--she is merely a good
+humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!
+
+"The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the
+martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest
+hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes
+charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh!
+my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all
+the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the
+same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair
+of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has
+enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife
+and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she
+can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She
+dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart
+in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if
+I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure
+some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of),
+and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this
+poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as
+Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest
+father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours.
+Pray, have compassion on your son."
+
+
+This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had
+a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had
+carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander
+about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about
+Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into
+signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart
+writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful
+light:
+
+
+"You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian
+stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies
+and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports,
+such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I
+would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became
+very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result
+was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he
+insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her
+daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing.
+What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or
+renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his
+beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst
+interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was
+in this form:
+
+"'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three
+years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I
+change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300
+florins.'
+
+"Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew
+that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could
+never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be
+too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as
+I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.
+
+"But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She
+desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear
+Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.'
+She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me."
+
+
+The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart
+does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not
+have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze.
+Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame
+Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the
+rôle of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart
+as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that,
+whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married.
+Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the
+affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a
+little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything
+worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to
+Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is,
+at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has
+evolved a little model:
+
+"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:--I never should have been so bold as to
+yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had
+not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do
+so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least,
+with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of
+Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I
+have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you
+as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you
+for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly
+deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you
+mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I
+may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE
+WEBER.
+
+"My compliments to your papa."
+
+With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is
+small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition
+of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One
+feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which
+she so carefully guarded,--Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved
+any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the
+social diversions of Vienna society at that time.
+
+"VIENNA, April 29, 1782.
+
+"MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:--You still, I hope, allow me to give you
+this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be
+your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to
+be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly
+as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In
+spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat
+refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with
+me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it
+seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore,
+so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I
+love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh
+well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being
+displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a
+game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by
+a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a
+thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many
+things to be considered besides,--whether only intimate friends and
+acquaintances are present,--whether you are a child, or a girl old
+enough to be married,--but, above all, whether you are with people of
+much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness
+[Waldstädten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she
+is a _passée_ elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and
+is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never
+lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife.
+But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct
+would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you
+will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This
+will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like
+you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling,
+then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind:
+My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling
+of her honest and kindly disposed,
+
+"MOZART."
+
+This letter seems to have ended the quarrel--the only one we know of
+their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart
+implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also
+that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and
+fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply
+absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly
+dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his
+ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in
+every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze
+are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints
+that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her
+without it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast
+in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldstädten had been touched by the
+troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for
+some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely
+in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she
+insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.
+
+When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not
+return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove
+Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between
+the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness
+wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000
+gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage
+portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of
+publishing the banns.
+
+Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the
+wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent
+however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance
+and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.
+
+There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious
+remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the
+contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to
+take money into account.
+
+Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account
+of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first
+opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. "No one attended the
+marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth
+in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the
+bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my
+wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on
+seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted
+of a supper, which Baroness Waldstädten gave us, and indeed it was more
+princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful
+at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake--ay, my very
+life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really
+know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled,
+honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."
+
+Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion--this wedlock of
+the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married
+in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty
+that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of
+these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is
+gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of
+the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for
+refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal
+congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.
+
+Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but
+we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been
+poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its
+presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing
+together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a
+detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to
+counterbalance the affection each found in each.
+
+As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have
+availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way
+in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of
+bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably
+have made him produce greater compositions--for no greater compositions
+than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced
+by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without
+conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness
+or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.
+
+The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart
+used to refer to his elopement as "Die Entführung aus dem Auge Gottes,"
+as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible,
+"Die Entführung aus dem Serail." It is a curious coincidence that the
+name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that
+she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the
+wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the
+height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a
+welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a
+cherished friend.
+
+Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It
+continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up
+his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might
+cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear
+his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for
+permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband,
+genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.
+
+All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the
+most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of
+putting his fingers to his lips and saying "Psst!" to any one who
+entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being
+spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips
+and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early,
+before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this:
+"_Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich wünsche, dass Du gut geschlafen
+habest_" etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling
+wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you
+will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too
+much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over
+the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household
+worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home
+at--o'clock punctually."
+
+Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in
+this tone:
+
+"Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended
+mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I
+found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by
+her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other,
+and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not
+forsake us."
+
+They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is
+not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of
+her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father
+and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the
+weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes
+to his father that his wife "carries about a little silhouette of you,
+which she kisses twenty times a day at least." His letters are full of
+little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the
+evening until seven in the morning,--a game of skittles of which
+Constanze was especially fond,--a concert where Aloysia sang with great
+success an aria Mozart wrote for her,--and financial troubles of the
+most petty and annoying sort.
+
+In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to
+the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either
+"Leopold" or "Leopoldine," according as fate decided. Fate decided that
+the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to
+Salzburg, for a visit.
+
+But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a
+success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a
+creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in
+Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed
+not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, "the
+poor little fat baby" died after six months of life.
+
+There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial
+troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance
+and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but
+there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief
+of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited
+them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.
+
+Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can
+be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous,
+beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though
+not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a
+reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's
+devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a
+breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's
+ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions
+from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! "He loved her
+dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she
+requited him with tenderness and true solicitude."
+
+She always said, "One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him,
+since he was himself so good."
+
+Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child
+lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the
+third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, "His
+wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious."
+
+In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the
+depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first
+lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had
+captured a widower of means and position.
+
+Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was
+away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness
+and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided
+that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources
+and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually
+dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the
+court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince
+Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical
+will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid
+pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that
+time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common
+diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most
+loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:
+
+"At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive
+to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may
+find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [_O
+Gott! mache meine Wünsche wahr!_] After receiving my letter, you must
+write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I
+shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [_ich
+bin Dich von ganzem Herzen küssend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart_] I am,
+kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,
+
+MOZART."
+
+_"Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre santé, si précieuse a votre époux."_
+In his next, three days later, he says:
+
+"MY DARLING WIFE:--Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell
+you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh.
+For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless
+you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas,
+Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it
+slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now!
+[_Nu--nu--nu--nu!_] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant
+word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse,
+sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the
+world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each
+other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you,
+and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love
+you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your
+fondly loving husband."
+
+Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his "_liebstes
+bestes Weibchen_" an account of his activities:
+
+"After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to
+me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my
+beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and
+over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read
+it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your
+letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.
+
+"Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:
+
+"1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of
+yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you
+will not go out to walk alone,--indeed, it would be better not to walk
+at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not
+written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before
+me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in
+your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be
+angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still
+better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish
+you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best
+beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with
+your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O _stru!
+stru!_ I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give
+you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever
+your most faithful husband and friend."
+
+Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a
+list of the letters he had written to his wife--eleven in all (one of
+them in French)--between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly
+that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet
+to add, seeing how poor they were:
+
+"My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than
+in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700,
+florins,--at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left
+me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place,
+Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so
+low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request--you know why. 4th. My
+concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so
+I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must
+be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be
+in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between
+ourselves."
+
+His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was
+embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon
+his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to
+despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging
+letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.
+
+Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to
+set forth again. He writes again to his _Herzens Weibchen_ or his
+_Herzaller-liebstes_ with renewed hope:
+
+"I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall
+then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall
+lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be
+placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with
+me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your
+loving Mozart.
+
+"P.S.--While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But
+now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about--Quick!
+catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are."
+
+This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he
+went.
+
+In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her
+health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and
+taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze
+was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot
+water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be
+worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of
+his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have
+not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more
+vivid to leave in the original:
+
+"MA TRÈS-CHÈRE ÉPOUSE:--J'écris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au
+Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; où j'ai couché cette nuit
+excellement--et j'espère que ma chère épouse aura passé cette nuit aussi
+bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que
+m'apprendra comme vous avez passé le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je
+pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de
+tomber sur l'escalier en sortant--et je me trouve entre l'espérance et
+la crainte--une situation bien désagréable! Si vous n'éties pas grosse,
+je craignerais moins--mais abandonons cette idée triste!--Le ciel aura
+eu certainement soin de ma chère Stanza Maria!...
+
+"I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are
+well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me
+to-day--but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
+my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
+have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
+like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
+it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
+2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
+sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr--du nun mir--nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
+zu immer mehr--und mehr--endlich sagen wir;--es ist wagen
+Slampi--Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
+ebben die Comodität. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."
+
+It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
+familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
+Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
+her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
+her if informed.
+
+It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
+domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdämmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
+grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
+almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
+that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
+first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
+later discarded after Köchel, another biographer, had succeeded in
+proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
+death. Hofdämmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
+he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
+however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
+who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
+1789--90. She sang in his "Entführung," and it was said that his friends
+had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
+idea.
+
+Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
+Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
+received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
+Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
+Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
+could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
+writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died,
+Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
+when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful
+friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking,
+young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."
+
+Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
+suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
+but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
+had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
+physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
+overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
+at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.
+
+After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
+leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
+Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
+solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
+last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
+even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
+to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
+When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:
+
+"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
+comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"
+
+Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
+door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
+and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
+for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these
+unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.
+
+After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
+would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
+applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
+unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
+1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
+the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!
+
+Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
+windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
+herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
+thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief
+was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
+to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
+to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
+friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
+sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
+pauper's grave, three corpses deep.
+
+It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
+She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
+identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
+sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
+and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.
+
+There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
+Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
+speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
+remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."
+
+For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
+biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
+highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
+love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
+there is a superfluity of proof.
+
+After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
+was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
+granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
+her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
+paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
+took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
+Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
+only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
+as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
+her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
+biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of
+Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
+he left fatherless and penniless.
+
+For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
+ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
+she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
+councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the
+education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in
+Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of
+this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it
+revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to
+Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her
+affections.
+
+There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic
+biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and
+enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of
+Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and
+Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a
+portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most
+beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle
+unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of
+Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."
+
+She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:
+
+"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"
+
+Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or
+her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius,
+and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she
+says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate
+love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828."
+What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to
+one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?
+
+When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was,
+according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband--an
+eminent musician--both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict
+of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau
+Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She
+was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his
+memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.
+
+"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most
+of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally
+cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes
+pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one
+in heaven now."
+
+Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in
+March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.
+
+Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
+for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
+sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
+tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
+Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
+the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
+thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
+it, his success and his immortality."
+
+So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
+Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
+well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet
+in utter disregard."
+
+Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
+or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
+He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
+ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
+self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal
+epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
+Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
+fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
+roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.
+
+A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
+and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
+women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.
+
+Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Händel, despised the pleasures of the
+table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love
+the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
+died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
+Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to
+have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
+neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
+her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
+intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
+had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.
+
+Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
+charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the café where
+Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
+Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
+whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
+Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
+ditties. Then came Fräulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
+Wertherlike fashion.
+
+Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna,
+at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
+in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
+where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
+hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
+each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."
+
+To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
+Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the
+tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
+Beethoven."
+
+There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
+and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very
+ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.
+
+An army captain cut him out with Fräulein d'Honrath; his good friend
+Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schöne und hochgebildete"
+Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
+she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
+Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
+beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fräulein Thérèse
+von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
+"volatile Thérèse who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von
+Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my
+dearest Thérèse; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
+Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin
+Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the
+well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
+pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fräulein
+Roeckel.
+
+The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdödy (_née_ Countess Niczky) is listed
+among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a
+friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an
+apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
+servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required
+bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a ménage could not last,
+as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
+easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her
+certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
+temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
+letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as
+"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gräfin," showing that she was his dearie to
+the fourth power.
+
+Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a
+twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
+in 1812, Beethoven says:
+
+"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
+even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
+of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
+gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
+myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
+companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
+of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
+more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
+foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
+part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
+to Amalie a right ardent kiss--if nobody there can see."
+
+In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
+album of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie").
+The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:
+
+  "Ludwig van Beethoven:
+  Who even if you would
+  Forget you never should."
+
+In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
+from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent
+passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
+affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
+lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:
+
+"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
+will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
+may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
+me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
+pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
+here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
+me of your attachment to your friend,
+
+"BEETHOVEN."
+
+There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
+called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion
+to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
+Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
+the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.
+
+It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the
+far-away love" _[An die ferne Geliebte],_ according to Thayer; and of
+her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
+none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."
+
+Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
+had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
+his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
+impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as
+ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
+could never get her out of his mind.
+
+In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
+devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.
+
+Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
+from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Müller. And there was a poetess
+who also annoyed him.
+
+In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful
+and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
+1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
+inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817--he being then
+forty-seven years old--the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
+who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son
+later asserted that it was only a kinship of "artistic sympathy,"--in
+fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his
+brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
+she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
+Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
+acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
+to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
+said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
+that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
+scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
+Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
+to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
+it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
+fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
+Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
+to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
+recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
+Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
+life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
+her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."
+
+Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
+always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
+"promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a
+handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
+mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
+Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
+lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
+respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
+to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
+were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
+was a cook.
+
+Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for
+female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
+met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
+and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
+observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
+generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
+conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
+him longest, and most seriously of all--namely, seven whole months!"
+
+Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
+Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
+piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions--
+"_amoroso," "a malinconico_" and the like.
+
+Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
+the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
+one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
+capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
+discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
+repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
+the head of the suggester of the mischief.
+
+Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as _"postillon
+d'amour"_ by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.
+
+Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
+dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
+inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
+Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake "der Verliebte." Other
+"gewidmets" were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
+Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdödy, von Brunswick,
+Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea
+Cäcilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.
+
+All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
+and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
+Juan's conquests, "but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve." I find I have
+catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
+one). And more are to come.
+
+And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
+Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was
+never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
+passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand,
+chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
+adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in
+Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
+however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
+acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
+without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer
+takes a middle ground,--that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
+grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
+while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
+endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
+him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
+and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.
+
+Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
+he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
+say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
+what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
+was no Fräulein Androcles to take it away.
+
+Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
+aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
+early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
+says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
+Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
+of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
+mute image of her that my fancy paints."
+
+This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
+his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
+no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
+wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
+friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.
+
+And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
+began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
+nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
+communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
+said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.
+
+The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
+the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
+themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
+this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
+bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
+his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
+trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
+that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.
+
+To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
+longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
+glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
+two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
+whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
+of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)--"_alla damigella contessa
+Giulietta Guicciardi."_ It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
+eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
+sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
+passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
+Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
+Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
+his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
+her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.
+
+It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
+inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:
+
+"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
+more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
+intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
+deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
+from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
+you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
+fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
+again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
+what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
+my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
+I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
+compassed half the world with my art--I must do it still. There exists
+for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
+will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."
+
+But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
+sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
+father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
+Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
+afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
+which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her,
+more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
+scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'étais bien aimé d'elle, et plus
+que jamais son époux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
+méprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as
+well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
+things?"
+
+Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
+three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
+in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
+his "unsterbliche Geliebte." They were written in pencil, and either
+were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
+passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
+in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
+with a few literalising changes:
+
+"My angel, my all, my self--only a few words to-day, and they with a
+pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
+to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
+grief when Necessity decides?--can our love exist without sacrifices,
+and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
+you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
+beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
+demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
+toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
+for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
+as I should.
+
+"My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
+yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
+another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
+warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
+but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
+broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
+and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
+wayside. Esterházy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
+eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
+which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
+I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
+again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
+during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
+ever, none of these would occur to me.
+
+"My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
+moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
+Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
+rest the gods must ordain--what must and shall become of us.
+
+"Your faithful LUDWIG."
+
+"Monday Evening, July 6th.
+
+"You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
+be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
+post goes to K----from here.
+
+"You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
+shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
+Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
+there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve--the
+servility of man towards his fellow man--it pains me--and when I regard
+myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
+the greatest?--and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
+weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
+probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
+fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
+at these baths, I must now go to rest." [A few words are here effaced by
+Beethoven himself.] "Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
+celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?"
+
+
+"Good Morning, July 7th.
+
+"Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
+Beloved!--now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
+whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
+all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
+your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
+unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
+will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
+my heart--never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
+loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
+made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
+life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
+relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
+so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
+for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
+contemplation of our existence. Be calm--love me--to-day--yesterday--
+what longings with tears for you--you! you!--my life!--my all! Farewell!
+Oh! love me well--and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.
+
+"Ever thine.
+
+"Ever mine.
+
+"Ever each other's."
+
+These impassioned letters to his "immortal beloved" were believed by
+Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
+in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
+Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
+could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
+Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
+life he hoped to share.
+
+Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
+been another Thérèse, the Countess Thérèse von Brunswick. She was the
+cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Thérèse
+"adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
+"Kiss your sister Thérèse," and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
+Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
+Thérèse, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ça va sans
+dire_!--" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
+character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
+words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
+she did not dare?
+
+Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
+more definite to Thayer's argument--if one is to believe a book I
+stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
+the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
+truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
+Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Thérèse well for many
+years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
+her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable
+woman I have ever known."
+
+"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
+Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
+in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
+her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
+because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
+beatified spirit."
+
+He told Fräulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Thérèse and
+Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
+he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
+the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
+but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
+obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
+her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
+bareheaded into the storm.
+
+Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
+"Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them,
+she rushed after him--she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
+a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
+give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
+ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Thérèse's
+diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maître," "mon maître chéri."
+
+She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
+her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
+saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that
+beautiful horrible Beethoven--if it were not such a come-down." She did
+not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.
+
+The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
+dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
+Thérèse. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
+of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:
+
+"I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
+the flower growing by the way."
+
+It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
+Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
+Thérèse's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
+thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
+delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
+of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
+furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
+snapped the bond with Thérèse. As she herself told Fräulein Tenger, "The
+word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
+frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled."
+
+Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Thérèse
+had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
+love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
+her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
+art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
+He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
+"immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
+betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
+Thérèse, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
+Fräulein Tenger:
+
+"I have read it so often that I know it by heart--like a poem--and was
+it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
+loved thee,' and thank God for it."
+
+She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
+on it an inscription from Ludwig:
+
+"L'immortelle à son Immortelle. LUIGI."
+
+
+These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
+that it be placed under her head in her coffin.
+
+When Fräulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
+asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
+Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
+long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
+her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
+reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.
+
+Thérèse von Brunswick was Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," and the
+picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
+when Thérèse was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
+the words:
+
+"To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from
+
+T.B."
+
+The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
+Museum at Pesth is a bust of Thérèse in her later years, erected in her
+honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
+school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
+pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
+muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
+was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.
+
+Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Thérèse's portrait and
+muttering: "Thou wast too noble--too like an angel." The baron withdrew
+silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
+mood. He explained: "My good angel has appeared to me."
+
+In 1813 he wrote in his diary:
+
+"What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
+longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
+longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
+and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!"
+
+And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
+he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
+life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
+and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.
+
+But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
+Gleichenstein:
+
+"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one--one who may
+perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
+must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
+could, I should fall in love with myself."
+
+One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
+fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:
+
+"Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
+who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
+own."
+
+Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
+individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
+And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
+Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
+of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
+indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
+best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:
+
+"For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
+become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
+thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess."
+
+To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
+Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
+publication after her death, adds the words: "I will not repeat my
+answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
+made his life unhappy."
+
+Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
+of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
+of fate?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+  "Though thou hast now offended like a man.
+  Do not persever in it like a devil;
+  Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul,
+  If sin by custom grow not into nature."
+
+  Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"
+
+
+Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the
+life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.
+For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake
+the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any
+such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last
+the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of
+frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their
+confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly
+find surpassed outside of Dickens.
+
+The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We
+have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which
+Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of
+Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a
+strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his
+orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought
+home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many
+musicians have earned distinction as soldiers--what, indeed, would the
+soldiers do without music?
+
+Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position
+of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful
+daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he
+used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his
+large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the
+neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he
+decided that his large family should help in its own support, and
+dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her
+fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later.
+Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though
+he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von
+Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that
+the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to
+realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a
+musical genius into the world.
+
+While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once
+more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his "Weber's
+Company of Comedians." Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself
+about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her
+health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and
+consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton
+was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.
+
+Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into
+the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music,
+though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's
+character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial
+life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his
+relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his
+first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:
+
+"Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the
+sixth year of his age; Nüremberg, the 10th of September, 1792." We
+hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was
+seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into
+dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, "through
+carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice
+spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling." The intoxicating draught of
+pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the
+ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female
+beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His
+teacher, Abbé Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at
+the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a
+sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with
+him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through
+his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for
+himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:
+
+"Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its
+walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale,
+slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst
+his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an
+unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This
+woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple
+were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young
+Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the
+feeling next akin."
+
+"That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very
+clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his
+slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties
+nigh equal to her own."
+
+Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of
+his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a
+Fräulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of Würtemberg, who
+took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical
+director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning
+Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he
+secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother,
+Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of Würtemberg, a monster of
+corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he
+might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable
+figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.
+
+"Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown,
+plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was
+known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the
+chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price
+were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the
+times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the
+government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was
+'Après moi, le deluge!'" The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift,
+and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor
+Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head
+the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron
+Max:
+
+"The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent
+king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his
+arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired
+incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his
+favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas
+vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,--would have been
+inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an
+autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But
+there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it
+did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.
+
+"Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed
+daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink
+bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in
+thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer
+the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to
+hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.
+
+"The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the
+utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was
+nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of
+Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he
+had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met
+him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the
+court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the
+door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently
+assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she
+stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed
+her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated
+monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the
+spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.
+
+"To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it
+must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed
+sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art
+during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated
+old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common
+door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808,
+composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser
+Leben.'
+
+"The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young
+man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the
+king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison
+cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated
+monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to
+himself."
+
+Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a
+university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts,
+with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men,
+who called themselves by the gentle name of "Faust's Ride to Hell." He
+now began also the composition of an opera, "Sylvana." This brought him
+into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of
+that "coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang."
+
+"To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would
+have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised
+circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump
+seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her
+undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly
+humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She
+became the central point of all his life and aspirations."
+
+Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl
+away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the
+money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and
+reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on
+Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen
+played Antony.
+
+The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father,
+who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his
+beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased
+luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay
+off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal
+of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in
+the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had
+been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the
+increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a
+reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's
+household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be
+concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him
+arrested during a rehearsal of his opera "Sylvana," and had him thrown
+into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was
+nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released
+from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt,
+and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage
+and driven across the border to exile.
+
+This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of
+disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of,
+and every mention of it was forbidden.
+
+Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an
+occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete
+laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally
+settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible,
+in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless
+legs, of which he writes: "And, oh, my calves, they might have done
+honour to a poodle!"
+
+Eight months after his banishment, his opera "Sylvana" was produced at
+Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of
+Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At
+Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers.
+They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties
+exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple
+flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became "All women
+are good for nothing" ("_Alle Weiber taugen nichts_"), which he used so
+often that he abbreviated it to "A.W.T.N." In the columns of his
+account-book he was provoked to write: "A. coquettes with me, though she
+knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid
+stories of her, and says I must not go home with her." He took a journey
+to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart
+long enough to inspire him to the scene in "Athalie," and to his song,
+"The Artist's Declaration of Love." He wandered here and there, for
+about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:
+
+"Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet,
+insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing
+figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting
+the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person
+uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with
+indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits
+and deep depression,--in all ways he resembled a figure from some
+romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of
+German art."
+
+In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to
+the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart;
+one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was
+Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several
+children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine,
+plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no
+improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this
+entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of
+exposure and its writhing humiliation:
+
+"He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which
+seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and
+reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the
+cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to
+conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark;
+excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in
+a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the
+slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh
+dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.
+
+"The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless
+husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination
+for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held
+out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.
+
+"The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in
+her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers,
+balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to
+discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would
+be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave.
+Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain,
+frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business
+for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she
+desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would
+receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes,
+when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed
+him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would
+cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right
+to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in
+every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling
+ever present--'How will she receive me?'
+
+"Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the
+lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again,
+but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on
+him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his
+better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A
+fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is
+lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful
+explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This
+reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt
+better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the
+happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near
+me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is
+mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but
+I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own
+heart, and work--work--work!'" It was in the fall of 1813--_prosit
+omen!_--that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still
+clinging to her whom the biographer calls "the rotten plant," and wrote
+in a note-book: "I found Calina with Thérèse, and I could scarcely
+conceal the fearful rage that burned in me." Or an elegy like this: "No
+joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow."
+
+Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Thérèse's birthday, Carl
+presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of
+trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets,
+something very rare and costly in Prague--oysters. Thérèse
+glanced--merely glanced--at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.
+Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure
+a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: "On a sudden the scales
+fell from his eyes." Ought he not rather have said, the shells?
+
+Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even
+music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.
+Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the
+Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the
+frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him
+casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to
+writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had
+more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she
+had formerly been _insouciante_ and amused at his pain, her pain hurt
+him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a
+leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away,
+he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps
+embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had
+reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new
+leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no
+means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while
+happiness.
+
+In the year 1810 his opera "Sylvana" had been sung, as I have said, with
+Caroline Brandt in the title rôle. When, in 1813, he was given the
+direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of
+the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner
+experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this
+same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be
+"at liberty," as they say.
+
+Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the
+daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight.
+She is described as "small and plump in figure, with beautiful,
+expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in
+her movements." She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified
+with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine
+skill, "her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible." She did
+not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January,
+1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Thérèse Brunetti in a fresher
+edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The
+oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the _coup de disgrâce_.
+
+Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt
+suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the
+head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow
+to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother,
+and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the
+stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a
+certain banker, saying: "He is worth the trouble, for he is rich."
+
+Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to
+keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we
+have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to
+the baths in Friedland.
+
+Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and
+her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not
+hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But
+what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have
+heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when
+Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left
+behind "a sweet, beloved being who might--who may--make me happy." "The
+absence of three months shall test our love." They wrote each other long
+and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled
+with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, "a sweet poison harmful to the
+soul."
+
+After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d
+in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague.
+He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's "Leier
+und Schwert." These choruses for men were sung throughout the
+Fatherland, as they still are sung.
+
+But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living
+voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little
+hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous
+enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving
+from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.
+
+Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could
+have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of
+herself and her career and her large following among the public was a
+deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice
+her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at
+last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream,
+and break their troth.
+
+In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a
+drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to
+Gansbacher, "I see now that her views of high art are not above the
+usual pitiful standard--namely, that art is but a means of procuring
+soup, meat, and shirts." To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more
+solemnly:
+
+"All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken
+man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason
+would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my
+heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last
+chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,--marry
+perhaps some day,--who knows? But love and trust again, never more."
+
+In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in
+person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the
+subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of
+marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and
+her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself
+would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day
+bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.
+Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.
+But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion
+of stage marriages.
+
+Even his patriotic songs, "The Lyre and the Sword," were a cause of
+disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and
+her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him
+her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the
+Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running,
+Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress,
+Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and
+make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the
+two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl
+who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.
+
+How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from
+the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of
+his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and
+continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute
+descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him
+with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his
+spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.
+
+At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the
+eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said
+she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced
+that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This
+blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he
+could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the
+blow so long:
+
+"Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow
+again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish
+than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back
+in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then
+acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest
+life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have
+woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care.
+Forgive me for my excess of love--forgive the passion that may have torn
+many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed--forgive me all
+the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will
+of mine--forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your
+precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I
+but buy it back for you.... Farewell--farewell."
+
+
+On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline
+was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too
+much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must
+frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her,
+she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.
+
+Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the
+autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze
+blended; their hands blended; the war was over.
+
+Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music
+began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his
+health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her
+house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of
+Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was
+hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for
+Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance.
+Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a
+curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just
+after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the
+darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.
+
+On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover,
+a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as
+Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.
+
+At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl
+assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a
+subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the
+world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto
+based on the old national legend, "Der Freischütz." Kind, the
+librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great
+enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it
+back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and
+her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for
+cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious
+old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and
+wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:
+
+"Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular
+element. Begin with the scene before the tavern." This seemed
+outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took
+it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book
+completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to
+her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes." Would to heaven, that
+there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner
+concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!
+
+Meanwhile, during the composition of "Der Freischütz," which was to mean
+so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera
+generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was
+spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring
+than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his
+bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of
+"chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and
+mustard-pot."
+
+She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating
+soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his
+duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her
+success in the "Magic Flute:"
+
+"I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberflöte,' but you know I
+hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your
+satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be
+only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench,
+and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking,
+I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar
+of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?"
+
+In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with
+his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline,
+who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the
+travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in
+Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of
+Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long
+and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his
+advice. Her savings were quite swept away.
+
+But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had
+in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and
+fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that
+Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love
+for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress
+he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.
+
+Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of "Der
+Freischütz." The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet
+between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed,
+through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw
+Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every
+note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over
+what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This
+spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have
+rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of
+art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the
+artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the
+composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual
+presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an
+accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters,
+painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the
+kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The
+longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which
+he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was
+driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent
+on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by
+coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married.
+Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though
+her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts
+here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal
+commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty
+forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and
+at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played
+the guitar.
+
+Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new
+home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in
+perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year
+1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there
+were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and
+training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and
+solemnity.
+
+"The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the
+blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the
+power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour
+and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!"
+
+As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in
+the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a
+_Haus-frau._ She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound,
+reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute
+care with which she kept all her "account-books, housekeeping-books,
+cellar-books." Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household
+became a dove-cote!
+
+The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and
+Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high
+favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally
+attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with
+unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though
+Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of
+desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought
+home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a
+signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a
+permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.
+
+Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two
+sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised
+accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and
+hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a
+country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose
+society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a
+starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.
+
+On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was
+dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health,
+always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be
+about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition
+of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his
+firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent
+into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and "the unhappy
+couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!'
+to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night,
+each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might
+not hear."
+
+Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on
+the final ebb--the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal
+tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable
+optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour.
+They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost
+unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could
+not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion
+fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was
+stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the
+baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place
+again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg,
+Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a
+mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her
+daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their
+married life.
+
+Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more
+into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for
+her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other
+hand, hated them. But Weber said:
+
+"There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I
+relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster."
+
+The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, "Ce
+n'est pas que la première huitre qui coute." Afterward Weber would
+groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?"
+
+In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at
+Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was
+given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischütz," in which
+Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two,
+was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious
+beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician
+has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every
+one looked for the composer, who was "sitting in a dark corner of his
+wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy."
+
+When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined
+by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to
+be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An
+accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving
+Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one
+who should disturb his wishes.
+
+Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when
+his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever.
+One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he
+turned pale and sighed: "God's will be done."
+
+From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early
+death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When "Der
+Freischütz" was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl
+arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news
+of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave
+Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened
+in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his
+affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many
+tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:
+
+"I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life.
+Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be
+in that which gives you joy too."
+
+From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always
+tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the
+fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two
+children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave
+them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the
+grave that yawned just before his weary feet.
+
+It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against
+fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl
+Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he
+jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before
+uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with
+him.
+
+"They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every
+wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I
+can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or
+turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome."
+
+In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.
+"I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve," he wrote, "But that I
+never cease to do. All my labours are for you--all my joy is with you."
+"Can I but be with you on New Year's eve," he wrote again, with that
+tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character,
+"I shall be with you all the year."
+
+Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to
+whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from
+pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease;
+hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt
+that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with
+aching heart in the biography:
+
+"To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to
+London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no,
+I must. Money must be made for my family--money, man. I am going to
+London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright,
+cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freischütz,'
+was already dead and gone.
+
+"Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most
+punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end
+rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his
+last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure
+the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.
+During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully
+changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find
+strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice
+was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.
+
+"In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of
+which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the
+charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill,
+good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'
+
+"And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel
+agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small
+remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She
+manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to
+renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to
+this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.
+
+"'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
+I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
+father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
+be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
+more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
+God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'
+
+"The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
+bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
+time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
+see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
+man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children--another
+long lingering kiss--the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
+carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs--the door was closed--and he
+rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
+shattered chest might almost burst at once.
+
+"Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
+'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'
+
+"At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
+horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
+voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
+and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
+fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
+as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
+repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
+sorrow."
+
+Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
+whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
+the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
+weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
+personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
+"Der Freischütz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
+always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.
+
+His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
+seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
+to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
+the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
+worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
+was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he
+cried:
+
+"Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is
+shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold
+together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!" His
+effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she
+wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long
+away, he answered:
+
+"Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to
+him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after
+day."
+
+"God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!" he wrote once more. "I count
+days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted
+before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible
+yearning I have never known before."
+
+At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his
+wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing
+his home again.
+
+At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and
+furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody,
+but, as his son writes:
+
+"At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting
+genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss
+upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death--for
+the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more
+than the notes for the voice."
+
+Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes
+upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to
+his future.
+
+"This day week is my concert," he wrote on the 19th of May. "How my poor
+heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last
+chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all
+they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest
+expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail
+me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to
+us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on
+this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose
+of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for
+so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my
+life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are
+all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled."
+
+To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest
+itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the
+skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The
+enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the
+end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a
+complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:
+
+"What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!"
+
+His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife;
+still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to
+London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting
+homeward--homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as
+he had planned. He writes:
+
+"What should I do there? I cannot walk--I cannot speak. I will have
+nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better
+I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels,
+Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming
+journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half
+a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end
+of June I hope to be in your arms.
+
+"How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my
+joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my
+best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching."
+
+The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase
+souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so
+impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his
+starting.
+
+"I must go back to my own, I must!" he sobbed incessantly. "Let me see
+them once more--and then God's will be done." The attempt appeared
+impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's
+request to have a consultation of physicians. "Be it so," he answered.
+"But come of it what may, I go!"
+
+His only thought, his only word, was "Home!" On the 2d of June he wrote
+his last letter to his beloved,--the last lines his hand ever traced.
+"What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness
+to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer,
+it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to
+answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst
+you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one!
+Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves
+you above all, your Carl."
+
+He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he
+could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to
+be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal
+of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, "Now let me sleep."
+
+The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for
+hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had
+added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great
+benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking
+him in his grave,--the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!
+
+A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to
+be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the
+committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians
+volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music
+was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien
+land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to
+Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, Fürstenau:
+
+"It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made
+two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the
+noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they
+were orphaned. No wonder that Fürstenau had not the courage to address
+Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest
+friend, Fräulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to
+Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.
+
+"But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the
+impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a
+little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived
+close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels--had looked
+out--had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and
+disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her--she
+rushed toward the spot--she saw the two standing in the little garden,
+wringing their hands and weeping--she knew all--and she lay senseless at
+their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh
+forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the
+sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her
+swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a
+flood of tears."
+
+Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached
+the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to
+haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for
+the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The
+idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by
+the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of
+Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son,
+Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's
+body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of
+Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once
+would have meant so much: "Weber in Dresden."
+
+"In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the
+theatre, with Schröder-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and
+covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The
+torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two
+candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small,
+now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale
+young man knelt praying by her side."
+
+This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we
+owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love,
+strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this
+character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side
+convincing, complete, alive.
+
+Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and
+ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation
+amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle
+for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect
+of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have
+written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But,
+if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of
+music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of
+the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best
+managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and
+life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.
+
+Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater
+Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these
+words:
+
+"Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever
+distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
+German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
+child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
+Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
+German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
+warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart--and who shall blame
+us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
+part of our dear German soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
+man whose love affairs make tame reading.
+
+It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
+Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
+him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
+thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
+and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
+the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
+human lives go, one of complete felicity.
+
+Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
+if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
+so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
+that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
+described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
+his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
+remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
+and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
+children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
+degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
+fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
+Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony
+and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
+written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
+of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
+sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
+of the sort.
+
+Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
+like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
+she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
+compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
+things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
+the age of forty-two she died.
+
+Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
+excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
+degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
+riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
+scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
+enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
+such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
+the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
+wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
+years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
+holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
+and childlike a mind."
+
+His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was
+always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
+bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart
+upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
+and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
+joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
+Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
+have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
+burned all the letters he had written her.
+
+We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
+old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
+spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
+wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
+English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
+womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the
+darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The
+fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
+seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
+piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
+forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
+in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
+case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
+first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
+Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
+occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
+alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.
+
+Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
+the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
+Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the
+world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
+friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
+poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
+of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
+that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
+wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product
+of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
+distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises
+thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
+
+"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
+morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
+other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
+Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
+aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
+It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
+Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
+let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
+and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
+turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
+point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
+and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
+pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
+goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."
+
+In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
+being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
+had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
+alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
+told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.
+
+In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
+a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
+widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_née_ Souchay); she was so well preserved
+and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
+But it was her second daughter, Cécile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
+the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
+seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.
+
+The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cécile, and described her:
+
+"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
+fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
+rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
+hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
+transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
+bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
+eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
+so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too
+reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
+In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
+deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cécile."
+
+Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
+girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
+really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
+Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
+emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
+9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:
+
+"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
+at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
+so rich and happy."
+
+It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
+when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
+Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
+"Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib
+errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
+enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
+and extemporise upon the theme.
+
+Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
+Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
+a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
+honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
+humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
+Hensel visited them, and found Cécile possessed not only of "the
+beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a
+wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
+promised to cure him of his irritability."
+
+The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
+had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
+and regretted being a conductor at all.
+
+In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cécile was dangerously
+ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
+bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
+was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
+married:
+
+"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
+may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
+every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
+my happiness."
+
+In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and
+sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
+without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
+music-paper and sketch-book, with Cécile and the children." Again, in
+1844, he writes of a return home:
+
+"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cécile looks
+so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
+former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
+room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
+at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
+garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
+paper that Cécile painted for me, to write to you.
+
+"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
+children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
+Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
+breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
+evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
+pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
+propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
+Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
+the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as _Punch_ does
+with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
+passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
+women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
+bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
+Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"
+
+Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:
+
+"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
+these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
+learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
+has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
+tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
+own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
+which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
+slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
+comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
+geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
+is gone if Cécile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
+picture."
+
+Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
+young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
+for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
+the strange reward of his art as follows:
+
+"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
+soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
+and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
+Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
+his own Germany."
+
+On one of the home festivals, Cécile and her sister gave and acted a
+comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
+Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
+his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
+vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
+rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
+dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
+Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
+it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
+on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
+the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
+his wife, his brother, and three friends.
+
+His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
+Cécile died at Frankfort of consumption.
+
+Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
+was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
+who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
+saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
+let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:
+
+"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
+conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
+me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
+am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
+earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
+character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
+but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
+understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
+hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
+them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
+towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
+an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
+human being, or anything on earth,--then God be praised! such a one I am
+not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
+sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
+does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
+people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I
+am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
+outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
+really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
+wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
+never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
+lot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+He wrote to his parents:
+
+"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant,
+well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is
+something in it that repels me."
+
+And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his
+piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned
+full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would
+say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely
+unlike--of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied;
+she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent
+woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse
+she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that,
+while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was
+certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from
+her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot,
+who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of
+Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like
+bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was--well,
+some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was
+angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal
+manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any
+non-effeminate man--outside of books.
+
+The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of
+presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and
+believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the
+Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was
+followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but
+resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of
+George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter
+surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco--though he
+neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at
+cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars--as
+did Liszt's princess.
+
+Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the
+credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire
+not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she
+conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.
+
+Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish
+fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.
+She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska--a good name to
+change for the shorter tinkle of "Chopin." It was from her that Chopin
+took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his
+music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to
+be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally
+the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the
+darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the
+loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!
+
+As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a
+public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa
+Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia
+Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was
+Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with
+a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her
+case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted
+himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska,
+however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as
+full of vague morose yearning as his Préludes. He left Warsaw for
+Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell
+concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a
+singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing
+the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians
+and poets of that day.
+
+To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and
+he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in
+appearance at least, athletic--even if he must ask his tailor to furnish
+the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with
+to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew
+from his familiar and dæmon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote
+about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:
+
+"God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her
+mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not
+cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be
+strewn under her feet."
+
+While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been
+finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's
+Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a
+few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the
+incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James
+Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
+subject of Chopin:
+
+"He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
+lady was married in 1832--preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
+genius--to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
+a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
+blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
+must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
+from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
+memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
+waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
+and rivers of ink have been spilt."
+
+This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
+residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
+brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
+called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
+avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
+hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
+amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
+praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
+that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
+gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
+manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
+next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
+declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
+and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
+says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
+man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
+himself in Paris very much _en prince_, according to Von Lenz, and such
+a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.
+
+The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
+whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
+Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
+which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
+was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
+long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen
+years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
+her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on "Chopin's Three Love
+Affairs," Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
+charm.
+
+"Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
+smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
+magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
+mantle."
+
+They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
+little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
+biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
+of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
+deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
+brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
+was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.
+
+Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
+has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
+family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
+were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
+living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
+was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
+In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
+carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
+furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.
+
+But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
+until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
+public.
+
+M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and _La Revue Musicale_ of
+Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
+but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
+two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
+admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
+pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,--advice
+which met the usual fate of good advice.
+
+Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: "In his letters to his family,
+Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
+always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
+the plural, for instance, 'Elles si chères, elles rirent pour tous,' or,
+'Here the vigil is sad, because _les malades_ do not wish a doctor.'"
+
+The first letter, signed "Fritz," is a most cordial welcome to a man
+about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand
+and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in
+1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever
+had, and writes to the whole family: "Tell them all that I love them,
+too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my
+roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton
+vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade
+of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving
+manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le télégraphe
+électro-magnétique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats
+extraordinaires." He revels in puns and gossip.
+
+Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin
+called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849,
+with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the
+last tendernesses in her power.
+
+This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come
+from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick,
+and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of
+Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the
+plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared
+joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a
+biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody
+which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it
+unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick
+the use of them.
+
+Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love
+requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as
+his music.
+
+Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: "As his talent,
+so did his heart mature early." It was at Warsaw, in his early youth,
+that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had
+married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society,
+Frédéric moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had
+always the princely way with him.
+
+One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose
+majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of
+Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke
+Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most
+welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music.
+Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would
+send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at
+the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his
+temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin
+was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor
+was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in
+whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully
+as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret.
+He was often teased on account of the beautiful "Mariolka," as he called
+her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove
+that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love
+was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams
+for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
+_à la Mazur_, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.
+
+In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George
+Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this
+time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty,
+vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria
+Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the "rag and the bone
+and the hank of hair" of contention.
+
+It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling
+similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of
+feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were
+like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering
+through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up
+their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these
+twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.
+
+The "black-eyed demoiselle," as she was called by the poet and the
+musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same
+time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and
+found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town,
+and to pass several weeks with each.
+
+It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to
+much verse, especially his "In der Schweiz." But all this while the
+little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes
+she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki
+hovering at her piano.
+
+When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his
+F-minor Étude which he called "the soul-portrait" of the comtesse. A
+year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he
+proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he
+composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor
+Nocturne.
+
+In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying
+Chopin's fiancée in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The
+distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he
+wrote to his mother:
+
+"They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental
+to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says
+that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls
+but out of all three only one angel can be created."
+
+But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself
+deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to
+Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.
+
+George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has
+contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader.
+It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even
+for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation.
+For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely
+blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which
+her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either
+the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could
+hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least
+as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount
+what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction
+would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar,
+I can be brief with it here.
+
+George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every
+conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as
+Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to
+him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity
+that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain
+others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some
+hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the
+nursery.
+
+On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme,
+and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years
+devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion,
+and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed
+by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless,
+and by nature--for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame--a
+voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted
+him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was
+as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the
+brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most
+of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was
+drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his
+gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.
+
+Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall
+out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that
+form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day.
+In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and
+daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious,
+the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset
+by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the
+place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant,
+her château. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of
+life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his
+art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion
+both to his health and to his music.
+
+The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a
+liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the
+"detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from
+one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There
+should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman
+infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart
+and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the rôle of nurse
+as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an
+invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
+on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
+fame.
+
+After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
+sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
+he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
+in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
+of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
+who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.
+
+Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
+not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
+deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
+mental support for ten long years.
+
+George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
+that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de
+ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
+the affair:
+
+"He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
+first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (_se reprenant_)
+incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
+object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
+affections."
+
+"Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
+friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
+me."
+
+"The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
+enough of his own ills to bear."
+
+"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
+was the first and the final time."
+
+"But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
+obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
+the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
+the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
+full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
+versa."
+
+"Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
+himself, he seemed almost to choke and die."
+
+
+It is generally believed that in the character of _Prince Karol_ in her
+novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
+weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
+Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated
+the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that
+Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
+None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:
+
+"It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
+(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
+mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
+proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
+a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
+full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
+good faith. I have traced in _Prince Karol_ the character of a man
+determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
+exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
+however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
+not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
+because it is too limited to reproduce them.
+
+"Chopin was a résumé of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
+can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
+was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
+instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
+itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
+fix themselves on a determined object.
+
+"However, _Prince Karol_ is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
+more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
+a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
+of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
+desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,--he who,
+nevertheless, was so suspicious.
+
+"And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
+the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
+friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
+made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
+that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
+why did he not re-read it?
+
+"This history is so little ours--It was the very reverse of it. There
+were between us neither the same raptures _(envirements)_, nor the same
+sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
+simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel
+with each other _à propos_ of each other."
+
+As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people
+tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George
+Sand's own version:
+
+"After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely
+gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was
+suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling
+subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand
+had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell
+there, one after another--all this was borne; but at last, one day,
+Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That
+could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate
+and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer
+loved him.
+
+"What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the
+poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that
+some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound,
+and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the
+revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to
+this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.
+Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had
+preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family,
+whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and
+deformed (_dénaturé_). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from
+liberty.
+
+"I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling
+and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my
+turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction,
+and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.
+
+"I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There
+were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous
+ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.
+
+"I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me
+filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that
+I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me
+till then."
+
+This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much
+credence.
+
+The cause of their--"divorce," one might call it--is blurred by the
+usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be
+that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her
+daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All
+accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles
+that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not
+Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts
+it, "had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically
+speaking, out-of-doors."
+
+The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at
+best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him
+with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a
+relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find
+herself free.
+
+But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had
+leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was
+eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the
+chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his
+haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was
+unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and
+a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it
+is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to
+see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, "She said I
+should die in no other arms than hers" (_Que je ne mourrais que dans ses
+bras_).
+
+But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty
+countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was
+the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's
+loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him,
+at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman
+sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait
+that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism
+undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever
+having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims
+that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.
+
+But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of
+his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of
+stars, one nocturne.
+
+END OF VOLUME I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
+Volume 1, by Rupert Hughes
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10957 ***
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10957 ***</div>
+
+<table width="80%" border="0" align="center">
+  <tr>
+    <td> <h1>The Love Affairs of <br />
+Great Musicians</h1>
+      <h2>By Rupert Hughes</h2>
+      <h3>Illustrated</h3>
+      <h3>Volume I.</h3>
+      <h3>1903</h3>
+	  </td>
+	  <td>
+<a name="img1" id="img1"></a><p><img src="images/img01.jpg" alt=" " align="right"/></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><a name="img2" id="img2"></a><img src="images/img02.jpg" align="left" alt="Princess Lichtenstein (Frontispiece)" />
+      <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h2>NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in <i>The
+Criterion</i>, and the last chapter was published in <i>The Smart Set</i>.</p>
+
+<p>While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
+subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
+advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
+the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
+revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's &quot;Immortal Beloved;&quot; the
+letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
+have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
+friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
+publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
+life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
+that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
+Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
+love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
+paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
+misunderstood.</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Love it is an hatefulle pees,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A free acquitaunce without re lees.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">An hevy burthen light to here,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A wikked wawe awey to were.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">It is kunnyng withoute science,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Wisdome withoute sapience,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Right eville savoured good savour;</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">And feblenesse fulle of myght.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A laughter it is, weping ay;</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Also a swete helle it is,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">And a soroufulle Paradys.</span><br />
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Romaunt of the Rose.</span><br />
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+ <h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+      <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="25">
+        <tr>
+    <td><h3>CHAPTER</h3>
+I. <a href="#chap1">THE OVERTURE</a><br />
+II. <a href="#chap2">THE ANCIENTS</a><br />
+III. <a href="#chap3">THE MEN OF FLANDERS</a><br />
+IV. <a href="#chap4">ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA</a><br />
+V. <a href="#chap5">HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL</a><br />
+VI. <a href="#chap6">THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA</a><br />
+VII. <a href="#chap7">GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA</a><br />
+VIII. <a href="#chap8">BACH, THE PATRIARCH</a><br />
+IX. <a href="#chap9">PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN</a><br />
+X. <a href="#chap10">THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR</a><br />
+XI. <a href="#chap11">GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</a><br />
+XII. <a href="#chap12">A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY&mdash;PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL</a><br />
+XIII. <a href="#chap13">MOZART</a><br />
+XIV. <a href="#chap14">BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE</a><br />
+XV. <a href="#chap15">VON WEBER&mdash;THE RAKE REFORMED</a><br />
+XVI. <a href="#chap16">THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN</a><br />
+XVII. <a href="#chap17">THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN</a>
+</td>
+    <td>
+      <h3>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<p><a href="#img2">PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)</a><br />
+<a href="#img3">DAPHNE</a><br />
+<a href="#img4">H&Eacute;LOISE</a><br />
+<a href="#img5">MARY STUART</a><br />
+<a href="#img6">ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)</a><br />
+<a href="#img7">HENRY PURCELL</a><br />
+<a href="#img8">JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH</a><br />
+<a href="#img9">MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH</a><br />
+<a href="#img10">JOSEPH HAYDN</a><br />
+<a href="#img11">MRS. BILLINGTON</a><br />
+<a href="#img12">GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL</a><br />
+<a href="#img13">CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK</a><br />
+<a href="#img14">JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU</a><br />
+<a href="#img15">NICOLA PICCINNI</a><br />
+<a href="#img16">JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY</a><br />
+<a href="#img17">WOLFGANG MOZART</a><br />
+<a href="#img18">MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA &quot;DON JUAN&quot; FOR THE FIRST TIME</a><br />
+<a href="#img19">LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN</a><br />
+<a href="#img20">BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM</a><br />
+<a href="#img21">COUNTESS TH&Eacute;R&Egrave;SE VON BRUNSWICK</a><br />
+<a href="#img22">CARL MARIA VON WEBER</a><br />
+<a href="#img23">FELIX MENDELSSOHN</a><br />
+<a href="#img24">FREDERICK CHOPIN</a><br />
+<a href="#img25">GEORGE SAND</a><br />
+<a href="#img26">COUNTESS POTOCKA</a></p>
+</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<a name="chap1"></a><h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE OVERTURE</h3>
+
+<p>Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
+amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
+that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
+he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of &quot;the
+inexpressive She;&quot; the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
+youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
+dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
+and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
+melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion&mdash;these are
+music's very own.</p>
+
+<p>So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
+wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
+expressed. And yet&mdash;! Round every corner there lurks an &quot;and yet.&quot; And
+if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
+corner.</p>
+
+<p>Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
+that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
+conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
+sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
+know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
+existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
+tune.</p>
+
+<p>But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
+world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
+and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
+tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
+begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.</p>
+
+<p>If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
+I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
+condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
+incidentally&mdash;to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
+skipped&mdash;let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
+to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.</p>
+
+<p>In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
+fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
+hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
+be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
+aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
+so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
+imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
+without frankly branding it as such.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
+tell their own stories in their own words.</p>
+
+<p>For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
+the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
+the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
+have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
+at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
+subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
+catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
+reader could consult with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
+necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
+matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
+verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
+marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
+heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
+wholesale blame&mdash;&quot;<i>tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner</i>.&quot; So, without
+pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
+have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
+and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
+And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
+think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
+and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
+blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
+of fame, or of amorous experience.</p>
+
+<p>As a last chapter to this series of &quot;true stories,&quot; I have ventured to
+sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
+compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
+on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
+had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
+warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
+dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
+saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
+clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
+lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
+true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
+collected.</p>
+
+<p>And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
+Artemus would say, to &quot;rise the curting.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap2"></a><h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+      <h3>THE ANCIENTS</h3>
+      <a name="img3" id="img3"></a><img src="images/img03.jpg" alt="Daphne" align="right" />
+      <p>The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
+certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
+god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
+hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
+ended in the death of the lady; as for himself&mdash;being a god, he was
+denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
+knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
+another woman, was soon blas&eacute; of divine courtship, and, for variety,
+turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
+son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
+claimed.</p>
+
+<p>Old Boetius&mdash;who had affection enough for both a first and a second
+wife&mdash;tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
+influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
+mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that &quot;the greatest caution is to
+be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
+corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
+gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
+corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
+suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
+more open than that of hearing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
+instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
+turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
+that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
+his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
+frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
+from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
+and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
+a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
+personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
+Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family&mdash;one of the first families of
+Arcadia&mdash;was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
+pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
+on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
+filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
+charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
+But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
+seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
+wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.</p>
+
+<p>The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs&mdash;a fact which
+should not be cherished against him&mdash;seems to have loved no one except
+himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
+effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
+mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
+Jonah's adventure turned inside out.</p>
+
+<p>Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
+life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
+that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
+violinists at the hands of the matin&eacute;e Bacchantes.</p>
+
+<p>The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
+married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
+her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
+can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
+his poesy.</p>
+      <a name="img4" id="img4"></a><img src="images/img04.jpg" alt="Heloise" align="right" />
+      <p>The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
+much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
+the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
+to be monks. This banishes them from a place here&mdash;not by any means
+because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
+because it greatly prevented a record of most of them&mdash;though happily
+not all. Ab&eacute;lard, for instance, was a monk, and his H&eacute;loise became a
+nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
+literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
+an abb&eacute;? There was a priest-musician, George de la H&egrave;le, who about 1585
+gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
+Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
+sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
+epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
+century, that as an &quot;adorateur diligent du Tr&egrave;s-Haut, ministre du
+Christ, il sut garder la chast&eacute;t&eacute; et se preserver du contact de l'amour
+sensuel.&quot; But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
+necessarily so.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
+tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
+flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
+children of Lorenzo dei Medici.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ange Politien,&quot; he says, &quot;a native of Florence, who passed for the
+finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
+criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
+became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
+family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
+the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
+disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
+the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
+with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
+himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
+in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
+couplet.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
+Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
+compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
+died.</p>
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap3"></a><h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE MEN OF FLANDERS</h3>
+
+<p>The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
+shelves of his big work, &quot;La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Si&egrave;cle,&quot;
+with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
+minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
+old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
+fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
+Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537&mdash;1577) &quot;Prince of musicians&quot; at Brussels.
+All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
+died&mdash;so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
+twenty-six at the time&mdash;so we can imagine how young and lithely
+beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia&mdash;a sweet
+name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
+she is called &quot;pudicissima et musicis scientissima.&quot; So she was good
+and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
+like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
+interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
+frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
+charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
+these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
+for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
+sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
+ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
+man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
+chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
+servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
+marked the &quot;golden age&quot; when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
+or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
+(1680&mdash;1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,&mdash;which
+was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
+twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
+ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
+pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
+asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
+a pitiful letter still preserved.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
+thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
+Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
+cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
+indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
+gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
+succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
+go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
+absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
+have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
+for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
+circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
+The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
+work, prevent me from gaining my own living.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
+Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
+pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
+wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
+his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
+poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
+eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
+because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
+support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
+is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.</p>
+
+<p>Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
+Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
+Flanders with her children.</p>
+
+<p>The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
+they were famous marriers, too,&mdash;but one of them met his match, Jean,
+called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
+widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
+Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
+ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
+he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
+compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
+na&iuml;vely points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
+married with three of his Majesty's servants. (<i>Casada con tres criados
+de V.M.</i>) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
+navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
+organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
+achieved.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
+(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
+Venetian school. He was a pupil of that &quot;Prince of Music&quot; Josquin
+Despr&egrave;s (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
+Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
+his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
+marriage).</p>
+
+<p>We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
+happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
+preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
+never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
+of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
+bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.</p>
+
+<p>As Van der Straeten says, &quot;it appears that the affection the old man
+vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
+approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
+daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
+daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
+disinherited.</p>
+      <a name="img5" id="img5"></a><img src="images/img05.jpg" alt="Mary Stuart" align="right" />
+      <p>One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
+one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
+music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
+Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
+upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
+managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
+Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
+He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
+became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
+odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
+dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
+the year 1566.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap4"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+      <h3>ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA</h3>
+<a name="img6" id="img6"></a>
+      <h3><img src="images/img06.jpg" alt="Orland di Lassus" align="left" /> </h3>
+      <p>A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
+his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
+Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the &quot;Belgian Orpheus,&quot; &quot;<i>le Prince des
+Musiciens</i>.&quot; There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
+the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
+at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
+changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
+father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a &quot;false
+moneyer,&quot; had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.</p>
+
+<p>Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
+this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
+esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.</p>
+
+<p>He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
+honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
+court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
+Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
+daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
+court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
+was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
+described her children as <i>elegantissimi</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
+thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
+As his biographer Delmotte says, &quot;His life indeed had been the most
+toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
+alert, had <i>enfant&eacute;</i> a multitude of compositions so great that their
+very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
+almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
+soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
+this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
+aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
+state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
+sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
+William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
+Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
+reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
+in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
+and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
+imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
+bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
+In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
+and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
+resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
+poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
+Lassus) that &quot;his <i>Altesse S&eacute;r&eacute;nissime</i> be pleased not to heap on the
+poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
+deserved through his <i>fantaisies bizarres</i>, the result of too much
+thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
+continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
+court chapel would be to kill him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was left undisturbed in his post, but, before long, death forced the
+acceptance of his resignation. Over his grave was placed a tomb on which
+besides the effigy of himself, are shown also his devoted wife and some
+of their children.</p>
+
+<p>Regina two years later founded a perpetual annual funeral service for
+him. By a later intercession, she secured for her son, Ferdinand, the
+succession to his father's dignities at the court of Bavaria. She died
+June 5, 1600, and on her tomb she is named, &quot;la noble et vertueuse dame
+Regina de Lassin, veuve de feu Orland de Lassus.&quot; She had been a good
+wife to a good husband. The sadness of her latter years with her beloved
+and demented husband reminds one of the pathetic fate of Robert Schumann
+and his wife.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap5"></a><h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+      <h3>HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL</h3>
+      <a name="img7" id="img7"></a><img src="images/img07.jpg" alt="Henry Purcell" align="left" />
+      <p>If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell
+deserved the name his &quot;loveing wife Frances Purcell&quot; gave him when she
+published after his death a collection of his songs under the name of
+&quot;Orpheus Britannicus.&quot; The analogy holds good also in the devotion of
+these married couples, for Henry willed to Frances the whole of his
+property absolutely.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the legend of the cause of his death would verify the old theory
+about the joltiness of the course of true love. For Sir John Hawkins
+passes along the gossip that Purcell met his death by &quot;a cold which he
+caught in the night waiting for admittance into his own house. It is
+said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders
+to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came
+home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that
+prescribed him, and, through the inclemency of the weather, contracted
+a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little
+honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of
+his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her
+dear lamented husband which she makes use of to Lady Elizabeth Howard in
+the dedication of the &quot;Orpheus Britannicus&quot;. It seems probable that the
+disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one,
+perhaps a consumption; and that, for some time at least, it had no way
+affected the powers of his mind, since one of the most celebrated of his
+compositions, the song 'From Rosy Bowers,' is in the printed book said
+to have been the last of his works, and to have been set during that
+sickness which put a period to his days.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of
+twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own
+house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the
+favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his
+pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in
+Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: &quot;Here
+lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that
+blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We now know that Purcell's marriage was either in 1680 or 1681, when he
+was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. August 2d, 1682, Purcell's
+father, a venerable and distinguished musician and a friend of Pepys,
+the diarist, was buried in Westminster Abbey, where later his more
+distinguished son was laid. A few days after the elder Purcell's burial,
+Henry and his wife came to Westminster Abbey again, for the baptism of a
+son new-born. He died in a few months and a third time they came to the
+sad old abbey to lay their child in the cloisters there.</p>
+
+<p>The next year, 1683, a second son died, and in 1687 a third boy two
+months old was buried in the cloisters of the abbey. This monotonous
+return of the hand of death must have embittered the life of these two,
+who seem to have remained lovers always. But in May, 1688, a daughter
+was born, named Frances after her mother; and she outlived both parents.
+She married a poet, when she and her lover were each nineteen, and named
+a child Frances after the grandmother. On Sept. 6th, 1689, Henry
+Purcell's son Edward was baptised, and he also lived to attain some
+distinction as an organist. In 1693 a daughter, Mary Peters, was born.</p>
+
+<p>Two years later, on May 21st, 1695, the young father died&mdash;on the eve of
+St. Cecilia's Day. At his bedside were his old mother, his young wife,
+and the two little children. Purcell was buried under the organ of
+Westminster Abbey and the anthems he had composed for the funeral of
+Queen Mary were sung at his own. And there he rests near his fellow
+musician, Pelham Humphries, who lies, as Runciman says, &quot;by the side of
+his younger wife in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Purcell's will, made the very day of his death, was as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the name of God, Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the Citty of Manchester,
+gent., being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in
+good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God), doe by these
+presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving Wife, Frances Purcell,
+all my Estate both reall and personall of what nature and kind soever,
+to her and to her assigns for ever. And I doe hereby constitute and
+appoint my said loveing Wife my sole Executrix of this my last Will and
+Testament, revokeing all my former Will or Wills. Witnesse my hand and
+scale this twentieth first day of November, Annoq. Dni. One thousand six
+hundred ninety-five, and in the seventh yeare of the Raigne of King
+William the Third, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>H. PURCELL.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As to Hawkins's theory that Purcell left his wife in needy
+circumstances, Cummings, his biographer, believes the thought refuted by
+the will left by the widow herself, who outlived her husband by eleven
+years, and on St. Valentine's Day, 1706, was buried at his side. In her
+will she says that: &quot;According to her husband's desire she had given
+her deare son (Edward) a good education, and she alsoe did give him all
+the Bookes of Musicke in generall, the Organ, the double spinett, the
+single spinett, a silver tankard, a silver watch, two pair of gold
+buttons, a hair ring, a mourning ring of Dr. Busby's, a Larum clock, Mr.
+Edward Purcell's picture, handsome furniture for a room, and he was to
+be maintained until provided for. All the residue of her property she
+gave to her said daughter Frances.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cummings also assails Hawkins's story that Purcell was dissipated and
+caught his death from being locked out. But Runciman objects that if
+Purcell had not been dissipated in those days, he would have been called
+a Puritan, and says: &quot;I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman,
+a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of
+men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to excel every
+one of his time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The love Frances Purcell bore her husband was kept green by her anxiety
+for his fame. She was, in her littler way, a Cosima Wagner. In 1696 she
+published a collection of harpsichord lessons by her husband; three
+editions being sold quickly. The next year she issued ten sonatas and a
+&quot;Collection of Ayres.&quot; In 1698 she issued (or reissued) the &quot;Orpheus
+Britannicus.&quot; In all of these she wrote dedications breathing devotion
+to her husband. In an ode printed in the second volume of the &quot;Orpheus,&quot;
+in 1704, Purcell's personality is thus limned:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Nor were his Beauties to his Art confin'd</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">So justly were his Soul and Body join'd</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">You'd think his Form the Product of his Mind.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A conquering sweetness in his Visage dwelt,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">His Eyes would warm, his Wit like lightning melt.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">But those must no more be seen, and that no more be felt.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Himself as Humble as his Art was High.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>Purcell died at the age of thirty-seven&mdash;being granted only two years
+more of life than Mozart and only six years more than Schubert. He is
+the moon of English music and his melodies are as exquisite and as
+silvery and as full of enamoured radiance as the tintinnabulations of
+the moonbeams themselves. But unfortunately for English music this
+beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers
+England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding
+glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the
+east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from
+dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of H&auml;ndel as a lover, we
+must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious
+morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have
+affected Purcell very deeply.</p>
+
+<p>The story concerns the strenuous career of Alessandro Stradella, and
+when you read it you will not wonder that it should have made a great
+success as an opera, or that it gave Flotow his greatest popularity next
+to &quot;Martha,&quot; even though its conclusion was made tamely theatrical.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap6"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+      <h3>THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA</h3>
+
+<p>There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the
+truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his
+&quot;Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets,&quot; but they cannot offer us any
+satisfactory substitute in its place, and without troubling to give
+their merely destructive complaints, and without attempting to improve
+upon the pompously fascinating English of old Sir John Hawkins, I will
+quote the story for your delectation.</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is that there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was
+an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer
+upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in
+musical history of some importance. The following story of his
+adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily
+newspapers&mdash;and surely no one could question the credibility of the
+daily newspapers. But here is the story as Hawkins tells it. As the
+cook-books say, salt it to your taste.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;His character as a musician was so high at Venice, that all who were
+desirous of excelling in the science were solicitous to become his
+pupils. Among the many whom he had the instruction of, was one, a young
+lady of a noble family of Rome, named Hortensia, who, notwithstanding
+her illustrious descent, submitted to live in a criminal intimacy with a
+Venetian nobleman. The frequent access of Stradella to this lady, and
+the many opportunities he had of being alone with her, produced in them
+both such an affection for each other, that they agreed to go off
+together for Rome. In consequence of this resolution they embarked in a
+very fine night, and by the favour of the wind effected their escape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Upon the discovery of the lady's flight, the Venetian had recourse to
+the usual method in that country of obtaining satisfaction for real or
+supposed injuries: he despatched two assassins, with instructions to
+murder both Stradella and the lady, giving them a sum of money in hand,
+and a promise of a larger if they succeeded in the attempt. Being
+arrived at Naples, the assassins received intelligence that those whom
+they were in pursuit of were at Rome, where the lady passed as the wife
+of Stradella. Upon this they determined to execute their commission,
+wrote to their employer, requesting letters of recommendation to the
+Venetian embassador at Rome, in order to secure an asylum for them to
+fly to, as soon as the deed should be perpetrated.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Upon the receipt of letters for this purpose, the assassins made the
+best of their way toward Rome; and being arrived there, they learned
+that on the morrow, at five in the evening, Stradella was to give an
+oratorio in the church of San Giovanni Laterano. They failed not to be
+present at the performance, and had concerted to follow Stradella and
+his mistress out of the church, and, seizing a convenient opportunity,
+to make the blow. The performance was now begun, and these men had
+nothing to do but to watch the motions of Stradella, and attend to the
+music, which they had scarce begun to hear, before the suggestions of
+humanity began to operate upon their minds; they were seized with
+remorse, and reflected with horror on the thought of depriving of his
+life a man capable of giving to his auditors such pleasure as they had
+just then felt.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In short, they desisted from their purpose, and determined, instead of
+taking away his life, to exert their endeavours for the preservation of
+it; they waited for his coming out of the church, and courteously
+addressed him and the lady, who was by his side, first returning him
+thanks for the pleasure they had received at hearing his music, and
+informed them both of the errand they had been sent upon; expatiating
+upon the irresistible charms, which of savages had made them men, and
+had rendered it impossible for them to effect their execrable purpose;
+and concluded with their earnest advice that Stradella and the lady
+should both depart from Rome the next day, themselves promising to
+deceive their employer, and forego the remainder part of their reward,
+by making him believe that Stradella and his lady had quitted Rome on
+the morning of their arrival.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Having thus escaped the malice of their enemy, the two lovers took an
+immediate resolution to fly for safety to Turin, and soon arrived there.
+The assassins being returned to Venice, reported to their employer that
+Stradella and Hortensia had fled from Rome, and taken shelter in the
+city of Turin, a place where the laws were very severe, and which,
+excepting the houses of embassadors, afforded no protection for
+murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two
+persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their
+engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of
+allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found
+means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various
+arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of
+his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent and vindictive
+than himself, the Venetian associated two ruffians, and dispatched them
+all three to Turin, fully inspired with a resolution of stabbing
+Stradella and the old man's daughter wherever they found them. The
+Venetian also furnished them with letters from Mons. l'Abb&eacute; d'Estrades,
+then embassador of France at Venice, addressed to the Marquis of
+Villars, the French embassador at Turin. The purport of these letters
+was a recommendation of the bearers of them, who were therein
+represented to be merchants, to the protection of the embassador, if at
+any time they should stand in need of it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Duchess of Savoy was at that time regent; and she having been
+informed of the arrival of Stradella and Hortensia, and the occasion of
+their precipitate flight from Rome; and knowing the vindictive temper of
+the Venetians, placed the lady in a convent, and retained Stradella in
+her palace as her principal musician. In a situation of such security as
+this seemed to be, Stradella's fears for the safety of himself and his
+mistress began to abate, till one evening, walking for the air upon the
+ramparts of the city, he was set upon by the three assassins above
+mentioned, that is to say, the father of Hortensia, and the two
+ruffians, who each gave him a stab with a dagger in the breast, and
+immediately betook themselves to the house of the French embassador as
+to a sanctuary.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The attack on Stradella having been made in the sight of numbers of
+people, who were walking in the same place, occasioned an uproar in the
+city, which soon reached the ears of the duchess: she ordered the gates
+to be shut, and diligent search to be made for the three assassins; and
+being informed that they had taken refuge in the house of the French
+embassador, she went to demand them. The embassador insisting on the
+privileges which those of his function claimed from the law of nations,
+refused to deliver them up. In the interim Stradella was cured of his
+wounds, and the Marquis de Villars, to make short of the question about
+privilege, and the rights of embassadors, suffered the assassins to
+escape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;From this time, finding himself disappointed of his revenge, but not
+the least abated in his ardour to accomplish it, this implacable
+Venetian contented himself with setting spies to watch the motions of
+Stradella. A year was elapsed after the cure of his wounds; no fresh
+disturbance had been given to him, and he thought himself secure from
+any further attempts on his life. The duchess regent, who was concerned
+for the honour of her sex, and the happiness of two persons who had
+suffered so much, and seemed to have been born for each other, joined
+the hands of Stradella and his beloved Hortensia, and they were married.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the
+port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin: the
+assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at
+their heels. Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the
+morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into
+their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart. The murderers had taken
+care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and
+made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella's assassination
+reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive
+to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great
+merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that
+kind; which, adds the relater, 'those who remember how lovingly Mr.
+Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to
+him, may understand without farther explication.'&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap7"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+      <h3>GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA</h3>
+
+<p>Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
+Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
+his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
+That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
+his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
+at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
+fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
+it seems, just getting into print for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
+Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
+was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
+all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
+appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
+from 1544 to 1551.</p>
+
+<p>Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
+married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
+him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, &quot;his
+equal and an honest damsel&quot; (<i>donzella onesta e sua para</i>), according to
+the biographer Baini, who adds:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the
+first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait
+penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions
+of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow: yet
+with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time
+to his glory and to his gain. And so they passed together, these two
+faithful consorts, nearly thirty years.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia bore him four children, all sons, Angelo, Ridolfo, Silla, and
+Igino. The first three died in early manhood, after showing themselves
+in some sort heirs of their father's genius: in the second book of his
+motets Palestrina has included some of their compositions. The last son,
+Igino, outlived his parents and his own welfare; he was &quot;<i>un' anima
+disarmonica&quot;</i> After his father's death he attempted to complete and
+market an unfinished and rejected composition of his father's, but he
+was legally restrained. He lost some of his father's unpublished works,
+while certain noddings of genius, better lost, and refused even by the
+Pope, Palestrina dedicated them to, still remain, with a dedication to
+yet another Pope, put on them by the scapegrace Igino.</p>
+
+<p>A certain writer Pitoni, by a bit of careless reading, multiplied
+Palestrina's wives by two, and divided his sons by the same number,
+claiming that Lucrezia, the first wife of Palestrina, was the mother of
+Angelo, that after her death he married one Doralice, and that she was
+the mother of Igino. But Baini exposes Pitoni's carelessness, proves the
+existence of Ridolfo and Silla by the inclusion of their works in the
+father's book, and shows that Doralice was the wife of Palestrina's son
+Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>It being established, then, that Palestrina was married but once, and it
+being assumed that he was happily married, it is strange to see how this
+happy marriage came near proving fatal to him. Palestrina, who was, like
+Michelangelo, intimate with various Popes, dedicated in 1554 his first
+printed book of masses to Pope Julius III. As a reward, the careless
+pontiff made him one of the singers of his Sistine Chapel, omitting the
+usual severe examination, and overlooking as a small matter the fact
+that Palestrina was so far from being a priest that he was very much
+married and very much the father, and furthermore had no voice. But
+Palestrina resigned his post as maestro at Saint Peter's and entered
+the chapel. The Pope died shortly afterward and was succeeded by a
+cardinal who was a patron of Palestrina's and continued his favour as
+Pope Marcellus II. Three weeks later this Pope also died, and was
+followed by Paul IV.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately for Palestrina, the new Pope was a strict constructionist,
+and he found it &quot;indecent that there should be married men
+(<i>ammogliati</i>) interfering in holy offices.&quot; In spite of the action of
+the two previous pontificates, he determined to expel the three
+Benedicks who had entered the choir, Leonardo Bar&egrave;, Domenico Ferrabosco,
+and Palestrina, &quot;uomini ammogliati, e chi con grandissimo scandalo, ed
+in vilipendio del divin culto, contro le disposizioni dei sagri canoni,
+e contro le costituzioni e le consuetudini della cappella apostolica
+cantano i medesimi tre ammogliati imitamente ai capellani cantori.&quot; He
+then declares that, after mature deliberation, &quot;cassiamo, discacciamo, e
+togliamo&quot; from the list of chappellary singers these three, and that
+they ought to be &quot;cassati, discacciati, e tolti dalla cappella,&quot; and
+that after the present order they &quot;cassino, discaccino, e tolgano.&quot; And
+excommunication was threatened if any more married men (<i>uxorati</i>) were
+received in the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had
+resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a
+family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous
+thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever
+and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found
+another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October,
+1555, he was maestro. Eleven years later, a year after he had written
+his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of
+his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his
+resignation. They gave him the acceptance. Again he found another post,
+and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his
+many wanderings and vicissitudes.</p>
+
+<p>In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old
+friend, Pope Marcellus II. The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had
+marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history
+of religious music.</p>
+
+<p>The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending
+of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to
+which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and
+often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or
+cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did
+in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the
+Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets. The
+trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the
+original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of
+the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would
+not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an
+all-hearing ear.</p>
+
+<p>I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a
+musician, a contemporary of Palestrina's mentioned by Van der Straeten;
+his name was Ambrosio de Cotes. He was the Maestro de Capilla of the
+King's Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth,
+and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a
+mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de
+Espinosa. Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets
+at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs. In 1591 he was
+officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to
+sacred music (<i>y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes</i>).</p>
+
+<p>So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that
+contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely. It was given a
+last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and
+capable of redemption. He composed three masses, and the third of them,
+dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as
+the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final
+word and ultimate model for future church music.</p>
+
+<p>Some years later, at the very height of his glory, Palestrina's heart
+suffered its final blow. In the words of Baini, &quot;Lucrezia, <i>la sua dolce
+consorte</i>, after having piously accompanied the solemn procession for
+the transport of the body of Saint Gregory Nazianzeno from the church of
+the monks of S. Maria Campa Marzo to the Vatican the fourth of June,
+1580, was assailed by a most oppressive malady.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The attentions of her husband and the remedies of the medical art of
+that day kept her alive up to the first of July. Then the sickness began
+anew and &quot;neither the tears nor the voice of the loving companion
+prevailed against the inexorable scythe of death.&quot; On the 21st of July
+Lucrezia died. The next day her body was received at the Vatican,
+Giovanni watching in the schoolroom of the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to picture the wild grief of this man, whom a previous
+anxiety had thrown into an almost mortal fever. Yet he lived fourteen
+busy years, and in his old age he felt both fatigue and want, and was
+compelled to join the long list of those musicians who have appealed to
+their patrons for charity. But at least his life, like Bach's and that
+of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily
+a failure when set to music.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap8"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+      <h3>BACH, THE PATRIARCH</h3>
+      <a name="img8" id="img8"></a><img src="images/img08.jpg" alt="John Sebastian Bach" align="left" />
+      <p>The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of
+marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific.</p>
+
+<p>Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of &quot;the Father of Modern Music,&quot; had a
+twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and
+manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly
+together. Their wives, it is said&mdash;<i>horresco referens</i>!&mdash;could not tell
+them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom
+he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but
+tired of. The Consistory ordered him to marry her, but he appealed to a
+higher court and was absolved from the tenacious woman whom he said he
+&quot;hated so that he could not bear the sight of her.&quot; He married another
+woman four years later.</p>
+
+<p>The great Bach, Johann Sebastian, was the youngest of six children. His
+mother died when he was nine years old, but with Bachic haste his
+father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit
+of it, for she buried J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
+Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.</p>
+
+<p>At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt&mdash;at twenty-one he went on foot
+fifty miles to L&uuml;beck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
+been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
+for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
+they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
+variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
+rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
+waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
+adding, that they &quot;furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
+latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
+in the choir.&quot; His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
+to the parson. Further explanation we have none.</p>
+
+<p>Spitta speculates on the identity of this &quot;stranger maiden.&quot; In the
+older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
+occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
+opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
+cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
+friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
+be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
+young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach &quot;spoke to
+the parson,&quot; he confessed his love and his betrothal.</p>
+      <a name="img9" id="img9"></a>
+      <div align="center"><img src="images/img09.jpg" alt="Morning Prayer" /></div>
+      <p>Further Spitta comments: &quot;The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
+family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
+which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
+conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
+relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
+certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
+at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
+race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
+its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
+marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
+cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
+may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
+reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
+further improvement, and attracted him to his own race. His second wife,
+indeed, was not allied with him in blood, but that with the first he
+found, in some respects, his more natural development may perhaps be
+concluded from the fact that the most remarkable of his sons were all
+the children of his first marriage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Upton says that Bach loved Maria Barbara when he was only eighteen and
+they agreed to wait till he got a better post. This was not till three
+years had passed and then his salary was only eighty-five gulden (about
+&pound;7, or $35) besides a little corn and wood and some kindling-wood.</p>
+
+<p>It was on October 17, 1707, that, according to the record, &quot;the
+respectable Herr J.S. Bach, the surviving lawful son of the late most
+respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician
+of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria Barbara Bach, the
+youngest surviving unmarried daughter of the late very respectable and
+famous artist Herr Johann Michael Bach.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A little inheritance of fifty gulden (&pound;4 or $20) aided the new couple.
+But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: &quot;Modest as is my
+way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable
+articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live.&quot; A year after his
+marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of
+Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with
+the Prince of Anhalt-K&ouml;then. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his
+prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his
+wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he
+stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to
+success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed. She had borne
+him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm
+Friedemann, the father's favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the
+world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times
+spitefully underrate.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach's powers,
+and his next cantata with the suggestive title, &quot;He that exalteth
+himself shall be abased,&quot; shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In
+the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the
+high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson
+accused of being &quot;a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted
+to the wine-cellar of the Council&quot;).</p>
+
+<p>For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach's first wife's
+children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more
+congenial and appreciative helpmeet. Bach's father had remarried after
+seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited
+from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years
+more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of
+whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical
+than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought
+it time to take the name out of the rut.</p>
+
+<p>Anna Magdalena W&uuml;lken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the
+ducal band at Weissenfels. She was twenty-one years old while Bach was
+thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and
+together stood sponsor to the child of the prince's cellar-clerk. The
+wedding took place at Bach's own house.</p>
+
+<p>The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.
+She made the Bach home a little musical circle. It is evident that she
+kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, &quot;They
+are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already
+form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family,
+particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest
+daughter joins in bravely.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical
+book together. Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband's
+cheery note that it was &quot;<i>Anti-Calvinismus</i> and <i>Anti-Melancholicus</i>.&quot;
+In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and
+other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There
+are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an
+unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, &quot;Edifying Reflections of a
+Smoker&quot; in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own
+hand&mdash;doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed
+contentment in uxorious ease. Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly
+beginning,</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Irh Diener, werthe Jungfer Braut</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Viel Gl&uuml;cke zur heutgen Freude!&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>and exclaiming that at the sight of her in her garland and wedding-garb
+the heart laughs out in rapture;&mdash;and what wonder that lips and breast
+overflow with joy. There are rules he wrote out for her instruction in
+thorough-bass with a note that others must be taught orally, and there
+is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge
+from the words, &quot;Willst du dein Herz mir schenken.&quot; Upton declares this
+song to have been written during and for their first courtship. A
+portrait of this ideal wife was painted by Cristofori and passed into
+the keeping of her stepson, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but alas, it is
+lost while so many a less interesting face is repeated in endless
+pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-eight years after her marriage this faithful woman stood by her
+husband's side in his blindness and through the two operations by the
+English surgeon in Leipzig. How must she have rejoiced when on July 18,
+1750, he suddenly found that he could see and endure with delight the
+blessed sunshine! How her heart must have sunk when a few hours later he
+was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more
+days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his
+youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as
+Spitta says, &quot;floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and
+perfect it.&quot; The original name had been, &quot;When we are in the highest
+need,&quot; but he changed the name by dictation now to &quot;Before thy throne
+with this I come&quot; (<i>Vor deiner Thron tret ich hiemit</i>). The preacher
+said he had &quot;fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God,&quot; and he was
+buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of,
+and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.</p>
+
+<p>It is a dismal task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and
+death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy
+and aided him with hand and voice and heart,&mdash;what had she done to
+deserve the dingy aftermath of her fidelity?</p>
+
+<p>Bach left no will, and his children seized his manuscripts; what little
+money remained from his salary of 87 thalers a year (&pound;13 or $65) they
+divided with the widow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was
+continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns,
+some of them to considerable success. The mother and three daughters
+were left to shift for themselves. Two years later they must sell a few
+musical remains and the town must aid them out of its funds.</p>
+
+<p>In the winter ten years after her husband's death, on Feb. 27, 1760,
+Anna Magdalena died, an alms-woman. Her only mourners were her daughters
+and a fourth of the public school children, who were forced by the
+custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In
+1801 Bach's daughter Regina was still living, a &quot;good old woman,&quot; who
+would have starved had there not been a public subscription, to which
+Beethoven contributed the proceeds of a composition.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated
+almost from man's memory. Half a century of oblivion was followed by the
+great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some
+radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he
+owed so much of his life's delight and his art's inspiration, to whom
+also he dedicated his life and his music&mdash;Anna Magdalena.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap9"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+      <h3>PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN</h3>
+      <a name="img10" id="img10"></a><img src="images/img10.jpg" alt="Joseph Haydn" align="left" />
+      <p>&quot;Such music by such a nigger!&quot; exclaimed one prince. Another called him
+a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized
+and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly
+reached the ground. His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with
+nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and
+unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days,
+when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague. He
+always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, &quot;for the
+sake of cleanliness&quot;! and continuing to the day of his death, even when
+wigs were out of style.</p>
+
+<p>This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in
+his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the
+hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet
+this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but
+strangely na&iuml;f; a revolutionist of childlike directness.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the
+twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a
+shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating
+suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so
+heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly
+thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his
+friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven
+he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became
+disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably
+unsophisticated nature.</p>
+
+<p>A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty
+that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters
+of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to
+Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an
+ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an
+elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the
+convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously
+suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.</p>
+
+<p>As Louis Nohl says, &quot;Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude,
+ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at
+once&mdash;whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely
+suffered for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led
+the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more
+of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her
+husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as
+Haydn could afford or endure.</p>
+
+<p>An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend
+Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of
+unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his &quot;Le Haydine&quot; in the form of
+letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one
+Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original
+series of &quot;Letters written from Vienna.&quot; He published these under the
+pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later
+the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the
+name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is
+commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his
+account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a
+honeymoon.</p>
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;But soon the caprices of Mrs. Anna turned the knot to a chain, the
+bliss to torment, and affairs went so far that, after suffering many
+years, this new Socrates ended by separating from his Xantippe. Mrs.
+Anna was not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her manners were immaculate, but she
+had a wooden head, and when she had fixed on a caprice, there was no way
+to change it. The woman loved her husband but was not congenial. An
+excess of religious piety badly directed came to disturb this happy
+harmony. Mrs. Anna wanted the house always full of priests, to whom she
+furnished good dinners, suppers, and luncheons. Haydn was a bit
+economical; but rather for cause than desire. At this time he had hardly
+enough to live on discreetly, and he began to look with evil eye on this
+endless procession of holy grasshoppers (<i>locuste</i>) who ravaged his
+larder. Nor was it appropriate to the house of a studious man, this
+ceaseless clatter of a numerous, genial, and lazy society; therefore,
+solidly religious as he was, he could not enjoy these sacred repasts and
+he had to close the door of the refectory. After that the deluge (<i>inde
+ir&aelig;</i>). Mrs. Anna had a religious brother. Haydn couldn't keep him from
+visiting his sister.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Monks are like cherries; if you lift one from the basket, ten come
+along with it. Haydn's convent was not depopulated. Nor did the demands
+decrease. Every now and then Mrs. Anna had a new request; to-day a
+responsory, to-morrow a motet, the day after a mass, then hymns, then
+psalms, then antiphons; and all <i>gratis</i>. If her husband declined to
+write them, there appeared on the scene the great confederates of
+capricious women; the effects of hysteria, spleen (<i>gli insulti di
+stomaco</i>), spasms; then shrieks, then criminations, weepings, quarrels,
+and bad humour unceasing. Haydn ended with having to appease the woman,
+to lose his point, and pay the doctor and the druggist to boot. He had
+always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true
+miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful
+works that all the world knows.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted
+that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in
+the service of Prince Esterh&aacute;zy. This friendship, rousing jealous
+suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable.
+The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's
+marriage.&quot; [On this point Haydn once opened his heart to Griesinger,
+saying: &quot;My wife was incapable of bearing children, and therefore I was
+less indifferent to the charms of other womankind.&quot;] &quot;Lacking its most
+solid link, the marital chain could not stand such shocks, and grew
+fatally weaker. The pair ceased to live together, and only that
+sacramental knot remained indissoluble and strong, which Haydn had
+contracted at the age of twenty-seven. Mrs. Anna lived to seventy years
+on a sufficient pension which her husband faithfully paid, and she died
+in 1800. These vicissitudes in great part explain why Haydn, though he
+earned much, could not for a long while put aside a penny and make
+himself a little ease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is not a pretty picture that Carpani draws of this home life, and
+Anna is made out to be far from a lovable creature. She is compared to
+the patron saint of shrews, Xantippe. But even Xantippe had her side of
+the story to tell; and with all possible admiration for that man
+Socrates, of such godlike wisdom and such great heart, it must be
+remembered that Socrates had many habits which would not only cause
+ostracism from society to-day, but would have tried the temper of even
+such a wife as the meek Griselda of Chaucer's poem.</p>
+
+<p>We constantly meet these husbands who are seemingly rich in geniality
+and yet are mysteriously unhappy at home. It is the custom of the
+acquaintances of these fellows to put all the blame on the wife. But
+there is a distinct type of mind which always enjoys dining abroad and
+appreciates a few herbs in a stranger's house more than a stalled ox at
+home. These people are gentle and genial and tender only out-of-doors.
+You might call them extra-mural saints.</p>
+
+<p>I have a strong suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul
+that he was commonly called &quot;Papa&quot; by his friends and disciples, was one
+of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never
+be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked
+inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of
+her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger wished to
+make Haydn's wife a present, Haydn forbade him, saying:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She does not deserve anything! It is little matter to her whether her
+husband is an artist or a cobbler.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As he passed in front of a picture of her once, he seized the violinist
+Baillot by the arm, and pointing to the picture said, &quot;That is my wife.
+Many a time she has maddened me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1792 he wrote to his mistress from London:&mdash;&quot;My wife, the infernal
+beast&quot; (<i>bestia infernale</i>&mdash;Pohl translates this <i>h&ouml;llische Bestie</i>)
+&quot;has written so much stuff that I had to tell her I would not come to
+the house any more; which has brought her again to her senses.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes
+again:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable
+temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer. There will sometime
+be an end of this torment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful
+tone! As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to
+see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for
+the unhappiness upon the husband. Anna Keller had a remarkably long and
+sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her
+husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case
+he died suddenly. He pointed to a series of canons which he had written
+and framed. When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him
+a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little
+house she had set her heart on, na&iuml;vely adding that it was just a cosy
+size for a widow.</p>
+
+<p>Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a
+widower. Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of
+Haydn's life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how
+various composers composed: Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and
+the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at
+night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the
+streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on
+a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and
+children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends;
+Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the
+floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy
+fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming
+sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his
+chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of
+Angelica. When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends
+divided his time. For thirty years he led this life, <i>monotona ma
+dolcissima</i>, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving
+Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy. Then Boselli died and he began
+to feel the ennui (<i>le noje</i>) of a void in his days. It was then that he
+went to London.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This mistress of Haydn's, whom Carpani and F&eacute;tis call Boselli and whom
+Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the
+spelling in Haydn's own handwriting. The pleasant legend Carpani gives
+of Haydn's life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her
+death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.
+Pohl, closely followed by Haydn's recent biographer, Schmidt, describes
+Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged to
+sing at the theatre of the Prince Esterh&aacute;zy. She was the wife of Anton
+Polzelli, an insignificant and sickly violinist, with whom she was
+apparently not in love. Luigia is pictured&mdash;doubtless by guesswork&mdash;as
+not beautiful, but of a pleasing appearance, showing the indications of
+her Italian birth in &quot;her small slim face, her dark complexion, her
+black eyes, her chestnut-coloured hair; her body of medium height and
+elegant form.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To this woman,&quot; says Schmidt, &quot;Haydn fetched his own deep and lasting
+sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily
+with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be
+known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good
+nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by
+the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout
+twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she
+was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London
+the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their
+correspondence shows, only postponed their union, till the day when
+'four eyes shall be closed,'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yet when finally both were free, Time had worked his almighty
+influence; Haydn had grown gray; outwardly as well as spiritually an
+estrangement had widened between them, and of their once so dear a
+desire there is no more word. Yet Haydn never ceased to provide for his
+friend, as well as to care for the education and the success of her
+sons. The elder, Pietro, Haydn's favourite, on whom he hung with his
+whole heart, died early.&quot; [Pohl quotes many allusions to him in Haydn's
+letters.] &quot;The younger, Anton, who was reported without proper
+foundation to be Haydn's natural son, later became musical director of
+the prince's chapel, but then gave up music and turned farmer, finally
+dying of the plague in sad circumstances.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Pohl is somewhat fuller upon this alliance than Schmidt, who, in fact,
+merely condenses and paraphrases him. He says that Polzelli's maiden
+name was Moreschi [which, being interpreted, is &quot;Moor,&quot; a name once
+given to Haydn]; she was a mezzo-soprano, who played secondary r&ocirc;les in
+the operas. She earned the same salary as her husband, 465 gulden a
+year. The letters Haydn wrote her were always in Italian, and in one of
+them he wishes her better r&ocirc;les, and &quot;a good master who will take the
+same interest as thy Haydn.&quot; Haydn had come to her for sympathy, since,
+as Pohl says and we have seen, &quot;thanks to his wife he had hell at home&quot;
+[<i>die Holle im House</i>].</p>
+
+<p>When increasing fame took Haydn by the hand and led him away to royal
+triumphs in London, he did not take jealousy along with his other
+luggage. He seems to have heard that his place was promptly filled in
+Polzelli's heart, but with all his geniality, he could write of the
+rumoured rival as &quot;this man, whose name I do not know, but who is to be
+so happy as to possess thee.&quot; Then there was a recrudescence of the old
+ardour:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, dear, dear Polzelli, thou lingerest always in my heart; never,
+never shall I forget thee (<i>O cara Polzelli, tu mi stai sempre nel
+core, mal, mal scordeo di te</i>).&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When some one in London told him that Polzelli had sold the piano he had
+given her, he could not believe it, and only wrote her, &quot;See how they
+tease me about you&quot; (<i>vedi come mi seccano per via di te</i>). Still less
+will he believe that she has spoken ill of him, and he writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;May God bless thee, and forgive thee everything, for I know that love
+speaks in thee. Be careful for thy good name, I beg thee, and think
+often of thy Haydn, who cherishes and tenderly loves thee and to thee
+will always be true.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even to Bologna, whither Polzelli went with her two sons, says Pohl,
+&quot;followed Haydn's love&mdash;and his gold.&quot; He intended after his first
+London visit to go to Italy to visit her, and wrote further:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I cherish thee and love thee as on that first day, and am always sad
+that I cannot do more for you. Yet have patience. Surely the day will
+come when I can show thee how much I love thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Loisa's choice of a spouse had been unhappy, as so many marriages have
+been where the wife is a singer on the stage, and the husband a fiddler
+in the band. Haydn seems to have sympathised with Loisa in her unhappy
+domestic affairs, as cordially as she had sympathised with him in his.
+He had sympathy, too, for her similarly ill-matched sister, Christine
+Negri, for he writes of her as&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Already long separated from her husband, that beast, she has been as
+unhappy as even you, and awakes my sympathy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Also in March, 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner
+implying that he was a brute or a maniac: &quot;Thou hast done well to have
+him taken to the hospital to save thy life.&quot; Haydn and Loisa, being
+Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of
+celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish
+husband and his shrewish wife&mdash;&quot;when four eyes shall close.&quot; Loisa's
+husband was the first to oblige, for in August, 1791, his death wrings a
+charitable word from even Haydn:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thy poor husband! I tell thee that Providence has managed well in
+freeing thee from thy heavy burden, for it is better to be in the other
+world, than useless in this one. The poor fellow has suffered enough.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Later he writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;DEAR POLZELLI:&mdash;Probably that time will come which we have so often
+longed for. Already two eyes are closed. But the other two&mdash;ah, well, as
+God wills!&quot; Eight years more, and the reluctant and wide-eyed Anna
+Haydn was foiled of her desire to be a widow in the snug cottage of her
+choice. The lovers at last were both single. But now, freed of their
+shackles, why do they not rush to each other's arms? The only answer we
+receive is this chill and shocking document found long after Haydn's
+death; it is written in Italian and dated shortly after Frau Haydn's
+death:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I, the undersigned, promise Signora Loisa Polzelli (in case I shall be
+disposed to marry again) to take no other for wife than the said Loisa
+Polzelli; and if I remain a widower, I promise the said Loisa Polzelli
+after my death to leave her a life pension of 300 gulden, that is 300
+florins in Vienna money. Valid before every court. I sign myself,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;JOSEPH HAYDN,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Maestro di Cappella of his Highness, the Prince Esterhazy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Vienna, May 23, 1800.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On this sad and icy postscript to the ardent love affair, Schmidt
+comments: &quot;The form of this writing leaves the conclusion plain, that
+Haydn was forced to this act by the Polzelli. This throws a poor light
+on her character, and we dare not evade the conclusion that, for twenty
+years in this love affair for life, she had in mind a business
+arrangement with the master.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years
+occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to
+heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little
+later, the genial master himself was not above reproach, and Loisa's
+anxiety was not unfounded, for her Joseph was casting amorous glances
+elsewhere. Thus after the long ardour, the love letters have frozen into
+a hard and fast negative betrothal in which Haydn promises to marry no
+one else. This, Schmidt says, was dragged out of Haydn. But, if such a
+bond were necessary, it speaks surely as ill for Haydn as for the woman
+who had given her life and her good name to brighten his joyless heart.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, dead as his love was, honour remained with him, though it was a
+rather close-reckoning honour. Three months later he answered with money
+her request for house-rent, and in a will dated May 5, 1801, occurs this
+clause, cancelling his former agreement, and making new provisions:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the widow Aloysia Polzelli, formerly singer at Prince Nikolaus
+Esterh&aacute;zy's, payable in ready money six months after my death, 100
+florins, and each year from the date of my death, for her life ... 150
+florins. After her death her son, Anton Polzelli, to receive 150 florins
+for one year, having always been a good son to his mother and a grateful
+pupil to me. N.B.&mdash;I hereby revoke the obligation in Italian, signed by
+me, which may be produced by Mme. Polzelli; otherwise so many of my poor
+relations with greater claims would receive too little. Finally Mme.
+Polzelli must be satisfied with the annuity of 150 florins.&quot; Two years
+later we find him writing to her (and, rumour said, his) son: &quot;I hope
+thy mamma finds herself well.&quot; In a new will, dated 1809, the year of
+his death, Haydn withdraws the cash gift to Loisa, and leaves her only
+150 florins annuity. She still remains, however, his chief heir.
+Meanwhile, without waiting for his death, she had married again to Luigi
+Franci, like herself a singer and an Italian. She outlived him and Haydn
+also, only to die in poverty and senility, far away in Hungary. Poor,
+eighty-two year old Loisa! Her affairs had been sadly mismanaged.</p>
+
+<p>Why had Loisa given up all hope of marrying Haydn, even when his wife
+was dead and she was possessed of his agreement, signed, sealed, and
+delivered, to marry no one but her? Awhile ago I stooped to repeating
+the scandal that during Signora Polzelli's life, Haydn had been casting
+sheep's eyes elsewhere. But it is such a pretty scandal! Besides, these
+old contrapuntists were trained from youth to keep two or more tunes
+going at once.</p>
+
+<p>I am not referring to Haydn's friendship with Frau von Genzinger. It was
+Karajan who discovered and published this pleasant correspondence with
+her. She was the wife of a very successful physician, a &quot;ladies' doctor&quot;
+(<i>Damen Doktor</i>). She was the daughter of the Hofrath von Kayser; her
+name was Maria Anna Sabina; she was born Nov. 6th, 1750, and had been
+married some seventeen years, and was the mother of five children when
+Haydn began taking his every Sunday dinner with the family. Karajan says
+that she was an <i>ausgezeichnete</i> singer and pianist.</p>
+
+<p>A deep friendship sprang up at once between them and they corresponded
+freely. Haydn's letters to her were published by Nohl, and you may read
+them in Lady Wallace's translation. They are full of the most
+interesting lights upon Haydn's life and experiences, and are brimful of
+affection for Frau von Genzinger. But the husband and the children are
+almost always referred to in the letters, and the friendship seems to
+have been entirely and only a friendship,&mdash;as Schmidt calls it, &quot;<i>eine
+tiefe und zugleich respectvolle Neigung</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as &quot;honourable,&quot; finds in Frau von
+Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for
+composition. &quot;We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and
+truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best
+work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any
+benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with
+Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many
+a billet-doux fragrant with charm.</p>
+      <a name="img11" id="img11"></a><img src="images/img11.jpg" alt="Mrs. Billington" align="right" />
+      <p>It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's
+supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata
+and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his
+canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called
+&quot;the loveliest woman I ever saw.&quot; Nor yet again the fascinating actress,
+Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he
+went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him
+painting Mrs. Billington as &quot;Saint Cecilia listening to the angels,&quot; and
+protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels
+listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a
+fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The
+skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790,
+a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good
+and famous story.</p>
+
+<p>The true woman in the case makes her <i>entr&eacute;e</i> in this innocent style:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
+that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him
+whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
+preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
+lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
+light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
+oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
+personage. May we be there to see!</p>
+
+<p>Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
+was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
+to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
+Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
+made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
+as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as &quot;the English
+Bach.&quot; He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
+London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
+son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
+aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
+according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
+that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
+pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
+notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
+consumption.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
+London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
+by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
+becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
+whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
+Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.</p>
+
+<p>Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, &quot;In London, I fell in love with
+a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time.&quot; But Mr. Krehbiel
+shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
+To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not &quot;though
+she was sixty years old,&quot; but &quot;though I was sixty years old.&quot; I think we
+are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
+thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
+as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
+of their most potent beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline
+D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter
+that she was &quot;an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a
+somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no
+disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to
+Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have
+not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer
+in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him
+and Frau Haydn in Vienna.&quot; We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do
+with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the
+charge of &quot;vulgarity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an
+Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on &quot;Mozart
+und Haydn in London&quot; quoted from them. But for their complete
+publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's
+&quot;Music and Manners in the Classical Period.&quot; This captivating work
+contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with
+amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the
+time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of
+Pepys.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through
+such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in
+all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain
+themselves. M.L. is &quot;my love,&quot; D.L. is &quot;dear love,&quot; M.D. is &quot;my dear,&quot;
+and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to
+the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied
+into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may
+have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.</p>
+
+<p>Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs.
+Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor
+her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she
+encloses him &quot;the words of the song you desire.&quot; This letter is dated
+February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792,
+and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased
+to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being
+suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Io vi mando questo foglio</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Dalle lagrime rigato,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Sotto scritto dal cordoglio</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Dai pensieri sigillato</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Testimento del mio amore</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">(Io) vi mando questo core.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate
+that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give
+them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets
+that they must be incomplete.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish
+much to know <i>how you do</i> to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure
+of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come
+tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not
+fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and
+best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity
+M.D. your &amp;c.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;March the 7th 92.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night,
+our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand
+affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of
+<i>tenderness</i> for you but no language can express <i>half</i> the <i>Love</i> and
+<i>Affection</i> I feel for you. you are <i>dearer</i> to me <i>every Day</i> of my
+life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my
+<i>Dearest</i> it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned
+my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am
+truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had
+happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with
+the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you
+will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the
+Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best
+wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and
+invariable Regard my D,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your truly affectionate&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when
+you will come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;April 4th 92.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons
+for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse
+me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be
+happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to
+you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your
+Concert. may all <i>success</i> attend you my ever D H that Night and always
+is the sincere and hearty wish of your &quot;Invariable and Truly
+affectionate&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James St. Thursday, April 12th</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I am so <i>truly anxious</i> about <i>you</i>. I must write to beg to know
+<i>how you do</i>? I was very sorry I <i>had</i> not the pleasure of Seeing you
+this Evening, my thoughts have been <i>constantly</i> with you and my D.L. no
+words can express half the tenderness and <i>affection I feel for you</i>. I
+thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always
+remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the
+most perfect sympathy in <i>all your sensations</i> and my regard is
+<i>Stronger every day</i>. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my
+D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were
+indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday,
+indeed <i>my D.L.</i> I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have
+already produced So many <i>wonderful</i> and <i>Charming</i> compositions Still
+fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your
+health let me prevail on you my <i>much-loved</i> H. not to keep to your
+Studys so long at <i>one time</i>, my D. love if you could know how very
+precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to
+preserve it for my sake as well as <i>your own</i>. pray inform me how you do
+and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and
+on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time
+my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with
+the <i>tenderest</i> regard your most &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;J.S. April the 19th 92&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;April 24th 1792.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my
+thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably
+attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the
+March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I
+hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you
+the <i>Dear</i> original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write
+Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the
+occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of
+your <i>health</i>. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday
+to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours
+etc.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I
+shall be very happy to see you and <i>particularly</i> wish for the pleasure
+of <i>your</i> company <i>my Dst Love</i> before our other friends come. I hope to
+hear you are in <i>good Health</i>. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are
+your constant attendants and I <i>ever</i> am with the <i>firmest</i> Attachment
+my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;R.S.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten
+thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from <i>your
+ever Enchanting</i> compositions and your <i>incomparably Charming</i>
+performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among <i>all</i> your numerous
+admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can
+have Such high veneration for your most <i>brilliant Talents</i> as I <i>have</i>,
+indeed my D.L. no tongue <i>can express</i> the gratitude I <i>feel</i> for the
+infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted
+thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that
+I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the
+<i>Chief</i> Blessings of my life, and it is the <i>Sincer</i> wish of my heart to
+preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you
+are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you <i>can</i>
+come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be
+particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come.
+God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect
+attachment your &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me
+and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of
+them, pray inform me <i>how you do</i>, and let me know my <i>Dst L</i> when you
+will dine with me; I shall be <i>happy</i> to <i>See</i> you to dinner either
+tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am <i>truly
+anxious</i> and <i>impatient</i> to <i>See you</i> and I wish to have as much of
+<i>your company</i> as possible; indeed <i>my Dst H</i>. I <i>feel</i> for you the
+<i>fondest</i> and <i>tenderest</i> affection the human Heart is capable of and I
+ever am with the <i>firmest</i> attachment my Dst Love</p>
+
+<p>&quot;most Sincerely, Faithfully</p>
+
+<p>&quot;and most affectionately yours</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was <i>extremely sorry</i> I had not the pleasure of <i>seeing you to-day,</i>
+indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every
+moment of your company is <i>more</i> and <i>more precious</i> to me now your
+<i>departure</i> is so near. I hope to hear you are <i>quite well</i> and I shall
+be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one
+o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of
+Seeing <i>you</i> on <i>Monday</i>. You will receive this letter to-morrow
+morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home
+and I <i>wish</i> to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more
+I repeat let me See you as <i>Soon</i> as possible. I <i>ever</i> am with the most
+<i>inviolable attachment</i> my Dst and most beloved H.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;most faithfully and most</p>
+
+<p>&quot;affectionately yours</p>
+
+<p>&quot;R.S.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with
+your <i>delightful</i> and enchanting <i>Compositions</i> and your Spirited and
+interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the
+great pleasure I <i>always</i> receive from your <i>incomparable</i> Music. My D:
+I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any <i>Sleep</i> to
+Night. I am <i>extremely anxious</i> about your health. I hope to hear a good
+account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be
+happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the
+tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Friday Night, 12 o'clock.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the
+barbarous word &quot;yearnful,&quot; once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to
+London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the
+acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious
+guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old
+lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.</p>
+
+<p>This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the
+considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought
+him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes
+through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St.
+James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the
+house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to
+letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind
+him the scores of his six last symphonies &quot;in the hands of a lady,&quot;
+probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn
+dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly
+she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies
+probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was
+asked what the letters were. &quot;They are letters from an English widow in
+London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty
+years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have
+married had I then been single.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded
+affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing
+to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes
+that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian
+woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius
+so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the
+enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?</p>
+
+<p>When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to&mdash;even the fable
+that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl,
+who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in
+Haydn's will.</p>
+
+<p>Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that
+Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson&mdash;and that points to us as a by-path,
+which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of
+Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art,
+that pet of artists.</p>
+
+<p>As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement
+in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of
+now as a musician.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I
+saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in
+diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can
+put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of
+which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The
+king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He
+gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor
+Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven
+years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many
+years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned,
+however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary
+instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and
+studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with
+him, married him, and gave him a dowry of &pound;100,000. Besides this he has
+&pound;500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him
+with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is
+of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits
+from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap10"></a><h2>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR</h3>
+
+<p>Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and
+the other eighteen, strike the town of L&uuml;beck in 1703. They are drawn
+thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition
+is to be friendly.</p>
+
+<p>Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of L&uuml;beck as soon as can
+be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the
+daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the
+pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see,
+and her years were thirty-four&mdash;just six years less than the total years
+of the two young candidates.</p>
+
+<p>Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship
+suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing
+&quot;Cleopatra,&quot; an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing
+the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and
+presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is
+another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For
+it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to
+come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.</p>
+
+<p>But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years,
+and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to
+yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that
+narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is
+postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a
+duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor;
+he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove
+fatal,&mdash;but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves
+its wearer for a better fate.</p>
+
+<p>By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is
+healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting
+with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way
+toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of
+versatility&mdash;which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a
+writer than aught else.</p>
+
+<p>The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their
+wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann
+Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
+compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
+son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
+had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
+candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
+J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
+and &quot;got the pretty job&quot; (&quot;<i>erhielt den sch&ouml;nen Dienst</i>&quot;).</p>
+
+<p>The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681&mdash;1764), a sort
+of &quot;Admirable Crichton,&quot; who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
+daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
+That is all of his story that belongs here.</p>
+      <a name="img12" id="img12"></a><img src="images/img12.jpg" alt="Georg Friedrich Handel" align="left" />
+      <p>The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
+whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
+and Handel&mdash;the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
+somebody said, love to speak learnedly of &quot;Handel and Gl&uuml;ck.&quot; It is not
+needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
+it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
+friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
+of deafness. H&auml;ndel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
+year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
+having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
+men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
+of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
+bachelorhood.</p>
+
+<p>H&auml;ndel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
+he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.</p>
+
+<p>The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
+occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
+the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
+threatened to throw her out, thundering, &quot;I always knew you were a
+devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>H&auml;ndel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
+memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
+the author says that H&auml;ndel was &quot;always habituated to an uncommon
+portion of food and nourishment,&quot; and accuses him of &quot;excessive
+indulgence in this lowest of gratifications.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
+it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution,
+so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him
+to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he
+hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have
+been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.
+Noting that the servant dawdled about, H&auml;ndel demanded why; the servant
+answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon H&auml;ndel
+stormed, in his famous broken English, &quot;Den pring up der tinner
+prestissimo. I am de gombany.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In his later years H&auml;ndel was not so beautiful as he might have been,
+and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and
+his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that &quot;in his youth he was the
+most handsome man of his time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of
+the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography
+states &quot;that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long
+career of his life.&quot; And yet contradicts himself in his very next
+sentence, for he adds:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with
+him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes
+Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess
+Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the
+part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that
+period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and
+princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.
+Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a
+young man twenty-four years old; but H&auml;ndel disdained her love. All the
+English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment
+which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never
+prudent.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring
+says that H&auml;ndel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great
+biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and
+represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that
+Vittoria was &quot;an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany&quot;&mdash;which gives a decidedly different look to H&auml;ndel's
+&quot;prudence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the
+famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, &quot;a contralto of masculine strength,&quot; as
+one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her
+chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave
+higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen
+years old when H&auml;ndel's &quot;Roderigo&quot; was produced there in 1707. That she
+should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be
+mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the
+time of her immortal amour. Love <i>&agrave; l'Italienne</i> is precocious.</p>
+
+<p>Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom
+H&auml;ndel never brought to London among all his importations&mdash;and with
+good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger
+account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar
+method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her
+to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong
+prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious
+appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man
+she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from
+dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money
+she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to
+the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.</p>
+
+<p>In London H&auml;ndel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He
+is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>He was a lordly man in his day was H&auml;ndel; and dared to cut that
+terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of
+all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: &quot;I admire H&auml;ndel
+principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such
+perfection.&quot; This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the
+dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other
+man's straight; or that H&auml;ndel was really more of a flirt than
+tradition makes him out.</p>
+
+<p>Rockstro said that H&auml;ndel was engaged more than once; once to the
+aforementioned Vittoria Tesi&mdash;this in spite of the tradition that woman
+proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases
+this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book,
+&quot;Anecdotes of H&auml;ndel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith.&quot;
+This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to
+have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith <i>(n&eacute;</i> Schmidt) was H&auml;ndel's
+secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on
+his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every
+emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy,
+in due time she married him.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that H&auml;ndel lacked
+social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first
+would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a
+fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles
+were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she
+fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second
+woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry H&auml;ndel if he
+would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and
+died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>In his will H&auml;ndel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and
+one other woman.</p>
+
+<p>He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances
+would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance,
+the creator of &quot;Samson.&quot; He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady
+Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died
+fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later
+he married the daughter of a harlequin.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain
+were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of
+vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers
+would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap11"></a><h2>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+      <h3>GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</h3>
+      <a name="img13" id="img13"></a><img src="images/img13.jpg" alt="Christoph Willibald Von Gluck" align="left" />
+      <p>While H&auml;ndel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
+visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
+revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
+To the lordly H&auml;ndel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
+people who know nothing else of either genius, know that H&auml;ndel said,
+&quot;Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
+both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
+that resulted in a determination to &quot;reform it altogether.&quot; From London
+he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
+moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
+the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
+banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
+with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
+not particularly novel expression, &quot;passionately fond of music.&quot; Gluck
+was soon made thoroughly at home there.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
+daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
+her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
+which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
+turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
+man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
+only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
+promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
+accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
+themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
+unbroken fidelity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
+the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
+himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna&mdash;as Schmid puts
+it&mdash;&quot;<i>auf dem Fl&uuml;geln der Liebe nach Wien zur&uuml;ck</i>&quot; On the 15th of
+September, he was married to his Maria Anne, &quot;with whom to his death he
+dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
+journeys four years later.&quot; In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
+Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
+strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and prot&eacute;g&eacute;
+of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.</p>
+
+<p>No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
+niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
+whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
+in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
+appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
+Gluck, <i>n&eacute;e</i> Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
+may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
+or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
+to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
+previous bequests,'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
+married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
+operatic warfare.</p>
+
+<p>Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
+niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
+Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
+by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: &quot;Old Gluck sang and played,
+<i>con amore</i>, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
+his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces.&quot; On the 15th of
+November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
+home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
+take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
+sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
+Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
+leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
+carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
+before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
+when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
+wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
+compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand <i>Fine</i>. But now
+he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.</p>
+
+<p>On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
+the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
+at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
+back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
+the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
+farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
+him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
+hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
+whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
+have procured,&mdash;indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
+eleven thousand florins,&mdash;outlived him less than three years, dying
+March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
+her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
+Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
+the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR</h3>
+      <a name="img14" id="img14"></a><img src="images/img14.jpg" alt="Jean Jacques Rousseau" align="left" />
+      <p>During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
+partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
+wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, &quot;Le Devin du Village,&quot; and
+other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
+notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
+not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
+curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
+&quot;Confessions,&quot; that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
+book on &quot;Great Amours,&quot; dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
+ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
+frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting &quot;Rousseau's
+first love,&quot; has neatly dubbed him &quot;the Great High Priest of those who
+kiss and tell.&quot;</p>
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h3>THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</h3>
+      <a name="img15" id="img15"></a><img src="images/img15.jpg" alt="Nicola Piccinni" align="left" />
+      <p>In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
+upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
+the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.</p>
+
+<p>The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
+way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
+the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
+his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
+consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
+made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
+mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
+not a genius of the first order.</p>
+
+<p>But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
+intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
+beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
+been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
+inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
+Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
+biographer Ginguen&eacute; says: &quot;She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
+beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
+study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
+and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
+for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
+which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
+He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
+the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
+every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
+the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
+husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and
+I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara
+Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art,
+so much soul, and expression, as by his wife.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support
+of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and prot&eacute;g&eacute;,
+Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like
+Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and
+kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of
+Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
+happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
+Piccinni's home life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
+tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born
+that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him
+tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in
+dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene
+himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
+indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
+a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of &quot;The Good Daughter&quot;
+[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling
+conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely
+than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December
+day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest
+daughter, aged eighteen. &quot;Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
+to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
+country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
+quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
+to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
+work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
+these intrigues.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
+&quot;Roland,&quot; and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
+He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
+and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
+perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
+so good a man merited.</p>
+
+<p>Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
+his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered
+the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna,
+Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.</p>
+
+<p>He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must
+be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution
+broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
+the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
+where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
+everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
+had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
+whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
+brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
+dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.</p>
+
+<p>In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
+gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here &quot;one heard with
+pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
+Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
+without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
+as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
+eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
+Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested.&quot;
+So says Ginguen&eacute; of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
+so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
+believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
+old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguen&eacute; has this last picture
+of him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
+home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
+the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
+They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
+expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' <i>Lasciami, o ciel pietoso</i>!
+composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
+and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
+eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
+forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
+Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
+daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
+accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
+so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
+had animated him when he produced those sublime works.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
+said that he was &quot;<i>Cher aux Arts et &agrave; l'Amitie</i>.&quot; He left to his widow
+and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
+Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
+purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
+assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
+sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
+a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
+to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
+but I do not find that he married. Salieri&mdash;whom Gluck assisted in the
+most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
+operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
+it was a success&mdash;was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
+him much affection. M&eacute;hul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
+married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
+a nephew.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
+take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
+the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
+should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
+Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap12"></a><h2>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+      <h3>A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY&mdash;PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.</h3>
+
+<p>Though it sounds strange to speak of the &quot;invention&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Dafne&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by
+his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to F&eacute;tis, Peri was
+very avaricious. Of noble 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a good division of labour, for those patients
+whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.</p>
+
+<p>Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Sch&uuml;tz, a great
+revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German
+opera, was &quot;Dafne,&quot; 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 &quot;Christian Wildeck of
+Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter,&quot; which description
+Hawkins compares to that of &quot;Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's
+sister's hat.&quot; 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.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>LULLY THE IMP</h3>
+      <a name="img16" id="img16"></a><img src="images/img16.jpg" alt="Jean Baptiste de Lully" align="left" />
+      <p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the &quot;atmosphere of
+passion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora.&quot; He was always a very
+dissipated man, but in July, 1662, &quot;regularised&quot; his life by marrying
+Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court. &quot;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.&quot; His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are
+said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent
+monument.</p>
+
+<p>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 Moli&egrave;re. His contract of marriage
+was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage,
+F&eacute;tis says: &quot;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 <i>menus
+plaisirs</i> only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted
+annually to seven or eight thousand francs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His dissipations, like those of H&auml;ndel, 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 &quot;Armide,&quot; he demanded, angrily, &quot;<i>Qui t'a fait cela</i>?&quot;
+and gave her a kick <i>qui lui fit faire une fausse couche</i>. 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 brandishing his b&acirc;ton 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, &quot;That's true, my dear,
+and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown
+poet, who hated him for his <i>moeurs infames</i>, scrawled on his tomb these
+terrific lines:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">D'un libertin, indigne de memoire,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Peut-&ecirc;tre m&ecirc;me indigne du tombeau.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain r&ocirc;les 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.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>THE TACITURN RAMEAU</h3>
+
+<p>The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683&mdash;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 crushing statement:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You spell like a scullion.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;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.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being &quot;a savage, a stranger to every
+sentiment of humanity.&quot; The great Diderot, in a book called &quot;The Nephew
+of Rameau,&quot; referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in
+acoustics, and added:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;tis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French
+music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister. &quot;Sombre and unsociable
+he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost
+absolute.&quot; I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>PERGOLESI</h3>
+
+<p>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, &quot;For those that like that
+sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>KEISER</h3>
+
+<p>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, H&auml;ndel, he attempted
+management, and like H&auml;ndel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
+quite unlike the woman-hater H&auml;ndel, he married his way out of poverty.
+In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership 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.</p>
+
+<h3>BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS</h3>
+
+<p>Of that exquisite and elegant scamp Bononcini, who was the great rival
+of H&auml;ndel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
+Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess of Marlborough, who
+gave him a pension of &pound;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 destitution, from which the famous
+artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap13"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+      <h3>MOZART</h3>
+      <a name="img17" id="img17"></a><img src="images/img17.jpg" alt="Wolfgang Mozart" align="left" />
+      <p>As we come nearer to our own day, the documents concerning the personal
+lives of composers begin to multiply. Of the love of Bach we have only
+that tantalising allusion to the &quot;stranger maiden.&quot; Of Haydn we have
+amorous documents 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.</p>
+<p>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,&mdash;all those qualities that are
+found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various
+operas&mdash;all the qualities that are combined in &quot;Don Giovanni,&quot; are the
+qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and
+the fanatic libertinism of his Don Juan.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer says that the genius is he who never quite outgrows the
+childhood of his attitude toward the world. Mozart was always the
+sublime child.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 constitute 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&mdash;woe's me!</p>
+<a name="img18" id="img18"></a>
+      <div align="center"><img src="images/img18.jpg" alt="Mozart at Vienna" />
+      </div>
+      <p>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 assistance of the father
+and the mother, themselves musicians.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;Next to God comes papa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;Nannerl,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 God 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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;I kiss
+your hand a thousand times, and have a great deal to say to my sister;
+but what? That is known only to God and myself. Please God I hope soon
+to be able to confide it to her verbally.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This does not sound like the writing of a composer who was adding in a
+letter a few days later, &quot;Pray to God that my opera may be successful.&quot;
+The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
+only fourteen years old!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
+as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
+messages as these:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't, I entreat, forget about <i>the one other</i>, where no other can ever
+be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say to Fraulein W. von M&ouml;lk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg,
+in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the
+minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all
+about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Carissima Sorella,&mdash;Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi
+gi&agrave; sapete.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dearest Sister,&mdash;I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to
+perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my
+reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in
+the most impressive and tender manner,&mdash;the most tender; and, oh,&mdash;but I
+need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to
+drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to
+Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before
+my eyes in her fascinating <i>n&eacute;glig&eacute;</i>. I have seen many pretty girls
+here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers.&quot; The
+daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his
+heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was &quot;the magnet.&quot; And Wendling's
+daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.</p>
+
+<p>These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the
+father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous
+activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When,
+therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest
+in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing,
+and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was
+Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little
+ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this
+letter to his father, dated 1777&mdash;he was born in 1756:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all
+this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and
+finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time
+known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the
+matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father
+on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the
+convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his B&auml;sle, or
+cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a
+concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the
+daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with
+certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his
+father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation
+of visiting the town. He found her &quot;pretty, intelligent, lovable,
+clever, and gay,&quot; and, like him, &quot;rather inclined to be satirical.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.
+His letters are full of that <i>possenhaften Jargon</i> with which he
+sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name
+of B&auml;sle, with which he rhymes &quot;H&auml;sle,&quot; a colloquial word for &quot;rabbit.&quot;
+His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes,
+puns, and quibbles, such as:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief&mdash;trief, welchen
+ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben&mdash;schaben.
+Desto besser, besser desto!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense
+if not literally the sense. This is a sample:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear Coz-Buzz:&mdash;I have safely received your precious
+epistle&mdash;thistle, and from it I perceive&mdash;achieve, that my
+aunt&mdash;gaunt, and you&mdash;shoe, are quite well&mdash;bell. I have
+to-day a letter&mdash;setter, from my papa&mdash;ah-ha, safe in my
+hands&mdash;sands.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A week later he writes her a letter beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!&mdash;Potz
+Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz
+Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
+Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans,
+Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons
+regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and
+villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls,
+and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such
+a packet and no portrait!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and
+it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have
+a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds,
+&quot;Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing.&quot; It is certain that
+in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his
+kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this
+very letter, &quot;love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease
+loving each other?&quot; Had he not thence broken into French?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Je vous baise vos mains,&mdash;v&ocirc;tre visage&mdash;afin, tout ce que vous me
+permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur,&quot; etc.</p>
+
+<p>His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
+met for crossbow practice, and the target represented &quot;the melancholy
+farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the B&auml;sle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
+was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
+more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
+Aloysia Weber&mdash;of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
+him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
+dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
+intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
+it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
+letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You may think or believe that I have croaked (<i>crepirt</i>)
+or kicked the bucket (<i>verreckt</i>). But I beg you not to think
+so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
+her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.</p>
+
+<p>In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
+Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
+frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
+absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
+should &quot;have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia.&quot; This I
+would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
+deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
+him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
+inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
+drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.</p>
+
+<p>And yet his flirtation with the B&auml;sle certainly went past mere bantering
+and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
+Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
+Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
+writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
+by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With her name he puns on <i>B&auml;sle</i> and <i>Bass</i>, thence, &quot;<i>B&auml;schen oder
+Violoncellchen</i>&quot;&mdash;a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
+says, to appease her &quot;alluring beauty (<i>visibilia et invisibilia</i>)
+heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel.&quot; Then he writes
+her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
+circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
+neither beauty on her part nor art on his.</p>
+
+<p>This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
+business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
+which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
+mood. Biographer Jahn says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The B&auml;sle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
+least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
+there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
+neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
+have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
+and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
+life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
+in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
+eighty-three.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So much for the B&auml;sle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
+bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
+serious&mdash;for Mozart a very serious&mdash;affair, was his infatuation with
+Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
+B&auml;sle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
+the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
+copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
+hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
+of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
+Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
+gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
+was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
+Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
+Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she
+is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not
+for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a
+downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very
+reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,&mdash;five girls and
+a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the
+last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already
+done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer
+for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis
+she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who
+had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a
+disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The
+deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, &quot;Friends
+who have no religion cannot long be our friends.&quot; Then, with man's usual
+consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break
+off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he
+wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter
+Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has
+written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy
+principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says,
+because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him
+greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial
+friend for Nannerl.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his
+father he declares:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish
+is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be
+answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my
+recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty
+zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I
+don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what
+is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the
+postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying
+a slight touch of motherly jealousy:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang
+makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she
+does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own
+interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I
+don't wish him to know it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend
+who married for money and commenting:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but
+not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from
+love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other
+considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife
+after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his
+property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a
+wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a
+one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the
+contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife,
+for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can
+deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing
+more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the
+Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for
+fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to
+pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought
+of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame
+the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!</p>
+
+<p>Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and
+tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He
+asks him to decide whether he wishes to become &quot;a commonplace artist
+whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom
+posterity will read years after in books,&mdash;whether, infatuated with a
+pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and
+children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian
+life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided
+for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of
+really great people. <i>Aut Caesar ant nihil</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in
+the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that
+his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother
+went to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.
+Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.
+For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone
+there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in
+Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply
+concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure
+her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this,
+however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the
+star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.
+The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's
+tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.
+But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the
+favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be
+held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence
+she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It
+was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other
+who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to
+love elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and
+dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with
+black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of
+her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal
+German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake
+once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself
+upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, &quot;Ich
+lass das M&auml;del gern das mich nicht will,&quot;&mdash;which you might translate,
+&quot;Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me.&quot; It was on Christmas Day
+that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the
+Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took
+it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend
+he locked himself in a room and wept for days.</p>
+
+<p>Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair
+before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and
+his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have
+answered with rebuking him for his foolish &quot;dreams of pleasure.&quot; To this
+ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up
+dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not
+often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure&mdash;peaceful dreams, sweet,
+cheering dreams, if you will&mdash;dreams which, if realised, would have
+rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his
+cousin the B&auml;sle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich,
+followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.</p>
+
+<p>As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the
+greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She
+married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to
+Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after,
+Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The
+lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least,
+Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, &quot;Otherwise
+he would hardly have taken the r&ocirc;le of Pierrot in the pantomime in which
+his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: &quot;Neither happiness nor riches
+brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from
+the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman,
+and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she
+liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the
+brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to
+revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any
+intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her
+freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her
+readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion
+of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into
+her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years
+of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from
+her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto
+regarded her was no longer the same.&quot;</p>
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth,
+there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so
+sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her
+youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his
+readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities
+belong exclusively to the historian.</p>
+
+<p>The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a
+prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the
+part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop
+was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious
+Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a
+declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long
+in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at
+the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to
+present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally
+kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but
+seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation
+only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that
+it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count
+Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count
+went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the
+humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken
+heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of
+course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that
+the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to
+punch the critic's head.</p>
+
+<p>Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that
+he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was
+so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those
+who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit
+to the artist and his art.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The
+emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the
+composition of his &quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Serail.&quot; In the first moment
+of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and
+sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the
+household of the Webers?&mdash;now more than ever in poverty since the good
+father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new
+engagement.</p>
+
+<p>The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
+series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
+gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
+fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
+love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
+indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
+is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
+opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
+is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
+kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
+a strange hand as follows:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Your good son has just been summoned by Countess</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">to you as what your son would have written. I beg</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">obedient friend,</span><br />
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;CONSTANZE WEBER.&quot;</span><br />
+<br />
+
+<p>This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
+Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
+or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
+fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
+fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
+improvisations.</p>
+
+<p>The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
+friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
+alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
+Wolfgang should move at once.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
+gossip that he is to marry Constanze&mdash;ridiculous gossip, he calls it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
+whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
+I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
+(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
+morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
+house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
+I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
+daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
+According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
+Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
+predicament&mdash;a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,&mdash;I am
+to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But,
+worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was
+a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it&mdash;by her
+beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came
+later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things&mdash;I was
+obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth
+in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more
+loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she
+began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she
+took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what
+you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are
+to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a
+face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always
+laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms
+it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage
+me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take
+advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but
+only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is
+nothing but an amorous fool.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from
+prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved
+frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved
+the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he
+was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with
+Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and
+this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything
+but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a
+well-behaved and conscientious man.</p>
+
+<p>He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his
+father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze.
+But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon
+tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he
+plighted his troth with her.</p>
+
+<p>He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news
+to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint
+of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was
+satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the
+closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have
+opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded,
+from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although
+merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at
+present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with
+what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live&mdash;and to marry! You
+are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father,
+to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you
+must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very
+well-grounded reasons they are.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do.
+In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love
+for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive
+any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to
+domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been
+in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I
+think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am
+forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I
+possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a
+wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous
+expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only
+half of life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat
+you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,&mdash;not
+Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with
+such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle,
+coarse, and deceitful&mdash;crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange
+(Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is
+still too young to have her character defined,&mdash;she is merely a good
+humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the
+martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest
+hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes
+charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh!
+my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all
+the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the
+same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair
+of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has
+enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife
+and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she
+can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She
+dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart
+in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if
+I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure
+some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of),
+and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this
+poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as
+Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest
+father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours.
+Pray, have compassion on your son.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had
+a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had
+carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander
+about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about
+Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into
+signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart
+writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful
+light:</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian
+stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies
+and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports,
+such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I
+would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became
+very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result
+was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he
+insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her
+daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing.
+What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or
+renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his
+beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst
+interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was
+in this form:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three
+years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I
+change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300
+florins.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew
+that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could
+never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be
+too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as
+I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She
+desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear
+Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.'
+She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart
+does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not
+have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze.
+Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame
+Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the
+r&ocirc;le of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart
+as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that,
+whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married.
+Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the
+affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a
+little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything
+worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to
+Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is,
+at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has
+evolved a little model:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:&mdash;I never should have been so bold as to
+yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had
+not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do
+so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least,
+with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of
+Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I
+have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you
+as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you
+for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly
+deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you
+mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I
+may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE
+WEBER.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My compliments to your papa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is
+small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition
+of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One
+feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which
+she so carefully guarded,&mdash;Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved
+any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the
+social diversions of Vienna society at that time.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;VIENNA, April 29, 1782.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:&mdash;You still, I hope, allow me to give you
+this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be
+your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to
+be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly
+as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In
+spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat
+refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with
+me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it
+seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore,
+so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I
+love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh
+well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being
+displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a
+game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by
+a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a
+thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many
+things to be considered besides,&mdash;whether only intimate friends and
+acquaintances are present,&mdash;whether you are a child, or a girl old
+enough to be married,&mdash;but, above all, whether you are with people of
+much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness
+[Waldst&auml;dten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she
+is a <i>pass&eacute;e</i> elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and
+is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never
+lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife.
+But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct
+would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you
+will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This
+will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like
+you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling,
+then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind:
+My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling
+of her honest and kindly disposed,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MOZART.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This letter seems to have ended the quarrel&mdash;the only one we know of
+their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart
+implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also
+that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and
+fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply
+absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly
+dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his
+ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in
+every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze
+are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints
+that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her
+without it.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast
+in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldst&auml;dten had been touched by the
+troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for
+some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely
+in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she
+insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.</p>
+
+<p>When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not
+return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove
+Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between
+the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness
+wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000
+gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage
+portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of
+publishing the banns.</p>
+
+<p>Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the
+wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent
+however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance
+and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.</p>
+
+<p>There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious
+remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the
+contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to
+take money into account.</p>
+
+<p>Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account
+of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first
+opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. &quot;No one attended the
+marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth
+in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the
+bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my
+wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on
+seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted
+of a supper, which Baroness Waldst&auml;dten gave us, and indeed it was more
+princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful
+at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake&mdash;ay, my very
+life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really
+know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled,
+honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion&mdash;this wedlock of
+the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married
+in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty
+that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of
+these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is
+gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of
+the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for
+refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal
+congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but
+we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been
+poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its
+presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing
+together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a
+detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to
+counterbalance the affection each found in each.</p>
+
+<p>As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have
+availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way
+in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of
+bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably
+have made him produce greater compositions&mdash;for no greater compositions
+than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced
+by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without
+conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness
+or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart
+used to refer to his elopement as &quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Auge Gottes,&quot;
+as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible,
+&quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Serail.&quot; It is a curious coincidence that the
+name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that
+she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the
+wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the
+height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a
+welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a
+cherished friend.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It
+continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up
+his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might
+cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear
+his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for
+permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband,
+genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.</p>
+
+<p>All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the
+most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of
+putting his fingers to his lips and saying &quot;Psst!&quot; to any one who
+entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being
+spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips
+and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early,
+before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this:
+&quot;<i>Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich w&uuml;nsche, dass Du gut geschlafen
+habest</i>&quot; etc., or, as it runs in English: &quot;Good morning, my darling
+wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you
+will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too
+much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over
+the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household
+worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home
+at&mdash;o'clock punctually.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in
+this tone:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended
+mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I
+found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by
+her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other,
+and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not
+forsake us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is
+not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of
+her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father
+and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the
+weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes
+to his father that his wife &quot;carries about a little silhouette of you,
+which she kisses twenty times a day at least.&quot; His letters are full of
+little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the
+evening until seven in the morning,&mdash;a game of skittles of which
+Constanze was especially fond,&mdash;a concert where Aloysia sang with great
+success an aria Mozart wrote for her,&mdash;and financial troubles of the
+most petty and annoying sort.</p>
+
+<p>In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to
+the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either
+&quot;Leopold&quot; or &quot;Leopoldine,&quot; according as fate decided. Fate decided that
+the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to
+Salzburg, for a visit.</p>
+
+<p>But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a
+success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a
+creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in
+Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed
+not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, &quot;the
+poor little fat baby&quot; died after six months of life.</p>
+
+<p>There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial
+troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance
+and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but
+there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief
+of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited
+them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.</p>
+
+<p>Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can
+be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous,
+beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though
+not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a
+reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's
+devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a
+breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's
+ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions
+from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! &quot;He loved her
+dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she
+requited him with tenderness and true solicitude.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She always said, &quot;One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him,
+since he was himself so good.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child
+lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the
+third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, &quot;His
+wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the
+depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first
+lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had
+captured a widower of means and position.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was
+away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness
+and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided
+that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources
+and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually
+dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the
+court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince
+Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical
+will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid
+pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that
+time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common
+diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most
+loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive
+to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may
+find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [<i>O
+Gott! mache meine W&uuml;nsche wahr!</i>] After receiving my letter, you must
+write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I
+shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [<i>ich
+bin Dich von ganzem Herzen k&uuml;ssend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart</i>] I am,
+kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,</p>
+
+<p>MOZART.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>&quot;Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre sant&eacute;, si pr&eacute;cieuse a votre &eacute;poux.&quot;</i>
+In his next, three days later, he says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DARLING WIFE:&mdash;Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell
+you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh.
+For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless
+you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas,
+Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it
+slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now!
+[<i>Nu&mdash;nu&mdash;nu&mdash;nu!</i>] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant
+word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse,
+sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the
+world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each
+other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you,
+and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love
+you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your
+fondly loving husband.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his &quot;<i>liebstes
+bestes Weibchen</i>&quot; an account of his activities:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to
+me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my
+beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and
+over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read
+it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your
+letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of
+yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you
+will not go out to walk alone,&mdash;indeed, it would be better not to walk
+at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not
+written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before
+me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in
+your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be
+angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still
+better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish
+you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best
+beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with
+your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O <i>stru!
+stru!</i> I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give
+you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever
+your most faithful husband and friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a
+list of the letters he had written to his wife&mdash;eleven in all (one of
+them in French)&mdash;between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly
+that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet
+to add, seeing how poor they were:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than
+in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700,
+florins,&mdash;at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left
+me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place,
+Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so
+low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request&mdash;you know why. 4th. My
+concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so
+I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must
+be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be
+in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between
+ourselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was
+embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon
+his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to
+despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging
+letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to
+set forth again. He writes again to his <i>Herzens Weibchen</i> or his
+<i>Herzaller-liebstes</i> with renewed hope:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall
+then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall
+lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be
+placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with
+me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your
+loving Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;P.S.&mdash;While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But
+now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about&mdash;Quick!
+catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he
+went.</p>
+
+<p>In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her
+health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and
+taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze
+was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot
+water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be
+worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of
+his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have
+not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more
+vivid to leave in the original:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MA TR&Egrave;S-CH&Egrave;RE &Eacute;POUSE:&mdash;J'&eacute;cris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au
+Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; o&ugrave; j'ai couch&eacute; cette nuit
+excellement&mdash;et j'esp&egrave;re que ma ch&egrave;re &eacute;pouse aura pass&eacute; cette nuit aussi
+bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que
+m'apprendra comme vous avez pass&eacute; le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je
+pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de
+tomber sur l'escalier en sortant&mdash;et je me trouve entre l'esp&eacute;rance et
+la crainte&mdash;une situation bien d&eacute;sagr&eacute;able! Si vous n'&eacute;ties pas grosse,
+je craignerais moins&mdash;mais abandonons cette id&eacute;e triste!&mdash;Le ciel aura
+eu certainement soin de ma ch&egrave;re Stanza Maria!...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are
+well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me
+to-day&mdash;but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
+my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
+have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
+like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
+it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
+2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
+sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr&mdash;du nun mir&mdash;nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
+zu immer mehr&mdash;und mehr&mdash;endlich sagen wir;&mdash;es ist wagen
+Slampi&mdash;Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
+ebben die Comodit&auml;t. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
+familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
+Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
+her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
+her if informed.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
+domestic tragedy. Frau Hofd&auml;mmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
+grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
+almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
+that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
+first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
+later discarded after K&ouml;chel, another biographer, had succeeded in
+proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
+death. Hofd&auml;mmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
+he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
+however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
+who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
+1789&mdash;90. She sang in his &quot;Entf&uuml;hrung,&quot; and it was said that his friends
+had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
+Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
+received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
+Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
+Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
+could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
+writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died,
+Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
+when it should come, and speaking of death as &quot;this good and faithful
+friend of man,&quot; and adding: &quot;I never lie down at night without thinking,
+young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
+suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
+but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
+had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
+physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
+overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
+at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
+leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
+Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
+solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
+last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
+even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
+to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
+When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
+comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
+door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
+and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
+for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of &quot;these
+unchristian Fathers&quot; to do as she wished.</p>
+
+<p>After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
+would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
+applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
+unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
+1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
+the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!</p>
+
+<p>Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
+windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
+herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
+thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief
+was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
+to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
+to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
+friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
+sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
+pauper's grave, three corpses deep.</p>
+
+<p>It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
+She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
+identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
+sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
+and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
+Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
+speaks of Constanze as &quot;indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
+remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
+biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
+highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
+love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
+there is a superfluity of proof.</p>
+
+<p>After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
+was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
+granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
+her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
+paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
+took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
+Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
+only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
+as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
+her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
+biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to &quot;our Raphael of
+Music,&quot; her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
+he left fatherless and penniless.</p>
+
+<p>For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
+ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
+she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
+councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the
+education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in
+Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of
+this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it
+revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to
+Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her
+affections.</p>
+
+<p>There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic
+biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and
+enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of
+Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and
+Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a
+portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most
+beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle
+unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself &quot;widow of
+Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or
+her &quot;indifference,&quot; responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius,
+and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she
+says: &quot;May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate
+love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828.&quot;
+What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to
+one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?</p>
+
+<p>When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was,
+according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband&mdash;an
+eminent musician&mdash;both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict
+of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau
+Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She
+was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his
+memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mozart,&quot; she said, &quot;loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most
+of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally
+cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes
+pensive. Indeed,&quot; she continued, &quot;he was an angel on earth, and is one
+in heaven now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in
+March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.</p>
+
+<p>Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
+for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
+sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
+tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
+Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
+the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap14"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+      <h3>BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE</h3>
+      <a name="img19" id="img19"></a><img src="images/img19.jpg" alt="Ludwig von Beethoven" align="left" />
+      <p>&quot;No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
+thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
+it, his success and his immortality.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
+Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
+well and loved him well, and as mutely as &quot;a violet blooming at his feet
+in utter disregard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
+or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
+He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
+ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
+self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose&mdash;all the brutal
+epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
+Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
+fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
+roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<p>A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
+and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
+women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant H&auml;ndel, despised the pleasures of the
+table; he substituted a passion for nature. &quot;No man on earth can love
+the country as I do!&quot; he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
+died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
+Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed &quot;Lorchen,&quot; seems to
+have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
+neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
+her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
+intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
+had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.</p>
+
+<p>Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
+charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the caf&eacute; where
+Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
+Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
+whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
+Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
+ditties. Then came Fr&auml;ulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
+Wertherlike fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that &quot;In Vienna,
+at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
+in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
+where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
+hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
+each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
+Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: &quot;A New Year's gift for the
+tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
+Beethoven.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
+and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, &quot;because he was very
+ugly and half crazy,&quot; as she told her niece.</p>
+
+<p>An army captain cut him out with Fr&auml;ulein d'Honrath; his good friend
+Stephan von Breuning won away from him the &quot;sch&ouml;ne und hochgebildete&quot;
+Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
+she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
+Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
+beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fr&auml;ulein Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
+&quot;volatile Th&eacute;r&egrave;se who takes life so lightly.&quot; She married the Baron von
+Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: &quot;Farewell, my
+dearest Th&eacute;r&egrave;se; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
+Think of me kindly, and forget my follies.&quot; She had a cousin
+Mathilde&mdash;later the Baroness Gleichenstein&mdash;who also left a barb in the
+well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
+pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fr&auml;ulein
+Roeckel.</p>
+
+<p>The Hungarian Countess Marie Erd&ouml;dy (<i>n&eacute;e</i> Countess Niczky) is listed
+among his flames, though Schindler thinks it &quot;nothing more than a
+friendly intimacy between the two.&quot; Still, she gave Beethoven an
+apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
+servant extra money to stay with him&mdash;a task servants always required
+bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a m&eacute;nage could not last,
+as Beethoven was &quot;too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
+easily injured and too hardly reconciled.&quot; Beethoven dedicated to her
+certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
+temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
+letters he calls her his &quot;confessor,&quot; and in one he addresses her as
+&quot;Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gr&auml;fin,&quot; showing that she was his dearie to
+the fourth power.</p>
+
+<p>Also there was Amalie Sebald, &quot;a nut-brown maid of Berlin,&quot; a
+twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
+in 1812, Beethoven says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
+even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
+of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
+gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
+myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
+companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
+of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
+more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
+foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
+part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
+to Amalie a right ardent kiss&mdash;if nobody there can see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
+album of the singer, Mine. &quot;Auguste&quot; Sebald (a mistake for &quot;Amalie&quot;).
+The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Ludwig van Beethoven:</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Who even if you would</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Forget you never should.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
+from Beethoven to her, showing &quot;not so much the warm, effervescent
+passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
+affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
+lasting.&quot; One of the letters he quotes. It runs:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
+will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
+may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
+me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
+pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
+here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
+me of your attachment to your friend,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;BEETHOVEN.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
+called the composer &quot;a tyrant,&quot; and he has much playfulness of allusion
+to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
+Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
+the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.</p>
+
+<p>It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, &quot;To the
+far-away love&quot; <i>[An die ferne Geliebte],</i> according to Thayer; and of
+her that he wrote to Ries: &quot;All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
+none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
+had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
+his life, but it was &quot;not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
+impracticability, a chimera.&quot; Still, he said, his love was as strong as
+ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
+could never get her out of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
+devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
+from &quot;a Bremen maiden,&quot; a pianist, Elise M&uuml;ller. And there was a poetess
+who also annoyed him.</p>
+      <a name="img20" id="img20"></a><img src="images/img20.jpg" alt="Bettina Brentano von Arnim" align="right" />
+      <p>In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of &quot;the beautiful
+and amiable&quot; Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
+1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
+inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817&mdash;he being then
+forty-seven years old&mdash;the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
+who observed it, called it an &quot;autumnal love,&quot; though the woman's son
+later asserted that it was only a kinship of &quot;artistic sympathy,&quot;&mdash;in
+fact, Beethoven called her &quot;a true foster-mother to the creations of his
+brain.&quot; Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
+she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
+Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
+acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
+to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
+said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
+that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
+scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
+Goethe's &quot;garden of girls&quot; before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
+to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
+it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
+fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
+Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
+to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
+recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
+Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
+life, &quot;a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
+her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
+always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
+&quot;promiscuous lover,&quot; because he once used to stare amorously at a
+handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
+mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
+Ries, who wrote: &quot;Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
+lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
+respectable daughters.&quot; In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
+to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
+were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
+was a cook.</p>
+
+<p>Ries describes him as a sad flirt. &quot;Beethoven had a great liking for
+female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
+met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
+and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
+observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
+generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
+conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
+him longest, and most seriously of all&mdash;namely, seven whole months!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
+Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
+piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions&mdash;
+&quot;<i>amoroso,&quot; &quot;a malinconico</i>&quot; and the like.</p>
+
+<p>Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
+the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
+one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
+capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
+discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
+repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
+the head of the suggester of the mischief.</p>
+
+<p>Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as <i>&quot;postillon
+d'amour&quot;</i> by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.</p>
+      <a name="img21" id="img21"></a><img src="images/img21.jpg" alt="Countess Therese von Brunswick" align="right" />
+      <p>Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
+dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
+inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
+Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake &quot;der Verliebte.&quot; Other
+&quot;gewidmets&quot; were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
+Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erd&ouml;dy, von Brunswick,
+Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his &quot;liebe, werthe, Dorothea
+C&auml;cilia&quot;), and to Eleonora von Breuning.</p>
+
+<p>All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
+and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
+Juan's conquests, &quot;but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve.&quot; I find I have
+catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
+one). And more are to come.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
+Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that &quot;Beethoven was
+never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
+passages in his life,&quot; while Francis Hueffer can speak of &quot;his grand,
+chaste way.&quot; On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
+adopts both sides at once by saying: &quot;In the main, authorities concur in
+Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
+however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
+acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
+without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side.&quot; Thayer
+takes a middle ground,&mdash;that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
+grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
+while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
+endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
+him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
+and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
+he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
+say, &quot;Poor Beethoven!&quot; is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
+what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
+was no Fr&auml;ulein Androcles to take it away.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
+aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
+early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
+says: &quot;She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
+Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
+of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
+mute image of her that my fancy paints.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
+his life-long griefs&mdash;lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
+no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
+wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
+friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.</p>
+
+<p>And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
+began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
+nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
+communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
+said, <i>inter lacrimas et luctum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
+the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
+themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
+this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
+bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
+his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
+trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
+that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.</p>
+
+<p>To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
+longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
+glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
+two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
+whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
+of his &quot;Moonlight Sonata&quot; (Op. 27, No. 2)&mdash;&quot;<i>alla damigella contessa
+Giulietta Guicciardi.&quot;</i> It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
+eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
+sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
+passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
+Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
+Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
+his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
+her own name over the &quot;Moonlight Sonata&quot; instead.</p>
+
+<p>It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
+inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
+more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
+intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
+deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
+from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
+you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
+fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
+again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
+what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
+my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
+I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
+compassed half the world with my art&mdash;I must do it still. There exists
+for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
+will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
+sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
+father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
+Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
+afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
+which his deafness compelled him to use: &quot;I was well beloved of her,
+more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
+scorned her.&quot; (He wrote it in French, &quot;J'&eacute;tais bien aim&eacute; d'elle, et plus
+que jamais son &eacute;poux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
+m&eacute;prisais&quot;), and he added: &quot;If I had parted thus with my strength as
+well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
+things?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
+three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
+in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
+his &quot;unsterbliche Geliebte.&quot; They were written in pencil, and either
+were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
+passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
+in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
+with a few literalising changes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My angel, my all, my self&mdash;only a few words to-day, and they with a
+pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
+to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
+grief when Necessity decides?&mdash;can our love exist without sacrifices,
+and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
+you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
+beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
+demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
+toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
+for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
+as I should.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
+yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
+another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
+warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
+but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
+broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
+and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
+wayside. Esterh&aacute;zy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
+eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
+which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
+I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
+again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
+during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
+ever, none of these would occur to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
+moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
+Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
+rest the gods must ordain&mdash;what must and shall become of us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your faithful LUDWIG.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Monday Evening, July 6th.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
+be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
+post goes to K----from here.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
+shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
+Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
+there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve&mdash;the
+servility of man towards his fellow man&mdash;it pains me&mdash;and when I regard
+myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
+the greatest?&mdash;and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
+weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
+probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
+fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
+at these baths, I must now go to rest.&quot; [A few words are here effaced by
+Beethoven himself.] &quot;Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
+celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;Good Morning, July 7th.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
+Beloved!&mdash;now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
+whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
+all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
+your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
+unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
+will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
+my heart&mdash;never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
+loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
+made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
+life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
+relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
+so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
+for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
+contemplation of our existence. Be calm&mdash;love me&mdash;to-day&mdash;yesterday&mdash;
+what longings with tears for you&mdash;you! you!&mdash;my life!&mdash;my all! Farewell!
+Oh! love me well&mdash;and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever thine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever mine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever each other's.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>These impassioned letters to his &quot;immortal beloved&quot; were believed by
+Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
+in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
+Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
+could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
+Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
+life he hoped to share.</p>
+
+<p>Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
+been another Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, the Countess Th&eacute;r&egrave;se von Brunswick. She was the
+cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+&quot;adored him.&quot; About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
+&quot;Kiss your sister Th&eacute;r&egrave;se,&quot; and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
+Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, Thayer says that she lived to a great age&mdash;&quot;<i>&ccedil;a va sans
+dire</i>!&mdash;&quot; and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
+character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
+words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
+she did not dare?</p>
+
+<p>Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
+more definite to Thayer's argument&mdash;if one is to believe a book I
+stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
+the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
+truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
+Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Th&eacute;r&egrave;se well for many
+years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
+her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her &quot;the most remarkable
+woman I have ever known.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
+Beethoven,&quot; he went on, &quot;and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
+in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
+her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
+because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
+beatified spirit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He told Fr&auml;ulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se and
+Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
+he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
+the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
+but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
+obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
+her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
+bareheaded into the storm.</p>
+
+<p>Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
+&quot;Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!&quot; she cried. Seizing them,
+she rushed after him&mdash;she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
+a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
+give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
+ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's
+diary Beethoven appeared constantly as &quot;mon ma&icirc;tre,&quot; &quot;mon ma&icirc;tre ch&eacute;ri.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
+her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
+saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for &quot;that
+beautiful horrible Beethoven&mdash;if it were not such a come-down.&quot; She did
+not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
+dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
+of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
+the flower growing by the way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
+Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
+thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
+delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
+of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
+furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
+snapped the bond with Th&eacute;r&egrave;se. As she herself told Fr&auml;ulein Tenger, &quot;The
+word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
+frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
+love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
+her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
+art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
+He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
+&quot;immortal beloved,&quot; which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
+betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
+Fr&auml;ulein Tenger:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have read it so often that I know it by heart&mdash;like a poem&mdash;and was
+it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
+loved thee,' and thank God for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
+on it an inscription from Ludwig:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;L'immortelle &agrave; son Immortelle. LUIGI.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
+that it be placed under her head in her coffin.</p>
+
+<p>When Fr&auml;ulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
+asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
+Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
+long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
+her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
+reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.</p>
+
+<p>Th&eacute;r&egrave;se von Brunswick was Beethoven's &quot;Immortal Beloved,&quot; and the
+picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
+when Th&eacute;r&egrave;se was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
+the words:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from</p>
+
+<p>T.B.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
+Museum at Pesth is a bust of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se in her later years, erected in her
+honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
+school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
+pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
+muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
+was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.</p>
+
+<p>Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's portrait and
+muttering: &quot;Thou wast too noble&mdash;too like an angel.&quot; The baron withdrew
+silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
+mood. He explained: &quot;My good angel has appeared to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 he wrote in his diary:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
+longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
+longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
+and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
+he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
+life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
+and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.</p>
+
+<p>But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
+Gleichenstein:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one&mdash;one who may
+perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
+must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
+could, I should fall in love with myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
+fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
+who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
+own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
+individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
+And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
+Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
+of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
+indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
+best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
+become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
+thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
+Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
+publication after her death, adds the words: &quot;I will not repeat my
+answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
+made his life unhappy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
+of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
+of fate?</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap15"></a><h2>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+      <h3>VON WEBER&mdash;THE RAKE REFORMED</h3>
+      <a name="img22" id="img22"></a><img src="images/img22.jpg" alt="Carl Maria von Weber" align="left" />
+      <p><span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Though
+        thou hast now offended like a man.</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Do not persever
+        in it like a devil;</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Yet, yet, thou
+        hast an amiable soul,</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">If sin by custom
+        grow not into nature.&quot;</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Christopher
+        Marlowe's &quot;Doctor Faustus&quot;</span><br />
+        <br />
+</p>
+      <p>Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the
+life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.
+For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake
+the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any
+such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last
+the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of
+frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their
+confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly
+find surpassed outside of Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We
+have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which
+Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of
+Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a
+strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his
+orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought
+home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many
+musicians have earned distinction as soldiers&mdash;what, indeed, would the
+soldiers do without music?</p>
+
+<p>Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position
+of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful
+daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he
+used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his
+large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the
+neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he
+decided that his large family should help in its own support, and
+dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her
+fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later.
+Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though
+he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von
+Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that
+the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to
+realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a
+musical genius into the world.</p>
+
+<p>While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once
+more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his &quot;Weber's
+Company of Comedians.&quot; Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself
+about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her
+health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and
+consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton
+was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.</p>
+
+<p>Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into
+the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music,
+though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's
+character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial
+life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his
+relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his
+first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the
+sixth year of his age; N&uuml;remberg, the 10th of September, 1792.&quot; We
+hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was
+seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into
+dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, &quot;through
+carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice
+spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling.&quot; The intoxicating draught of
+pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the
+ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female
+beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His
+teacher, Abb&eacute; Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at
+the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a
+sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with
+him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through
+his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for
+himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its
+walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale,
+slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst
+his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an
+unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This
+woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple
+were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young
+Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the
+feeling next akin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very
+clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his
+slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties
+nigh equal to her own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of
+his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a
+Fr&auml;ulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of W&uuml;rtemberg, who
+took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical
+director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning
+Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he
+secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother,
+Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of W&uuml;rtemberg, a monster of
+corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he
+might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable
+figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown,
+plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was
+known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the
+chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price
+were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the
+times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the
+government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was
+'Apr&egrave;s moi, le deluge!'&quot; The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift,
+and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor
+Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head
+the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron
+Max:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent
+king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his
+arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired
+incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his
+favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas
+vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,&mdash;would have been
+inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an
+autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But
+there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it
+did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed
+daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink
+bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in
+thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer
+the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to
+hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the
+utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was
+nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of
+Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he
+had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met
+him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the
+court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the
+door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently
+assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she
+stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed
+her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated
+monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the
+spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it
+must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed
+sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art
+during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated
+old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common
+door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808,
+composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser
+Leben.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young
+man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the
+king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison
+cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated
+monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to
+himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a
+university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts,
+with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men,
+who called themselves by the gentle name of &quot;Faust's Ride to Hell.&quot; He
+now began also the composition of an opera, &quot;Sylvana.&quot; This brought him
+into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of
+that &quot;coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would
+have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised
+circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump
+seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her
+undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly
+humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She
+became the central point of all his life and aspirations.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl
+away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the
+money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and
+reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on
+Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen
+played Antony.</p>
+
+<p>The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father,
+who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his
+beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased
+luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay
+off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal
+of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in
+the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had
+been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the
+increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a
+reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's
+household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be
+concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him
+arrested during a rehearsal of his opera &quot;Sylvana,&quot; and had him thrown
+into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was
+nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released
+from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt,
+and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage
+and driven across the border to exile.</p>
+
+<p>This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of
+disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of,
+and every mention of it was forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an
+occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete
+laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally
+settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible,
+in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless
+legs, of which he writes: &quot;And, oh, my calves, they might have done
+honour to a poodle!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Eight months after his banishment, his opera &quot;Sylvana&quot; was produced at
+Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of
+Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At
+Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers.
+They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties
+exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple
+flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became &quot;All women
+are good for nothing&quot; (&quot;<i>Alle Weiber taugen nichts</i>&quot;), which he used so
+often that he abbreviated it to &quot;A.W.T.N.&quot; In the columns of his
+account-book he was provoked to write: &quot;A. coquettes with me, though she
+knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid
+stories of her, and says I must not go home with her.&quot; He took a journey
+to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart
+long enough to inspire him to the scene in &quot;Athalie,&quot; and to his song,
+&quot;The Artist's Declaration of Love.&quot; He wandered here and there, for
+about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet,
+insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing
+figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting
+the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person
+uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with
+indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits
+and deep depression,&mdash;in all ways he resembled a figure from some
+romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of
+German art.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to
+the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart;
+one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was
+Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several
+children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine,
+plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no
+improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this
+entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of
+exposure and its writhing humiliation:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which
+seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and
+reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the
+cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to
+conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark;
+excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in
+a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the
+slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh
+dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless
+husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination
+for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held
+out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in
+her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers,
+balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to
+discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would
+be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave.
+Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain,
+frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business
+for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she
+desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would
+receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes,
+when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed
+him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would
+cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right
+to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in
+every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling
+ever present&mdash;'How will she receive me?'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the
+lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again,
+but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on
+him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his
+better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A
+fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is
+lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful
+explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This
+reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt
+better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the
+happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near
+me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is
+mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but
+I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own
+heart, and work&mdash;work&mdash;work!'&quot; It was in the fall of 1813&mdash;<i>prosit
+omen!</i>&mdash;that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still
+clinging to her whom the biographer calls &quot;the rotten plant,&quot; and wrote
+in a note-book: &quot;I found Calina with Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, and I could scarcely
+conceal the fearful rage that burned in me.&quot; Or an elegy like this: &quot;No
+joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's birthday, Carl
+presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of
+trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets,
+something very rare and costly in Prague&mdash;oysters. Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+glanced&mdash;merely glanced&mdash;at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.
+Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure
+a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: &quot;On a sudden the scales
+fell from his eyes.&quot; Ought he not rather have said, the shells?</p>
+
+<p>Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even
+music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.
+Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the
+Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the
+frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him
+casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to
+writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had
+more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she
+had formerly been <i>insouciante</i> and amused at his pain, her pain hurt
+him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a
+leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away,
+he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps
+embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had
+reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new
+leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no
+means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1810 his opera &quot;Sylvana&quot; had been sung, as I have said, with
+Caroline Brandt in the title r&ocirc;le. When, in 1813, he was given the
+direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of
+the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner
+experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this
+same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be
+&quot;at liberty,&quot; as they say.</p>
+
+<p>Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the
+daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight.
+She is described as &quot;small and plump in figure, with beautiful,
+expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in
+her movements.&quot; She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified
+with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine
+skill, &quot;her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible.&quot; She did
+not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January,
+1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Brunetti in a fresher
+edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The
+oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the <i>coup de disgr&acirc;ce</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt
+suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the
+head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow
+to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother,
+and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the
+stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a
+certain banker, saying: &quot;He is worth the trouble, for he is rich.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to
+keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we
+have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to
+the baths in Friedland.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and
+her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not
+hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But
+what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have
+heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when
+Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left
+behind &quot;a sweet, beloved being who might&mdash;who may&mdash;make me happy.&quot; &quot;The
+absence of three months shall test our love.&quot; They wrote each other long
+and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled
+with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, &quot;a sweet poison harmful to the
+soul.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d
+in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague.
+He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's &quot;Leier
+und Schwert.&quot; These choruses for men were sung throughout the
+Fatherland, as they still are sung.</p>
+
+<p>But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living
+voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little
+hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous
+enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving
+from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.</p>
+
+<p>Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could
+have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of
+herself and her career and her large following among the public was a
+deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice
+her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at
+last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream,
+and break their troth.</p>
+
+<p>In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a
+drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to
+Gansbacher, &quot;I see now that her views of high art are not above the
+usual pitiful standard&mdash;namely, that art is but a means of procuring
+soup, meat, and shirts.&quot; To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more
+solemnly:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken
+man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason
+would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my
+heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last
+chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,&mdash;marry
+perhaps some day,&mdash;who knows? But love and trust again, never more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in
+person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the
+subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of
+marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and
+her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself
+would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day
+bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.
+Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.
+But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion
+of stage marriages.</p>
+
+<p>Even his patriotic songs, &quot;The Lyre and the Sword,&quot; were a cause of
+disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and
+her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him
+her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the
+Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running,
+Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress,
+Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and
+make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the
+two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl
+who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.</p>
+
+<p>How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from
+the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of
+his sturdiest works, &quot;Kampf und Sieg.&quot; He settled in Munich, and
+continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute
+descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him
+with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his
+spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.</p>
+
+<p>At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the
+eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said
+she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced
+that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This
+blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he
+could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the
+blow so long:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow
+again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish
+than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back
+in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then
+acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest
+life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have
+woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care.
+Forgive me for my excess of love&mdash;forgive the passion that may have torn
+many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed&mdash;forgive me all
+the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will
+of mine&mdash;forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your
+precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I
+but buy it back for you.... Farewell&mdash;farewell.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline
+was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too
+much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must
+frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her,
+she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.</p>
+
+<p>Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the
+autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze
+blended; their hands blended; the war was over.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music
+began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his
+health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her
+house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of
+Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was
+hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for
+Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance.
+Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a
+curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just
+after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the
+darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.</p>
+
+<p>On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover,
+a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as
+Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.</p>
+
+<p>At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl
+assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a
+subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the
+world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto
+based on the old national legend, &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz.&quot; Kind, the
+librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great
+enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it
+back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and
+her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for
+cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious
+old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and
+wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular
+element. Begin with the scene before the tavern.&quot; This seemed
+outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took
+it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book
+completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to
+her, whom he called his &quot;Public with two eyes.&quot; Would to heaven, that
+there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner
+concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, during the composition of &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; which was to mean
+so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera
+generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was
+spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring
+than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his
+bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of
+&quot;chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and
+mustard-pot.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating
+soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his &quot;pug, his
+duck, his bird.&quot; He answered a letter she wrote him describing her
+success in the &quot;Magic Flute:&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberfl&ouml;te,' but you know I
+hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your
+satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be
+only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench,
+and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking,
+I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar
+of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with
+his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline,
+who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the
+travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in
+Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of
+Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long
+and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his
+advice. Her savings were quite swept away.</p>
+
+<p>But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had
+in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and
+fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that
+Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love
+for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress
+he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of &quot;Der
+Freisch&uuml;tz.&quot; The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet
+between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed,
+through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw
+Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every
+note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over
+what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This
+spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have
+rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of
+art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the
+artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the
+composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual
+presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an
+accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters,
+painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the
+kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The
+longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which
+he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was
+driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent
+on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by
+coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married.
+Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though
+her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts
+here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal
+commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty
+forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and
+at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played
+the guitar.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new
+home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in
+perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year
+1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there
+were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and
+training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and
+solemnity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the
+blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the
+power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour
+and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in
+the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a
+<i>Haus-frau.</i> She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound,
+reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute
+care with which she kept all her &quot;account-books, housekeeping-books,
+cellar-books.&quot; Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household
+became a dove-cote!</p>
+
+<p>The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and
+Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high
+favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally
+attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with
+unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though
+Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of
+desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought
+home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a
+signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a
+permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.</p>
+
+<p>Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two
+sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised
+accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and
+hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a
+country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose
+society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a
+starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.</p>
+
+<p>On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was
+dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health,
+always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be
+about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition
+of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his
+firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent
+into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and &quot;the unhappy
+couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!'
+to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night,
+each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might
+not hear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on
+the final ebb&mdash;the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal
+tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable
+optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour.
+They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost
+unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could
+not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion
+fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was
+stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the
+baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place
+again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg,
+Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a
+mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her
+daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their
+married life.</p>
+
+<p>Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more
+into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for
+her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other
+hand, hated them. But Weber said:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I
+relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, &quot;Ce
+n'est pas que la premi&egrave;re huitre qui coute.&quot; Afterward Weber would
+groan, &quot;Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at
+Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's &quot;Olympic&quot; was
+given first with enormous success, and &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; in which
+Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two,
+was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious
+beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician
+has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every
+one looked for the composer, who was &quot;sitting in a dark corner of his
+wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined
+by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to
+be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An
+accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving
+Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one
+who should disturb his wishes.</p>
+
+<p>Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when
+his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever.
+One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he
+turned pale and sighed: &quot;God's will be done.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early
+death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When &quot;Der
+Freisch&uuml;tz&quot; was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl
+arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news
+of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave
+Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened
+in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his
+affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many
+tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life.
+Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be
+in that which gives you joy too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always
+tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the
+fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two
+children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave
+them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the
+grave that yawned just before his weary feet.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against
+fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl
+Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he
+jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before
+uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They carry me in triumph,&quot; he wrote to Caroline: &quot;they watch for every
+wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I
+can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or
+turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.
+&quot;I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve,&quot; he wrote, &quot;But that I
+never cease to do. All my labours are for you&mdash;all my joy is with you.&quot;
+&quot;Can I but be with you on New Year's eve,&quot; he wrote again, with that
+tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character,
+&quot;I shall be with you all the year.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to
+whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from
+pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease;
+hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt
+that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with
+aching heart in the biography:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to
+London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no,
+I must. Money must be made for my family&mdash;money, man. I am going to
+London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright,
+cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freisch&uuml;tz,'
+was already dead and gone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most
+punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end
+rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his
+last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure
+the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.
+During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully
+changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find
+strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice
+was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of
+which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the
+charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill,
+good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel
+agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small
+remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She
+manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to
+renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to
+this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
+I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
+father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
+be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
+more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
+God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
+bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
+time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
+see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
+man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children&mdash;another
+long lingering kiss&mdash;the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
+carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs&mdash;the door was closed&mdash;and he
+rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
+shattered chest might almost burst at once.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
+'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
+horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
+voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
+and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
+fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
+as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
+repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
+sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
+whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
+the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
+weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
+personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
+&quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
+always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.</p>
+
+<p>His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
+seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
+to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
+the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
+worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
+was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he
+cried:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is
+shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold
+together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!&quot; His
+effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she
+wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long
+away, he answered:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to
+him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after
+day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!&quot; he wrote once more. &quot;I count
+days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted
+before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible
+yearning I have never known before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his
+wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing
+his home again.</p>
+
+<p>At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and
+furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody,
+but, as his son writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting
+genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss
+upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death&mdash;for
+the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more
+than the notes for the voice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes
+upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to
+his future.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This day week is my concert,&quot; he wrote on the 19th of May. &quot;How my poor
+heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last
+chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all
+they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest
+expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail
+me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to
+us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on
+this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose
+of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for
+so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my
+life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are
+all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest
+itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the
+skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The
+enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the
+end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a
+complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife;
+still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to
+London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting
+homeward&mdash;homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as
+he had planned. He writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What should I do there? I cannot walk&mdash;I cannot speak. I will have
+nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better
+I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels,
+Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming
+journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half
+a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end
+of June I hope to be in your arms.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my
+joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my
+best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase
+souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so
+impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his
+starting.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must go back to my own, I must!&quot; he sobbed incessantly. &quot;Let me see
+them once more&mdash;and then God's will be done.&quot; The attempt appeared
+impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's
+request to have a consultation of physicians. &quot;Be it so,&quot; he answered.
+&quot;But come of it what may, I go!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His only thought, his only word, was &quot;Home!&quot; On the 2d of June he wrote
+his last letter to his beloved,&mdash;the last lines his hand ever traced.
+&quot;What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness
+to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer,
+it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to
+answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst
+you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one!
+Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves
+you above all, your Carl.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he
+could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to
+be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal
+of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, &quot;Now let me sleep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for
+hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had
+added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great
+benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking
+him in his grave,&mdash;the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!</p>
+
+<p>A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to
+be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the
+committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians
+volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music
+was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien
+land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to
+Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, F&uuml;rstenau:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made
+two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the
+noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they
+were orphaned. No wonder that F&uuml;rstenau had not the courage to address
+Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest
+friend, Fr&auml;ulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to
+Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the
+impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a
+little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived
+close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels&mdash;had looked
+out&mdash;had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and
+disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her&mdash;she
+rushed toward the spot&mdash;she saw the two standing in the little garden,
+wringing their hands and weeping&mdash;she knew all&mdash;and she lay senseless at
+their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh
+forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the
+sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her
+swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a
+flood of tears.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached
+the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to
+haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for
+the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The
+idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by
+the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of
+Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son,
+Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's
+body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of
+Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once
+would have meant so much: &quot;Weber in Dresden.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the
+theatre, with Schr&ouml;der-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and
+covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The
+torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two
+candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small,
+now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale
+young man knelt praying by her side.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we
+owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love,
+strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this
+character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side
+convincing, complete, alive.</p>
+
+<p>Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and
+ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation
+amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle
+for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect
+of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have
+written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But,
+if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of
+music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of
+the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best
+managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and
+life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.</p>
+
+<p>Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater
+Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these
+words:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever
+distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
+German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
+child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
+Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
+German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
+warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart&mdash;and who shall blame
+us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
+part of our dear German soil.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap16"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+      <h3>THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN</h3>
+      <a name="img23" id="img23"></a><img src="images/img23.jpg" alt="Felix Mendelssohn" align="left" />
+      <p>Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
+man whose love affairs make tame reading.</p>
+
+<p>It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
+Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
+him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
+thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
+and rebuffs,&mdash;being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
+the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
+human lives go, one of complete felicity.</p>
+
+<p>Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
+if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
+so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
+that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
+described as having been &quot;enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
+his father,&quot; who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
+remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
+and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
+children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
+degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
+fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
+Overture to &quot;A Midsummer-Night's Dream,&quot; a wonderful fabric of harmony
+and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
+written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
+of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
+sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
+of the sort.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
+like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
+she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
+compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
+things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
+the age of forty-two she died.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
+excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
+degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
+riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
+scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
+enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
+such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
+the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
+wrote his mother: &quot;If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
+years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
+holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
+and childlike a mind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: &quot;He was
+always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
+bedimmed the shining brightness of his character.&quot; &quot;He wore his heart
+upon his sleeve,&quot; says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
+and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
+joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
+Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
+have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
+burned all the letters he had written her.</p>
+
+<p>We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
+old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
+spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
+wrote home: &quot;Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
+English.&quot; Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
+womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, &quot;the
+darling in every house, the centre of every circle.&quot; The
+fifteen-year-old Josephine or &quot;Peppi&quot; Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
+seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
+piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
+forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
+in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
+case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
+first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
+Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
+occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
+alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
+the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
+Stratton says, &quot;on the most excellent terms with himself,&quot; as with the
+world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
+friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
+poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
+of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
+that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
+wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: &quot;My music is the product
+of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
+distress is that which the world seems to like best.&quot; Grove moralises
+thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
+morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
+other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
+Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
+aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
+It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
+Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
+let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
+and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
+turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
+point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
+and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
+pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
+goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
+being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
+had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
+alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
+told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.</p>
+
+<p>In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
+a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
+widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (<i>n&eacute;e</i> Souchay); she was so well preserved
+and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
+But it was her second daughter, C&eacute;cile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
+the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
+seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw C&eacute;cile, and described her:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
+fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
+rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
+hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
+transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
+bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
+eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
+so beautifully calls <i>Marienhaft</i>. Her manner was generally thought too
+reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
+In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
+deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of C&eacute;cile.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
+girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
+really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
+Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
+emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
+9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
+at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
+so rich and happy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
+when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
+Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
+&quot;Fidelio,&quot; &quot;He who has gained a charming wife&quot; (&quot;<i>Wer ein holdes Weib
+errungen</i>&quot;). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
+enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
+and extemporise upon the theme.</p>
+
+<p>Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
+Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
+a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
+honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
+humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
+Hensel visited them, and found C&eacute;cile possessed not only of &quot;the
+beautiful eyes&quot; Felix had raved over so much, &quot;but possessed also of a
+wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
+promised to cure him of his irritability.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
+had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
+and regretted being a conductor at all.</p>
+
+<p>In February, 1838, the first child was born, and C&eacute;cile was dangerously
+ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
+bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
+was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
+married:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
+may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
+every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
+my happiness.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: &quot;Eating and
+sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
+without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
+music-paper and sketch-book, with C&eacute;cile and the children.&quot; Again, in
+1844, he writes of a return home:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. C&eacute;cile looks
+so well again,&mdash;tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
+former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
+room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
+at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
+garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
+paper that C&eacute;cile painted for me, to write to you.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
+children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
+Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
+breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
+evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
+pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
+propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
+Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
+the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as <i>Punch</i> does
+with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
+passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
+women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
+bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
+Rhenish air,&mdash;this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
+these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
+learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
+has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
+tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
+own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
+which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
+slices of bread and jam&mdash;'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
+comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
+geography&mdash;and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
+is gone if C&eacute;cile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
+picture.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
+young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
+for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
+the strange reward of his art as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
+soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
+and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
+Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
+his own Germany.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On one of the home festivals, C&eacute;cile and her sister gave and acted a
+comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
+Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
+his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
+vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
+rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
+dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
+Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
+it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
+on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
+the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
+his wife, his brother, and three friends.</p>
+
+<p>His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
+C&eacute;cile died at Frankfort of consumption.</p>
+
+<p>Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
+was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
+who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
+saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
+let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
+conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
+me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
+am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
+earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
+character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
+but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
+understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
+hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
+them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
+towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
+an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
+human being, or anything on earth,&mdash;then God be praised! such a one I am
+not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
+sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
+does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
+people should select precisely <i>this</i> time to say such a thing, when I
+am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
+outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
+really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
+wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
+never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
+lot.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap17"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+      <h3>THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN</h3>
+      <a name="img24" id="img24"></a><img src="images/img24.jpg" alt="Frederick Chopin" align="left" />
+      <p>He wrote to his parents:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant,
+well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is
+something in it that repels me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his
+piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned
+full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would
+say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely
+unlike&mdash;of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied;
+she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent
+woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse
+she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that,
+while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was
+certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from
+her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot,
+who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of
+Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like
+bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was&mdash;well,
+some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was
+angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal
+manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any
+non-effeminate man&mdash;outside of books.</p>
+
+<p>The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of
+presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and
+believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the
+Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was
+followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but
+resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of
+George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter
+surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco&mdash;though he
+neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at
+cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars&mdash;as
+did Liszt's princess.</p>
+
+<p>Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the
+credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire
+not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she
+conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.</p>
+      <a name="img25" id="img25"></a><img src="images/img25.jpg" alt="George Sand" align="right" />
+      <p>Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish
+fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.
+She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska&mdash;a good name to
+change for the shorter tinkle of &quot;Chopin.&quot; It was from her that Chopin
+took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his
+music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to
+be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally
+the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the
+darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the
+loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!</p>
+
+<p>As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a
+public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa
+Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia
+Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was
+Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with
+a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her
+case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted
+himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska,
+however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as
+full of vague morose yearning as his Pr&eacute;ludes. He left Warsaw for
+Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell
+concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a
+singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing
+the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians
+and poets of that day.</p>
+
+<p>To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and
+he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in
+appearance at least, athletic&mdash;even if he must ask his tailor to furnish
+the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with
+to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew
+from his familiar and d&aelig;mon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote
+about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her
+mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not
+cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be
+strewn under her feet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been
+finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's
+Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a
+few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the
+incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James
+Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
+subject of Chopin:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
+lady was married in 1832&mdash;preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
+genius&mdash;to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
+a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
+blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
+must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
+from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
+memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
+waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
+and rivers of ink have been spilt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
+residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
+brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
+called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
+avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
+hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
+amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
+praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
+that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
+gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
+manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
+next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
+declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
+and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
+says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
+man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
+himself in Paris very much <i>en prince</i>, according to Von Lenz, and such
+a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.</p>
+
+<p>The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
+whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
+Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
+which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
+was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
+long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen
+years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
+her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on &quot;Chopin's Three Love
+Affairs,&quot; Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
+charm.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
+smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
+magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
+mantle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
+little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
+biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
+of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
+deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
+brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
+was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
+has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
+family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
+were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
+living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
+was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
+In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
+carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
+furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.</p>
+
+<p>But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
+until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and <i>La Revue Musicale</i> of
+Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
+but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
+two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
+admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
+pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,&mdash;advice
+which met the usual fate of good advice.</p>
+
+<p>Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: &quot;In his letters to his family,
+Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
+always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
+the plural, for instance, 'Elles si ch&egrave;res, elles rirent pour tous,' or,
+'Here the vigil is sad, because <i>les malades</i> do not wish a doctor.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The first letter, signed &quot;Fritz,&quot; is a most cordial welcome to a man
+about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand
+and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in
+1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever
+had, and writes to the whole family: &quot;Tell them all that I love them,
+too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my
+roof.&quot; Chopin refers to Sand as &quot;My hostess,&quot; and signs himself &quot;Ton
+vieux.&quot; In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade
+of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving
+manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that &quot;le t&eacute;l&eacute;graphe
+&eacute;lectro-magn&eacute;tique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats
+extraordinaires.&quot; He revels in puns and gossip.</p>
+
+<p>Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin
+called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849,
+with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the
+last tendernesses in her power.</p>
+
+<p>This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come
+from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick,
+and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of
+Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the
+plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared
+joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a
+biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody
+which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it
+unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick
+the use of them.</p>
+
+<p>Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love
+requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as
+his music.</p>
+
+<p>Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: &quot;As his talent,
+so did his heart mature early.&quot; It was at Warsaw, in his early youth,
+that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had
+married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society,
+Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had
+always the princely way with him.</p>
+
+<p>One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose
+majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of
+Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke
+Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most
+welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music.
+Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would
+send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at
+the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his
+temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin
+was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor
+was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in
+whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully
+as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret.
+He was often teased on account of the beautiful &quot;Mariolka,&quot; as he called
+her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove
+that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love
+was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams
+for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
+<i>&agrave; la Mazur</i>, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.</p>
+
+<p>In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George
+Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this
+time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty,
+vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria
+Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the &quot;rag and the bone
+and the hank of hair&quot; of contention.</p>
+
+<p>It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling
+similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of
+feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were
+like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering
+through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up
+their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these
+twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;black-eyed demoiselle,&quot; as she was called by the poet and the
+musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same
+time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and
+found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town,
+and to pass several weeks with each.</p>
+
+<p>It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to
+much verse, especially his &quot;In der Schweiz.&quot; But all this while the
+little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes
+she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki
+hovering at her piano.</p>
+
+<p>When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his
+F-minor &Eacute;tude which he called &quot;the soul-portrait&quot; of the comtesse. A
+year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he
+proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he
+composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor
+Nocturne.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying
+Chopin's fianc&eacute;e in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The
+distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he
+wrote to his mother:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental
+to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says
+that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls
+but out of all three only one angel can be created.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself
+deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to
+Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has
+contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader.
+It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even
+for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation.
+For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely
+blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which
+her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either
+the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could
+hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least
+as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount
+what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction
+would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar,
+I can be brief with it here.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every
+conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as
+Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to
+him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity
+that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain
+others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some
+hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the
+nursery.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme,
+and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years
+devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion,
+and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed
+by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless,
+and by nature&mdash;for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame&mdash;a
+voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted
+him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was
+as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the
+brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most
+of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was
+drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his
+gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.</p>
+
+<p>Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall
+out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that
+form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day.
+In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and
+daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious,
+the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset
+by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the
+place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant,
+her ch&acirc;teau. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of
+life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his
+art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion
+both to his health and to his music.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a
+liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the
+&quot;detestable invalid&quot; she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from
+one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There
+should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman
+infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart
+and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the r&ocirc;le of nurse
+as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an
+invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
+on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
+fame.</p>
+
+<p>After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
+sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
+he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
+in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
+of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
+who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.</p>
+
+<p>Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
+not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
+deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
+mental support for ten long years.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
+that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her &quot;Histoire de
+ma Vie,&quot; as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
+the affair:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
+first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (<i>se reprenant</i>)
+incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
+object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
+affections.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
+friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
+enough of his own ills to bear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
+was the first and the final time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
+obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
+the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
+the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
+full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
+versa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
+himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is generally believed that in the character of <i>Prince Karol</i> in her
+novel, &quot;Lucrezia Floriani,&quot; published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
+weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
+Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated
+the charge in his &quot;Life of Chopin,&quot; and though Karasovski says that
+Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
+None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
+(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
+mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
+proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
+a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
+full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
+good faith. I have traced in <i>Prince Karol</i> the character of a man
+determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
+exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
+however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
+not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
+because it is too limited to reproduce them.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin was a r&eacute;sum&eacute; of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
+can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
+was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
+instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
+itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
+fix themselves on a determined object.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;However, <i>Prince Karol</i> is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
+more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
+a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
+of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
+desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,&mdash;he who,
+nevertheless, was so suspicious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
+the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
+friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
+made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
+that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
+why did he not re-read it?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This history is so little ours&mdash;It was the very reverse of it. There
+were between us neither the same raptures <i>(envirements)</i>, nor the same
+sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
+simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel
+with each other <i>&agrave; propos</i> of each other.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people
+tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George
+Sand's own version:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely
+gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was
+suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling
+subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand
+had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell
+there, one after another&mdash;all this was borne; but at last, one day,
+Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That
+could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate
+and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer
+loved him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the
+poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that
+some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound,
+and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the
+revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to
+this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.
+Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had
+preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family,
+whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and
+deformed (<i>d&eacute;natur&eacute;</i>). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from
+liberty.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling
+and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my
+turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction,
+and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There
+were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous
+ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me
+filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that
+I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me
+till then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much
+credence.</p>
+
+<p>The cause of their&mdash;&quot;divorce,&quot; one might call it&mdash;is blurred by the
+usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be
+that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her
+daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All
+accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles
+that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not
+Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts
+it, &quot;had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically
+speaking, out-of-doors.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at
+best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him
+with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a
+relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find
+herself free.</p>
+
+<p>But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had
+leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was
+eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the
+chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his
+haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was
+unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and
+a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it
+is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to
+see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, &quot;She said I
+should die in no other arms than hers&quot; (<i>Que je ne mourrais que dans ses
+bras</i>).</p>
+      <a name="img26" id="img26"></a><img src="images/img26.jpg" alt="Countess Potocka" align="right" />
+      <p>But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty
+countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was
+the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's
+loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him,
+at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman
+sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait
+that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism
+undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever
+having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims
+that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.</p>
+
+<p>But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of
+his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of
+stars, one nocturne.</p>
+
+<p>END OF VOLUME I.</p>
+<br />
+
+</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 10957 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #10957 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10957)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume
+1, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Release Date: February 6, 2004 [EBook #10957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS MUSICIANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Lisa Richards, Sjaani and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+By Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrated
+
+Volume I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+1903
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in _The
+Criterion_, and the last chapter was published in _The Smart Set_.
+
+While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
+subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
+advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
+the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
+revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the
+letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
+have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
+friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
+publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
+life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
+that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
+Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
+love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
+paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
+misunderstood.
+
+  Love it is an hatefulle pees,
+  A free acquitaunce without re lees.
+  An hevy burthen light to here,
+  A wikked wawe awey to were.
+  It is kunnyng withoute science,
+  Wisdome withoute sapience,
+  Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,
+  Right eville savoured good savour;
+  A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,
+  And feblenesse fulle of myght.
+  A laughter it is, weping ay;
+  Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.
+  Also a swete helle it is,
+  And a soroufulle Paradys.
+
+  Romaunt of the Rose.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I. THE OVERTURE
+
+    II. THE ANCIENTS
+
+   III. THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+    IV. ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+     V. HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+    VI. THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+   VII. GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+  VIII. BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+    IX. PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+     X. THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+    XI. GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR,
+        AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+   XII. A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY
+        --PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL
+
+  XIII. MOZART
+
+   XIV. BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+    XV. VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+   XVI. THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+  XVII. THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)
+
+DAPHNE
+
+HÉLOISE
+
+MARY STUART
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)
+
+HENRY PURCELL
+
+JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+JOSEPH HAYDN
+
+MRS. BILLINGTON
+
+GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL
+
+CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+NICOLA PICCINNI
+
+JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY
+
+WOLFGANG MOZART
+
+MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA "DON JUAN" FOR THE FIRST TIME
+
+LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN
+
+BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM
+
+COUNTESS THÉRÈSE VON BRUNSWICK
+
+CARL MARIA VON WEBER
+
+FELIX MENDELSSOHN
+
+FREDERICK CHOPIN
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+COUNTESS POTOCKA
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+
+
+VOLUME I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+THE OVERTURE
+
+Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
+amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
+that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
+he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the
+inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
+youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
+dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
+and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
+melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
+music's very own.
+
+So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
+wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
+expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And
+if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
+corner.
+
+Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
+that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
+conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
+sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
+know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
+existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
+tune.
+
+But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
+world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
+and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
+tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
+begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.
+
+If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
+I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
+condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
+incidentally--to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
+skipped--let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
+to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.
+
+In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
+fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
+hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
+be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
+aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
+so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
+imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
+without frankly branding it as such.
+
+Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
+tell their own stories in their own words.
+
+For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
+the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
+the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
+have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
+at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
+subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
+catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
+reader could consult with pleasure.
+
+It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
+necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
+matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
+verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
+marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
+heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
+wholesale blame--"_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_." So, without
+pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
+have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
+and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
+And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
+think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
+and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
+blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
+of fame, or of amorous experience.
+
+As a last chapter to this series of "true stories," I have ventured to
+sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
+compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
+on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
+had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
+warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
+dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
+saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
+clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
+lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
+true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
+collected.
+
+And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
+Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE ANCIENTS
+
+The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
+certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
+god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
+hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
+ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a god, he was
+denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
+knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
+another woman, was soon blasé of divine courtship, and, for variety,
+turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
+son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
+claimed.
+
+Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second
+wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
+influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
+mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to
+be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
+corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
+gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
+corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
+suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
+more open than that of hearing."
+
+The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
+instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
+turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
+that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
+his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
+frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
+from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
+and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
+a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
+personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
+Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of
+Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
+pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
+on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
+filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
+charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
+But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
+seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
+wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.
+
+The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs--a fact which
+should not be cherished against him--seems to have loved no one except
+himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
+effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
+mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
+Jonah's adventure turned inside out.
+
+Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
+life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
+that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
+violinists at the hands of the matinée Bacchantes.
+
+The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
+married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
+her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
+can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
+his poesy.
+
+The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
+much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
+the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
+to be monks. This banishes them from a place here--not by any means
+because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
+because it greatly prevented a record of most of them--though happily
+not all. Abélard, for instance, was a monk, and his Héloise became a
+nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
+literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
+an abbé? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hèle, who about 1585
+gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
+Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
+sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
+epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
+century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Très-Haut, ministre du
+Christ, il sut garder la chastété et se preserver du contact de l'amour
+sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
+necessarily so.
+
+Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
+tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
+flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
+children of Lorenzo dei Medici.
+
+"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who passed for the
+finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
+criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
+became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
+family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
+the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
+disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
+the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
+with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
+himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
+in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
+couplet."
+
+
+Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
+Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
+compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
+died.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
+shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siècle,"
+with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
+minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
+old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
+fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
+Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537--1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels.
+All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
+died--so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
+twenty-six at the time--so we can imagine how young and lithely
+beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia--a sweet
+name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
+she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good
+and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
+like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.
+
+Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
+interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
+frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
+charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
+these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
+for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
+sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
+ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
+man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
+chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
+servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
+marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
+or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.
+
+Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
+(1680--1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,--which
+was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
+twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
+ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
+pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
+asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
+a pitiful letter still preserved.
+
+"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
+thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
+Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
+cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
+indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
+gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
+succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.
+
+"The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
+go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
+absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
+have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
+for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
+circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
+The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
+work, prevent me from gaining my own living."
+
+Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
+Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
+pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
+wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
+his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
+poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
+eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
+because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
+support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
+is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.
+
+Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
+Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
+Flanders with her children.
+
+The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
+they were famous marriers, too,--but one of them met his match, Jean,
+called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
+widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
+Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
+ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
+he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
+compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
+naïvely points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
+married with three of his Majesty's servants. (_Casada con tres criados
+de V.M._) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
+navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
+organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
+achieved.
+
+Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
+(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
+Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin
+Desprès (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
+Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
+his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
+marriage).
+
+We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
+happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
+preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
+never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
+of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
+bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.
+
+As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man
+vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
+approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard."
+
+Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
+daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
+daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
+disinherited.
+
+One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
+one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
+music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
+Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
+upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
+managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
+Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
+He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
+became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
+odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
+dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
+the year 1566.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
+his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
+Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the "Belgian Orpheus," "_le Prince des
+Musiciens_." There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
+the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
+at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
+changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
+father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a "false
+moneyer," had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.
+
+Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
+this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
+esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.
+
+He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
+honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
+court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
+Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
+daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
+court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
+was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
+described her children as _elegantissimi_.
+
+There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
+thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
+As his biographer Delmotte says, "His life indeed had been the most
+toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
+alert, had _enfanté_ a multitude of compositions so great that their
+very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
+almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
+soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
+this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
+aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.
+
+"Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
+state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
+sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
+William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
+Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
+reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
+in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
+and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'"
+
+While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
+imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
+bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
+In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
+and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
+resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
+poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
+Lassus) that "his _Altesse Sérénissime_ be pleased not to heap on the
+poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
+deserved through his _fantaisies bizarres_, the result of too much
+thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
+continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
+court chapel would be to kill him."
+
+He was left undisturbed in his post, but, before long, death forced the
+acceptance of his resignation. Over his grave was placed a tomb on which
+besides the effigy of himself, are shown also his devoted wife and some
+of their children.
+
+Regina two years later founded a perpetual annual funeral service for
+him. By a later intercession, she secured for her son, Ferdinand, the
+succession to his father's dignities at the court of Bavaria. She died
+June 5, 1600, and on her tomb she is named, "la noble et vertueuse dame
+Regina de Lassin, veuve de feu Orland de Lassus." She had been a good
+wife to a good husband. The sadness of her latter years with her beloved
+and demented husband reminds one of the pathetic fate of Robert Schumann
+and his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell
+deserved the name his "loveing wife Frances Purcell" gave him when she
+published after his death a collection of his songs under the name of
+"Orpheus Britannicus." The analogy holds good also in the devotion of
+these married couples, for Henry willed to Frances the whole of his
+property absolutely.
+
+Yet the legend of the cause of his death would verify the old theory
+about the joltiness of the course of true love. For Sir John Hawkins
+passes along the gossip that Purcell met his death by "a cold which he
+caught in the night waiting for admittance into his own house. It is
+said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders
+to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came
+home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that
+prescribed him, and, through the inclemency of the weather, contracted
+a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little
+honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of
+his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her
+dear lamented husband which she makes use of to Lady Elizabeth Howard in
+the dedication of the "Orpheus Britannicus". It seems probable that the
+disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one,
+perhaps a consumption; and that, for some time at least, it had no way
+affected the powers of his mind, since one of the most celebrated of his
+compositions, the song 'From Rosy Bowers,' is in the printed book said
+to have been the last of his works, and to have been set during that
+sickness which put a period to his days."
+
+Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of
+twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own
+house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the
+favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his
+pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in
+Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: "Here
+lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that
+blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded."
+
+We now know that Purcell's marriage was either in 1680 or 1681, when he
+was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. August 2d, 1682, Purcell's
+father, a venerable and distinguished musician and a friend of Pepys,
+the diarist, was buried in Westminster Abbey, where later his more
+distinguished son was laid. A few days after the elder Purcell's burial,
+Henry and his wife came to Westminster Abbey again, for the baptism of a
+son new-born. He died in a few months and a third time they came to the
+sad old abbey to lay their child in the cloisters there.
+
+The next year, 1683, a second son died, and in 1687 a third boy two
+months old was buried in the cloisters of the abbey. This monotonous
+return of the hand of death must have embittered the life of these two,
+who seem to have remained lovers always. But in May, 1688, a daughter
+was born, named Frances after her mother; and she outlived both parents.
+She married a poet, when she and her lover were each nineteen, and named
+a child Frances after the grandmother. On Sept. 6th, 1689, Henry
+Purcell's son Edward was baptised, and he also lived to attain some
+distinction as an organist. In 1693 a daughter, Mary Peters, was born.
+
+Two years later, on May 21st, 1695, the young father died--on the eve of
+St. Cecilia's Day. At his bedside were his old mother, his young wife,
+and the two little children. Purcell was buried under the organ of
+Westminster Abbey and the anthems he had composed for the funeral of
+Queen Mary were sung at his own. And there he rests near his fellow
+musician, Pelham Humphries, who lies, as Runciman says, "by the side of
+his younger wife in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey."
+
+Purcell's will, made the very day of his death, was as follows:
+
+"In the name of God, Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the Citty of Manchester,
+gent., being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in
+good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God), doe by these
+presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament.
+
+"And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving Wife, Frances Purcell,
+all my Estate both reall and personall of what nature and kind soever,
+to her and to her assigns for ever. And I doe hereby constitute and
+appoint my said loveing Wife my sole Executrix of this my last Will and
+Testament, revokeing all my former Will or Wills. Witnesse my hand and
+scale this twentieth first day of November, Annoq. Dni. One thousand six
+hundred ninety-five, and in the seventh yeare of the Raigne of King
+William the Third, &c.
+
+H. PURCELL."
+
+As to Hawkins's theory that Purcell left his wife in needy
+circumstances, Cummings, his biographer, believes the thought refuted by
+the will left by the widow herself, who outlived her husband by eleven
+years, and on St. Valentine's Day, 1706, was buried at his side. In her
+will she says that: "According to her husband's desire she had given
+her deare son (Edward) a good education, and she alsoe did give him all
+the Bookes of Musicke in generall, the Organ, the double spinett, the
+single spinett, a silver tankard, a silver watch, two pair of gold
+buttons, a hair ring, a mourning ring of Dr. Busby's, a Larum clock, Mr.
+Edward Purcell's picture, handsome furniture for a room, and he was to
+be maintained until provided for. All the residue of her property she
+gave to her said daughter Frances."
+
+Cummings also assails Hawkins's story that Purcell was dissipated and
+caught his death from being locked out. But Runciman objects that if
+Purcell had not been dissipated in those days, he would have been called
+a Puritan, and says: "I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman,
+a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of
+men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to excel every
+one of his time."
+
+The love Frances Purcell bore her husband was kept green by her anxiety
+for his fame. She was, in her littler way, a Cosima Wagner. In 1696 she
+published a collection of harpsichord lessons by her husband; three
+editions being sold quickly. The next year she issued ten sonatas and a
+"Collection of Ayres." In 1698 she issued (or reissued) the "Orpheus
+Britannicus." In all of these she wrote dedications breathing devotion
+to her husband. In an ode printed in the second volume of the "Orpheus,"
+in 1704, Purcell's personality is thus limned:
+
+  "Nor were his Beauties to his Art confin'd
+  So justly were his Soul and Body join'd
+  You'd think his Form the Product of his Mind.
+  A conquering sweetness in his Visage dwelt,
+  His Eyes would warm, his Wit like lightning melt.
+  But those must no more be seen, and that no more be felt.
+  Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye,
+  Himself as Humble as his Art was High."
+
+Purcell died at the age of thirty-seven--being granted only two years
+more of life than Mozart and only six years more than Schubert. He is
+the moon of English music and his melodies are as exquisite and as
+silvery and as full of enamoured radiance as the tintinnabulations of
+the moonbeams themselves. But unfortunately for English music this
+beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers
+England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding
+glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the
+east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from
+dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of Händel as a lover, we
+must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious
+morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have
+affected Purcell very deeply.
+
+The story concerns the strenuous career of Alessandro Stradella, and
+when you read it you will not wonder that it should have made a great
+success as an opera, or that it gave Flotow his greatest popularity next
+to "Martha," even though its conclusion was made tamely theatrical.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the
+truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his
+"Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets," but they cannot offer us any
+satisfactory substitute in its place, and without troubling to give
+their merely destructive complaints, and without attempting to improve
+upon the pompously fascinating English of old Sir John Hawkins, I will
+quote the story for your delectation.
+
+Certain it is that there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was
+an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer
+upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in
+musical history of some importance. The following story of his
+adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily
+newspapers--and surely no one could question the credibility of the
+daily newspapers. But here is the story as Hawkins tells it. As the
+cook-books say, salt it to your taste.
+
+"His character as a musician was so high at Venice, that all who were
+desirous of excelling in the science were solicitous to become his
+pupils. Among the many whom he had the instruction of, was one, a young
+lady of a noble family of Rome, named Hortensia, who, notwithstanding
+her illustrious descent, submitted to live in a criminal intimacy with a
+Venetian nobleman. The frequent access of Stradella to this lady, and
+the many opportunities he had of being alone with her, produced in them
+both such an affection for each other, that they agreed to go off
+together for Rome. In consequence of this resolution they embarked in a
+very fine night, and by the favour of the wind effected their escape.
+
+"Upon the discovery of the lady's flight, the Venetian had recourse to
+the usual method in that country of obtaining satisfaction for real or
+supposed injuries: he despatched two assassins, with instructions to
+murder both Stradella and the lady, giving them a sum of money in hand,
+and a promise of a larger if they succeeded in the attempt. Being
+arrived at Naples, the assassins received intelligence that those whom
+they were in pursuit of were at Rome, where the lady passed as the wife
+of Stradella. Upon this they determined to execute their commission,
+wrote to their employer, requesting letters of recommendation to the
+Venetian embassador at Rome, in order to secure an asylum for them to
+fly to, as soon as the deed should be perpetrated.
+
+"Upon the receipt of letters for this purpose, the assassins made the
+best of their way toward Rome; and being arrived there, they learned
+that on the morrow, at five in the evening, Stradella was to give an
+oratorio in the church of San Giovanni Laterano. They failed not to be
+present at the performance, and had concerted to follow Stradella and
+his mistress out of the church, and, seizing a convenient opportunity,
+to make the blow. The performance was now begun, and these men had
+nothing to do but to watch the motions of Stradella, and attend to the
+music, which they had scarce begun to hear, before the suggestions of
+humanity began to operate upon their minds; they were seized with
+remorse, and reflected with horror on the thought of depriving of his
+life a man capable of giving to his auditors such pleasure as they had
+just then felt.
+
+"In short, they desisted from their purpose, and determined, instead of
+taking away his life, to exert their endeavours for the preservation of
+it; they waited for his coming out of the church, and courteously
+addressed him and the lady, who was by his side, first returning him
+thanks for the pleasure they had received at hearing his music, and
+informed them both of the errand they had been sent upon; expatiating
+upon the irresistible charms, which of savages had made them men, and
+had rendered it impossible for them to effect their execrable purpose;
+and concluded with their earnest advice that Stradella and the lady
+should both depart from Rome the next day, themselves promising to
+deceive their employer, and forego the remainder part of their reward,
+by making him believe that Stradella and his lady had quitted Rome on
+the morning of their arrival.
+
+"Having thus escaped the malice of their enemy, the two lovers took an
+immediate resolution to fly for safety to Turin, and soon arrived there.
+The assassins being returned to Venice, reported to their employer that
+Stradella and Hortensia had fled from Rome, and taken shelter in the
+city of Turin, a place where the laws were very severe, and which,
+excepting the houses of embassadors, afforded no protection for
+murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two
+persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their
+engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of
+allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found
+means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various
+arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of
+his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent and vindictive
+than himself, the Venetian associated two ruffians, and dispatched them
+all three to Turin, fully inspired with a resolution of stabbing
+Stradella and the old man's daughter wherever they found them. The
+Venetian also furnished them with letters from Mons. l'Abbé d'Estrades,
+then embassador of France at Venice, addressed to the Marquis of
+Villars, the French embassador at Turin. The purport of these letters
+was a recommendation of the bearers of them, who were therein
+represented to be merchants, to the protection of the embassador, if at
+any time they should stand in need of it.
+
+"The Duchess of Savoy was at that time regent; and she having been
+informed of the arrival of Stradella and Hortensia, and the occasion of
+their precipitate flight from Rome; and knowing the vindictive temper of
+the Venetians, placed the lady in a convent, and retained Stradella in
+her palace as her principal musician. In a situation of such security as
+this seemed to be, Stradella's fears for the safety of himself and his
+mistress began to abate, till one evening, walking for the air upon the
+ramparts of the city, he was set upon by the three assassins above
+mentioned, that is to say, the father of Hortensia, and the two
+ruffians, who each gave him a stab with a dagger in the breast, and
+immediately betook themselves to the house of the French embassador as
+to a sanctuary.
+
+"The attack on Stradella having been made in the sight of numbers of
+people, who were walking in the same place, occasioned an uproar in the
+city, which soon reached the ears of the duchess: she ordered the gates
+to be shut, and diligent search to be made for the three assassins; and
+being informed that they had taken refuge in the house of the French
+embassador, she went to demand them. The embassador insisting on the
+privileges which those of his function claimed from the law of nations,
+refused to deliver them up. In the interim Stradella was cured of his
+wounds, and the Marquis de Villars, to make short of the question about
+privilege, and the rights of embassadors, suffered the assassins to
+escape.
+
+"From this time, finding himself disappointed of his revenge, but not
+the least abated in his ardour to accomplish it, this implacable
+Venetian contented himself with setting spies to watch the motions of
+Stradella. A year was elapsed after the cure of his wounds; no fresh
+disturbance had been given to him, and he thought himself secure from
+any further attempts on his life. The duchess regent, who was concerned
+for the honour of her sex, and the happiness of two persons who had
+suffered so much, and seemed to have been born for each other, joined
+the hands of Stradella and his beloved Hortensia, and they were married.
+
+"After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the
+port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin: the
+assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at
+their heels. Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the
+morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into
+their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart. The murderers had taken
+care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and
+made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.
+
+"Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella's assassination
+reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive
+to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great
+merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that
+kind; which, adds the relater, 'those who remember how lovingly Mr.
+Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to
+him, may understand without farther explication.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
+Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
+his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
+That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
+his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
+at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
+fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
+it seems, just getting into print for the first time.
+
+The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
+Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
+was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
+all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
+appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
+from 1544 to 1551.
+
+Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
+married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
+him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, "his
+equal and an honest damsel" (_donzella onesta e sua para_), according to
+the biographer Baini, who adds:
+
+"With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the
+first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait
+penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions
+of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow: yet
+with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time
+to his glory and to his gain. And so they passed together, these two
+faithful consorts, nearly thirty years."
+
+Lucrezia bore him four children, all sons, Angelo, Ridolfo, Silla, and
+Igino. The first three died in early manhood, after showing themselves
+in some sort heirs of their father's genius: in the second book of his
+motets Palestrina has included some of their compositions. The last son,
+Igino, outlived his parents and his own welfare; he was "_un' anima
+disarmonica"_ After his father's death he attempted to complete and
+market an unfinished and rejected composition of his father's, but he
+was legally restrained. He lost some of his father's unpublished works,
+while certain noddings of genius, better lost, and refused even by the
+Pope, Palestrina dedicated them to, still remain, with a dedication to
+yet another Pope, put on them by the scapegrace Igino.
+
+A certain writer Pitoni, by a bit of careless reading, multiplied
+Palestrina's wives by two, and divided his sons by the same number,
+claiming that Lucrezia, the first wife of Palestrina, was the mother of
+Angelo, that after her death he married one Doralice, and that she was
+the mother of Igino. But Baini exposes Pitoni's carelessness, proves the
+existence of Ridolfo and Silla by the inclusion of their works in the
+father's book, and shows that Doralice was the wife of Palestrina's son
+Angelo.
+
+It being established, then, that Palestrina was married but once, and it
+being assumed that he was happily married, it is strange to see how this
+happy marriage came near proving fatal to him. Palestrina, who was, like
+Michelangelo, intimate with various Popes, dedicated in 1554 his first
+printed book of masses to Pope Julius III. As a reward, the careless
+pontiff made him one of the singers of his Sistine Chapel, omitting the
+usual severe examination, and overlooking as a small matter the fact
+that Palestrina was so far from being a priest that he was very much
+married and very much the father, and furthermore had no voice. But
+Palestrina resigned his post as maestro at Saint Peter's and entered
+the chapel. The Pope died shortly afterward and was succeeded by a
+cardinal who was a patron of Palestrina's and continued his favour as
+Pope Marcellus II. Three weeks later this Pope also died, and was
+followed by Paul IV.
+
+Unfortunately for Palestrina, the new Pope was a strict constructionist,
+and he found it "indecent that there should be married men
+(_ammogliati_) interfering in holy offices." In spite of the action of
+the two previous pontificates, he determined to expel the three
+Benedicks who had entered the choir, Leonardo Barè, Domenico Ferrabosco,
+and Palestrina, "uomini ammogliati, e chi con grandissimo scandalo, ed
+in vilipendio del divin culto, contro le disposizioni dei sagri canoni,
+e contro le costituzioni e le consuetudini della cappella apostolica
+cantano i medesimi tre ammogliati imitamente ai capellani cantori." He
+then declares that, after mature deliberation, "cassiamo, discacciamo, e
+togliamo" from the list of chappellary singers these three, and that
+they ought to be "cassati, discacciati, e tolti dalla cappella," and
+that after the present order they "cassino, discaccino, e tolgano." And
+excommunication was threatened if any more married men (_uxorati_) were
+received in the chapel.
+
+This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had
+resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a
+family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous
+thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever
+and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found
+another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October,
+1555, he was maestro. Eleven years later, a year after he had written
+his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of
+his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his
+resignation. They gave him the acceptance. Again he found another post,
+and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his
+many wanderings and vicissitudes.
+
+In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old
+friend, Pope Marcellus II. The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had
+marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history
+of religious music.
+
+The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending
+of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to
+which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and
+often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or
+cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did
+in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the
+Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets. The
+trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the
+original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of
+the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would
+not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an
+all-hearing ear.
+
+I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a
+musician, a contemporary of Palestrina's mentioned by Van der Straeten;
+his name was Ambrosio de Cotes. He was the Maestro de Capilla of the
+King's Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth,
+and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a
+mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de
+Espinosa. Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets
+at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs. In 1591 he was
+officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to
+sacred music (_y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes_).
+
+So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that
+contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely. It was given a
+last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and
+capable of redemption. He composed three masses, and the third of them,
+dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as
+the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final
+word and ultimate model for future church music.
+
+Some years later, at the very height of his glory, Palestrina's heart
+suffered its final blow. In the words of Baini, "Lucrezia, _la sua dolce
+consorte_, after having piously accompanied the solemn procession for
+the transport of the body of Saint Gregory Nazianzeno from the church of
+the monks of S. Maria Campa Marzo to the Vatican the fourth of June,
+1580, was assailed by a most oppressive malady."
+
+The attentions of her husband and the remedies of the medical art of
+that day kept her alive up to the first of July. Then the sickness began
+anew and "neither the tears nor the voice of the loving companion
+prevailed against the inexorable scythe of death." On the 21st of July
+Lucrezia died. The next day her body was received at the Vatican,
+Giovanni watching in the schoolroom of the chapel.
+
+It is easy to picture the wild grief of this man, whom a previous
+anxiety had thrown into an almost mortal fever. Yet he lived fourteen
+busy years, and in his old age he felt both fatigue and want, and was
+compelled to join the long list of those musicians who have appealed to
+their patrons for charity. But at least his life, like Bach's and that
+of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily
+a failure when set to music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of
+marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific.
+
+Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a
+twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and
+manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly
+together. Their wives, it is said--_horresco referens_!--could not tell
+them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom
+he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but
+tired of. The Consistory ordered him to marry her, but he appealed to a
+higher court and was absolved from the tenacious woman whom he said he
+"hated so that he could not bear the sight of her." He married another
+woman four years later.
+
+The great Bach, Johann Sebastian, was the youngest of six children. His
+mother died when he was nine years old, but with Bachic haste his
+father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit
+of it, for she buried J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
+Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.
+
+At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt--at twenty-one he went on foot
+fifty miles to Lübeck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
+been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
+for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
+they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
+variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
+rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
+waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
+adding, that they "furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
+latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
+in the choir." His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
+to the parson. Further explanation we have none.
+
+Spitta speculates on the identity of this "stranger maiden." In the
+older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
+occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
+opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
+cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
+friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
+be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
+young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach "spoke to
+the parson," he confessed his love and his betrothal.
+
+Further Spitta comments: "The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
+family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
+which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
+conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
+relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
+certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
+at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
+race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
+its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
+marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
+cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
+may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
+reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
+further improvement, and attracted him to his own race. His second wife,
+indeed, was not allied with him in blood, but that with the first he
+found, in some respects, his more natural development may perhaps be
+concluded from the fact that the most remarkable of his sons were all
+the children of his first marriage."
+
+Upton says that Bach loved Maria Barbara when he was only eighteen and
+they agreed to wait till he got a better post. This was not till three
+years had passed and then his salary was only eighty-five gulden (about
+£7, or $35) besides a little corn and wood and some kindling-wood.
+
+It was on October 17, 1707, that, according to the record, "the
+respectable Herr J.S. Bach, the surviving lawful son of the late most
+respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician
+of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria Barbara Bach, the
+youngest surviving unmarried daughter of the late very respectable and
+famous artist Herr Johann Michael Bach."
+
+A little inheritance of fifty gulden (£4 or $20) aided the new couple.
+But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: "Modest as is my
+way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable
+articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live." A year after his
+marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of
+Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with
+the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his
+prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his
+wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he
+stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to
+success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed. She had borne
+him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm
+Friedemann, the father's favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the
+world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times
+spitefully underrate.
+
+The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach's powers,
+and his next cantata with the suggestive title, "He that exalteth
+himself shall be abased," shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In
+the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the
+high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson
+accused of being "a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted
+to the wine-cellar of the Council").
+
+For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach's first wife's
+children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more
+congenial and appreciative helpmeet. Bach's father had remarried after
+seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited
+from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years
+more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of
+whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical
+than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought
+it time to take the name out of the rut.
+
+Anna Magdalena Wülken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the
+ducal band at Weissenfels. She was twenty-one years old while Bach was
+thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and
+together stood sponsor to the child of the prince's cellar-clerk. The
+wedding took place at Bach's own house.
+
+The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.
+She made the Bach home a little musical circle. It is evident that she
+kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, "They
+are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already
+form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family,
+particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest
+daughter joins in bravely."
+
+Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical
+book together. Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband's
+cheery note that it was "_Anti-Calvinismus_ and _Anti-Melancholicus_."
+In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and
+other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There
+are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an
+unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, "Edifying Reflections of a
+Smoker" in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own
+hand--doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed
+contentment in uxorious ease. Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly
+beginning,
+
+  "Irh Diener, werthe Jungfer Braut
+  Viel Glücke zur heutgen Freude!"
+
+and exclaiming that at the sight of her in her garland and wedding-garb
+the heart laughs out in rapture;--and what wonder that lips and breast
+overflow with joy. There are rules he wrote out for her instruction in
+thorough-bass with a note that others must be taught orally, and there
+is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge
+from the words, "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken." Upton declares this
+song to have been written during and for their first courtship. A
+portrait of this ideal wife was painted by Cristofori and passed into
+the keeping of her stepson, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but alas, it is
+lost while so many a less interesting face is repeated in endless
+pictures.
+
+Twenty-eight years after her marriage this faithful woman stood by her
+husband's side in his blindness and through the two operations by the
+English surgeon in Leipzig. How must she have rejoiced when on July 18,
+1750, he suddenly found that he could see and endure with delight the
+blessed sunshine! How her heart must have sunk when a few hours later he
+was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more
+days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his
+youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as
+Spitta says, "floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and
+perfect it." The original name had been, "When we are in the highest
+need," but he changed the name by dictation now to "Before thy throne
+with this I come" (_Vor deiner Thron tret ich hiemit_). The preacher
+said he had "fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God," and he was
+buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of,
+and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.
+
+It is a dismal task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and
+death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy
+and aided him with hand and voice and heart,--what had she done to
+deserve the dingy aftermath of her fidelity?
+
+Bach left no will, and his children seized his manuscripts; what little
+money remained from his salary of 87 thalers a year (£13 or $65) they
+divided with the widow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was
+continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns,
+some of them to considerable success. The mother and three daughters
+were left to shift for themselves. Two years later they must sell a few
+musical remains and the town must aid them out of its funds.
+
+In the winter ten years after her husband's death, on Feb. 27, 1760,
+Anna Magdalena died, an alms-woman. Her only mourners were her daughters
+and a fourth of the public school children, who were forced by the
+custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In
+1801 Bach's daughter Regina was still living, a "good old woman," who
+would have starved had there not been a public subscription, to which
+Beethoven contributed the proceeds of a composition.
+
+Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated
+almost from man's memory. Half a century of oblivion was followed by the
+great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some
+radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he
+owed so much of his life's delight and his art's inspiration, to whom
+also he dedicated his life and his music--Anna Magdalena.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+"Such music by such a nigger!" exclaimed one prince. Another called him
+a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized
+and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly
+reached the ground. His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with
+nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and
+unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days,
+when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague. He
+always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, "for the
+sake of cleanliness"! and continuing to the day of his death, even when
+wigs were out of style.
+
+This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in
+his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the
+hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet
+this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but
+strangely naïf; a revolutionist of childlike directness.
+
+Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the
+twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a
+shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.
+
+Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating
+suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so
+heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly
+thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his
+friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven
+he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became
+disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably
+unsophisticated nature.
+
+A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty
+that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters
+of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to
+Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an
+ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an
+elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the
+convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously
+suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.
+
+As Louis Nohl says, "Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude,
+ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at
+once--whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely
+suffered for it."
+
+Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led
+the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more
+of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her
+husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as
+Haydn could afford or endure.
+
+An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend
+Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of
+unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his "Le Haydine" in the form of
+letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one
+Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original
+series of "Letters written from Vienna." He published these under the
+pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later
+the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the
+name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is
+commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his
+account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a
+honeymoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"But soon the caprices of Mrs. Anna turned the knot to a chain, the
+bliss to torment, and affairs went so far that, after suffering many
+years, this new Socrates ended by separating from his Xantippe. Mrs.
+Anna was not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her manners were immaculate, but she
+had a wooden head, and when she had fixed on a caprice, there was no way
+to change it. The woman loved her husband but was not congenial. An
+excess of religious piety badly directed came to disturb this happy
+harmony. Mrs. Anna wanted the house always full of priests, to whom she
+furnished good dinners, suppers, and luncheons. Haydn was a bit
+economical; but rather for cause than desire. At this time he had hardly
+enough to live on discreetly, and he began to look with evil eye on this
+endless procession of holy grasshoppers (_locuste_) who ravaged his
+larder. Nor was it appropriate to the house of a studious man, this
+ceaseless clatter of a numerous, genial, and lazy society; therefore,
+solidly religious as he was, he could not enjoy these sacred repasts and
+he had to close the door of the refectory. After that the deluge (_inde
+iræ_). Mrs. Anna had a religious brother. Haydn couldn't keep him from
+visiting his sister.
+
+"Monks are like cherries; if you lift one from the basket, ten come
+along with it. Haydn's convent was not depopulated. Nor did the demands
+decrease. Every now and then Mrs. Anna had a new request; to-day a
+responsory, to-morrow a motet, the day after a mass, then hymns, then
+psalms, then antiphons; and all _gratis_. If her husband declined to
+write them, there appeared on the scene the great confederates of
+capricious women; the effects of hysteria, spleen (_gli insulti di
+stomaco_), spasms; then shrieks, then criminations, weepings, quarrels,
+and bad humour unceasing. Haydn ended with having to appease the woman,
+to lose his point, and pay the doctor and the druggist to boot. He had
+always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true
+miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful
+works that all the world knows.
+
+"It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted
+that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in
+the service of Prince Esterházy. This friendship, rousing jealous
+suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable.
+The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's
+marriage." [On this point Haydn once opened his heart to Griesinger,
+saying: "My wife was incapable of bearing children, and therefore I was
+less indifferent to the charms of other womankind."] "Lacking its most
+solid link, the marital chain could not stand such shocks, and grew
+fatally weaker. The pair ceased to live together, and only that
+sacramental knot remained indissoluble and strong, which Haydn had
+contracted at the age of twenty-seven. Mrs. Anna lived to seventy years
+on a sufficient pension which her husband faithfully paid, and she died
+in 1800. These vicissitudes in great part explain why Haydn, though he
+earned much, could not for a long while put aside a penny and make
+himself a little ease."
+
+It is not a pretty picture that Carpani draws of this home life, and
+Anna is made out to be far from a lovable creature. She is compared to
+the patron saint of shrews, Xantippe. But even Xantippe had her side of
+the story to tell; and with all possible admiration for that man
+Socrates, of such godlike wisdom and such great heart, it must be
+remembered that Socrates had many habits which would not only cause
+ostracism from society to-day, but would have tried the temper of even
+such a wife as the meek Griselda of Chaucer's poem.
+
+We constantly meet these husbands who are seemingly rich in geniality
+and yet are mysteriously unhappy at home. It is the custom of the
+acquaintances of these fellows to put all the blame on the wife. But
+there is a distinct type of mind which always enjoys dining abroad and
+appreciates a few herbs in a stranger's house more than a stalled ox at
+home. These people are gentle and genial and tender only out-of-doors.
+You might call them extra-mural saints.
+
+I have a strong suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul
+that he was commonly called "Papa" by his friends and disciples, was one
+of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never
+be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked
+inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of
+her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger wished to
+make Haydn's wife a present, Haydn forbade him, saying:
+
+"She does not deserve anything! It is little matter to her whether her
+husband is an artist or a cobbler."
+
+As he passed in front of a picture of her once, he seized the violinist
+Baillot by the arm, and pointing to the picture said, "That is my wife.
+Many a time she has maddened me."
+
+In 1792 he wrote to his mistress from London:--"My wife, the infernal
+beast" (_bestia infernale_--Pohl translates this _höllische Bestie_)
+"has written so much stuff that I had to tell her I would not come to
+the house any more; which has brought her again to her senses."
+
+This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes
+again:
+
+"My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable
+temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer. There will sometime
+be an end of this torment."
+
+Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful
+tone! As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to
+see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for
+the unhappiness upon the husband. Anna Keller had a remarkably long and
+sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her
+husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case
+he died suddenly. He pointed to a series of canons which he had written
+and framed. When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him
+a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little
+house she had set her heart on, naïvely adding that it was just a cosy
+size for a widow.
+
+Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a
+widower. Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of
+Haydn's life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how
+various composers composed: Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and
+the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at
+night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the
+streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on
+a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and
+children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends;
+Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the
+floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy
+fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming
+sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.
+
+"But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his
+chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of
+Angelica. When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends
+divided his time. For thirty years he led this life, _monotona ma
+dolcissima_, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving
+Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy. Then Boselli died and he began
+to feel the ennui (_le noje_) of a void in his days. It was then that he
+went to London."
+
+This mistress of Haydn's, whom Carpani and Fétis call Boselli and whom
+Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the
+spelling in Haydn's own handwriting. The pleasant legend Carpani gives
+of Haydn's life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her
+death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.
+Pohl, closely followed by Haydn's recent biographer, Schmidt, describes
+Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged to
+sing at the theatre of the Prince Esterházy. She was the wife of Anton
+Polzelli, an insignificant and sickly violinist, with whom she was
+apparently not in love. Luigia is pictured--doubtless by guesswork--as
+not beautiful, but of a pleasing appearance, showing the indications of
+her Italian birth in "her small slim face, her dark complexion, her
+black eyes, her chestnut-coloured hair; her body of medium height and
+elegant form."
+
+"To this woman," says Schmidt, "Haydn fetched his own deep and lasting
+sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily
+with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be
+known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good
+nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by
+the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout
+twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she
+was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London
+the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their
+correspondence shows, only postponed their union, till the day when
+'four eyes shall be closed,'
+
+"Yet when finally both were free, Time had worked his almighty
+influence; Haydn had grown gray; outwardly as well as spiritually an
+estrangement had widened between them, and of their once so dear a
+desire there is no more word. Yet Haydn never ceased to provide for his
+friend, as well as to care for the education and the success of her
+sons. The elder, Pietro, Haydn's favourite, on whom he hung with his
+whole heart, died early." [Pohl quotes many allusions to him in Haydn's
+letters.] "The younger, Anton, who was reported without proper
+foundation to be Haydn's natural son, later became musical director of
+the prince's chapel, but then gave up music and turned farmer, finally
+dying of the plague in sad circumstances."
+
+Pohl is somewhat fuller upon this alliance than Schmidt, who, in fact,
+merely condenses and paraphrases him. He says that Polzelli's maiden
+name was Moreschi [which, being interpreted, is "Moor," a name once
+given to Haydn]; she was a mezzo-soprano, who played secondary rôles in
+the operas. She earned the same salary as her husband, 465 gulden a
+year. The letters Haydn wrote her were always in Italian, and in one of
+them he wishes her better rôles, and "a good master who will take the
+same interest as thy Haydn." Haydn had come to her for sympathy, since,
+as Pohl says and we have seen, "thanks to his wife he had hell at home"
+[_die Holle im House_].
+
+When increasing fame took Haydn by the hand and led him away to royal
+triumphs in London, he did not take jealousy along with his other
+luggage. He seems to have heard that his place was promptly filled in
+Polzelli's heart, but with all his geniality, he could write of the
+rumoured rival as "this man, whose name I do not know, but who is to be
+so happy as to possess thee." Then there was a recrudescence of the old
+ardour:
+
+"Oh, dear, dear Polzelli, thou lingerest always in my heart; never,
+never shall I forget thee (_O cara Polzelli, tu mi stai sempre nel
+core, mal, mal scordeo di te_)."
+
+When some one in London told him that Polzelli had sold the piano he had
+given her, he could not believe it, and only wrote her, "See how they
+tease me about you" (_vedi come mi seccano per via di te_). Still less
+will he believe that she has spoken ill of him, and he writes:
+
+"May God bless thee, and forgive thee everything, for I know that love
+speaks in thee. Be careful for thy good name, I beg thee, and think
+often of thy Haydn, who cherishes and tenderly loves thee and to thee
+will always be true."
+
+Even to Bologna, whither Polzelli went with her two sons, says Pohl,
+"followed Haydn's love--and his gold." He intended after his first
+London visit to go to Italy to visit her, and wrote further:
+
+"I cherish thee and love thee as on that first day, and am always sad
+that I cannot do more for you. Yet have patience. Surely the day will
+come when I can show thee how much I love thee."
+
+Loisa's choice of a spouse had been unhappy, as so many marriages have
+been where the wife is a singer on the stage, and the husband a fiddler
+in the band. Haydn seems to have sympathised with Loisa in her unhappy
+domestic affairs, as cordially as she had sympathised with him in his.
+He had sympathy, too, for her similarly ill-matched sister, Christine
+Negri, for he writes of her as--
+
+"Already long separated from her husband, that beast, she has been as
+unhappy as even you, and awakes my sympathy."
+
+Also in March, 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner
+implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have
+him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being
+Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of
+celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish
+husband and his shrewish wife--"when four eyes shall close." Loisa's
+husband was the first to oblige, for in August, 1791, his death wrings a
+charitable word from even Haydn:
+
+"Thy poor husband! I tell thee that Providence has managed well in
+freeing thee from thy heavy burden, for it is better to be in the other
+world, than useless in this one. The poor fellow has suffered enough."
+
+Later he writes:
+
+"DEAR POLZELLI:--Probably that time will come which we have so often
+longed for. Already two eyes are closed. But the other two--ah, well, as
+God wills!" Eight years more, and the reluctant and wide-eyed Anna
+Haydn was foiled of her desire to be a widow in the snug cottage of her
+choice. The lovers at last were both single. But now, freed of their
+shackles, why do they not rush to each other's arms? The only answer we
+receive is this chill and shocking document found long after Haydn's
+death; it is written in Italian and dated shortly after Frau Haydn's
+death:
+
+"I, the undersigned, promise Signora Loisa Polzelli (in case I shall be
+disposed to marry again) to take no other for wife than the said Loisa
+Polzelli; and if I remain a widower, I promise the said Loisa Polzelli
+after my death to leave her a life pension of 300 gulden, that is 300
+florins in Vienna money. Valid before every court. I sign myself,
+
+"JOSEPH HAYDN,
+
+"_Maestro di Cappella of his Highness, the Prince Esterhazy_.
+
+Vienna, May 23, 1800."
+
+On this sad and icy postscript to the ardent love affair, Schmidt
+comments: "The form of this writing leaves the conclusion plain, that
+Haydn was forced to this act by the Polzelli. This throws a poor light
+on her character, and we dare not evade the conclusion that, for twenty
+years in this love affair for life, she had in mind a business
+arrangement with the master."
+
+Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years
+occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to
+heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little
+later, the genial master himself was not above reproach, and Loisa's
+anxiety was not unfounded, for her Joseph was casting amorous glances
+elsewhere. Thus after the long ardour, the love letters have frozen into
+a hard and fast negative betrothal in which Haydn promises to marry no
+one else. This, Schmidt says, was dragged out of Haydn. But, if such a
+bond were necessary, it speaks surely as ill for Haydn as for the woman
+who had given her life and her good name to brighten his joyless heart.
+
+Yet, dead as his love was, honour remained with him, though it was a
+rather close-reckoning honour. Three months later he answered with money
+her request for house-rent, and in a will dated May 5, 1801, occurs this
+clause, cancelling his former agreement, and making new provisions:
+
+"To the widow Aloysia Polzelli, formerly singer at Prince Nikolaus
+Esterházy's, payable in ready money six months after my death, 100
+florins, and each year from the date of my death, for her life ... 150
+florins. After her death her son, Anton Polzelli, to receive 150 florins
+for one year, having always been a good son to his mother and a grateful
+pupil to me. N.B.--I hereby revoke the obligation in Italian, signed by
+me, which may be produced by Mme. Polzelli; otherwise so many of my poor
+relations with greater claims would receive too little. Finally Mme.
+Polzelli must be satisfied with the annuity of 150 florins." Two years
+later we find him writing to her (and, rumour said, his) son: "I hope
+thy mamma finds herself well." In a new will, dated 1809, the year of
+his death, Haydn withdraws the cash gift to Loisa, and leaves her only
+150 florins annuity. She still remains, however, his chief heir.
+Meanwhile, without waiting for his death, she had married again to Luigi
+Franci, like herself a singer and an Italian. She outlived him and Haydn
+also, only to die in poverty and senility, far away in Hungary. Poor,
+eighty-two year old Loisa! Her affairs had been sadly mismanaged.
+
+Why had Loisa given up all hope of marrying Haydn, even when his wife
+was dead and she was possessed of his agreement, signed, sealed, and
+delivered, to marry no one but her? Awhile ago I stooped to repeating
+the scandal that during Signora Polzelli's life, Haydn had been casting
+sheep's eyes elsewhere. But it is such a pretty scandal! Besides, these
+old contrapuntists were trained from youth to keep two or more tunes
+going at once.
+
+I am not referring to Haydn's friendship with Frau von Genzinger. It was
+Karajan who discovered and published this pleasant correspondence with
+her. She was the wife of a very successful physician, a "ladies' doctor"
+(_Damen Doktor_). She was the daughter of the Hofrath von Kayser; her
+name was Maria Anna Sabina; she was born Nov. 6th, 1750, and had been
+married some seventeen years, and was the mother of five children when
+Haydn began taking his every Sunday dinner with the family. Karajan says
+that she was an _ausgezeichnete_ singer and pianist.
+
+A deep friendship sprang up at once between them and they corresponded
+freely. Haydn's letters to her were published by Nohl, and you may read
+them in Lady Wallace's translation. They are full of the most
+interesting lights upon Haydn's life and experiences, and are brimful of
+affection for Frau von Genzinger. But the husband and the children are
+almost always referred to in the letters, and the friendship seems to
+have been entirely and only a friendship,--as Schmidt calls it, "_eine
+tiefe und zugleich respectvolle Neigung_."
+
+Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as "honourable," finds in Frau von
+Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for
+composition. "We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and
+truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best
+work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any
+benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally."
+
+But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with
+Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many
+a billet-doux fragrant with charm.
+
+It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's
+supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata
+and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his
+canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called
+"the loveliest woman I ever saw." Nor yet again the fascinating actress,
+Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he
+went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him
+painting Mrs. Billington as "Saint Cecilia listening to the angels," and
+protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels
+listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a
+fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The
+skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790,
+a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good
+and famous story.
+
+The true woman in the case makes her _entrée_ in this innocent style:
+
+"Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
+that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him
+whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.
+
+"James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791."
+
+This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
+preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
+lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
+light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
+oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
+personage. May we be there to see!
+
+Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
+was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
+to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
+Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
+made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
+as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English
+Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
+London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
+son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
+aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
+according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
+that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
+pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
+notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
+consumption.
+
+Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
+London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
+by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
+becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
+whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
+Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.
+
+Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, "In London, I fell in love with
+a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time." But Mr. Krehbiel
+shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
+To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not "though
+she was sixty years old," but "though I was sixty years old." I think we
+are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
+thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
+as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
+of their most potent beauty.
+
+Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline
+D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter
+that she was "an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a
+somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no
+disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to
+Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have
+not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer
+in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him
+and Frau Haydn in Vienna." We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do
+with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the
+charge of "vulgarity."
+
+The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an
+Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on "Mozart
+und Haydn in London" quoted from them. But for their complete
+publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's
+"Music and Manners in the Classical Period." This captivating work
+contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with
+amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the
+time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of
+Pepys.
+
+I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through
+such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in
+all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain
+themselves. M.L. is "my love," D.L. is "dear love," M.D. is "my dear,"
+and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to
+the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied
+into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may
+have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.
+
+Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs.
+Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor
+her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she
+encloses him "the words of the song you desire." This letter is dated
+February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792,
+and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased
+to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being
+suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.
+
+  "Io vi mando questo foglio
+  Dalle lagrime rigato,
+  Sotto scritto dal cordoglio
+  Dai pensieri sigillato
+  Testimento del mio amore
+  (Io) vi mando questo core."
+
+Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate
+that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give
+them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets
+that they must be incomplete.
+
+"Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.
+
+"M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish
+much to know _how you do_ to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure
+of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come
+tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not
+fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and
+best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity
+M.D. your &c."
+
+"March the 7th 92.
+
+"My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night,
+our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand
+affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of
+_tenderness_ for you but no language can express _half_ the _Love_ and
+_Affection_ I feel for you. you are _dearer_ to me _every Day_ of my
+life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my
+_Dearest_ it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned
+my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am
+truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had
+happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with
+the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you
+will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the
+Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best
+wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and
+invariable Regard my D,
+
+"Your truly affectionate--
+
+"my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when
+you will come."
+
+"April 4th 92.
+
+"My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons
+for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse
+me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be
+happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to
+you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your
+Concert. may all _success_ attend you my ever D H that Night and always
+is the sincere and hearty wish of your "Invariable and Truly
+affectionate--"
+
+"James St. Thursday, April 12th
+
+"M.D. I am so _truly anxious_ about _you_. I must write to beg to know
+_how you do_? I was very sorry I _had_ not the pleasure of Seeing you
+this Evening, my thoughts have been _constantly_ with you and my D.L. no
+words can express half the tenderness and _affection I feel for you_. I
+thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always
+remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the
+most perfect sympathy in _all your sensations_ and my regard is
+_Stronger every day_. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my
+D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc."
+
+"M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were
+indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday,
+indeed _my D.L._ I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have
+already produced So many _wonderful_ and _Charming_ compositions Still
+fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your
+health let me prevail on you my _much-loved_ H. not to keep to your
+Studys so long at _one time_, my D. love if you could know how very
+precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to
+preserve it for my sake as well as _your own_. pray inform me how you do
+and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and
+on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time
+my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with
+the _tenderest_ regard your most &c.
+
+"J.S. April the 19th 92"
+
+"April 24th 1792.
+
+"My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my
+thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably
+attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the
+March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I
+hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you
+the _Dear_ original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write
+Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the
+occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of
+your _health_. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday
+to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours
+etc."
+
+"M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I
+shall be very happy to see you and _particularly_ wish for the pleasure
+of _your_ company _my Dst Love_ before our other friends come. I hope to
+hear you are in _good Health_. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are
+your constant attendants and I _ever_ am with the _firmest_ Attachment
+my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,
+
+"R.S."
+
+"James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d."
+
+"M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten
+thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from _your
+ever Enchanting_ compositions and your _incomparably Charming_
+performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among _all_ your numerous
+admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can
+have Such high veneration for your most _brilliant Talents_ as I _have_,
+indeed my D.L. no tongue _can express_ the gratitude I _feel_ for the
+infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted
+thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that
+I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the
+_Chief_ Blessings of my life, and it is the _Sincer_ wish of my heart to
+preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you
+are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you _can_
+come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be
+particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come.
+God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect
+attachment your &c.
+
+"Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792."
+
+"My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me
+and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of
+them, pray inform me _how you do_, and let me know my _Dst L_ when you
+will dine with me; I shall be _happy_ to _See_ you to dinner either
+tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am _truly
+anxious_ and _impatient_ to _See you_ and I wish to have as much of
+_your company_ as possible; indeed _my Dst H_. I _feel_ for you the
+_fondest_ and _tenderest_ affection the human Heart is capable of and I
+ever am with the _firmest_ attachment my Dst Love
+
+"most Sincerely, Faithfully
+
+"and most affectionately yours
+
+"Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792"
+
+"M.D.
+
+"I was _extremely sorry_ I had not the pleasure of _seeing you to-day,_
+indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every
+moment of your company is _more_ and _more precious_ to me now your
+_departure_ is so near. I hope to hear you are _quite well_ and I shall
+be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one
+o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of
+Seeing _you_ on _Monday_. You will receive this letter to-morrow
+morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home
+and I _wish_ to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more
+I repeat let me See you as _Soon_ as possible. I _ever_ am with the most
+_inviolable attachment_ my Dst and most beloved H.
+
+"most faithfully and most
+
+"affectionately yours
+
+"R.S."
+
+
+"I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with
+your _delightful_ and enchanting _Compositions_ and your Spirited and
+interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the
+great pleasure I _always_ receive from your _incomparable_ Music. My D:
+I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any _Sleep_ to
+Night. I am _extremely anxious_ about your health. I hope to hear a good
+account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be
+happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the
+tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate
+
+"Friday Night, 12 o'clock."
+
+
+This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the
+barbarous word "yearnful," once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to
+London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the
+acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious
+guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old
+lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.
+
+This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the
+considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought
+him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes
+through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St.
+James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the
+house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to
+letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind
+him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady,"
+probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn
+dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly
+she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies
+probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was
+asked what the letters were. "They are letters from an English widow in
+London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty
+years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have
+married had I then been single."
+
+Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded
+affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing
+to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes
+that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian
+woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius
+so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the
+enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?
+
+When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to--even the fable
+that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl,
+who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in
+Haydn's will.
+
+Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that
+Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson--and that points to us as a by-path,
+which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of
+Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art,
+that pet of artists.
+
+As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement
+in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of
+now as a musician.
+
+"On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I
+saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in
+diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can
+put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of
+which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The
+king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He
+gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor
+Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven
+years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many
+years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned,
+however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary
+instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and
+studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with
+him, married him, and gave him a dowry of £100,000. Besides this he has
+£500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him
+with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is
+of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits
+from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and
+the other eighteen, strike the town of Lübeck in 1703. They are drawn
+thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition
+is to be friendly.
+
+Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Lübeck as soon as can
+be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the
+daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the
+pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see,
+and her years were thirty-four--just six years less than the total years
+of the two young candidates.
+
+Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship
+suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing
+"Cleopatra," an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing
+the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and
+presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is
+another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For
+it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to
+come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.
+
+But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years,
+and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to
+yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that
+narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is
+postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a
+duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor;
+he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove
+fatal,--but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves
+its wearer for a better fate.
+
+By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is
+healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting
+with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way
+toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of
+versatility--which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a
+writer than aught else.
+
+The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their
+wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann
+Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
+compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
+son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
+had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
+candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
+J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
+and "got the pretty job" ("_erhielt den schönen Dienst_").
+
+The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681--1764), a sort
+of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
+daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
+That is all of his story that belongs here.
+
+The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
+whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
+and Handel--the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
+somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glück." It is not
+needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
+it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
+friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
+of deafness. Händel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
+year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
+having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
+men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
+of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
+bachelorhood.
+
+Händel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
+he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.
+
+The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
+occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
+the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
+threatened to throw her out, thundering, "I always knew you were a
+devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils."
+
+Händel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
+memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
+the author says that Händel was "always habituated to an uncommon
+portion of food and nourishment," and accuses him of "excessive
+indulgence in this lowest of gratifications."
+
+"He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
+it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution,
+so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him
+to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he
+hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have
+been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous."
+
+A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.
+Noting that the servant dawdled about, Händel demanded why; the servant
+answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Händel
+stormed, in his famous broken English, "Den pring up der tinner
+prestissimo. I am de gombany."
+
+In his later years Händel was not so beautiful as he might have been,
+and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and
+his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that "in his youth he was the
+most handsome man of his time."
+
+Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of
+the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography
+states "that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long
+career of his life." And yet contradicts himself in his very next
+sentence, for he adds:
+
+"When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with
+him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes
+Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess
+Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the
+part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that
+period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and
+princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.
+Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a
+young man twenty-four years old; but Händel disdained her love. All the
+English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment
+which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never
+prudent."
+
+This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring
+says that Händel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great
+biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and
+represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that
+Vittoria was "an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany"--which gives a decidedly different look to Händel's
+"prudence."
+
+Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the
+famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, "a contralto of masculine strength," as
+one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her
+chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave
+higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen
+years old when Händel's "Roderigo" was produced there in 1707. That she
+should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be
+mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the
+time of her immortal amour. Love _à l'Italienne_ is precocious.
+
+Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom
+Händel never brought to London among all his importations--and with
+good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger
+account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar
+method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her
+to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong
+prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious
+appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man
+she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from
+dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money
+she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to
+the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.
+
+In London Händel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He
+is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical
+independence.
+
+He was a lordly man in his day was Händel; and dared to cut that
+terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of
+all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: "I admire Händel
+principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such
+perfection." This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the
+dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other
+man's straight; or that Händel was really more of a flirt than
+tradition makes him out.
+
+Rockstro said that Händel was engaged more than once; once to the
+aforementioned Vittoria Tesi--this in spite of the tradition that woman
+proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases
+this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book,
+"Anecdotes of Händel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith."
+This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to
+have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith _(né_ Schmidt) was Händel's
+secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on
+his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every
+emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy,
+in due time she married him.
+
+Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that Händel lacked
+social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first
+would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a
+fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles
+were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she
+fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second
+woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry Händel if he
+would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and
+died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.
+
+In his will Händel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and
+one other woman.
+
+He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances
+would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance,
+the creator of "Samson." He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady
+Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died
+fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later
+he married the daughter of a harlequin.
+
+Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain
+were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of
+vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers
+would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+While Händel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
+visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
+revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
+To the lordly Händel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
+people who know nothing else of either genius, know that Händel said,
+"Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook."
+
+Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
+both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
+that resulted in a determination to "reform it altogether." From London
+he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
+moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
+the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
+banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
+with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
+not particularly novel expression, "passionately fond of music." Gluck
+was soon made thoroughly at home there.
+
+"Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
+daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
+her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
+which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
+turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
+man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
+only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
+promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
+accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
+themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
+unbroken fidelity."
+
+Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
+the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
+himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna--as Schmid puts
+it--"_auf dem Flügeln der Liebe nach Wien zurück_" On the 15th of
+September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he
+dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
+journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
+Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
+strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protégé
+of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.
+
+No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
+niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.
+
+"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
+whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
+in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
+appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
+Gluck, _née_ Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
+may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
+or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
+to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
+previous bequests,'"
+
+None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
+married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
+operatic warfare.
+
+Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
+niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
+Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
+by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played,
+_con amore_, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
+his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of
+November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
+home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
+take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
+sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
+Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
+leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
+carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
+before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
+when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
+wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
+compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand _Fine_. But now
+he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.
+
+On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
+the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
+at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
+back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
+the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
+farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
+him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
+hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
+whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
+have procured,--indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
+eleven thousand florins,--outlived him less than three years, dying
+March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
+her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:
+
+"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
+Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
+the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."
+
+
+ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR
+
+During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
+partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
+wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and
+other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
+notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
+not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
+curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
+"Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
+book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
+ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
+frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's
+first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who
+kiss and tell."
+
+
+THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
+upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
+the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.
+
+The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
+way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
+the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
+his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
+consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
+made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
+mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
+not a genius of the first order.
+
+But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
+intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
+beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
+been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
+inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
+Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
+biographer Ginguené says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
+beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
+study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
+and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
+for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
+which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
+He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
+the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
+every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
+the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
+husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and
+I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara
+Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art,
+so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."
+
+In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support
+of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protégé,
+Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like
+Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and
+kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of
+Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
+happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
+Piccinni's home life.
+
+"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
+tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born
+that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him
+tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in
+dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene
+himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
+indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
+a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter"
+[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"
+
+The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling
+conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely
+than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December
+day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest
+daughter, aged eighteen. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
+to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
+country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
+quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
+to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
+work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
+these intrigues."
+
+In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
+"Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
+He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
+and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
+perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
+so good a man merited.
+
+Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
+his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered
+the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna,
+Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.
+
+He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must
+be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution
+broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
+the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
+where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
+everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
+had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
+whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
+brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
+dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.
+
+In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
+gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with
+pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
+Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
+without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
+as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
+eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
+Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested."
+So says Ginguené of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
+so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
+believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
+old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguené has this last picture
+of him:
+
+"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
+home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
+the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
+They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
+expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' _Lasciami, o ciel pietoso_!
+composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
+and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
+eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
+forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
+Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
+daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
+accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
+so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
+had animated him when he produced those sublime works."
+
+Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
+said that he was "_Cher aux Arts et à l'Amitie_." He left to his widow
+and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
+Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
+purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
+assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
+sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
+a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.
+
+Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
+to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
+but I do not find that he married. Salieri--whom Gluck assisted in the
+most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
+operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
+it was a success--was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
+him much affection. Méhul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
+married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
+a nephew.
+
+It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
+take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
+the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
+should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
+Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY--PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.
+
+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-god by
+his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fétis, Peri was
+very avaricious. Of noble 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 Schütz, 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
+passion, 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 Molière. His contract of marriage
+was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage,
+Fétis 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 Händel, 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 brandishing his bâton 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-être même indigne du tombeau."
+
+It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain rôles 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 crushing 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."
+
+Fétis 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, Händel, he attempted
+management, and like Händel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
+quite unlike the woman-hater Händel, he married his way out of poverty.
+In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership 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 Händel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
+Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess 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 destitution, from which the famous
+artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+MOZART
+
+As we come nearer to our own day, the documents 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 documents 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 attitude 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 constitute 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 assistance 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 God 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 God 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 God and myself. Please God 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 God that my opera may be successful."
+The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
+only fourteen years old!
+
+Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
+as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
+messages as these:
+
+"Don't, I entreat, forget about _the one other_, where no other can ever
+be."
+
+"Say to Fraulein W. von Mölk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg,
+in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the
+minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all
+about it."
+
+"Carissima Sorella,--Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi
+già sapete."
+
+"My dearest Sister,--I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to
+perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my
+reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in
+the most impressive and tender manner,--the most tender; and, oh,--but I
+need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to
+drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to
+Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before
+my eyes in her fascinating _négligé_. I have seen many pretty girls
+here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers." The
+daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his
+heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was "the magnet." And Wendling's
+daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.
+
+These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the
+father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous
+activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When,
+therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest
+in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing,
+and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was
+Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little
+ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.
+
+There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this
+letter to his father, dated 1777--he was born in 1756:
+
+"As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all
+this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and
+finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time
+known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the
+matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father
+on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the
+convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg."
+
+Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Bäsle, or
+cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a
+concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the
+daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with
+certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his
+father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation
+of visiting the town. He found her "pretty, intelligent, lovable,
+clever, and gay," and, like him, "rather inclined to be satirical."
+
+They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.
+His letters are full of that _possenhaften Jargon_ with which he
+sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name
+of Bäsle, with which he rhymes "Häsle," a colloquial word for "rabbit."
+His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes,
+puns, and quibbles, such as:
+
+"Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief--trief, welchen
+ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben--schaben.
+Desto besser, besser desto!"
+
+Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense
+if not literally the sense. This is a sample:
+
+"My dear Coz-Buzz:--I have safely received your precious
+epistle--thistle, and from it I perceive--achieve, that my
+aunt--gaunt, and you--shoe, are quite well--bell. I have
+to-day a letter--setter, from my papa--ah-ha, safe in my
+hands--sands."
+
+A week later he writes her a letter beginning:
+
+"My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!--Potz
+Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz
+Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
+Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans,
+Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons
+regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and
+villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls,
+and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such
+a packet and no portrait!"
+
+It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and
+it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have
+a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds,
+"Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing." It is certain that
+in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his
+kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this
+very letter, "love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease
+loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?
+
+"Je vous baise vos mains,--vôtre visage--afin, tout ce que vous me
+permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.
+
+His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
+met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy
+farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Bäsle."
+
+His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
+was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
+more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
+Aloysia Weber--of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
+him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
+dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:
+
+"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
+intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
+it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."
+
+A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
+letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:
+
+"You may think or believe that I have croaked (_crepirt_)
+or kicked the bucket (_verreckt_). But I beg you not to think
+so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"
+
+Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
+her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.
+
+In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
+Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
+frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
+absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
+should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I
+would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
+deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
+him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
+inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
+drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.
+
+And yet his flirtation with the Bäsle certainly went past mere bantering
+and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
+Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
+Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
+writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as--
+
+"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
+by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."
+
+With her name he puns on _Bäsle_ and _Bass_, thence, "_Bäschen oder
+Violoncellchen_"--a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
+says, to appease her "alluring beauty (_visibilia et invisibilia_)
+heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes
+her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
+circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
+neither beauty on her part nor art on his.
+
+This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
+business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
+which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
+mood. Biographer Jahn says:
+
+"The Bäsle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
+least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
+there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
+neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
+have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
+and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
+life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
+in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
+eighty-three."
+
+So much for the Bäsle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
+bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
+serious--for Mozart a very serious--affair, was his infatuation with
+Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
+heart.
+
+When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
+Bäsle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
+the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
+copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
+hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
+of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.
+
+The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
+Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
+gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
+was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
+Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
+Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:
+
+"He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she
+is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not
+for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a
+downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very
+reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,--five girls and
+a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the
+last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already
+done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer
+for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis
+she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages."
+
+He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who
+had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a
+disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The
+deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, "Friends
+who have no religion cannot long be our friends." Then, with man's usual
+consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break
+off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he
+wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter
+Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has
+written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy
+principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says,
+because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him
+greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial
+friend for Nannerl.
+
+Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his
+father he declares:
+
+"I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish
+is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be
+answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my
+recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty
+zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I
+don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what
+is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans."
+
+How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the
+postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying
+a slight touch of motherly jealousy:
+
+"No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang
+makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she
+does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own
+interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I
+don't wish him to know it."
+
+Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend
+who married for money and commenting:
+
+"I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but
+not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from
+love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other
+considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife
+after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his
+property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a
+wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a
+one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the
+contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife,
+for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can
+deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing
+more."
+
+Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the
+Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for
+fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to
+pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought
+of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame
+the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!
+
+Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and
+tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He
+asks him to decide whether he wishes to become "a commonplace artist
+whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom
+posterity will read years after in books,--whether, infatuated with a
+pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and
+children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian
+life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided
+for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of
+really great people. _Aut Caesar ant nihil_."
+
+Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in
+the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that
+his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother
+went to Paris.
+
+He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.
+Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.
+For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone
+there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in
+Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply
+concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure
+her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this,
+however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the
+star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.
+
+What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.
+The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's
+tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.
+But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the
+favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be
+held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence
+she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It
+was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other
+who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to
+love elsewhere.
+
+When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and
+dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with
+black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of
+her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal
+German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake
+once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself
+upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, "Ich
+lass das Mädel gern das mich nicht will,"--which you might translate,
+"Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me." It was on Christmas Day
+that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the
+Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took
+it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend
+he locked himself in a room and wept for days.
+
+Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair
+before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and
+his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have
+answered with rebuking him for his foolish "dreams of pleasure." To this
+ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:
+
+"What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up
+dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not
+often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure--peaceful dreams, sweet,
+cheering dreams, if you will--dreams which, if realised, would have
+rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable."
+
+In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his
+cousin the Bäsle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich,
+followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.
+
+As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the
+greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She
+married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to
+Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after,
+Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The
+lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least,
+Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, "Otherwise
+he would hardly have taken the rôle of Pierrot in the pantomime in which
+his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin."
+
+Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: "Neither happiness nor riches
+brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from
+the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman,
+and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she
+liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the
+brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to
+revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any
+intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her
+freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her
+readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion
+of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into
+her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years
+of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from
+her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto
+regarded her was no longer the same."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth,
+there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so
+sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her
+youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his
+readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities
+belong exclusively to the historian.
+
+The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a
+prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the
+part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop
+was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious
+Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a
+declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long
+in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at
+the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to
+present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally
+kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but
+seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation
+only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that
+it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count
+Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count
+went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.
+
+The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the
+humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken
+heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of
+course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that
+the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to
+punch the critic's head.
+
+Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that
+he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was
+so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those
+who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit
+to the artist and his art.
+
+Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The
+emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the
+composition of his "Die Entführung aus dem Serail." In the first moment
+of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and
+sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the
+household of the Webers?--now more than ever in poverty since the good
+father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new
+engagement.
+
+The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
+series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
+gentleness.
+
+"What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
+fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
+love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
+indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
+is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
+opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
+is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
+kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so."
+
+A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
+a strange hand as follows:
+
+  "Your good son has just been summoned by Countess
+  Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear
+  father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you
+  know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be
+  without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.
+  I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable
+  to you as what your son would have written. I beg
+  my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your
+  obedient friend,
+
+  "CONSTANZE WEBER."
+
+
+This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
+Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
+or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
+fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
+fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
+improvisations.
+
+The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
+friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
+alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
+Wolfgang should move at once.
+
+Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
+gossip that he is to marry Constanze--ridiculous gossip, he calls it.
+
+"I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
+whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
+I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
+(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
+morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
+house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
+I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives."
+
+Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
+daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
+According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
+Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
+predicament--a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:
+
+"She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,--I am
+to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But,
+worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was
+a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it--by her
+beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came
+later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things--I was
+obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth
+in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more
+loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she
+began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she
+took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what
+you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are
+to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a
+face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always
+laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms
+it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage
+me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take
+advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but
+only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is
+nothing but an amorous fool."
+
+Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from
+prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved
+frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved
+the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he
+was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with
+Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and
+this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything
+but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a
+well-behaved and conscientious man.
+
+He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his
+father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze.
+But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon
+tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he
+plighted his troth with her.
+
+He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news
+to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint
+of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was
+satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:
+
+"My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the
+closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have
+opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded,
+from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although
+merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at
+present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with
+what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live--and to marry! You
+are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father,
+to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you
+must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very
+well-grounded reasons they are.
+
+"My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do.
+In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love
+for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive
+any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to
+domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been
+in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I
+think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am
+forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I
+possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a
+wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous
+expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only
+half of life.
+
+"But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat
+you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,--not
+Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with
+such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle,
+coarse, and deceitful--crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange
+(Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is
+still too young to have her character defined,--she is merely a good
+humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!
+
+"The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the
+martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest
+hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes
+charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh!
+my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all
+the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the
+same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair
+of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has
+enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife
+and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she
+can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She
+dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart
+in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if
+I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure
+some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of),
+and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this
+poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as
+Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest
+father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours.
+Pray, have compassion on your son."
+
+
+This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had
+a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had
+carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander
+about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about
+Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into
+signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart
+writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful
+light:
+
+
+"You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian
+stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies
+and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports,
+such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I
+would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became
+very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result
+was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he
+insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her
+daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing.
+What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or
+renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his
+beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst
+interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was
+in this form:
+
+"'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three
+years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I
+change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300
+florins.'
+
+"Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew
+that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could
+never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be
+too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as
+I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.
+
+"But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She
+desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear
+Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.'
+She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me."
+
+
+The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart
+does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not
+have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze.
+Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame
+Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the
+rôle of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart
+as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that,
+whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married.
+Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the
+affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a
+little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything
+worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to
+Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is,
+at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has
+evolved a little model:
+
+"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:--I never should have been so bold as to
+yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had
+not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do
+so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least,
+with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of
+Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I
+have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you
+as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you
+for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly
+deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you
+mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I
+may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE
+WEBER.
+
+"My compliments to your papa."
+
+With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is
+small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition
+of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One
+feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which
+she so carefully guarded,--Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved
+any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the
+social diversions of Vienna society at that time.
+
+"VIENNA, April 29, 1782.
+
+"MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:--You still, I hope, allow me to give you
+this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be
+your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to
+be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly
+as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In
+spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat
+refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with
+me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it
+seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore,
+so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I
+love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh
+well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being
+displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a
+game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by
+a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a
+thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many
+things to be considered besides,--whether only intimate friends and
+acquaintances are present,--whether you are a child, or a girl old
+enough to be married,--but, above all, whether you are with people of
+much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness
+[Waldstädten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she
+is a _passée_ elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and
+is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never
+lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife.
+But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct
+would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you
+will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This
+will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like
+you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling,
+then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind:
+My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling
+of her honest and kindly disposed,
+
+"MOZART."
+
+This letter seems to have ended the quarrel--the only one we know of
+their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart
+implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also
+that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and
+fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply
+absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly
+dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his
+ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in
+every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze
+are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints
+that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her
+without it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast
+in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldstädten had been touched by the
+troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for
+some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely
+in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she
+insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.
+
+When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not
+return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove
+Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between
+the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness
+wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000
+gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage
+portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of
+publishing the banns.
+
+Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the
+wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent
+however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance
+and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.
+
+There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious
+remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the
+contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to
+take money into account.
+
+Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account
+of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first
+opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. "No one attended the
+marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth
+in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the
+bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my
+wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on
+seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted
+of a supper, which Baroness Waldstädten gave us, and indeed it was more
+princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful
+at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake--ay, my very
+life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really
+know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled,
+honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."
+
+Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion--this wedlock of
+the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married
+in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty
+that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of
+these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is
+gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of
+the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for
+refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal
+congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.
+
+Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but
+we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been
+poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its
+presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing
+together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a
+detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to
+counterbalance the affection each found in each.
+
+As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have
+availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way
+in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of
+bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably
+have made him produce greater compositions--for no greater compositions
+than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced
+by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without
+conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness
+or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.
+
+The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart
+used to refer to his elopement as "Die Entführung aus dem Auge Gottes,"
+as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible,
+"Die Entführung aus dem Serail." It is a curious coincidence that the
+name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that
+she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the
+wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the
+height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a
+welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a
+cherished friend.
+
+Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It
+continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up
+his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might
+cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear
+his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for
+permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband,
+genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.
+
+All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the
+most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of
+putting his fingers to his lips and saying "Psst!" to any one who
+entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being
+spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips
+and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early,
+before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this:
+"_Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich wünsche, dass Du gut geschlafen
+habest_" etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling
+wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you
+will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too
+much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over
+the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household
+worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home
+at--o'clock punctually."
+
+Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in
+this tone:
+
+"Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended
+mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I
+found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by
+her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other,
+and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not
+forsake us."
+
+They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is
+not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of
+her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father
+and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the
+weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes
+to his father that his wife "carries about a little silhouette of you,
+which she kisses twenty times a day at least." His letters are full of
+little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the
+evening until seven in the morning,--a game of skittles of which
+Constanze was especially fond,--a concert where Aloysia sang with great
+success an aria Mozart wrote for her,--and financial troubles of the
+most petty and annoying sort.
+
+In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to
+the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either
+"Leopold" or "Leopoldine," according as fate decided. Fate decided that
+the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to
+Salzburg, for a visit.
+
+But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a
+success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a
+creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in
+Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed
+not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, "the
+poor little fat baby" died after six months of life.
+
+There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial
+troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance
+and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but
+there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief
+of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited
+them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.
+
+Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can
+be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous,
+beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though
+not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a
+reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's
+devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a
+breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's
+ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions
+from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! "He loved her
+dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she
+requited him with tenderness and true solicitude."
+
+She always said, "One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him,
+since he was himself so good."
+
+Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child
+lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the
+third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, "His
+wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious."
+
+In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the
+depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first
+lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had
+captured a widower of means and position.
+
+Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was
+away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness
+and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided
+that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources
+and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually
+dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the
+court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince
+Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical
+will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid
+pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that
+time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common
+diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most
+loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:
+
+"At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive
+to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may
+find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [_O
+Gott! mache meine Wünsche wahr!_] After receiving my letter, you must
+write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I
+shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [_ich
+bin Dich von ganzem Herzen küssend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart_] I am,
+kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,
+
+MOZART."
+
+_"Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre santé, si précieuse a votre époux."_
+In his next, three days later, he says:
+
+"MY DARLING WIFE:--Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell
+you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh.
+For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless
+you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas,
+Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it
+slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now!
+[_Nu--nu--nu--nu!_] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant
+word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse,
+sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the
+world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each
+other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you,
+and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love
+you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your
+fondly loving husband."
+
+Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his "_liebstes
+bestes Weibchen_" an account of his activities:
+
+"After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to
+me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my
+beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and
+over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read
+it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your
+letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.
+
+"Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:
+
+"1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of
+yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you
+will not go out to walk alone,--indeed, it would be better not to walk
+at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not
+written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before
+me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in
+your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be
+angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still
+better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish
+you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best
+beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with
+your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O _stru!
+stru!_ I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give
+you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever
+your most faithful husband and friend."
+
+Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a
+list of the letters he had written to his wife--eleven in all (one of
+them in French)--between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly
+that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet
+to add, seeing how poor they were:
+
+"My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than
+in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700,
+florins,--at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left
+me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place,
+Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so
+low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request--you know why. 4th. My
+concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so
+I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must
+be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be
+in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between
+ourselves."
+
+His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was
+embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon
+his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to
+despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging
+letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.
+
+Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to
+set forth again. He writes again to his _Herzens Weibchen_ or his
+_Herzaller-liebstes_ with renewed hope:
+
+"I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall
+then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall
+lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be
+placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with
+me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your
+loving Mozart.
+
+"P.S.--While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But
+now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about--Quick!
+catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are."
+
+This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he
+went.
+
+In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her
+health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and
+taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze
+was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot
+water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be
+worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of
+his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have
+not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more
+vivid to leave in the original:
+
+"MA TRÈS-CHÈRE ÉPOUSE:--J'écris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au
+Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; où j'ai couché cette nuit
+excellement--et j'espère que ma chère épouse aura passé cette nuit aussi
+bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que
+m'apprendra comme vous avez passé le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je
+pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de
+tomber sur l'escalier en sortant--et je me trouve entre l'espérance et
+la crainte--une situation bien désagréable! Si vous n'éties pas grosse,
+je craignerais moins--mais abandonons cette idée triste!--Le ciel aura
+eu certainement soin de ma chère Stanza Maria!...
+
+"I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are
+well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me
+to-day--but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
+my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
+have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
+like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
+it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
+2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
+sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr--du nun mir--nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
+zu immer mehr--und mehr--endlich sagen wir;--es ist wagen
+Slampi--Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
+ebben die Comodität. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."
+
+It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
+familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
+Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
+her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
+her if informed.
+
+It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
+domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdämmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
+grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
+almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
+that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
+first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
+later discarded after Köchel, another biographer, had succeeded in
+proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
+death. Hofdämmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
+he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
+however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
+who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
+1789--90. She sang in his "Entführung," and it was said that his friends
+had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
+idea.
+
+Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
+Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
+received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
+Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
+Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
+could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
+writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died,
+Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
+when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful
+friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking,
+young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."
+
+Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
+suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
+but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
+had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
+physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
+overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
+at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.
+
+After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
+leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
+Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
+solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
+last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
+even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
+to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
+When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:
+
+"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
+comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"
+
+Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
+door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
+and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
+for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these
+unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.
+
+After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
+would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
+applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
+unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
+1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
+the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!
+
+Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
+windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
+herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
+thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief
+was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
+to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
+to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
+friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
+sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
+pauper's grave, three corpses deep.
+
+It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
+She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
+identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
+sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
+and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.
+
+There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
+Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
+speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
+remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."
+
+For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
+biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
+highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
+love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
+there is a superfluity of proof.
+
+After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
+was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
+granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
+her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
+paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
+took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
+Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
+only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
+as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
+her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
+biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of
+Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
+he left fatherless and penniless.
+
+For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
+ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
+she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
+councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the
+education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in
+Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of
+this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it
+revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to
+Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her
+affections.
+
+There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic
+biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and
+enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of
+Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and
+Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a
+portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most
+beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle
+unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of
+Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."
+
+She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:
+
+"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"
+
+Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or
+her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius,
+and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she
+says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate
+love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828."
+What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to
+one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?
+
+When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was,
+according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband--an
+eminent musician--both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict
+of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau
+Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She
+was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his
+memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.
+
+"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most
+of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally
+cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes
+pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one
+in heaven now."
+
+Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in
+March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.
+
+Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
+for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
+sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
+tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
+Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
+the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
+thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
+it, his success and his immortality."
+
+So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
+Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
+well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet
+in utter disregard."
+
+Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
+or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
+He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
+ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
+self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal
+epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
+Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
+fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
+roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.
+
+A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
+and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
+women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.
+
+Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Händel, despised the pleasures of the
+table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love
+the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
+died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
+Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to
+have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
+neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
+her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
+intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
+had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.
+
+Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
+charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the café where
+Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
+Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
+whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
+Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
+ditties. Then came Fräulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
+Wertherlike fashion.
+
+Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna,
+at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
+in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
+where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
+hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
+each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."
+
+To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
+Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the
+tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
+Beethoven."
+
+There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
+and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very
+ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.
+
+An army captain cut him out with Fräulein d'Honrath; his good friend
+Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schöne und hochgebildete"
+Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
+she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
+Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
+beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fräulein Thérèse
+von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
+"volatile Thérèse who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von
+Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my
+dearest Thérèse; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
+Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin
+Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the
+well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
+pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fräulein
+Roeckel.
+
+The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdödy (_née_ Countess Niczky) is listed
+among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a
+friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an
+apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
+servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required
+bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a ménage could not last,
+as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
+easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her
+certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
+temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
+letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as
+"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gräfin," showing that she was his dearie to
+the fourth power.
+
+Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a
+twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
+in 1812, Beethoven says:
+
+"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
+even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
+of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
+gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
+myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
+companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
+of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
+more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
+foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
+part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
+to Amalie a right ardent kiss--if nobody there can see."
+
+In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
+album of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie").
+The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:
+
+  "Ludwig van Beethoven:
+  Who even if you would
+  Forget you never should."
+
+In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
+from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent
+passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
+affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
+lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:
+
+"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
+will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
+may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
+me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
+pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
+here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
+me of your attachment to your friend,
+
+"BEETHOVEN."
+
+There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
+called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion
+to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
+Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
+the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.
+
+It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the
+far-away love" _[An die ferne Geliebte],_ according to Thayer; and of
+her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
+none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."
+
+Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
+had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
+his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
+impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as
+ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
+could never get her out of his mind.
+
+In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
+devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.
+
+Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
+from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Müller. And there was a poetess
+who also annoyed him.
+
+In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful
+and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
+1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
+inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817--he being then
+forty-seven years old--the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
+who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son
+later asserted that it was only a kinship of "artistic sympathy,"--in
+fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his
+brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
+she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
+Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
+acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
+to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
+said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
+that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
+scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
+Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
+to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
+it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
+fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
+Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
+to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
+recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
+Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
+life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
+her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."
+
+Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
+always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
+"promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a
+handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
+mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
+Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
+lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
+respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
+to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
+were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
+was a cook.
+
+Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for
+female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
+met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
+and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
+observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
+generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
+conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
+him longest, and most seriously of all--namely, seven whole months!"
+
+Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
+Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
+piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions--
+"_amoroso," "a malinconico_" and the like.
+
+Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
+the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
+one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
+capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
+discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
+repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
+the head of the suggester of the mischief.
+
+Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as _"postillon
+d'amour"_ by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.
+
+Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
+dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
+inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
+Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake "der Verliebte." Other
+"gewidmets" were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
+Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdödy, von Brunswick,
+Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea
+Cäcilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.
+
+All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
+and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
+Juan's conquests, "but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve." I find I have
+catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
+one). And more are to come.
+
+And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
+Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was
+never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
+passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand,
+chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
+adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in
+Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
+however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
+acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
+without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer
+takes a middle ground,--that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
+grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
+while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
+endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
+him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
+and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.
+
+Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
+he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
+say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
+what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
+was no Fräulein Androcles to take it away.
+
+Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
+aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
+early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
+says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
+Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
+of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
+mute image of her that my fancy paints."
+
+This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
+his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
+no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
+wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
+friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.
+
+And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
+began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
+nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
+communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
+said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.
+
+The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
+the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
+themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
+this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
+bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
+his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
+trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
+that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.
+
+To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
+longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
+glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
+two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
+whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
+of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)--"_alla damigella contessa
+Giulietta Guicciardi."_ It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
+eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
+sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
+passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
+Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
+Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
+his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
+her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.
+
+It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
+inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:
+
+"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
+more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
+intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
+deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
+from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
+you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
+fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
+again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
+what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
+my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
+I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
+compassed half the world with my art--I must do it still. There exists
+for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
+will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."
+
+But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
+sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
+father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
+Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
+afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
+which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her,
+more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
+scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'étais bien aimé d'elle, et plus
+que jamais son époux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
+méprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as
+well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
+things?"
+
+Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
+three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
+in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
+his "unsterbliche Geliebte." They were written in pencil, and either
+were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
+passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
+in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
+with a few literalising changes:
+
+"My angel, my all, my self--only a few words to-day, and they with a
+pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
+to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
+grief when Necessity decides?--can our love exist without sacrifices,
+and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
+you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
+beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
+demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
+toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
+for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
+as I should.
+
+"My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
+yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
+another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
+warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
+but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
+broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
+and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
+wayside. Esterházy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
+eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
+which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
+I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
+again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
+during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
+ever, none of these would occur to me.
+
+"My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
+moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
+Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
+rest the gods must ordain--what must and shall become of us.
+
+"Your faithful LUDWIG."
+
+"Monday Evening, July 6th.
+
+"You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
+be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
+post goes to K----from here.
+
+"You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
+shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
+Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
+there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve--the
+servility of man towards his fellow man--it pains me--and when I regard
+myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
+the greatest?--and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
+weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
+probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
+fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
+at these baths, I must now go to rest." [A few words are here effaced by
+Beethoven himself.] "Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
+celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?"
+
+
+"Good Morning, July 7th.
+
+"Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
+Beloved!--now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
+whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
+all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
+your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
+unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
+will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
+my heart--never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
+loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
+made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
+life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
+relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
+so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
+for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
+contemplation of our existence. Be calm--love me--to-day--yesterday--
+what longings with tears for you--you! you!--my life!--my all! Farewell!
+Oh! love me well--and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.
+
+"Ever thine.
+
+"Ever mine.
+
+"Ever each other's."
+
+These impassioned letters to his "immortal beloved" were believed by
+Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
+in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
+Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
+could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
+Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
+life he hoped to share.
+
+Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
+been another Thérèse, the Countess Thérèse von Brunswick. She was the
+cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Thérèse
+"adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
+"Kiss your sister Thérèse," and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
+Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
+Thérèse, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ça va sans
+dire_!--" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
+character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
+words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
+she did not dare?
+
+Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
+more definite to Thayer's argument--if one is to believe a book I
+stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
+the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
+truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
+Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Thérèse well for many
+years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
+her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable
+woman I have ever known."
+
+"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
+Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
+in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
+her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
+because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
+beatified spirit."
+
+He told Fräulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Thérèse and
+Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
+he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
+the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
+but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
+obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
+her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
+bareheaded into the storm.
+
+Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
+"Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them,
+she rushed after him--she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
+a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
+give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
+ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Thérèse's
+diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maître," "mon maître chéri."
+
+She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
+her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
+saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that
+beautiful horrible Beethoven--if it were not such a come-down." She did
+not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.
+
+The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
+dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
+Thérèse. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
+of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:
+
+"I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
+the flower growing by the way."
+
+It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
+Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
+Thérèse's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
+thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
+delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
+of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
+furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
+snapped the bond with Thérèse. As she herself told Fräulein Tenger, "The
+word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
+frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled."
+
+Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Thérèse
+had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
+love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
+her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
+art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
+He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
+"immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
+betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
+Thérèse, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
+Fräulein Tenger:
+
+"I have read it so often that I know it by heart--like a poem--and was
+it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
+loved thee,' and thank God for it."
+
+She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
+on it an inscription from Ludwig:
+
+"L'immortelle à son Immortelle. LUIGI."
+
+
+These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
+that it be placed under her head in her coffin.
+
+When Fräulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
+asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
+Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
+long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
+her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
+reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.
+
+Thérèse von Brunswick was Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," and the
+picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
+when Thérèse was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
+the words:
+
+"To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from
+
+T.B."
+
+The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
+Museum at Pesth is a bust of Thérèse in her later years, erected in her
+honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
+school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
+pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
+muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
+was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.
+
+Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Thérèse's portrait and
+muttering: "Thou wast too noble--too like an angel." The baron withdrew
+silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
+mood. He explained: "My good angel has appeared to me."
+
+In 1813 he wrote in his diary:
+
+"What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
+longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
+longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
+and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!"
+
+And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
+he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
+life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
+and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.
+
+But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
+Gleichenstein:
+
+"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one--one who may
+perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
+must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
+could, I should fall in love with myself."
+
+One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
+fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:
+
+"Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
+who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
+own."
+
+Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
+individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
+And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
+Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
+of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
+indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
+best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:
+
+"For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
+become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
+thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess."
+
+To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
+Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
+publication after her death, adds the words: "I will not repeat my
+answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
+made his life unhappy."
+
+Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
+of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
+of fate?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+  "Though thou hast now offended like a man.
+  Do not persever in it like a devil;
+  Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul,
+  If sin by custom grow not into nature."
+
+  Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"
+
+
+Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the
+life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.
+For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake
+the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any
+such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last
+the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of
+frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their
+confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly
+find surpassed outside of Dickens.
+
+The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We
+have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which
+Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of
+Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a
+strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his
+orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought
+home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many
+musicians have earned distinction as soldiers--what, indeed, would the
+soldiers do without music?
+
+Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position
+of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful
+daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he
+used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his
+large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the
+neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he
+decided that his large family should help in its own support, and
+dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her
+fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later.
+Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though
+he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von
+Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that
+the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to
+realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a
+musical genius into the world.
+
+While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once
+more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his "Weber's
+Company of Comedians." Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself
+about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her
+health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and
+consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton
+was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.
+
+Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into
+the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music,
+though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's
+character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial
+life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his
+relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his
+first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:
+
+"Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the
+sixth year of his age; Nüremberg, the 10th of September, 1792." We
+hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was
+seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into
+dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, "through
+carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice
+spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling." The intoxicating draught of
+pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the
+ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female
+beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His
+teacher, Abbé Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at
+the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a
+sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with
+him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through
+his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for
+himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:
+
+"Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its
+walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale,
+slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst
+his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an
+unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This
+woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple
+were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young
+Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the
+feeling next akin."
+
+"That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very
+clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his
+slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties
+nigh equal to her own."
+
+Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of
+his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a
+Fräulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of Würtemberg, who
+took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical
+director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning
+Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he
+secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother,
+Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of Würtemberg, a monster of
+corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he
+might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable
+figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.
+
+"Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown,
+plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was
+known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the
+chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price
+were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the
+times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the
+government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was
+'Après moi, le deluge!'" The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift,
+and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor
+Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head
+the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron
+Max:
+
+"The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent
+king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his
+arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired
+incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his
+favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas
+vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,--would have been
+inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an
+autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But
+there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it
+did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.
+
+"Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed
+daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink
+bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in
+thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer
+the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to
+hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.
+
+"The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the
+utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was
+nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of
+Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he
+had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met
+him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the
+court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the
+door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently
+assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she
+stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed
+her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated
+monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the
+spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.
+
+"To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it
+must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed
+sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art
+during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated
+old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common
+door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808,
+composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser
+Leben.'
+
+"The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young
+man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the
+king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison
+cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated
+monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to
+himself."
+
+Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a
+university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts,
+with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men,
+who called themselves by the gentle name of "Faust's Ride to Hell." He
+now began also the composition of an opera, "Sylvana." This brought him
+into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of
+that "coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang."
+
+"To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would
+have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised
+circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump
+seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her
+undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly
+humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She
+became the central point of all his life and aspirations."
+
+Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl
+away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the
+money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and
+reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on
+Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen
+played Antony.
+
+The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father,
+who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his
+beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased
+luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay
+off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal
+of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in
+the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had
+been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the
+increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a
+reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's
+household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be
+concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him
+arrested during a rehearsal of his opera "Sylvana," and had him thrown
+into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was
+nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released
+from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt,
+and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage
+and driven across the border to exile.
+
+This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of
+disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of,
+and every mention of it was forbidden.
+
+Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an
+occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete
+laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally
+settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible,
+in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless
+legs, of which he writes: "And, oh, my calves, they might have done
+honour to a poodle!"
+
+Eight months after his banishment, his opera "Sylvana" was produced at
+Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of
+Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At
+Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers.
+They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties
+exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple
+flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became "All women
+are good for nothing" ("_Alle Weiber taugen nichts_"), which he used so
+often that he abbreviated it to "A.W.T.N." In the columns of his
+account-book he was provoked to write: "A. coquettes with me, though she
+knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid
+stories of her, and says I must not go home with her." He took a journey
+to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart
+long enough to inspire him to the scene in "Athalie," and to his song,
+"The Artist's Declaration of Love." He wandered here and there, for
+about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:
+
+"Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet,
+insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing
+figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting
+the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person
+uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with
+indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits
+and deep depression,--in all ways he resembled a figure from some
+romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of
+German art."
+
+In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to
+the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart;
+one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was
+Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several
+children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine,
+plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no
+improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this
+entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of
+exposure and its writhing humiliation:
+
+"He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which
+seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and
+reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the
+cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to
+conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark;
+excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in
+a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the
+slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh
+dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.
+
+"The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless
+husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination
+for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held
+out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.
+
+"The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in
+her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers,
+balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to
+discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would
+be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave.
+Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain,
+frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business
+for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she
+desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would
+receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes,
+when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed
+him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would
+cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right
+to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in
+every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling
+ever present--'How will she receive me?'
+
+"Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the
+lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again,
+but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on
+him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his
+better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A
+fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is
+lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful
+explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This
+reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt
+better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the
+happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near
+me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is
+mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but
+I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own
+heart, and work--work--work!'" It was in the fall of 1813--_prosit
+omen!_--that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still
+clinging to her whom the biographer calls "the rotten plant," and wrote
+in a note-book: "I found Calina with Thérèse, and I could scarcely
+conceal the fearful rage that burned in me." Or an elegy like this: "No
+joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow."
+
+Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Thérèse's birthday, Carl
+presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of
+trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets,
+something very rare and costly in Prague--oysters. Thérèse
+glanced--merely glanced--at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.
+Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure
+a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: "On a sudden the scales
+fell from his eyes." Ought he not rather have said, the shells?
+
+Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even
+music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.
+Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the
+Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the
+frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him
+casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to
+writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had
+more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she
+had formerly been _insouciante_ and amused at his pain, her pain hurt
+him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a
+leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away,
+he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps
+embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had
+reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new
+leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no
+means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while
+happiness.
+
+In the year 1810 his opera "Sylvana" had been sung, as I have said, with
+Caroline Brandt in the title rôle. When, in 1813, he was given the
+direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of
+the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner
+experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this
+same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be
+"at liberty," as they say.
+
+Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the
+daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight.
+She is described as "small and plump in figure, with beautiful,
+expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in
+her movements." She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified
+with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine
+skill, "her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible." She did
+not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January,
+1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Thérèse Brunetti in a fresher
+edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The
+oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the _coup de disgrâce_.
+
+Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt
+suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the
+head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow
+to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother,
+and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the
+stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a
+certain banker, saying: "He is worth the trouble, for he is rich."
+
+Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to
+keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we
+have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to
+the baths in Friedland.
+
+Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and
+her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not
+hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But
+what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have
+heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when
+Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left
+behind "a sweet, beloved being who might--who may--make me happy." "The
+absence of three months shall test our love." They wrote each other long
+and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled
+with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, "a sweet poison harmful to the
+soul."
+
+After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d
+in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague.
+He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's "Leier
+und Schwert." These choruses for men were sung throughout the
+Fatherland, as they still are sung.
+
+But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living
+voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little
+hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous
+enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving
+from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.
+
+Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could
+have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of
+herself and her career and her large following among the public was a
+deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice
+her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at
+last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream,
+and break their troth.
+
+In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a
+drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to
+Gansbacher, "I see now that her views of high art are not above the
+usual pitiful standard--namely, that art is but a means of procuring
+soup, meat, and shirts." To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more
+solemnly:
+
+"All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken
+man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason
+would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my
+heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last
+chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,--marry
+perhaps some day,--who knows? But love and trust again, never more."
+
+In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in
+person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the
+subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of
+marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and
+her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself
+would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day
+bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.
+Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.
+But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion
+of stage marriages.
+
+Even his patriotic songs, "The Lyre and the Sword," were a cause of
+disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and
+her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him
+her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the
+Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running,
+Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress,
+Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and
+make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the
+two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl
+who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.
+
+How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from
+the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of
+his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and
+continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute
+descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him
+with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his
+spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.
+
+At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the
+eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said
+she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced
+that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This
+blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he
+could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the
+blow so long:
+
+"Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow
+again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish
+than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back
+in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then
+acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest
+life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have
+woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care.
+Forgive me for my excess of love--forgive the passion that may have torn
+many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed--forgive me all
+the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will
+of mine--forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your
+precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I
+but buy it back for you.... Farewell--farewell."
+
+
+On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline
+was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too
+much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must
+frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her,
+she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.
+
+Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the
+autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze
+blended; their hands blended; the war was over.
+
+Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music
+began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his
+health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her
+house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of
+Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was
+hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for
+Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance.
+Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a
+curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just
+after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the
+darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.
+
+On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover,
+a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as
+Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.
+
+At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl
+assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a
+subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the
+world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto
+based on the old national legend, "Der Freischütz." Kind, the
+librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great
+enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it
+back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and
+her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for
+cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious
+old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and
+wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:
+
+"Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular
+element. Begin with the scene before the tavern." This seemed
+outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took
+it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book
+completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to
+her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes." Would to heaven, that
+there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner
+concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!
+
+Meanwhile, during the composition of "Der Freischütz," which was to mean
+so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera
+generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was
+spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring
+than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his
+bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of
+"chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and
+mustard-pot."
+
+She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating
+soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his
+duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her
+success in the "Magic Flute:"
+
+"I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberflöte,' but you know I
+hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your
+satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be
+only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench,
+and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking,
+I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar
+of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?"
+
+In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with
+his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline,
+who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the
+travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in
+Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of
+Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long
+and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his
+advice. Her savings were quite swept away.
+
+But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had
+in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and
+fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that
+Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love
+for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress
+he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.
+
+Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of "Der
+Freischütz." The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet
+between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed,
+through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw
+Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every
+note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over
+what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This
+spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have
+rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of
+art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the
+artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the
+composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual
+presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an
+accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters,
+painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the
+kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The
+longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which
+he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was
+driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent
+on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by
+coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married.
+Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though
+her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts
+here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal
+commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty
+forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and
+at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played
+the guitar.
+
+Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new
+home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in
+perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year
+1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there
+were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and
+training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and
+solemnity.
+
+"The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the
+blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the
+power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour
+and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!"
+
+As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in
+the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a
+_Haus-frau._ She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound,
+reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute
+care with which she kept all her "account-books, housekeeping-books,
+cellar-books." Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household
+became a dove-cote!
+
+The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and
+Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high
+favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally
+attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with
+unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though
+Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of
+desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought
+home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a
+signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a
+permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.
+
+Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two
+sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised
+accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and
+hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a
+country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose
+society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a
+starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.
+
+On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was
+dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health,
+always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be
+about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition
+of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his
+firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent
+into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and "the unhappy
+couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!'
+to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night,
+each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might
+not hear."
+
+Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on
+the final ebb--the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal
+tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable
+optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour.
+They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost
+unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could
+not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion
+fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was
+stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the
+baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place
+again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg,
+Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a
+mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her
+daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their
+married life.
+
+Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more
+into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for
+her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other
+hand, hated them. But Weber said:
+
+"There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I
+relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster."
+
+The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, "Ce
+n'est pas que la première huitre qui coute." Afterward Weber would
+groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?"
+
+In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at
+Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was
+given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischütz," in which
+Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two,
+was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious
+beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician
+has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every
+one looked for the composer, who was "sitting in a dark corner of his
+wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy."
+
+When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined
+by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to
+be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An
+accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving
+Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one
+who should disturb his wishes.
+
+Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when
+his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever.
+One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he
+turned pale and sighed: "God's will be done."
+
+From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early
+death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When "Der
+Freischütz" was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl
+arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news
+of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave
+Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened
+in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his
+affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many
+tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:
+
+"I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life.
+Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be
+in that which gives you joy too."
+
+From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always
+tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the
+fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two
+children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave
+them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the
+grave that yawned just before his weary feet.
+
+It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against
+fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl
+Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he
+jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before
+uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with
+him.
+
+"They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every
+wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I
+can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or
+turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome."
+
+In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.
+"I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve," he wrote, "But that I
+never cease to do. All my labours are for you--all my joy is with you."
+"Can I but be with you on New Year's eve," he wrote again, with that
+tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character,
+"I shall be with you all the year."
+
+Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to
+whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from
+pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease;
+hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt
+that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with
+aching heart in the biography:
+
+"To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to
+London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no,
+I must. Money must be made for my family--money, man. I am going to
+London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright,
+cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freischütz,'
+was already dead and gone.
+
+"Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most
+punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end
+rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his
+last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure
+the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.
+During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully
+changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find
+strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice
+was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.
+
+"In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of
+which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the
+charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill,
+good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'
+
+"And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel
+agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small
+remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She
+manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to
+renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to
+this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.
+
+"'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
+I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
+father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
+be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
+more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
+God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'
+
+"The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
+bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
+time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
+see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
+man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children--another
+long lingering kiss--the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
+carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs--the door was closed--and he
+rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
+shattered chest might almost burst at once.
+
+"Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
+'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'
+
+"At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
+horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
+voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
+and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
+fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
+as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
+repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
+sorrow."
+
+Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
+whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
+the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
+weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
+personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
+"Der Freischütz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
+always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.
+
+His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
+seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
+to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
+the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
+worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
+was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he
+cried:
+
+"Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is
+shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold
+together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!" His
+effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she
+wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long
+away, he answered:
+
+"Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to
+him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after
+day."
+
+"God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!" he wrote once more. "I count
+days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted
+before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible
+yearning I have never known before."
+
+At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his
+wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing
+his home again.
+
+At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and
+furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody,
+but, as his son writes:
+
+"At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting
+genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss
+upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death--for
+the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more
+than the notes for the voice."
+
+Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes
+upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to
+his future.
+
+"This day week is my concert," he wrote on the 19th of May. "How my poor
+heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last
+chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all
+they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest
+expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail
+me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to
+us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on
+this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose
+of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for
+so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my
+life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are
+all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled."
+
+To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest
+itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the
+skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The
+enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the
+end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a
+complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:
+
+"What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!"
+
+His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife;
+still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to
+London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting
+homeward--homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as
+he had planned. He writes:
+
+"What should I do there? I cannot walk--I cannot speak. I will have
+nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better
+I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels,
+Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming
+journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half
+a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end
+of June I hope to be in your arms.
+
+"How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my
+joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my
+best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching."
+
+The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase
+souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so
+impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his
+starting.
+
+"I must go back to my own, I must!" he sobbed incessantly. "Let me see
+them once more--and then God's will be done." The attempt appeared
+impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's
+request to have a consultation of physicians. "Be it so," he answered.
+"But come of it what may, I go!"
+
+His only thought, his only word, was "Home!" On the 2d of June he wrote
+his last letter to his beloved,--the last lines his hand ever traced.
+"What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness
+to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer,
+it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to
+answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst
+you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one!
+Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves
+you above all, your Carl."
+
+He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he
+could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to
+be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal
+of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, "Now let me sleep."
+
+The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for
+hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had
+added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great
+benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking
+him in his grave,--the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!
+
+A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to
+be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the
+committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians
+volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music
+was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien
+land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to
+Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, Fürstenau:
+
+"It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made
+two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the
+noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they
+were orphaned. No wonder that Fürstenau had not the courage to address
+Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest
+friend, Fräulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to
+Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.
+
+"But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the
+impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a
+little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived
+close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels--had looked
+out--had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and
+disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her--she
+rushed toward the spot--she saw the two standing in the little garden,
+wringing their hands and weeping--she knew all--and she lay senseless at
+their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh
+forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the
+sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her
+swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a
+flood of tears."
+
+Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached
+the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to
+haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for
+the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The
+idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by
+the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of
+Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son,
+Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's
+body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of
+Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once
+would have meant so much: "Weber in Dresden."
+
+"In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the
+theatre, with Schröder-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and
+covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The
+torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two
+candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small,
+now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale
+young man knelt praying by her side."
+
+This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we
+owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love,
+strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this
+character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side
+convincing, complete, alive.
+
+Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and
+ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation
+amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle
+for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect
+of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have
+written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But,
+if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of
+music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of
+the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best
+managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and
+life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.
+
+Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater
+Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these
+words:
+
+"Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever
+distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
+German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
+child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
+Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
+German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
+warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart--and who shall blame
+us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
+part of our dear German soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
+man whose love affairs make tame reading.
+
+It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
+Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
+him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
+thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
+and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
+the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
+human lives go, one of complete felicity.
+
+Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
+if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
+so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
+that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
+described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
+his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
+remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
+and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
+children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
+degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
+fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
+Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony
+and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
+written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
+of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
+sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
+of the sort.
+
+Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
+like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
+she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
+compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
+things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
+the age of forty-two she died.
+
+Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
+excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
+degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
+riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
+scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
+enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
+such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
+the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
+wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
+years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
+holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
+and childlike a mind."
+
+His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was
+always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
+bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart
+upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
+and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
+joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
+Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
+have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
+burned all the letters he had written her.
+
+We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
+old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
+spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
+wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
+English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
+womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the
+darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The
+fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
+seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
+piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
+forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
+in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
+case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
+first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
+Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
+occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
+alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.
+
+Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
+the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
+Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the
+world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
+friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
+poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
+of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
+that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
+wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product
+of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
+distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises
+thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
+
+"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
+morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
+other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
+Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
+aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
+It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
+Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
+let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
+and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
+turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
+point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
+and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
+pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
+goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."
+
+In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
+being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
+had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
+alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
+told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.
+
+In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
+a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
+widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_née_ Souchay); she was so well preserved
+and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
+But it was her second daughter, Cécile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
+the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
+seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.
+
+The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cécile, and described her:
+
+"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
+fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
+rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
+hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
+transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
+bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
+eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
+so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too
+reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
+In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
+deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cécile."
+
+Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
+girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
+really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
+Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
+emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
+9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:
+
+"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
+at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
+so rich and happy."
+
+It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
+when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
+Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
+"Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib
+errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
+enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
+and extemporise upon the theme.
+
+Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
+Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
+a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
+honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
+humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
+Hensel visited them, and found Cécile possessed not only of "the
+beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a
+wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
+promised to cure him of his irritability."
+
+The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
+had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
+and regretted being a conductor at all.
+
+In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cécile was dangerously
+ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
+bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
+was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
+married:
+
+"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
+may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
+every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
+my happiness."
+
+In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and
+sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
+without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
+music-paper and sketch-book, with Cécile and the children." Again, in
+1844, he writes of a return home:
+
+"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cécile looks
+so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
+former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
+room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
+at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
+garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
+paper that Cécile painted for me, to write to you.
+
+"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
+children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
+Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
+breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
+evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
+pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
+propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
+Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
+the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as _Punch_ does
+with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
+passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
+women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
+bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
+Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"
+
+Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:
+
+"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
+these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
+learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
+has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
+tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
+own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
+which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
+slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
+comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
+geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
+is gone if Cécile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
+picture."
+
+Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
+young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
+for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
+the strange reward of his art as follows:
+
+"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
+soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
+and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
+Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
+his own Germany."
+
+On one of the home festivals, Cécile and her sister gave and acted a
+comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
+Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
+his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
+vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
+rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
+dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
+Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
+it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
+on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
+the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
+his wife, his brother, and three friends.
+
+His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
+Cécile died at Frankfort of consumption.
+
+Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
+was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
+who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
+saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
+let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:
+
+"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
+conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
+me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
+am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
+earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
+character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
+but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
+understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
+hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
+them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
+towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
+an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
+human being, or anything on earth,--then God be praised! such a one I am
+not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
+sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
+does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
+people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I
+am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
+outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
+really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
+wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
+never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
+lot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+He wrote to his parents:
+
+"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant,
+well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is
+something in it that repels me."
+
+And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his
+piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned
+full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would
+say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely
+unlike--of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied;
+she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent
+woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse
+she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that,
+while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was
+certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from
+her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot,
+who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of
+Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like
+bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was--well,
+some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was
+angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal
+manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any
+non-effeminate man--outside of books.
+
+The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of
+presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and
+believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the
+Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was
+followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but
+resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of
+George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter
+surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco--though he
+neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at
+cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars--as
+did Liszt's princess.
+
+Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the
+credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire
+not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she
+conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.
+
+Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish
+fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.
+She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska--a good name to
+change for the shorter tinkle of "Chopin." It was from her that Chopin
+took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his
+music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to
+be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally
+the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the
+darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the
+loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!
+
+As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a
+public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa
+Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia
+Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was
+Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with
+a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her
+case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted
+himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska,
+however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as
+full of vague morose yearning as his Préludes. He left Warsaw for
+Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell
+concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a
+singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing
+the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians
+and poets of that day.
+
+To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and
+he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in
+appearance at least, athletic--even if he must ask his tailor to furnish
+the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with
+to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew
+from his familiar and dæmon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote
+about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:
+
+"God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her
+mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not
+cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be
+strewn under her feet."
+
+While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been
+finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's
+Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a
+few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the
+incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James
+Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
+subject of Chopin:
+
+"He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
+lady was married in 1832--preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
+genius--to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
+a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
+blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
+must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
+from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
+memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
+waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
+and rivers of ink have been spilt."
+
+This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
+residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
+brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
+called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
+avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
+hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
+amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
+praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
+that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
+gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
+manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
+next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
+declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
+and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
+says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
+man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
+himself in Paris very much _en prince_, according to Von Lenz, and such
+a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.
+
+The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
+whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
+Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
+which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
+was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
+long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen
+years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
+her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on "Chopin's Three Love
+Affairs," Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
+charm.
+
+"Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
+smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
+magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
+mantle."
+
+They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
+little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
+biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
+of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
+deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
+brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
+was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.
+
+Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
+has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
+family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
+were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
+living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
+was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
+In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
+carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
+furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.
+
+But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
+until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
+public.
+
+M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and _La Revue Musicale_ of
+Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
+but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
+two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
+admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
+pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,--advice
+which met the usual fate of good advice.
+
+Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: "In his letters to his family,
+Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
+always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
+the plural, for instance, 'Elles si chères, elles rirent pour tous,' or,
+'Here the vigil is sad, because _les malades_ do not wish a doctor.'"
+
+The first letter, signed "Fritz," is a most cordial welcome to a man
+about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand
+and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in
+1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever
+had, and writes to the whole family: "Tell them all that I love them,
+too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my
+roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton
+vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade
+of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving
+manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le télégraphe
+électro-magnétique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats
+extraordinaires." He revels in puns and gossip.
+
+Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin
+called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849,
+with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the
+last tendernesses in her power.
+
+This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come
+from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick,
+and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of
+Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the
+plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared
+joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a
+biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody
+which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it
+unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick
+the use of them.
+
+Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love
+requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as
+his music.
+
+Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: "As his talent,
+so did his heart mature early." It was at Warsaw, in his early youth,
+that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had
+married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society,
+Frédéric moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had
+always the princely way with him.
+
+One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose
+majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of
+Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke
+Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most
+welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music.
+Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would
+send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at
+the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his
+temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin
+was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor
+was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in
+whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully
+as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret.
+He was often teased on account of the beautiful "Mariolka," as he called
+her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove
+that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love
+was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams
+for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
+_à la Mazur_, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.
+
+In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George
+Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this
+time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty,
+vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria
+Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the "rag and the bone
+and the hank of hair" of contention.
+
+It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling
+similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of
+feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were
+like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering
+through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up
+their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these
+twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.
+
+The "black-eyed demoiselle," as she was called by the poet and the
+musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same
+time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and
+found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town,
+and to pass several weeks with each.
+
+It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to
+much verse, especially his "In der Schweiz." But all this while the
+little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes
+she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki
+hovering at her piano.
+
+When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his
+F-minor Étude which he called "the soul-portrait" of the comtesse. A
+year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he
+proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he
+composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor
+Nocturne.
+
+In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying
+Chopin's fiancée in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The
+distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he
+wrote to his mother:
+
+"They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental
+to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says
+that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls
+but out of all three only one angel can be created."
+
+But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself
+deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to
+Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.
+
+George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has
+contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader.
+It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even
+for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation.
+For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely
+blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which
+her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either
+the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could
+hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least
+as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount
+what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction
+would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar,
+I can be brief with it here.
+
+George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every
+conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as
+Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to
+him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity
+that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain
+others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some
+hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the
+nursery.
+
+On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme,
+and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years
+devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion,
+and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed
+by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless,
+and by nature--for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame--a
+voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted
+him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was
+as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the
+brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most
+of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was
+drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his
+gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.
+
+Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall
+out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that
+form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day.
+In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and
+daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious,
+the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset
+by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the
+place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant,
+her château. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of
+life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his
+art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion
+both to his health and to his music.
+
+The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a
+liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the
+"detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from
+one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There
+should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman
+infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart
+and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the rôle of nurse
+as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an
+invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
+on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
+fame.
+
+After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
+sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
+he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
+in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
+of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
+who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.
+
+Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
+not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
+deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
+mental support for ten long years.
+
+George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
+that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de
+ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
+the affair:
+
+"He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
+first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (_se reprenant_)
+incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
+object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
+affections."
+
+"Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
+friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
+me."
+
+"The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
+enough of his own ills to bear."
+
+"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
+was the first and the final time."
+
+"But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
+obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
+the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
+the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
+full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
+versa."
+
+"Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
+himself, he seemed almost to choke and die."
+
+
+It is generally believed that in the character of _Prince Karol_ in her
+novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
+weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
+Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated
+the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that
+Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
+None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:
+
+"It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
+(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
+mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
+proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
+a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
+full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
+good faith. I have traced in _Prince Karol_ the character of a man
+determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
+exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
+however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
+not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
+because it is too limited to reproduce them.
+
+"Chopin was a résumé of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
+can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
+was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
+instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
+itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
+fix themselves on a determined object.
+
+"However, _Prince Karol_ is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
+more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
+a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
+of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
+desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,--he who,
+nevertheless, was so suspicious.
+
+"And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
+the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
+friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
+made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
+that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
+why did he not re-read it?
+
+"This history is so little ours--It was the very reverse of it. There
+were between us neither the same raptures _(envirements)_, nor the same
+sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
+simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel
+with each other _à propos_ of each other."
+
+As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people
+tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George
+Sand's own version:
+
+"After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely
+gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was
+suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling
+subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand
+had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell
+there, one after another--all this was borne; but at last, one day,
+Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That
+could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate
+and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer
+loved him.
+
+"What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the
+poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that
+some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound,
+and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the
+revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to
+this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.
+Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had
+preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family,
+whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and
+deformed (_dénaturé_). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from
+liberty.
+
+"I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling
+and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my
+turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction,
+and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.
+
+"I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There
+were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous
+ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.
+
+"I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me
+filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that
+I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me
+till then."
+
+This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much
+credence.
+
+The cause of their--"divorce," one might call it--is blurred by the
+usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be
+that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her
+daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All
+accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles
+that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not
+Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts
+it, "had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically
+speaking, out-of-doors."
+
+The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at
+best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him
+with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a
+relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find
+herself free.
+
+But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had
+leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was
+eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the
+chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his
+haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was
+unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and
+a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it
+is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to
+see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, "She said I
+should die in no other arms than hers" (_Que je ne mourrais que dans ses
+bras_).
+
+But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty
+countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was
+the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's
+loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him,
+at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman
+sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait
+that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism
+undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever
+having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims
+that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.
+
+But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of
+his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of
+stars, one nocturne.
+
+END OF VOLUME I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
+Volume 1, by Rupert Hughes
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+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+<head>
+<title>Love Affairs of Great Musicians Vol. I</title>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+<style type="text/css">
+body {	font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
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+</head>
+<!-- Converted to HTML for the Gutenberg Project by Sjaani -->
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume
+1, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Release Date: February 6, 2004 [EBook #10957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS MUSICIANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Lisa Richards, Sjaani and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<table width="80%" border="0" align="center">
+  <tr>
+    <td> <h1>The Love Affairs of <br />
+Great Musicians</h1>
+      <h2>By Rupert Hughes</h2>
+      <h3>Illustrated</h3>
+      <h3>Volume I.</h3>
+      <h3>1903</h3>
+	  </td>
+	  <td>
+<a name="img1" id="img1"></a><p><img src="images/img01.jpg" alt=" " align="right"/></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><a name="img2" id="img2"></a><img src="images/img02.jpg" align="left" alt="Princess Lichtenstein (Frontispiece)" />
+      <hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<h2>NOTE</h2>
+
+<p>Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in <i>The
+Criterion</i>, and the last chapter was published in <i>The Smart Set</i>.</p>
+
+<p>While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
+subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
+advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
+the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
+revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's &quot;Immortal Beloved;&quot; the
+letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
+have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
+friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
+publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
+life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
+that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
+Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
+love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
+paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
+misunderstood.</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Love it is an hatefulle pees,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A free acquitaunce without re lees.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">An hevy burthen light to here,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A wikked wawe awey to were.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">It is kunnyng withoute science,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Wisdome withoute sapience,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Right eville savoured good savour;</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">And feblenesse fulle of myght.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A laughter it is, weping ay;</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Also a swete helle it is,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">And a soroufulle Paradys.</span><br />
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Romaunt of the Rose.</span><br />
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+ <h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+      <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="25">
+        <tr>
+    <td><h3>CHAPTER</h3>
+I. <a href="#chap1">THE OVERTURE</a><br />
+II. <a href="#chap2">THE ANCIENTS</a><br />
+III. <a href="#chap3">THE MEN OF FLANDERS</a><br />
+IV. <a href="#chap4">ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA</a><br />
+V. <a href="#chap5">HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL</a><br />
+VI. <a href="#chap6">THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA</a><br />
+VII. <a href="#chap7">GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA</a><br />
+VIII. <a href="#chap8">BACH, THE PATRIARCH</a><br />
+IX. <a href="#chap9">PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN</a><br />
+X. <a href="#chap10">THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR</a><br />
+XI. <a href="#chap11">GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</a><br />
+XII. <a href="#chap12">A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY&mdash;PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL</a><br />
+XIII. <a href="#chap13">MOZART</a><br />
+XIV. <a href="#chap14">BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE</a><br />
+XV. <a href="#chap15">VON WEBER&mdash;THE RAKE REFORMED</a><br />
+XVI. <a href="#chap16">THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN</a><br />
+XVII. <a href="#chap17">THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN</a>
+</td>
+    <td>
+      <h3>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h3>
+
+<p><a href="#img2">PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)</a><br />
+<a href="#img3">DAPHNE</a><br />
+<a href="#img4">H&Eacute;LOISE</a><br />
+<a href="#img5">MARY STUART</a><br />
+<a href="#img6">ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)</a><br />
+<a href="#img7">HENRY PURCELL</a><br />
+<a href="#img8">JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH</a><br />
+<a href="#img9">MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH</a><br />
+<a href="#img10">JOSEPH HAYDN</a><br />
+<a href="#img11">MRS. BILLINGTON</a><br />
+<a href="#img12">GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL</a><br />
+<a href="#img13">CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK</a><br />
+<a href="#img14">JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU</a><br />
+<a href="#img15">NICOLA PICCINNI</a><br />
+<a href="#img16">JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY</a><br />
+<a href="#img17">WOLFGANG MOZART</a><br />
+<a href="#img18">MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA &quot;DON JUAN&quot; FOR THE FIRST TIME</a><br />
+<a href="#img19">LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN</a><br />
+<a href="#img20">BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM</a><br />
+<a href="#img21">COUNTESS TH&Eacute;R&Egrave;SE VON BRUNSWICK</a><br />
+<a href="#img22">CARL MARIA VON WEBER</a><br />
+<a href="#img23">FELIX MENDELSSOHN</a><br />
+<a href="#img24">FREDERICK CHOPIN</a><br />
+<a href="#img25">GEORGE SAND</a><br />
+<a href="#img26">COUNTESS POTOCKA</a></p>
+</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+<a name="chap1"></a><h2>CHAPTER I.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE OVERTURE</h3>
+
+<p>Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
+amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
+that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
+he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of &quot;the
+inexpressive She;&quot; the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
+youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
+dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
+and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
+melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion&mdash;these are
+music's very own.</p>
+
+<p>So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
+wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
+expressed. And yet&mdash;! Round every corner there lurks an &quot;and yet.&quot; And
+if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
+corner.</p>
+
+<p>Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
+that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
+conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
+sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
+know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
+existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
+tune.</p>
+
+<p>But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
+world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
+and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
+tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
+begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.</p>
+
+<p>If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
+I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
+condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
+incidentally&mdash;to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
+skipped&mdash;let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
+to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.</p>
+
+<p>In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
+fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
+hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
+be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
+aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
+so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
+imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
+without frankly branding it as such.</p>
+
+<p>Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
+tell their own stories in their own words.</p>
+
+<p>For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
+the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
+the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
+have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
+at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
+subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
+catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
+reader could consult with pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
+necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
+matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
+verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
+marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
+heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
+wholesale blame&mdash;&quot;<i>tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner</i>.&quot; So, without
+pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
+have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
+and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
+And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
+think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
+and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
+blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
+of fame, or of amorous experience.</p>
+
+<p>As a last chapter to this series of &quot;true stories,&quot; I have ventured to
+sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
+compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
+on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
+had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
+warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
+dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
+saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
+clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
+lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
+true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
+collected.</p>
+
+<p>And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
+Artemus would say, to &quot;rise the curting.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap2"></a><h2>CHAPTER II.</h2>
+      <h3>THE ANCIENTS</h3>
+      <a name="img3" id="img3"></a><img src="images/img03.jpg" alt="Daphne" align="right" />
+      <p>The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
+certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
+god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
+hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
+ended in the death of the lady; as for himself&mdash;being a god, he was
+denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
+knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
+another woman, was soon blas&eacute; of divine courtship, and, for variety,
+turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
+son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
+claimed.</p>
+
+<p>Old Boetius&mdash;who had affection enough for both a first and a second
+wife&mdash;tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
+influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
+mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that &quot;the greatest caution is to
+be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
+corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
+gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
+corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
+suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
+more open than that of hearing.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
+instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
+turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
+that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
+his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
+frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
+from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
+and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
+a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
+personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
+Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family&mdash;one of the first families of
+Arcadia&mdash;was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
+pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
+on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
+filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
+charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
+But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
+seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
+wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.</p>
+
+<p>The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs&mdash;a fact which
+should not be cherished against him&mdash;seems to have loved no one except
+himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
+effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
+mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
+Jonah's adventure turned inside out.</p>
+
+<p>Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
+life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
+that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
+violinists at the hands of the matin&eacute;e Bacchantes.</p>
+
+<p>The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
+married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
+her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
+can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
+his poesy.</p>
+      <a name="img4" id="img4"></a><img src="images/img04.jpg" alt="Heloise" align="right" />
+      <p>The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
+much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
+the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
+to be monks. This banishes them from a place here&mdash;not by any means
+because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
+because it greatly prevented a record of most of them&mdash;though happily
+not all. Ab&eacute;lard, for instance, was a monk, and his H&eacute;loise became a
+nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
+literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
+an abb&eacute;? There was a priest-musician, George de la H&egrave;le, who about 1585
+gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
+Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
+sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
+epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
+century, that as an &quot;adorateur diligent du Tr&egrave;s-Haut, ministre du
+Christ, il sut garder la chast&eacute;t&eacute; et se preserver du contact de l'amour
+sensuel.&quot; But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
+necessarily so.</p>
+
+<p>Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
+tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
+flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
+children of Lorenzo dei Medici.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ange Politien,&quot; he says, &quot;a native of Florence, who passed for the
+finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
+criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
+became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
+family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
+the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
+disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
+the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
+with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
+himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
+in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
+couplet.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
+Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
+compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
+died.</p>
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap3"></a><h2>CHAPTER III.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE MEN OF FLANDERS</h3>
+
+<p>The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
+shelves of his big work, &quot;La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Si&egrave;cle,&quot;
+with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
+minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
+old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
+fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
+Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537&mdash;1577) &quot;Prince of musicians&quot; at Brussels.
+All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
+died&mdash;so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
+twenty-six at the time&mdash;so we can imagine how young and lithely
+beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia&mdash;a sweet
+name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
+she is called &quot;pudicissima et musicis scientissima.&quot; So she was good
+and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
+like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.</p>
+
+<p>Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
+interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
+frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
+charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
+these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
+for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
+sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
+ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
+man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
+chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
+servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
+marked the &quot;golden age&quot; when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
+or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
+(1680&mdash;1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,&mdash;which
+was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
+twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
+ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
+pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
+asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
+a pitiful letter still preserved.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
+thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
+Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
+cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
+indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
+gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
+succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
+go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
+absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
+have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
+for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
+circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
+The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
+work, prevent me from gaining my own living.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
+Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
+pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
+wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
+his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
+poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
+eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
+because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
+support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
+is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.</p>
+
+<p>Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
+Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
+Flanders with her children.</p>
+
+<p>The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
+they were famous marriers, too,&mdash;but one of them met his match, Jean,
+called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
+widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
+Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
+ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
+he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
+compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
+na&iuml;vely points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
+married with three of his Majesty's servants. (<i>Casada con tres criados
+de V.M.</i>) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
+navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
+organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
+achieved.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
+(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
+Venetian school. He was a pupil of that &quot;Prince of Music&quot; Josquin
+Despr&egrave;s (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
+Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
+his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
+marriage).</p>
+
+<p>We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
+happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
+preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
+never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
+of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
+bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.</p>
+
+<p>As Van der Straeten says, &quot;it appears that the affection the old man
+vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
+approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
+daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
+daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
+disinherited.</p>
+      <a name="img5" id="img5"></a><img src="images/img05.jpg" alt="Mary Stuart" align="right" />
+      <p>One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
+one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
+music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
+Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
+upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
+managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
+Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
+He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
+became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
+odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
+dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
+the year 1566.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap4"></a><h2>CHAPTER IV.</h2>
+      <h3>ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA</h3>
+<a name="img6" id="img6"></a>
+      <h3><img src="images/img06.jpg" alt="Orland di Lassus" align="left" /> </h3>
+      <p>A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
+his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
+Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the &quot;Belgian Orpheus,&quot; &quot;<i>le Prince des
+Musiciens</i>.&quot; There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
+the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
+at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
+changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
+father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a &quot;false
+moneyer,&quot; had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.</p>
+
+<p>Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
+this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
+esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.</p>
+
+<p>He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
+honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
+court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
+Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
+daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
+court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
+was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
+described her children as <i>elegantissimi</i>.</p>
+
+<p>There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
+thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
+As his biographer Delmotte says, &quot;His life indeed had been the most
+toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
+alert, had <i>enfant&eacute;</i> a multitude of compositions so great that their
+very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
+almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
+soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
+this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
+aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
+state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
+sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
+William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
+Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
+reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
+in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
+and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
+imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
+bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
+In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
+and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
+resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
+poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
+Lassus) that &quot;his <i>Altesse S&eacute;r&eacute;nissime</i> be pleased not to heap on the
+poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
+deserved through his <i>fantaisies bizarres</i>, the result of too much
+thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
+continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
+court chapel would be to kill him.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was left undisturbed in his post, but, before long, death forced the
+acceptance of his resignation. Over his grave was placed a tomb on which
+besides the effigy of himself, are shown also his devoted wife and some
+of their children.</p>
+
+<p>Regina two years later founded a perpetual annual funeral service for
+him. By a later intercession, she secured for her son, Ferdinand, the
+succession to his father's dignities at the court of Bavaria. She died
+June 5, 1600, and on her tomb she is named, &quot;la noble et vertueuse dame
+Regina de Lassin, veuve de feu Orland de Lassus.&quot; She had been a good
+wife to a good husband. The sadness of her latter years with her beloved
+and demented husband reminds one of the pathetic fate of Robert Schumann
+and his wife.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap5"></a><h2>CHAPTER V.</h2>
+      <h3>HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL</h3>
+      <a name="img7" id="img7"></a><img src="images/img07.jpg" alt="Henry Purcell" align="left" />
+      <p>If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell
+deserved the name his &quot;loveing wife Frances Purcell&quot; gave him when she
+published after his death a collection of his songs under the name of
+&quot;Orpheus Britannicus.&quot; The analogy holds good also in the devotion of
+these married couples, for Henry willed to Frances the whole of his
+property absolutely.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the legend of the cause of his death would verify the old theory
+about the joltiness of the course of true love. For Sir John Hawkins
+passes along the gossip that Purcell met his death by &quot;a cold which he
+caught in the night waiting for admittance into his own house. It is
+said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders
+to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came
+home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that
+prescribed him, and, through the inclemency of the weather, contracted
+a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little
+honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of
+his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her
+dear lamented husband which she makes use of to Lady Elizabeth Howard in
+the dedication of the &quot;Orpheus Britannicus&quot;. It seems probable that the
+disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one,
+perhaps a consumption; and that, for some time at least, it had no way
+affected the powers of his mind, since one of the most celebrated of his
+compositions, the song 'From Rosy Bowers,' is in the printed book said
+to have been the last of his works, and to have been set during that
+sickness which put a period to his days.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of
+twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own
+house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the
+favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his
+pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in
+Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: &quot;Here
+lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that
+blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>We now know that Purcell's marriage was either in 1680 or 1681, when he
+was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. August 2d, 1682, Purcell's
+father, a venerable and distinguished musician and a friend of Pepys,
+the diarist, was buried in Westminster Abbey, where later his more
+distinguished son was laid. A few days after the elder Purcell's burial,
+Henry and his wife came to Westminster Abbey again, for the baptism of a
+son new-born. He died in a few months and a third time they came to the
+sad old abbey to lay their child in the cloisters there.</p>
+
+<p>The next year, 1683, a second son died, and in 1687 a third boy two
+months old was buried in the cloisters of the abbey. This monotonous
+return of the hand of death must have embittered the life of these two,
+who seem to have remained lovers always. But in May, 1688, a daughter
+was born, named Frances after her mother; and she outlived both parents.
+She married a poet, when she and her lover were each nineteen, and named
+a child Frances after the grandmother. On Sept. 6th, 1689, Henry
+Purcell's son Edward was baptised, and he also lived to attain some
+distinction as an organist. In 1693 a daughter, Mary Peters, was born.</p>
+
+<p>Two years later, on May 21st, 1695, the young father died&mdash;on the eve of
+St. Cecilia's Day. At his bedside were his old mother, his young wife,
+and the two little children. Purcell was buried under the organ of
+Westminster Abbey and the anthems he had composed for the funeral of
+Queen Mary were sung at his own. And there he rests near his fellow
+musician, Pelham Humphries, who lies, as Runciman says, &quot;by the side of
+his younger wife in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Purcell's will, made the very day of his death, was as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the name of God, Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the Citty of Manchester,
+gent., being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in
+good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God), doe by these
+presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving Wife, Frances Purcell,
+all my Estate both reall and personall of what nature and kind soever,
+to her and to her assigns for ever. And I doe hereby constitute and
+appoint my said loveing Wife my sole Executrix of this my last Will and
+Testament, revokeing all my former Will or Wills. Witnesse my hand and
+scale this twentieth first day of November, Annoq. Dni. One thousand six
+hundred ninety-five, and in the seventh yeare of the Raigne of King
+William the Third, &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>H. PURCELL.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As to Hawkins's theory that Purcell left his wife in needy
+circumstances, Cummings, his biographer, believes the thought refuted by
+the will left by the widow herself, who outlived her husband by eleven
+years, and on St. Valentine's Day, 1706, was buried at his side. In her
+will she says that: &quot;According to her husband's desire she had given
+her deare son (Edward) a good education, and she alsoe did give him all
+the Bookes of Musicke in generall, the Organ, the double spinett, the
+single spinett, a silver tankard, a silver watch, two pair of gold
+buttons, a hair ring, a mourning ring of Dr. Busby's, a Larum clock, Mr.
+Edward Purcell's picture, handsome furniture for a room, and he was to
+be maintained until provided for. All the residue of her property she
+gave to her said daughter Frances.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cummings also assails Hawkins's story that Purcell was dissipated and
+caught his death from being locked out. But Runciman objects that if
+Purcell had not been dissipated in those days, he would have been called
+a Puritan, and says: &quot;I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman,
+a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of
+men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to excel every
+one of his time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The love Frances Purcell bore her husband was kept green by her anxiety
+for his fame. She was, in her littler way, a Cosima Wagner. In 1696 she
+published a collection of harpsichord lessons by her husband; three
+editions being sold quickly. The next year she issued ten sonatas and a
+&quot;Collection of Ayres.&quot; In 1698 she issued (or reissued) the &quot;Orpheus
+Britannicus.&quot; In all of these she wrote dedications breathing devotion
+to her husband. In an ode printed in the second volume of the &quot;Orpheus,&quot;
+in 1704, Purcell's personality is thus limned:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Nor were his Beauties to his Art confin'd</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">So justly were his Soul and Body join'd</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">You'd think his Form the Product of his Mind.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">A conquering sweetness in his Visage dwelt,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">His Eyes would warm, his Wit like lightning melt.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">But those must no more be seen, and that no more be felt.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Himself as Humble as his Art was High.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>Purcell died at the age of thirty-seven&mdash;being granted only two years
+more of life than Mozart and only six years more than Schubert. He is
+the moon of English music and his melodies are as exquisite and as
+silvery and as full of enamoured radiance as the tintinnabulations of
+the moonbeams themselves. But unfortunately for English music this
+beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers
+England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding
+glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the
+east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from
+dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of H&auml;ndel as a lover, we
+must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious
+morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have
+affected Purcell very deeply.</p>
+
+<p>The story concerns the strenuous career of Alessandro Stradella, and
+when you read it you will not wonder that it should have made a great
+success as an opera, or that it gave Flotow his greatest popularity next
+to &quot;Martha,&quot; even though its conclusion was made tamely theatrical.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap6"></a><h2>CHAPTER VI.</h2>
+      <h3>THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA</h3>
+
+<p>There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the
+truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his
+&quot;Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets,&quot; but they cannot offer us any
+satisfactory substitute in its place, and without troubling to give
+their merely destructive complaints, and without attempting to improve
+upon the pompously fascinating English of old Sir John Hawkins, I will
+quote the story for your delectation.</p>
+
+<p>Certain it is that there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was
+an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer
+upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in
+musical history of some importance. The following story of his
+adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily
+newspapers&mdash;and surely no one could question the credibility of the
+daily newspapers. But here is the story as Hawkins tells it. As the
+cook-books say, salt it to your taste.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;His character as a musician was so high at Venice, that all who were
+desirous of excelling in the science were solicitous to become his
+pupils. Among the many whom he had the instruction of, was one, a young
+lady of a noble family of Rome, named Hortensia, who, notwithstanding
+her illustrious descent, submitted to live in a criminal intimacy with a
+Venetian nobleman. The frequent access of Stradella to this lady, and
+the many opportunities he had of being alone with her, produced in them
+both such an affection for each other, that they agreed to go off
+together for Rome. In consequence of this resolution they embarked in a
+very fine night, and by the favour of the wind effected their escape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Upon the discovery of the lady's flight, the Venetian had recourse to
+the usual method in that country of obtaining satisfaction for real or
+supposed injuries: he despatched two assassins, with instructions to
+murder both Stradella and the lady, giving them a sum of money in hand,
+and a promise of a larger if they succeeded in the attempt. Being
+arrived at Naples, the assassins received intelligence that those whom
+they were in pursuit of were at Rome, where the lady passed as the wife
+of Stradella. Upon this they determined to execute their commission,
+wrote to their employer, requesting letters of recommendation to the
+Venetian embassador at Rome, in order to secure an asylum for them to
+fly to, as soon as the deed should be perpetrated.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Upon the receipt of letters for this purpose, the assassins made the
+best of their way toward Rome; and being arrived there, they learned
+that on the morrow, at five in the evening, Stradella was to give an
+oratorio in the church of San Giovanni Laterano. They failed not to be
+present at the performance, and had concerted to follow Stradella and
+his mistress out of the church, and, seizing a convenient opportunity,
+to make the blow. The performance was now begun, and these men had
+nothing to do but to watch the motions of Stradella, and attend to the
+music, which they had scarce begun to hear, before the suggestions of
+humanity began to operate upon their minds; they were seized with
+remorse, and reflected with horror on the thought of depriving of his
+life a man capable of giving to his auditors such pleasure as they had
+just then felt.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In short, they desisted from their purpose, and determined, instead of
+taking away his life, to exert their endeavours for the preservation of
+it; they waited for his coming out of the church, and courteously
+addressed him and the lady, who was by his side, first returning him
+thanks for the pleasure they had received at hearing his music, and
+informed them both of the errand they had been sent upon; expatiating
+upon the irresistible charms, which of savages had made them men, and
+had rendered it impossible for them to effect their execrable purpose;
+and concluded with their earnest advice that Stradella and the lady
+should both depart from Rome the next day, themselves promising to
+deceive their employer, and forego the remainder part of their reward,
+by making him believe that Stradella and his lady had quitted Rome on
+the morning of their arrival.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Having thus escaped the malice of their enemy, the two lovers took an
+immediate resolution to fly for safety to Turin, and soon arrived there.
+The assassins being returned to Venice, reported to their employer that
+Stradella and Hortensia had fled from Rome, and taken shelter in the
+city of Turin, a place where the laws were very severe, and which,
+excepting the houses of embassadors, afforded no protection for
+murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two
+persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their
+engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of
+allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found
+means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various
+arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of
+his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent and vindictive
+than himself, the Venetian associated two ruffians, and dispatched them
+all three to Turin, fully inspired with a resolution of stabbing
+Stradella and the old man's daughter wherever they found them. The
+Venetian also furnished them with letters from Mons. l'Abb&eacute; d'Estrades,
+then embassador of France at Venice, addressed to the Marquis of
+Villars, the French embassador at Turin. The purport of these letters
+was a recommendation of the bearers of them, who were therein
+represented to be merchants, to the protection of the embassador, if at
+any time they should stand in need of it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The Duchess of Savoy was at that time regent; and she having been
+informed of the arrival of Stradella and Hortensia, and the occasion of
+their precipitate flight from Rome; and knowing the vindictive temper of
+the Venetians, placed the lady in a convent, and retained Stradella in
+her palace as her principal musician. In a situation of such security as
+this seemed to be, Stradella's fears for the safety of himself and his
+mistress began to abate, till one evening, walking for the air upon the
+ramparts of the city, he was set upon by the three assassins above
+mentioned, that is to say, the father of Hortensia, and the two
+ruffians, who each gave him a stab with a dagger in the breast, and
+immediately betook themselves to the house of the French embassador as
+to a sanctuary.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The attack on Stradella having been made in the sight of numbers of
+people, who were walking in the same place, occasioned an uproar in the
+city, which soon reached the ears of the duchess: she ordered the gates
+to be shut, and diligent search to be made for the three assassins; and
+being informed that they had taken refuge in the house of the French
+embassador, she went to demand them. The embassador insisting on the
+privileges which those of his function claimed from the law of nations,
+refused to deliver them up. In the interim Stradella was cured of his
+wounds, and the Marquis de Villars, to make short of the question about
+privilege, and the rights of embassadors, suffered the assassins to
+escape.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;From this time, finding himself disappointed of his revenge, but not
+the least abated in his ardour to accomplish it, this implacable
+Venetian contented himself with setting spies to watch the motions of
+Stradella. A year was elapsed after the cure of his wounds; no fresh
+disturbance had been given to him, and he thought himself secure from
+any further attempts on his life. The duchess regent, who was concerned
+for the honour of her sex, and the happiness of two persons who had
+suffered so much, and seemed to have been born for each other, joined
+the hands of Stradella and his beloved Hortensia, and they were married.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the
+port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin: the
+assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at
+their heels. Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the
+morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into
+their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart. The murderers had taken
+care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and
+made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella's assassination
+reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive
+to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great
+merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that
+kind; which, adds the relater, 'those who remember how lovingly Mr.
+Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to
+him, may understand without farther explication.'&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap7"></a><h2>CHAPTER VII.</h2>
+      <h3>GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA</h3>
+
+<p>Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
+Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
+his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
+That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
+his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
+at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
+fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
+it seems, just getting into print for the first time.</p>
+
+<p>The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
+Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
+was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
+all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
+appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
+from 1544 to 1551.</p>
+
+<p>Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
+married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
+him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, &quot;his
+equal and an honest damsel&quot; (<i>donzella onesta e sua para</i>), according to
+the biographer Baini, who adds:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the
+first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait
+penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions
+of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow: yet
+with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time
+to his glory and to his gain. And so they passed together, these two
+faithful consorts, nearly thirty years.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lucrezia bore him four children, all sons, Angelo, Ridolfo, Silla, and
+Igino. The first three died in early manhood, after showing themselves
+in some sort heirs of their father's genius: in the second book of his
+motets Palestrina has included some of their compositions. The last son,
+Igino, outlived his parents and his own welfare; he was &quot;<i>un' anima
+disarmonica&quot;</i> After his father's death he attempted to complete and
+market an unfinished and rejected composition of his father's, but he
+was legally restrained. He lost some of his father's unpublished works,
+while certain noddings of genius, better lost, and refused even by the
+Pope, Palestrina dedicated them to, still remain, with a dedication to
+yet another Pope, put on them by the scapegrace Igino.</p>
+
+<p>A certain writer Pitoni, by a bit of careless reading, multiplied
+Palestrina's wives by two, and divided his sons by the same number,
+claiming that Lucrezia, the first wife of Palestrina, was the mother of
+Angelo, that after her death he married one Doralice, and that she was
+the mother of Igino. But Baini exposes Pitoni's carelessness, proves the
+existence of Ridolfo and Silla by the inclusion of their works in the
+father's book, and shows that Doralice was the wife of Palestrina's son
+Angelo.</p>
+
+<p>It being established, then, that Palestrina was married but once, and it
+being assumed that he was happily married, it is strange to see how this
+happy marriage came near proving fatal to him. Palestrina, who was, like
+Michelangelo, intimate with various Popes, dedicated in 1554 his first
+printed book of masses to Pope Julius III. As a reward, the careless
+pontiff made him one of the singers of his Sistine Chapel, omitting the
+usual severe examination, and overlooking as a small matter the fact
+that Palestrina was so far from being a priest that he was very much
+married and very much the father, and furthermore had no voice. But
+Palestrina resigned his post as maestro at Saint Peter's and entered
+the chapel. The Pope died shortly afterward and was succeeded by a
+cardinal who was a patron of Palestrina's and continued his favour as
+Pope Marcellus II. Three weeks later this Pope also died, and was
+followed by Paul IV.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately for Palestrina, the new Pope was a strict constructionist,
+and he found it &quot;indecent that there should be married men
+(<i>ammogliati</i>) interfering in holy offices.&quot; In spite of the action of
+the two previous pontificates, he determined to expel the three
+Benedicks who had entered the choir, Leonardo Bar&egrave;, Domenico Ferrabosco,
+and Palestrina, &quot;uomini ammogliati, e chi con grandissimo scandalo, ed
+in vilipendio del divin culto, contro le disposizioni dei sagri canoni,
+e contro le costituzioni e le consuetudini della cappella apostolica
+cantano i medesimi tre ammogliati imitamente ai capellani cantori.&quot; He
+then declares that, after mature deliberation, &quot;cassiamo, discacciamo, e
+togliamo&quot; from the list of chappellary singers these three, and that
+they ought to be &quot;cassati, discacciati, e tolti dalla cappella,&quot; and
+that after the present order they &quot;cassino, discaccino, e tolgano.&quot; And
+excommunication was threatened if any more married men (<i>uxorati</i>) were
+received in the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had
+resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a
+family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous
+thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever
+and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found
+another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October,
+1555, he was maestro. Eleven years later, a year after he had written
+his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of
+his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his
+resignation. They gave him the acceptance. Again he found another post,
+and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his
+many wanderings and vicissitudes.</p>
+
+<p>In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old
+friend, Pope Marcellus II. The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had
+marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history
+of religious music.</p>
+
+<p>The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending
+of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to
+which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and
+often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or
+cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did
+in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the
+Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets. The
+trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the
+original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of
+the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would
+not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an
+all-hearing ear.</p>
+
+<p>I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a
+musician, a contemporary of Palestrina's mentioned by Van der Straeten;
+his name was Ambrosio de Cotes. He was the Maestro de Capilla of the
+King's Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth,
+and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a
+mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de
+Espinosa. Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets
+at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs. In 1591 he was
+officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to
+sacred music (<i>y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes</i>).</p>
+
+<p>So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that
+contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely. It was given a
+last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and
+capable of redemption. He composed three masses, and the third of them,
+dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as
+the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final
+word and ultimate model for future church music.</p>
+
+<p>Some years later, at the very height of his glory, Palestrina's heart
+suffered its final blow. In the words of Baini, &quot;Lucrezia, <i>la sua dolce
+consorte</i>, after having piously accompanied the solemn procession for
+the transport of the body of Saint Gregory Nazianzeno from the church of
+the monks of S. Maria Campa Marzo to the Vatican the fourth of June,
+1580, was assailed by a most oppressive malady.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The attentions of her husband and the remedies of the medical art of
+that day kept her alive up to the first of July. Then the sickness began
+anew and &quot;neither the tears nor the voice of the loving companion
+prevailed against the inexorable scythe of death.&quot; On the 21st of July
+Lucrezia died. The next day her body was received at the Vatican,
+Giovanni watching in the schoolroom of the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to picture the wild grief of this man, whom a previous
+anxiety had thrown into an almost mortal fever. Yet he lived fourteen
+busy years, and in his old age he felt both fatigue and want, and was
+compelled to join the long list of those musicians who have appealed to
+their patrons for charity. But at least his life, like Bach's and that
+of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily
+a failure when set to music.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap8"></a><h2>CHAPTER VIII.</h2>
+      <h3>BACH, THE PATRIARCH</h3>
+      <a name="img8" id="img8"></a><img src="images/img08.jpg" alt="John Sebastian Bach" align="left" />
+      <p>The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of
+marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific.</p>
+
+<p>Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of &quot;the Father of Modern Music,&quot; had a
+twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and
+manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly
+together. Their wives, it is said&mdash;<i>horresco referens</i>!&mdash;could not tell
+them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom
+he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but
+tired of. The Consistory ordered him to marry her, but he appealed to a
+higher court and was absolved from the tenacious woman whom he said he
+&quot;hated so that he could not bear the sight of her.&quot; He married another
+woman four years later.</p>
+
+<p>The great Bach, Johann Sebastian, was the youngest of six children. His
+mother died when he was nine years old, but with Bachic haste his
+father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit
+of it, for she buried J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
+Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.</p>
+
+<p>At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt&mdash;at twenty-one he went on foot
+fifty miles to L&uuml;beck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
+been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
+for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
+they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
+variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
+rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
+waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
+adding, that they &quot;furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
+latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
+in the choir.&quot; His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
+to the parson. Further explanation we have none.</p>
+
+<p>Spitta speculates on the identity of this &quot;stranger maiden.&quot; In the
+older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
+occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
+opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
+cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
+friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
+be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
+young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach &quot;spoke to
+the parson,&quot; he confessed his love and his betrothal.</p>
+      <a name="img9" id="img9"></a>
+      <div align="center"><img src="images/img09.jpg" alt="Morning Prayer" /></div>
+      <p>Further Spitta comments: &quot;The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
+family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
+which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
+conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
+relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
+certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
+at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
+race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
+its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
+marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
+cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
+may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
+reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
+further improvement, and attracted him to his own race. His second wife,
+indeed, was not allied with him in blood, but that with the first he
+found, in some respects, his more natural development may perhaps be
+concluded from the fact that the most remarkable of his sons were all
+the children of his first marriage.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Upton says that Bach loved Maria Barbara when he was only eighteen and
+they agreed to wait till he got a better post. This was not till three
+years had passed and then his salary was only eighty-five gulden (about
+&pound;7, or $35) besides a little corn and wood and some kindling-wood.</p>
+
+<p>It was on October 17, 1707, that, according to the record, &quot;the
+respectable Herr J.S. Bach, the surviving lawful son of the late most
+respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician
+of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria Barbara Bach, the
+youngest surviving unmarried daughter of the late very respectable and
+famous artist Herr Johann Michael Bach.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A little inheritance of fifty gulden (&pound;4 or $20) aided the new couple.
+But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: &quot;Modest as is my
+way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable
+articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live.&quot; A year after his
+marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of
+Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with
+the Prince of Anhalt-K&ouml;then. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his
+prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his
+wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he
+stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to
+success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed. She had borne
+him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm
+Friedemann, the father's favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the
+world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times
+spitefully underrate.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach's powers,
+and his next cantata with the suggestive title, &quot;He that exalteth
+himself shall be abased,&quot; shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In
+the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the
+high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson
+accused of being &quot;a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted
+to the wine-cellar of the Council&quot;).</p>
+
+<p>For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach's first wife's
+children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more
+congenial and appreciative helpmeet. Bach's father had remarried after
+seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited
+from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years
+more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of
+whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical
+than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought
+it time to take the name out of the rut.</p>
+
+<p>Anna Magdalena W&uuml;lken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the
+ducal band at Weissenfels. She was twenty-one years old while Bach was
+thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and
+together stood sponsor to the child of the prince's cellar-clerk. The
+wedding took place at Bach's own house.</p>
+
+<p>The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.
+She made the Bach home a little musical circle. It is evident that she
+kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, &quot;They
+are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already
+form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family,
+particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest
+daughter joins in bravely.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical
+book together. Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband's
+cheery note that it was &quot;<i>Anti-Calvinismus</i> and <i>Anti-Melancholicus</i>.&quot;
+In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and
+other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There
+are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an
+unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, &quot;Edifying Reflections of a
+Smoker&quot; in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own
+hand&mdash;doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed
+contentment in uxorious ease. Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly
+beginning,</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Irh Diener, werthe Jungfer Braut</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Viel Gl&uuml;cke zur heutgen Freude!&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>and exclaiming that at the sight of her in her garland and wedding-garb
+the heart laughs out in rapture;&mdash;and what wonder that lips and breast
+overflow with joy. There are rules he wrote out for her instruction in
+thorough-bass with a note that others must be taught orally, and there
+is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge
+from the words, &quot;Willst du dein Herz mir schenken.&quot; Upton declares this
+song to have been written during and for their first courtship. A
+portrait of this ideal wife was painted by Cristofori and passed into
+the keeping of her stepson, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but alas, it is
+lost while so many a less interesting face is repeated in endless
+pictures.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty-eight years after her marriage this faithful woman stood by her
+husband's side in his blindness and through the two operations by the
+English surgeon in Leipzig. How must she have rejoiced when on July 18,
+1750, he suddenly found that he could see and endure with delight the
+blessed sunshine! How her heart must have sunk when a few hours later he
+was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more
+days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his
+youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as
+Spitta says, &quot;floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and
+perfect it.&quot; The original name had been, &quot;When we are in the highest
+need,&quot; but he changed the name by dictation now to &quot;Before thy throne
+with this I come&quot; (<i>Vor deiner Thron tret ich hiemit</i>). The preacher
+said he had &quot;fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God,&quot; and he was
+buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of,
+and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.</p>
+
+<p>It is a dismal task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and
+death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy
+and aided him with hand and voice and heart,&mdash;what had she done to
+deserve the dingy aftermath of her fidelity?</p>
+
+<p>Bach left no will, and his children seized his manuscripts; what little
+money remained from his salary of 87 thalers a year (&pound;13 or $65) they
+divided with the widow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was
+continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns,
+some of them to considerable success. The mother and three daughters
+were left to shift for themselves. Two years later they must sell a few
+musical remains and the town must aid them out of its funds.</p>
+
+<p>In the winter ten years after her husband's death, on Feb. 27, 1760,
+Anna Magdalena died, an alms-woman. Her only mourners were her daughters
+and a fourth of the public school children, who were forced by the
+custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In
+1801 Bach's daughter Regina was still living, a &quot;good old woman,&quot; who
+would have starved had there not been a public subscription, to which
+Beethoven contributed the proceeds of a composition.</p>
+
+<p>Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated
+almost from man's memory. Half a century of oblivion was followed by the
+great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some
+radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he
+owed so much of his life's delight and his art's inspiration, to whom
+also he dedicated his life and his music&mdash;Anna Magdalena.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap9"></a><h2>CHAPTER IX.</h2>
+      <h3>PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN</h3>
+      <a name="img10" id="img10"></a><img src="images/img10.jpg" alt="Joseph Haydn" align="left" />
+      <p>&quot;Such music by such a nigger!&quot; exclaimed one prince. Another called him
+a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized
+and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly
+reached the ground. His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with
+nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and
+unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days,
+when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague. He
+always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, &quot;for the
+sake of cleanliness&quot;! and continuing to the day of his death, even when
+wigs were out of style.</p>
+
+<p>This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in
+his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the
+hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet
+this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but
+strangely na&iuml;f; a revolutionist of childlike directness.</p>
+
+<p>Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the
+twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a
+shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.</p>
+
+<p>Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating
+suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so
+heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly
+thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his
+friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven
+he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became
+disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably
+unsophisticated nature.</p>
+
+<p>A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty
+that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters
+of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to
+Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an
+ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an
+elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the
+convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously
+suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.</p>
+
+<p>As Louis Nohl says, &quot;Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude,
+ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at
+once&mdash;whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely
+suffered for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led
+the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more
+of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her
+husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as
+Haydn could afford or endure.</p>
+
+<p>An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend
+Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of
+unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his &quot;Le Haydine&quot; in the form of
+letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one
+Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original
+series of &quot;Letters written from Vienna.&quot; He published these under the
+pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later
+the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the
+name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is
+commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his
+account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a
+honeymoon.</p>
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;But soon the caprices of Mrs. Anna turned the knot to a chain, the
+bliss to torment, and affairs went so far that, after suffering many
+years, this new Socrates ended by separating from his Xantippe. Mrs.
+Anna was not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her manners were immaculate, but she
+had a wooden head, and when she had fixed on a caprice, there was no way
+to change it. The woman loved her husband but was not congenial. An
+excess of religious piety badly directed came to disturb this happy
+harmony. Mrs. Anna wanted the house always full of priests, to whom she
+furnished good dinners, suppers, and luncheons. Haydn was a bit
+economical; but rather for cause than desire. At this time he had hardly
+enough to live on discreetly, and he began to look with evil eye on this
+endless procession of holy grasshoppers (<i>locuste</i>) who ravaged his
+larder. Nor was it appropriate to the house of a studious man, this
+ceaseless clatter of a numerous, genial, and lazy society; therefore,
+solidly religious as he was, he could not enjoy these sacred repasts and
+he had to close the door of the refectory. After that the deluge (<i>inde
+ir&aelig;</i>). Mrs. Anna had a religious brother. Haydn couldn't keep him from
+visiting his sister.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Monks are like cherries; if you lift one from the basket, ten come
+along with it. Haydn's convent was not depopulated. Nor did the demands
+decrease. Every now and then Mrs. Anna had a new request; to-day a
+responsory, to-morrow a motet, the day after a mass, then hymns, then
+psalms, then antiphons; and all <i>gratis</i>. If her husband declined to
+write them, there appeared on the scene the great confederates of
+capricious women; the effects of hysteria, spleen (<i>gli insulti di
+stomaco</i>), spasms; then shrieks, then criminations, weepings, quarrels,
+and bad humour unceasing. Haydn ended with having to appease the woman,
+to lose his point, and pay the doctor and the druggist to boot. He had
+always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true
+miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful
+works that all the world knows.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted
+that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in
+the service of Prince Esterh&aacute;zy. This friendship, rousing jealous
+suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable.
+The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's
+marriage.&quot; [On this point Haydn once opened his heart to Griesinger,
+saying: &quot;My wife was incapable of bearing children, and therefore I was
+less indifferent to the charms of other womankind.&quot;] &quot;Lacking its most
+solid link, the marital chain could not stand such shocks, and grew
+fatally weaker. The pair ceased to live together, and only that
+sacramental knot remained indissoluble and strong, which Haydn had
+contracted at the age of twenty-seven. Mrs. Anna lived to seventy years
+on a sufficient pension which her husband faithfully paid, and she died
+in 1800. These vicissitudes in great part explain why Haydn, though he
+earned much, could not for a long while put aside a penny and make
+himself a little ease.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is not a pretty picture that Carpani draws of this home life, and
+Anna is made out to be far from a lovable creature. She is compared to
+the patron saint of shrews, Xantippe. But even Xantippe had her side of
+the story to tell; and with all possible admiration for that man
+Socrates, of such godlike wisdom and such great heart, it must be
+remembered that Socrates had many habits which would not only cause
+ostracism from society to-day, but would have tried the temper of even
+such a wife as the meek Griselda of Chaucer's poem.</p>
+
+<p>We constantly meet these husbands who are seemingly rich in geniality
+and yet are mysteriously unhappy at home. It is the custom of the
+acquaintances of these fellows to put all the blame on the wife. But
+there is a distinct type of mind which always enjoys dining abroad and
+appreciates a few herbs in a stranger's house more than a stalled ox at
+home. These people are gentle and genial and tender only out-of-doors.
+You might call them extra-mural saints.</p>
+
+<p>I have a strong suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul
+that he was commonly called &quot;Papa&quot; by his friends and disciples, was one
+of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never
+be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked
+inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of
+her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger wished to
+make Haydn's wife a present, Haydn forbade him, saying:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She does not deserve anything! It is little matter to her whether her
+husband is an artist or a cobbler.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As he passed in front of a picture of her once, he seized the violinist
+Baillot by the arm, and pointing to the picture said, &quot;That is my wife.
+Many a time she has maddened me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1792 he wrote to his mistress from London:&mdash;&quot;My wife, the infernal
+beast&quot; (<i>bestia infernale</i>&mdash;Pohl translates this <i>h&ouml;llische Bestie</i>)
+&quot;has written so much stuff that I had to tell her I would not come to
+the house any more; which has brought her again to her senses.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes
+again:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable
+temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer. There will sometime
+be an end of this torment.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful
+tone! As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to
+see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.</p>
+
+<p>Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for
+the unhappiness upon the husband. Anna Keller had a remarkably long and
+sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her
+husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case
+he died suddenly. He pointed to a series of canons which he had written
+and framed. When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him
+a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little
+house she had set her heart on, na&iuml;vely adding that it was just a cosy
+size for a widow.</p>
+
+<p>Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a
+widower. Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of
+Haydn's life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how
+various composers composed: Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and
+the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at
+night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the
+streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on
+a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and
+children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends;
+Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the
+floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy
+fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming
+sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his
+chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of
+Angelica. When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends
+divided his time. For thirty years he led this life, <i>monotona ma
+dolcissima</i>, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving
+Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy. Then Boselli died and he began
+to feel the ennui (<i>le noje</i>) of a void in his days. It was then that he
+went to London.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This mistress of Haydn's, whom Carpani and F&eacute;tis call Boselli and whom
+Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the
+spelling in Haydn's own handwriting. The pleasant legend Carpani gives
+of Haydn's life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her
+death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.
+Pohl, closely followed by Haydn's recent biographer, Schmidt, describes
+Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged to
+sing at the theatre of the Prince Esterh&aacute;zy. She was the wife of Anton
+Polzelli, an insignificant and sickly violinist, with whom she was
+apparently not in love. Luigia is pictured&mdash;doubtless by guesswork&mdash;as
+not beautiful, but of a pleasing appearance, showing the indications of
+her Italian birth in &quot;her small slim face, her dark complexion, her
+black eyes, her chestnut-coloured hair; her body of medium height and
+elegant form.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To this woman,&quot; says Schmidt, &quot;Haydn fetched his own deep and lasting
+sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily
+with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be
+known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good
+nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by
+the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout
+twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she
+was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London
+the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their
+correspondence shows, only postponed their union, till the day when
+'four eyes shall be closed,'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yet when finally both were free, Time had worked his almighty
+influence; Haydn had grown gray; outwardly as well as spiritually an
+estrangement had widened between them, and of their once so dear a
+desire there is no more word. Yet Haydn never ceased to provide for his
+friend, as well as to care for the education and the success of her
+sons. The elder, Pietro, Haydn's favourite, on whom he hung with his
+whole heart, died early.&quot; [Pohl quotes many allusions to him in Haydn's
+letters.] &quot;The younger, Anton, who was reported without proper
+foundation to be Haydn's natural son, later became musical director of
+the prince's chapel, but then gave up music and turned farmer, finally
+dying of the plague in sad circumstances.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Pohl is somewhat fuller upon this alliance than Schmidt, who, in fact,
+merely condenses and paraphrases him. He says that Polzelli's maiden
+name was Moreschi [which, being interpreted, is &quot;Moor,&quot; a name once
+given to Haydn]; she was a mezzo-soprano, who played secondary r&ocirc;les in
+the operas. She earned the same salary as her husband, 465 gulden a
+year. The letters Haydn wrote her were always in Italian, and in one of
+them he wishes her better r&ocirc;les, and &quot;a good master who will take the
+same interest as thy Haydn.&quot; Haydn had come to her for sympathy, since,
+as Pohl says and we have seen, &quot;thanks to his wife he had hell at home&quot;
+[<i>die Holle im House</i>].</p>
+
+<p>When increasing fame took Haydn by the hand and led him away to royal
+triumphs in London, he did not take jealousy along with his other
+luggage. He seems to have heard that his place was promptly filled in
+Polzelli's heart, but with all his geniality, he could write of the
+rumoured rival as &quot;this man, whose name I do not know, but who is to be
+so happy as to possess thee.&quot; Then there was a recrudescence of the old
+ardour:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Oh, dear, dear Polzelli, thou lingerest always in my heart; never,
+never shall I forget thee (<i>O cara Polzelli, tu mi stai sempre nel
+core, mal, mal scordeo di te</i>).&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When some one in London told him that Polzelli had sold the piano he had
+given her, he could not believe it, and only wrote her, &quot;See how they
+tease me about you&quot; (<i>vedi come mi seccano per via di te</i>). Still less
+will he believe that she has spoken ill of him, and he writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;May God bless thee, and forgive thee everything, for I know that love
+speaks in thee. Be careful for thy good name, I beg thee, and think
+often of thy Haydn, who cherishes and tenderly loves thee and to thee
+will always be true.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even to Bologna, whither Polzelli went with her two sons, says Pohl,
+&quot;followed Haydn's love&mdash;and his gold.&quot; He intended after his first
+London visit to go to Italy to visit her, and wrote further:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I cherish thee and love thee as on that first day, and am always sad
+that I cannot do more for you. Yet have patience. Surely the day will
+come when I can show thee how much I love thee.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Loisa's choice of a spouse had been unhappy, as so many marriages have
+been where the wife is a singer on the stage, and the husband a fiddler
+in the band. Haydn seems to have sympathised with Loisa in her unhappy
+domestic affairs, as cordially as she had sympathised with him in his.
+He had sympathy, too, for her similarly ill-matched sister, Christine
+Negri, for he writes of her as&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Already long separated from her husband, that beast, she has been as
+unhappy as even you, and awakes my sympathy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Also in March, 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner
+implying that he was a brute or a maniac: &quot;Thou hast done well to have
+him taken to the hospital to save thy life.&quot; Haydn and Loisa, being
+Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of
+celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish
+husband and his shrewish wife&mdash;&quot;when four eyes shall close.&quot; Loisa's
+husband was the first to oblige, for in August, 1791, his death wrings a
+charitable word from even Haydn:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thy poor husband! I tell thee that Providence has managed well in
+freeing thee from thy heavy burden, for it is better to be in the other
+world, than useless in this one. The poor fellow has suffered enough.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Later he writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;DEAR POLZELLI:&mdash;Probably that time will come which we have so often
+longed for. Already two eyes are closed. But the other two&mdash;ah, well, as
+God wills!&quot; Eight years more, and the reluctant and wide-eyed Anna
+Haydn was foiled of her desire to be a widow in the snug cottage of her
+choice. The lovers at last were both single. But now, freed of their
+shackles, why do they not rush to each other's arms? The only answer we
+receive is this chill and shocking document found long after Haydn's
+death; it is written in Italian and dated shortly after Frau Haydn's
+death:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I, the undersigned, promise Signora Loisa Polzelli (in case I shall be
+disposed to marry again) to take no other for wife than the said Loisa
+Polzelli; and if I remain a widower, I promise the said Loisa Polzelli
+after my death to leave her a life pension of 300 gulden, that is 300
+florins in Vienna money. Valid before every court. I sign myself,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;JOSEPH HAYDN,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;<i>Maestro di Cappella of his Highness, the Prince Esterhazy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Vienna, May 23, 1800.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On this sad and icy postscript to the ardent love affair, Schmidt
+comments: &quot;The form of this writing leaves the conclusion plain, that
+Haydn was forced to this act by the Polzelli. This throws a poor light
+on her character, and we dare not evade the conclusion that, for twenty
+years in this love affair for life, she had in mind a business
+arrangement with the master.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years
+occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to
+heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little
+later, the genial master himself was not above reproach, and Loisa's
+anxiety was not unfounded, for her Joseph was casting amorous glances
+elsewhere. Thus after the long ardour, the love letters have frozen into
+a hard and fast negative betrothal in which Haydn promises to marry no
+one else. This, Schmidt says, was dragged out of Haydn. But, if such a
+bond were necessary, it speaks surely as ill for Haydn as for the woman
+who had given her life and her good name to brighten his joyless heart.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, dead as his love was, honour remained with him, though it was a
+rather close-reckoning honour. Three months later he answered with money
+her request for house-rent, and in a will dated May 5, 1801, occurs this
+clause, cancelling his former agreement, and making new provisions:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the widow Aloysia Polzelli, formerly singer at Prince Nikolaus
+Esterh&aacute;zy's, payable in ready money six months after my death, 100
+florins, and each year from the date of my death, for her life ... 150
+florins. After her death her son, Anton Polzelli, to receive 150 florins
+for one year, having always been a good son to his mother and a grateful
+pupil to me. N.B.&mdash;I hereby revoke the obligation in Italian, signed by
+me, which may be produced by Mme. Polzelli; otherwise so many of my poor
+relations with greater claims would receive too little. Finally Mme.
+Polzelli must be satisfied with the annuity of 150 florins.&quot; Two years
+later we find him writing to her (and, rumour said, his) son: &quot;I hope
+thy mamma finds herself well.&quot; In a new will, dated 1809, the year of
+his death, Haydn withdraws the cash gift to Loisa, and leaves her only
+150 florins annuity. She still remains, however, his chief heir.
+Meanwhile, without waiting for his death, she had married again to Luigi
+Franci, like herself a singer and an Italian. She outlived him and Haydn
+also, only to die in poverty and senility, far away in Hungary. Poor,
+eighty-two year old Loisa! Her affairs had been sadly mismanaged.</p>
+
+<p>Why had Loisa given up all hope of marrying Haydn, even when his wife
+was dead and she was possessed of his agreement, signed, sealed, and
+delivered, to marry no one but her? Awhile ago I stooped to repeating
+the scandal that during Signora Polzelli's life, Haydn had been casting
+sheep's eyes elsewhere. But it is such a pretty scandal! Besides, these
+old contrapuntists were trained from youth to keep two or more tunes
+going at once.</p>
+
+<p>I am not referring to Haydn's friendship with Frau von Genzinger. It was
+Karajan who discovered and published this pleasant correspondence with
+her. She was the wife of a very successful physician, a &quot;ladies' doctor&quot;
+(<i>Damen Doktor</i>). She was the daughter of the Hofrath von Kayser; her
+name was Maria Anna Sabina; she was born Nov. 6th, 1750, and had been
+married some seventeen years, and was the mother of five children when
+Haydn began taking his every Sunday dinner with the family. Karajan says
+that she was an <i>ausgezeichnete</i> singer and pianist.</p>
+
+<p>A deep friendship sprang up at once between them and they corresponded
+freely. Haydn's letters to her were published by Nohl, and you may read
+them in Lady Wallace's translation. They are full of the most
+interesting lights upon Haydn's life and experiences, and are brimful of
+affection for Frau von Genzinger. But the husband and the children are
+almost always referred to in the letters, and the friendship seems to
+have been entirely and only a friendship,&mdash;as Schmidt calls it, &quot;<i>eine
+tiefe und zugleich respectvolle Neigung</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as &quot;honourable,&quot; finds in Frau von
+Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for
+composition. &quot;We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and
+truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best
+work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any
+benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with
+Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many
+a billet-doux fragrant with charm.</p>
+      <a name="img11" id="img11"></a><img src="images/img11.jpg" alt="Mrs. Billington" align="right" />
+      <p>It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's
+supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata
+and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his
+canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called
+&quot;the loveliest woman I ever saw.&quot; Nor yet again the fascinating actress,
+Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he
+went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him
+painting Mrs. Billington as &quot;Saint Cecilia listening to the angels,&quot; and
+protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels
+listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a
+fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The
+skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790,
+a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good
+and famous story.</p>
+
+<p>The true woman in the case makes her <i>entr&eacute;e</i> in this innocent style:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
+that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him
+whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
+preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
+lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
+light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
+oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
+personage. May we be there to see!</p>
+
+<p>Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
+was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
+to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
+Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
+made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
+as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as &quot;the English
+Bach.&quot; He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
+London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
+son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
+aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
+according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
+that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
+pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
+notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
+consumption.</p>
+
+<p>Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
+London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
+by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
+becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
+whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
+Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.</p>
+
+<p>Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, &quot;In London, I fell in love with
+a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time.&quot; But Mr. Krehbiel
+shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
+To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not &quot;though
+she was sixty years old,&quot; but &quot;though I was sixty years old.&quot; I think we
+are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
+thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
+as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
+of their most potent beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline
+D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter
+that she was &quot;an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a
+somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no
+disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to
+Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have
+not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer
+in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him
+and Frau Haydn in Vienna.&quot; We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do
+with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the
+charge of &quot;vulgarity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an
+Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on &quot;Mozart
+und Haydn in London&quot; quoted from them. But for their complete
+publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's
+&quot;Music and Manners in the Classical Period.&quot; This captivating work
+contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with
+amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the
+time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of
+Pepys.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through
+such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in
+all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain
+themselves. M.L. is &quot;my love,&quot; D.L. is &quot;dear love,&quot; M.D. is &quot;my dear,&quot;
+and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to
+the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied
+into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may
+have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.</p>
+
+<p>Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs.
+Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor
+her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she
+encloses him &quot;the words of the song you desire.&quot; This letter is dated
+February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792,
+and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased
+to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being
+suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Io vi mando questo foglio</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Dalle lagrime rigato,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Sotto scritto dal cordoglio</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Dai pensieri sigillato</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Testimento del mio amore</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">(Io) vi mando questo core.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate
+that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give
+them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets
+that they must be incomplete.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish
+much to know <i>how you do</i> to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure
+of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come
+tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not
+fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and
+best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity
+M.D. your &amp;c.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;March the 7th 92.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night,
+our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand
+affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of
+<i>tenderness</i> for you but no language can express <i>half</i> the <i>Love</i> and
+<i>Affection</i> I feel for you. you are <i>dearer</i> to me <i>every Day</i> of my
+life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my
+<i>Dearest</i> it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned
+my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am
+truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had
+happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with
+the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you
+will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the
+Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best
+wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and
+invariable Regard my D,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your truly affectionate&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when
+you will come.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;April 4th 92.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons
+for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse
+me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be
+happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to
+you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your
+Concert. may all <i>success</i> attend you my ever D H that Night and always
+is the sincere and hearty wish of your &quot;Invariable and Truly
+affectionate&mdash;&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James St. Thursday, April 12th</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I am so <i>truly anxious</i> about <i>you</i>. I must write to beg to know
+<i>how you do</i>? I was very sorry I <i>had</i> not the pleasure of Seeing you
+this Evening, my thoughts have been <i>constantly</i> with you and my D.L. no
+words can express half the tenderness and <i>affection I feel for you</i>. I
+thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always
+remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the
+most perfect sympathy in <i>all your sensations</i> and my regard is
+<i>Stronger every day</i>. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my
+D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were
+indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday,
+indeed <i>my D.L.</i> I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have
+already produced So many <i>wonderful</i> and <i>Charming</i> compositions Still
+fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your
+health let me prevail on you my <i>much-loved</i> H. not to keep to your
+Studys so long at <i>one time</i>, my D. love if you could know how very
+precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to
+preserve it for my sake as well as <i>your own</i>. pray inform me how you do
+and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and
+on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time
+my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with
+the <i>tenderest</i> regard your most &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;J.S. April the 19th 92&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;April 24th 1792.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my
+thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably
+attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the
+March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I
+hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you
+the <i>Dear</i> original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write
+Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the
+occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of
+your <i>health</i>. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday
+to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours
+etc.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I
+shall be very happy to see you and <i>particularly</i> wish for the pleasure
+of <i>your</i> company <i>my Dst Love</i> before our other friends come. I hope to
+hear you are in <i>good Health</i>. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are
+your constant attendants and I <i>ever</i> am with the <i>firmest</i> Attachment
+my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;R.S.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten
+thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from <i>your
+ever Enchanting</i> compositions and your <i>incomparably Charming</i>
+performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among <i>all</i> your numerous
+admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can
+have Such high veneration for your most <i>brilliant Talents</i> as I <i>have</i>,
+indeed my D.L. no tongue <i>can express</i> the gratitude I <i>feel</i> for the
+infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted
+thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that
+I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the
+<i>Chief</i> Blessings of my life, and it is the <i>Sincer</i> wish of my heart to
+preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you
+are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you <i>can</i>
+come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be
+particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come.
+God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect
+attachment your &amp;c.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me
+and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of
+them, pray inform me <i>how you do</i>, and let me know my <i>Dst L</i> when you
+will dine with me; I shall be <i>happy</i> to <i>See</i> you to dinner either
+tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am <i>truly
+anxious</i> and <i>impatient</i> to <i>See you</i> and I wish to have as much of
+<i>your company</i> as possible; indeed <i>my Dst H</i>. I <i>feel</i> for you the
+<i>fondest</i> and <i>tenderest</i> affection the human Heart is capable of and I
+ever am with the <i>firmest</i> attachment my Dst Love</p>
+
+<p>&quot;most Sincerely, Faithfully</p>
+
+<p>&quot;and most affectionately yours</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;M.D.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was <i>extremely sorry</i> I had not the pleasure of <i>seeing you to-day,</i>
+indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every
+moment of your company is <i>more</i> and <i>more precious</i> to me now your
+<i>departure</i> is so near. I hope to hear you are <i>quite well</i> and I shall
+be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one
+o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of
+Seeing <i>you</i> on <i>Monday</i>. You will receive this letter to-morrow
+morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home
+and I <i>wish</i> to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more
+I repeat let me See you as <i>Soon</i> as possible. I <i>ever</i> am with the most
+<i>inviolable attachment</i> my Dst and most beloved H.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;most faithfully and most</p>
+
+<p>&quot;affectionately yours</p>
+
+<p>&quot;R.S.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with
+your <i>delightful</i> and enchanting <i>Compositions</i> and your Spirited and
+interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the
+great pleasure I <i>always</i> receive from your <i>incomparable</i> Music. My D:
+I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any <i>Sleep</i> to
+Night. I am <i>extremely anxious</i> about your health. I hope to hear a good
+account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be
+happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the
+tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Friday Night, 12 o'clock.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the
+barbarous word &quot;yearnful,&quot; once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to
+London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the
+acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious
+guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old
+lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.</p>
+
+<p>This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the
+considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought
+him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes
+through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St.
+James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the
+house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to
+letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind
+him the scores of his six last symphonies &quot;in the hands of a lady,&quot;
+probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn
+dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly
+she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies
+probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was
+asked what the letters were. &quot;They are letters from an English widow in
+London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty
+years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have
+married had I then been single.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded
+affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing
+to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes
+that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian
+woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius
+so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the
+enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?</p>
+
+<p>When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to&mdash;even the fable
+that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl,
+who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in
+Haydn's will.</p>
+
+<p>Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that
+Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson&mdash;and that points to us as a by-path,
+which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of
+Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art,
+that pet of artists.</p>
+
+<p>As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement
+in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of
+now as a musician.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I
+saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in
+diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can
+put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of
+which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The
+king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He
+gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor
+Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven
+years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many
+years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned,
+however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary
+instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and
+studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with
+him, married him, and gave him a dowry of &pound;100,000. Besides this he has
+&pound;500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him
+with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is
+of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits
+from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap10"></a><h2>CHAPTER X.</h2>
+
+      <h3>THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR</h3>
+
+<p>Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and
+the other eighteen, strike the town of L&uuml;beck in 1703. They are drawn
+thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition
+is to be friendly.</p>
+
+<p>Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of L&uuml;beck as soon as can
+be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the
+daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the
+pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see,
+and her years were thirty-four&mdash;just six years less than the total years
+of the two young candidates.</p>
+
+<p>Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship
+suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing
+&quot;Cleopatra,&quot; an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing
+the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and
+presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is
+another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For
+it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to
+come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.</p>
+
+<p>But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years,
+and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to
+yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that
+narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is
+postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a
+duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor;
+he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove
+fatal,&mdash;but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves
+its wearer for a better fate.</p>
+
+<p>By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is
+healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting
+with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way
+toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of
+versatility&mdash;which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a
+writer than aught else.</p>
+
+<p>The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their
+wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann
+Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
+compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
+son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
+had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
+candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
+J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
+and &quot;got the pretty job&quot; (&quot;<i>erhielt den sch&ouml;nen Dienst</i>&quot;).</p>
+
+<p>The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681&mdash;1764), a sort
+of &quot;Admirable Crichton,&quot; who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
+daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
+That is all of his story that belongs here.</p>
+      <a name="img12" id="img12"></a><img src="images/img12.jpg" alt="Georg Friedrich Handel" align="left" />
+      <p>The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
+whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
+and Handel&mdash;the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
+somebody said, love to speak learnedly of &quot;Handel and Gl&uuml;ck.&quot; It is not
+needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
+it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
+friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
+of deafness. H&auml;ndel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
+year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
+having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
+men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
+of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
+bachelorhood.</p>
+
+<p>H&auml;ndel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
+he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.</p>
+
+<p>The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
+occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
+the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
+threatened to throw her out, thundering, &quot;I always knew you were a
+devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>H&auml;ndel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
+memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
+the author says that H&auml;ndel was &quot;always habituated to an uncommon
+portion of food and nourishment,&quot; and accuses him of &quot;excessive
+indulgence in this lowest of gratifications.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
+it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution,
+so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him
+to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he
+hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have
+been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.
+Noting that the servant dawdled about, H&auml;ndel demanded why; the servant
+answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon H&auml;ndel
+stormed, in his famous broken English, &quot;Den pring up der tinner
+prestissimo. I am de gombany.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In his later years H&auml;ndel was not so beautiful as he might have been,
+and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and
+his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that &quot;in his youth he was the
+most handsome man of his time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of
+the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography
+states &quot;that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long
+career of his life.&quot; And yet contradicts himself in his very next
+sentence, for he adds:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with
+him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes
+Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess
+Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the
+part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that
+period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and
+princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.
+Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a
+young man twenty-four years old; but H&auml;ndel disdained her love. All the
+English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment
+which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never
+prudent.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring
+says that H&auml;ndel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great
+biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and
+represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that
+Vittoria was &quot;an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany&quot;&mdash;which gives a decidedly different look to H&auml;ndel's
+&quot;prudence.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the
+famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, &quot;a contralto of masculine strength,&quot; as
+one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her
+chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave
+higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen
+years old when H&auml;ndel's &quot;Roderigo&quot; was produced there in 1707. That she
+should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be
+mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the
+time of her immortal amour. Love <i>&agrave; l'Italienne</i> is precocious.</p>
+
+<p>Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom
+H&auml;ndel never brought to London among all his importations&mdash;and with
+good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger
+account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar
+method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her
+to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong
+prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious
+appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man
+she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from
+dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money
+she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to
+the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.</p>
+
+<p>In London H&auml;ndel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He
+is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical
+independence.</p>
+
+<p>He was a lordly man in his day was H&auml;ndel; and dared to cut that
+terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of
+all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: &quot;I admire H&auml;ndel
+principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such
+perfection.&quot; This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the
+dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other
+man's straight; or that H&auml;ndel was really more of a flirt than
+tradition makes him out.</p>
+
+<p>Rockstro said that H&auml;ndel was engaged more than once; once to the
+aforementioned Vittoria Tesi&mdash;this in spite of the tradition that woman
+proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases
+this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book,
+&quot;Anecdotes of H&auml;ndel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith.&quot;
+This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to
+have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith <i>(n&eacute;</i> Schmidt) was H&auml;ndel's
+secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on
+his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every
+emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy,
+in due time she married him.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that H&auml;ndel lacked
+social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first
+would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a
+fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles
+were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she
+fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second
+woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry H&auml;ndel if he
+would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and
+died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>In his will H&auml;ndel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and
+one other woman.</p>
+
+<p>He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances
+would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance,
+the creator of &quot;Samson.&quot; He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady
+Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died
+fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later
+he married the daughter of a harlequin.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain
+were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of
+vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers
+would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap11"></a><h2>CHAPTER XI.</h2>
+      <h3>GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</h3>
+      <a name="img13" id="img13"></a><img src="images/img13.jpg" alt="Christoph Willibald Von Gluck" align="left" />
+      <p>While H&auml;ndel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
+visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
+revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
+To the lordly H&auml;ndel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
+people who know nothing else of either genius, know that H&auml;ndel said,
+&quot;Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
+both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
+that resulted in a determination to &quot;reform it altogether.&quot; From London
+he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
+moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
+the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
+banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
+with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
+not particularly novel expression, &quot;passionately fond of music.&quot; Gluck
+was soon made thoroughly at home there.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
+daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
+her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
+which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
+turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
+man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
+only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
+promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
+accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
+themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
+unbroken fidelity.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
+the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
+himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna&mdash;as Schmid puts
+it&mdash;&quot;<i>auf dem Fl&uuml;geln der Liebe nach Wien zur&uuml;ck</i>&quot; On the 15th of
+September, he was married to his Maria Anne, &quot;with whom to his death he
+dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
+journeys four years later.&quot; In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
+Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
+strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and prot&eacute;g&eacute;
+of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.</p>
+
+<p>No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
+niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
+whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
+in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
+appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
+Gluck, <i>n&eacute;e</i> Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
+may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
+or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
+to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
+previous bequests,'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
+married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
+operatic warfare.</p>
+
+<p>Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
+niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
+Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
+by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: &quot;Old Gluck sang and played,
+<i>con amore</i>, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
+his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces.&quot; On the 15th of
+November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
+home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
+take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
+sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
+Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
+leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
+carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
+before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
+when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
+wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
+compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand <i>Fine</i>. But now
+he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.</p>
+
+<p>On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
+the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
+at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
+back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
+the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
+farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
+him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
+hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
+whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
+have procured,&mdash;indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
+eleven thousand florins,&mdash;outlived him less than three years, dying
+March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
+her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
+Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
+the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR</h3>
+      <a name="img14" id="img14"></a><img src="images/img14.jpg" alt="Jean Jacques Rousseau" align="left" />
+      <p>During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
+partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
+wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, &quot;Le Devin du Village,&quot; and
+other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
+notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
+not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
+curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
+&quot;Confessions,&quot; that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
+book on &quot;Great Amours,&quot; dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
+ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
+frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting &quot;Rousseau's
+first love,&quot; has neatly dubbed him &quot;the Great High Priest of those who
+kiss and tell.&quot;</p>
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+<h3>THE AMIABLE PICCINNI</h3>
+      <a name="img15" id="img15"></a><img src="images/img15.jpg" alt="Nicola Piccinni" align="left" />
+      <p>In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
+upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
+the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.</p>
+
+<p>The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
+way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
+the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
+his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
+consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
+made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
+mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
+not a genius of the first order.</p>
+
+<p>But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
+intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
+beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
+been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
+inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
+Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
+biographer Ginguen&eacute; says: &quot;She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
+beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
+study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
+and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
+for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
+which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
+He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
+the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
+every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
+the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
+husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and
+I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara
+Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art,
+so much soul, and expression, as by his wife.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support
+of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and prot&eacute;g&eacute;,
+Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like
+Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and
+kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of
+Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
+happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
+Piccinni's home life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
+tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born
+that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him
+tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in
+dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene
+himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
+indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
+a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of &quot;The Good Daughter&quot;
+[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling
+conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely
+than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December
+day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest
+daughter, aged eighteen. &quot;Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
+to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
+country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
+quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
+to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
+work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
+these intrigues.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
+&quot;Roland,&quot; and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
+He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
+and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
+perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
+so good a man merited.</p>
+
+<p>Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
+his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered
+the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna,
+Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.</p>
+
+<p>He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must
+be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution
+broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
+the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
+where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
+everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
+had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
+whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
+brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
+dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.</p>
+
+<p>In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
+gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here &quot;one heard with
+pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
+Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
+without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
+as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
+eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
+Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested.&quot;
+So says Ginguen&eacute; of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
+so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
+believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
+old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguen&eacute; has this last picture
+of him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
+home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
+the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
+They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
+expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' <i>Lasciami, o ciel pietoso</i>!
+composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
+and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
+eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
+forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
+Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
+daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
+accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
+so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
+had animated him when he produced those sublime works.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
+said that he was &quot;<i>Cher aux Arts et &agrave; l'Amitie</i>.&quot; He left to his widow
+and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
+Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
+purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
+assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
+sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
+a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.</p>
+
+<p>Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
+to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
+but I do not find that he married. Salieri&mdash;whom Gluck assisted in the
+most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
+operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
+it was a success&mdash;was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
+him much affection. M&eacute;hul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
+married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
+a nephew.</p>
+
+<p>It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
+take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
+the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
+should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
+Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap12"></a><h2>CHAPTER XII.</h2>
+      <h3>A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY&mdash;PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.</h3>
+
+<p>Though it sounds strange to speak of the &quot;invention&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 &quot;Dafne&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by
+his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to F&eacute;tis, Peri was
+very avaricious. Of noble 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a good division of labour, for those patients
+whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.</p>
+
+<p>Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Sch&uuml;tz, a great
+revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German
+opera, was &quot;Dafne,&quot; 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 &quot;Christian Wildeck of
+Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter,&quot; which description
+Hawkins compares to that of &quot;Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's
+sister's hat.&quot; 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.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>LULLY THE IMP</h3>
+      <a name="img16" id="img16"></a><img src="images/img16.jpg" alt="Jean Baptiste de Lully" align="left" />
+      <p>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,&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the &quot;atmosphere of
+passion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora.&quot; He was always a very
+dissipated man, but in July, 1662, &quot;regularised&quot; his life by marrying
+Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court. &quot;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.&quot; His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are
+said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent
+monument.</p>
+
+<p>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 Moli&egrave;re. His contract of marriage
+was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage,
+F&eacute;tis says: &quot;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 <i>menus
+plaisirs</i> only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted
+annually to seven or eight thousand francs.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His dissipations, like those of H&auml;ndel, 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 &quot;Armide,&quot; he demanded, angrily, &quot;<i>Qui t'a fait cela</i>?&quot;
+and gave her a kick <i>qui lui fit faire une fausse couche</i>. 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 brandishing his b&acirc;ton 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, &quot;That's true, my dear,
+and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown
+poet, who hated him for his <i>moeurs infames</i>, scrawled on his tomb these
+terrific lines:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">D'un libertin, indigne de memoire,</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Peut-&ecirc;tre m&ecirc;me indigne du tombeau.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain r&ocirc;les 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.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>THE TACITURN RAMEAU</h3>
+
+<p>The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683&mdash;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 crushing statement:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You spell like a scullion.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;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.&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being &quot;a savage, a stranger to every
+sentiment of humanity.&quot; The great Diderot, in a book called &quot;The Nephew
+of Rameau,&quot; referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in
+acoustics, and added:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;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.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>F&eacute;tis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French
+music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister. &quot;Sombre and unsociable
+he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost
+absolute.&quot; I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him.</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>PERGOLESI</h3>
+
+<p>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, &quot;For those that like that
+sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<h3>KEISER</h3>
+
+<p>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, H&auml;ndel, he attempted
+management, and like H&auml;ndel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
+quite unlike the woman-hater H&auml;ndel, he married his way out of poverty.
+In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership 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.</p>
+
+<h3>BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS</h3>
+
+<p>Of that exquisite and elegant scamp Bononcini, who was the great rival
+of H&auml;ndel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
+Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess of Marlborough, who
+gave him a pension of &pound;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 destitution, from which the famous
+artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap13"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIII.</h2>
+      <h3>MOZART</h3>
+      <a name="img17" id="img17"></a><img src="images/img17.jpg" alt="Wolfgang Mozart" align="left" />
+      <p>As we come nearer to our own day, the documents concerning the personal
+lives of composers begin to multiply. Of the love of Bach we have only
+that tantalising allusion to the &quot;stranger maiden.&quot; Of Haydn we have
+amorous documents 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.</p>
+<p>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,&mdash;all those qualities that are
+found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various
+operas&mdash;all the qualities that are combined in &quot;Don Giovanni,&quot; are the
+qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and
+the fanatic libertinism of his Don Juan.</p>
+
+<p>Schopenhauer says that the genius is he who never quite outgrows the
+childhood of his attitude toward the world. Mozart was always the
+sublime child.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 constitute 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&mdash;woe's me!</p>
+<a name="img18" id="img18"></a>
+      <div align="center"><img src="images/img18.jpg" alt="Mozart at Vienna" />
+      </div>
+      <p>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 assistance of the father
+and the mother, themselves musicians.</p>
+
+<p>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,
+&quot;Next to God comes papa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>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
+&quot;Nannerl,&quot; 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 God 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.</p>
+
+<p>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: &quot;I kiss
+your hand a thousand times, and have a great deal to say to my sister;
+but what? That is known only to God and myself. Please God I hope soon
+to be able to confide it to her verbally.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This does not sound like the writing of a composer who was adding in a
+letter a few days later, &quot;Pray to God that my opera may be successful.&quot;
+The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
+only fourteen years old!</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
+as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
+messages as these:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Don't, I entreat, forget about <i>the one other</i>, where no other can ever
+be.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Say to Fraulein W. von M&ouml;lk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg,
+in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the
+minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all
+about it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Carissima Sorella,&mdash;Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi
+gi&agrave; sapete.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dearest Sister,&mdash;I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to
+perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my
+reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in
+the most impressive and tender manner,&mdash;the most tender; and, oh,&mdash;but I
+need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to
+drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to
+Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before
+my eyes in her fascinating <i>n&eacute;glig&eacute;</i>. I have seen many pretty girls
+here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers.&quot; The
+daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his
+heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was &quot;the magnet.&quot; And Wendling's
+daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.</p>
+
+<p>These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the
+father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous
+activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When,
+therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest
+in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing,
+and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was
+Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little
+ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.</p>
+
+<p>There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this
+letter to his father, dated 1777&mdash;he was born in 1756:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all
+this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and
+finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time
+known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the
+matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father
+on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the
+convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his B&auml;sle, or
+cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a
+concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the
+daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with
+certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his
+father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation
+of visiting the town. He found her &quot;pretty, intelligent, lovable,
+clever, and gay,&quot; and, like him, &quot;rather inclined to be satirical.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.
+His letters are full of that <i>possenhaften Jargon</i> with which he
+sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name
+of B&auml;sle, with which he rhymes &quot;H&auml;sle,&quot; a colloquial word for &quot;rabbit.&quot;
+His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes,
+puns, and quibbles, such as:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief&mdash;trief, welchen
+ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben&mdash;schaben.
+Desto besser, besser desto!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense
+if not literally the sense. This is a sample:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear Coz-Buzz:&mdash;I have safely received your precious
+epistle&mdash;thistle, and from it I perceive&mdash;achieve, that my
+aunt&mdash;gaunt, and you&mdash;shoe, are quite well&mdash;bell. I have
+to-day a letter&mdash;setter, from my papa&mdash;ah-ha, safe in my
+hands&mdash;sands.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A week later he writes her a letter beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!&mdash;Potz
+Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz
+Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
+Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans,
+Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons
+regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and
+villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls,
+and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such
+a packet and no portrait!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and
+it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have
+a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds,
+&quot;Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing.&quot; It is certain that
+in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his
+kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this
+very letter, &quot;love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease
+loving each other?&quot; Had he not thence broken into French?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Je vous baise vos mains,&mdash;v&ocirc;tre visage&mdash;afin, tout ce que vous me
+permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur,&quot; etc.</p>
+
+<p>His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
+met for crossbow practice, and the target represented &quot;the melancholy
+farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the B&auml;sle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
+was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
+more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
+Aloysia Weber&mdash;of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
+him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
+dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
+intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
+it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
+letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You may think or believe that I have croaked (<i>crepirt</i>)
+or kicked the bucket (<i>verreckt</i>). But I beg you not to think
+so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
+her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.</p>
+
+<p>In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
+Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
+frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
+absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
+should &quot;have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia.&quot; This I
+would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
+deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
+him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
+inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
+drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.</p>
+
+<p>And yet his flirtation with the B&auml;sle certainly went past mere bantering
+and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
+Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
+Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
+writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
+by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With her name he puns on <i>B&auml;sle</i> and <i>Bass</i>, thence, &quot;<i>B&auml;schen oder
+Violoncellchen</i>&quot;&mdash;a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
+says, to appease her &quot;alluring beauty (<i>visibilia et invisibilia</i>)
+heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel.&quot; Then he writes
+her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
+circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
+neither beauty on her part nor art on his.</p>
+
+<p>This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
+business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
+which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
+mood. Biographer Jahn says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The B&auml;sle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
+least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
+there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
+neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
+have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
+and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
+life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
+in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
+eighty-three.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So much for the B&auml;sle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
+bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
+serious&mdash;for Mozart a very serious&mdash;affair, was his infatuation with
+Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
+heart.</p>
+
+<p>When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
+B&auml;sle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
+the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
+copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
+hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
+of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.</p>
+
+<p>The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
+Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
+gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
+was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
+Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
+Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she
+is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not
+for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a
+downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very
+reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,&mdash;five girls and
+a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the
+last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already
+done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer
+for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis
+she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who
+had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a
+disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The
+deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, &quot;Friends
+who have no religion cannot long be our friends.&quot; Then, with man's usual
+consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break
+off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he
+wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter
+Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has
+written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy
+principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says,
+because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him
+greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial
+friend for Nannerl.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his
+father he declares:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish
+is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be
+answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my
+recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty
+zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I
+don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what
+is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the
+postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying
+a slight touch of motherly jealousy:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang
+makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she
+does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own
+interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I
+don't wish him to know it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend
+who married for money and commenting:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but
+not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from
+love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other
+considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife
+after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his
+property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a
+wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a
+one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the
+contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife,
+for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can
+deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing
+more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the
+Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for
+fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to
+pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought
+of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame
+the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!</p>
+
+<p>Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and
+tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He
+asks him to decide whether he wishes to become &quot;a commonplace artist
+whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom
+posterity will read years after in books,&mdash;whether, infatuated with a
+pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and
+children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian
+life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided
+for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of
+really great people. <i>Aut Caesar ant nihil</i>.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in
+the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that
+his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother
+went to Paris.</p>
+
+<p>He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.
+Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.
+For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone
+there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in
+Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply
+concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure
+her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this,
+however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the
+star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.</p>
+
+<p>What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.
+The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's
+tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.
+But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the
+favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be
+held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence
+she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It
+was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other
+who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to
+love elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and
+dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with
+black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of
+her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal
+German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake
+once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself
+upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, &quot;Ich
+lass das M&auml;del gern das mich nicht will,&quot;&mdash;which you might translate,
+&quot;Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me.&quot; It was on Christmas Day
+that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the
+Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took
+it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend
+he locked himself in a room and wept for days.</p>
+
+<p>Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair
+before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and
+his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have
+answered with rebuking him for his foolish &quot;dreams of pleasure.&quot; To this
+ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up
+dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not
+often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure&mdash;peaceful dreams, sweet,
+cheering dreams, if you will&mdash;dreams which, if realised, would have
+rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his
+cousin the B&auml;sle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich,
+followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.</p>
+
+<p>As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the
+greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She
+married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to
+Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after,
+Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The
+lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least,
+Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, &quot;Otherwise
+he would hardly have taken the r&ocirc;le of Pierrot in the pantomime in which
+his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: &quot;Neither happiness nor riches
+brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from
+the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman,
+and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she
+liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the
+brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to
+revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any
+intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her
+freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her
+readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion
+of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into
+her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years
+of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from
+her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto
+regarded her was no longer the same.&quot;</p>
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" />
+<br />
+
+<p>Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth,
+there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so
+sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her
+youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his
+readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities
+belong exclusively to the historian.</p>
+
+<p>The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a
+prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the
+part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop
+was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious
+Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a
+declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long
+in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at
+the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to
+present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally
+kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but
+seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation
+only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that
+it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count
+Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count
+went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.</p>
+
+<p>The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the
+humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken
+heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of
+course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that
+the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to
+punch the critic's head.</p>
+
+<p>Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that
+he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was
+so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those
+who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit
+to the artist and his art.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The
+emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the
+composition of his &quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Serail.&quot; In the first moment
+of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and
+sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the
+household of the Webers?&mdash;now more than ever in poverty since the good
+father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new
+engagement.</p>
+
+<p>The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
+series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
+gentleness.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
+fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
+love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
+indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
+is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
+opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
+is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
+kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
+a strange hand as follows:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Your good son has just been summoned by Countess</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">to you as what your son would have written. I beg</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">obedient friend,</span><br />
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;CONSTANZE WEBER.&quot;</span><br />
+<br />
+
+<p>This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
+Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
+or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
+fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
+fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
+improvisations.</p>
+
+<p>The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
+friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
+alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
+Wolfgang should move at once.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
+gossip that he is to marry Constanze&mdash;ridiculous gossip, he calls it.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
+whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
+I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
+(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
+morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
+house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
+I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
+daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
+According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
+Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
+predicament&mdash;a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,&mdash;I am
+to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But,
+worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was
+a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it&mdash;by her
+beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came
+later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things&mdash;I was
+obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth
+in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more
+loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she
+began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she
+took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what
+you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are
+to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a
+face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always
+laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms
+it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage
+me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take
+advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but
+only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is
+nothing but an amorous fool.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from
+prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved
+frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved
+the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he
+was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with
+Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and
+this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything
+but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a
+well-behaved and conscientious man.</p>
+
+<p>He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his
+father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze.
+But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon
+tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he
+plighted his troth with her.</p>
+
+<p>He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news
+to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint
+of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was
+satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the
+closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have
+opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded,
+from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although
+merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at
+present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with
+what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live&mdash;and to marry! You
+are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father,
+to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you
+must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very
+well-grounded reasons they are.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do.
+In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love
+for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive
+any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to
+domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been
+in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I
+think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am
+forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I
+possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a
+wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous
+expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only
+half of life.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat
+you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,&mdash;not
+Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with
+such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle,
+coarse, and deceitful&mdash;crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange
+(Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is
+still too young to have her character defined,&mdash;she is merely a good
+humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the
+martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest
+hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes
+charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh!
+my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all
+the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the
+same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair
+of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has
+enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife
+and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she
+can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She
+dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart
+in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if
+I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure
+some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of),
+and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this
+poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as
+Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest
+father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours.
+Pray, have compassion on your son.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had
+a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had
+carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander
+about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about
+Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into
+signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart
+writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful
+light:</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian
+stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies
+and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports,
+such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I
+would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became
+very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result
+was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he
+insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her
+daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing.
+What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or
+renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his
+beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst
+interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was
+in this form:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three
+years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I
+change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300
+florins.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew
+that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could
+never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be
+too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as
+I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She
+desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear
+Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.'
+She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart
+does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not
+have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze.
+Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame
+Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the
+r&ocirc;le of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart
+as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that,
+whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married.
+Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the
+affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a
+little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything
+worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to
+Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is,
+at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has
+evolved a little model:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:&mdash;I never should have been so bold as to
+yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had
+not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do
+so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least,
+with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of
+Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I
+have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you
+as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you
+for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly
+deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you
+mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I
+may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE
+WEBER.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My compliments to your papa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is
+small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition
+of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One
+feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which
+she so carefully guarded,&mdash;Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved
+any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the
+social diversions of Vienna society at that time.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;VIENNA, April 29, 1782.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:&mdash;You still, I hope, allow me to give you
+this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be
+your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to
+be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly
+as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In
+spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat
+refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with
+me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it
+seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore,
+so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I
+love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh
+well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being
+displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a
+game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by
+a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a
+thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many
+things to be considered besides,&mdash;whether only intimate friends and
+acquaintances are present,&mdash;whether you are a child, or a girl old
+enough to be married,&mdash;but, above all, whether you are with people of
+much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness
+[Waldst&auml;dten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she
+is a <i>pass&eacute;e</i> elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and
+is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never
+lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife.
+But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct
+would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you
+will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This
+will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like
+you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling,
+then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind:
+My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling
+of her honest and kindly disposed,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MOZART.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This letter seems to have ended the quarrel&mdash;the only one we know of
+their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart
+implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also
+that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and
+fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply
+absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly
+dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his
+ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in
+every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze
+are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints
+that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her
+without it.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast
+in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldst&auml;dten had been touched by the
+troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for
+some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely
+in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she
+insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.</p>
+
+<p>When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not
+return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove
+Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between
+the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness
+wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000
+gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage
+portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of
+publishing the banns.</p>
+
+<p>Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the
+wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent
+however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance
+and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.</p>
+
+<p>There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious
+remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the
+contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to
+take money into account.</p>
+
+<p>Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account
+of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first
+opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. &quot;No one attended the
+marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth
+in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the
+bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my
+wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on
+seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted
+of a supper, which Baroness Waldst&auml;dten gave us, and indeed it was more
+princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful
+at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake&mdash;ay, my very
+life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really
+know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled,
+honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion&mdash;this wedlock of
+the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married
+in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty
+that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of
+these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is
+gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of
+the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for
+refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal
+congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.</p>
+
+<p>Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but
+we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been
+poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its
+presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing
+together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a
+detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to
+counterbalance the affection each found in each.</p>
+
+<p>As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have
+availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way
+in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of
+bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably
+have made him produce greater compositions&mdash;for no greater compositions
+than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced
+by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without
+conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness
+or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart
+used to refer to his elopement as &quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Auge Gottes,&quot;
+as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible,
+&quot;Die Entf&uuml;hrung aus dem Serail.&quot; It is a curious coincidence that the
+name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that
+she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the
+wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the
+height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a
+welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a
+cherished friend.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It
+continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up
+his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might
+cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear
+his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for
+permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband,
+genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.</p>
+
+<p>All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the
+most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of
+putting his fingers to his lips and saying &quot;Psst!&quot; to any one who
+entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being
+spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips
+and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early,
+before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this:
+&quot;<i>Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich w&uuml;nsche, dass Du gut geschlafen
+habest</i>&quot; etc., or, as it runs in English: &quot;Good morning, my darling
+wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you
+will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too
+much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over
+the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household
+worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home
+at&mdash;o'clock punctually.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in
+this tone:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended
+mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I
+found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by
+her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other,
+and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not
+forsake us.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is
+not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of
+her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father
+and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the
+weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes
+to his father that his wife &quot;carries about a little silhouette of you,
+which she kisses twenty times a day at least.&quot; His letters are full of
+little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the
+evening until seven in the morning,&mdash;a game of skittles of which
+Constanze was especially fond,&mdash;a concert where Aloysia sang with great
+success an aria Mozart wrote for her,&mdash;and financial troubles of the
+most petty and annoying sort.</p>
+
+<p>In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to
+the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either
+&quot;Leopold&quot; or &quot;Leopoldine,&quot; according as fate decided. Fate decided that
+the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to
+Salzburg, for a visit.</p>
+
+<p>But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a
+success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a
+creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in
+Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed
+not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, &quot;the
+poor little fat baby&quot; died after six months of life.</p>
+
+<p>There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial
+troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance
+and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but
+there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief
+of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited
+them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.</p>
+
+<p>Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can
+be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous,
+beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though
+not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a
+reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's
+devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a
+breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's
+ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions
+from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! &quot;He loved her
+dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she
+requited him with tenderness and true solicitude.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She always said, &quot;One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him,
+since he was himself so good.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child
+lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the
+third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, &quot;His
+wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the
+depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first
+lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had
+captured a widower of means and position.</p>
+
+<p>Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was
+away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness
+and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided
+that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources
+and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually
+dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the
+court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince
+Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical
+will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid
+pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that
+time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common
+diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most
+loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive
+to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may
+find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [<i>O
+Gott! mache meine W&uuml;nsche wahr!</i>] After receiving my letter, you must
+write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I
+shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [<i>ich
+bin Dich von ganzem Herzen k&uuml;ssend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart</i>] I am,
+kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,</p>
+
+<p>MOZART.&quot;</p>
+
+<p><i>&quot;Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre sant&eacute;, si pr&eacute;cieuse a votre &eacute;poux.&quot;</i>
+In his next, three days later, he says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MY DARLING WIFE:&mdash;Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell
+you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh.
+For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless
+you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas,
+Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it
+slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now!
+[<i>Nu&mdash;nu&mdash;nu&mdash;nu!</i>] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant
+word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse,
+sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the
+world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each
+other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you,
+and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love
+you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your
+fondly loving husband.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his &quot;<i>liebstes
+bestes Weibchen</i>&quot; an account of his activities:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to
+me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my
+beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and
+over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read
+it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your
+letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of
+yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you
+will not go out to walk alone,&mdash;indeed, it would be better not to walk
+at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not
+written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before
+me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in
+your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be
+angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still
+better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish
+you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best
+beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with
+your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O <i>stru!
+stru!</i> I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give
+you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever
+your most faithful husband and friend.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a
+list of the letters he had written to his wife&mdash;eleven in all (one of
+them in French)&mdash;between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly
+that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet
+to add, seeing how poor they were:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than
+in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700,
+florins,&mdash;at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left
+me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place,
+Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so
+low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request&mdash;you know why. 4th. My
+concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so
+I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must
+be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be
+in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between
+ourselves.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was
+embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon
+his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to
+despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging
+letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.</p>
+
+<p>Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to
+set forth again. He writes again to his <i>Herzens Weibchen</i> or his
+<i>Herzaller-liebstes</i> with renewed hope:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall
+then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall
+lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be
+placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with
+me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your
+loving Mozart.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;P.S.&mdash;While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But
+now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about&mdash;Quick!
+catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he
+went.</p>
+
+<p>In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her
+health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and
+taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze
+was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot
+water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be
+worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of
+his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have
+not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more
+vivid to leave in the original:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;MA TR&Egrave;S-CH&Egrave;RE &Eacute;POUSE:&mdash;J'&eacute;cris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au
+Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; o&ugrave; j'ai couch&eacute; cette nuit
+excellement&mdash;et j'esp&egrave;re que ma ch&egrave;re &eacute;pouse aura pass&eacute; cette nuit aussi
+bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que
+m'apprendra comme vous avez pass&eacute; le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je
+pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de
+tomber sur l'escalier en sortant&mdash;et je me trouve entre l'esp&eacute;rance et
+la crainte&mdash;une situation bien d&eacute;sagr&eacute;able! Si vous n'&eacute;ties pas grosse,
+je craignerais moins&mdash;mais abandonons cette id&eacute;e triste!&mdash;Le ciel aura
+eu certainement soin de ma ch&egrave;re Stanza Maria!...</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are
+well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me
+to-day&mdash;but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
+my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
+have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
+like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
+it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
+2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
+sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr&mdash;du nun mir&mdash;nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
+zu immer mehr&mdash;und mehr&mdash;endlich sagen wir;&mdash;es ist wagen
+Slampi&mdash;Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
+ebben die Comodit&auml;t. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
+familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
+Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
+her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
+her if informed.</p>
+
+<p>It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
+domestic tragedy. Frau Hofd&auml;mmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
+grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
+almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
+that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
+first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
+later discarded after K&ouml;chel, another biographer, had succeeded in
+proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
+death. Hofd&auml;mmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
+he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
+however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
+who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
+1789&mdash;90. She sang in his &quot;Entf&uuml;hrung,&quot; and it was said that his friends
+had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
+Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
+received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
+Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
+Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
+could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
+writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died,
+Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
+when it should come, and speaking of death as &quot;this good and faithful
+friend of man,&quot; and adding: &quot;I never lie down at night without thinking,
+young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
+suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
+but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
+had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
+physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
+overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
+at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.</p>
+
+<p>After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
+leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
+Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
+solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
+last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
+even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
+to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
+When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
+comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
+door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
+and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
+for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of &quot;these
+unchristian Fathers&quot; to do as she wished.</p>
+
+<p>After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
+would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
+applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
+unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
+1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
+the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!</p>
+
+<p>Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
+windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
+herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
+thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief
+was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
+to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
+to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
+friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
+sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
+pauper's grave, three corpses deep.</p>
+
+<p>It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
+She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
+identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
+sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
+and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.</p>
+
+<p>There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
+Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
+speaks of Constanze as &quot;indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
+remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
+biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
+highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
+love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
+there is a superfluity of proof.</p>
+
+<p>After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
+was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
+granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
+her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
+paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
+took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
+Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
+only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
+as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
+her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
+biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to &quot;our Raphael of
+Music,&quot; her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
+he left fatherless and penniless.</p>
+
+<p>For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
+ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
+she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
+councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the
+education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in
+Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of
+this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it
+revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to
+Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her
+affections.</p>
+
+<p>There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic
+biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and
+enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of
+Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and
+Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a
+portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most
+beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle
+unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself &quot;widow of
+Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or
+her &quot;indifference,&quot; responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius,
+and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she
+says: &quot;May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate
+love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828.&quot;
+What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to
+one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?</p>
+
+<p>When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was,
+according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband&mdash;an
+eminent musician&mdash;both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict
+of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau
+Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She
+was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his
+memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Mozart,&quot; she said, &quot;loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most
+of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally
+cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes
+pensive. Indeed,&quot; she continued, &quot;he was an angel on earth, and is one
+in heaven now.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in
+March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.</p>
+
+<p>Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
+for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
+sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
+tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
+Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
+the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap14"></a><h2>CHAPTER XIV.</h2>
+      <h3>BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE</h3>
+      <a name="img19" id="img19"></a><img src="images/img19.jpg" alt="Ludwig von Beethoven" align="left" />
+      <p>&quot;No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
+thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
+it, his success and his immortality.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
+Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
+well and loved him well, and as mutely as &quot;a violet blooming at his feet
+in utter disregard.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
+or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
+He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
+ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
+self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose&mdash;all the brutal
+epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
+Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
+fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
+roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.</p>
+<br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<p>A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
+and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
+women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant H&auml;ndel, despised the pleasures of the
+table; he substituted a passion for nature. &quot;No man on earth can love
+the country as I do!&quot; he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
+died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
+Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed &quot;Lorchen,&quot; seems to
+have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
+neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
+her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
+intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
+had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.</p>
+
+<p>Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
+charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the caf&eacute; where
+Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
+Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
+whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
+Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
+ditties. Then came Fr&auml;ulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
+Wertherlike fashion.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that &quot;In Vienna,
+at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
+in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
+where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
+hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
+each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
+Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: &quot;A New Year's gift for the
+tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
+Beethoven.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
+and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, &quot;because he was very
+ugly and half crazy,&quot; as she told her niece.</p>
+
+<p>An army captain cut him out with Fr&auml;ulein d'Honrath; his good friend
+Stephan von Breuning won away from him the &quot;sch&ouml;ne und hochgebildete&quot;
+Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
+she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
+Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
+beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fr&auml;ulein Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
+&quot;volatile Th&eacute;r&egrave;se who takes life so lightly.&quot; She married the Baron von
+Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: &quot;Farewell, my
+dearest Th&eacute;r&egrave;se; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
+Think of me kindly, and forget my follies.&quot; She had a cousin
+Mathilde&mdash;later the Baroness Gleichenstein&mdash;who also left a barb in the
+well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
+pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fr&auml;ulein
+Roeckel.</p>
+
+<p>The Hungarian Countess Marie Erd&ouml;dy (<i>n&eacute;e</i> Countess Niczky) is listed
+among his flames, though Schindler thinks it &quot;nothing more than a
+friendly intimacy between the two.&quot; Still, she gave Beethoven an
+apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
+servant extra money to stay with him&mdash;a task servants always required
+bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a m&eacute;nage could not last,
+as Beethoven was &quot;too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
+easily injured and too hardly reconciled.&quot; Beethoven dedicated to her
+certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
+temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
+letters he calls her his &quot;confessor,&quot; and in one he addresses her as
+&quot;Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Gr&auml;fin,&quot; showing that she was his dearie to
+the fourth power.</p>
+
+<p>Also there was Amalie Sebald, &quot;a nut-brown maid of Berlin,&quot; a
+twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
+in 1812, Beethoven says:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
+even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
+of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
+gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
+myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
+companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
+of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
+more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
+foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
+part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
+to Amalie a right ardent kiss&mdash;if nobody there can see.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
+album of the singer, Mine. &quot;Auguste&quot; Sebald (a mistake for &quot;Amalie&quot;).
+The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:</p>
+
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Ludwig van Beethoven:</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Who even if you would</span><br />
+<span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Forget you never should.&quot;</span><br />
+
+<p>In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
+from Beethoven to her, showing &quot;not so much the warm, effervescent
+passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
+affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
+lasting.&quot; One of the letters he quotes. It runs:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
+will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
+may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
+me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
+pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
+here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
+me of your attachment to your friend,</p>
+
+<p>&quot;BEETHOVEN.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
+called the composer &quot;a tyrant,&quot; and he has much playfulness of allusion
+to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
+Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
+the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.</p>
+
+<p>It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, &quot;To the
+far-away love&quot; <i>[An die ferne Geliebte],</i> according to Thayer; and of
+her that he wrote to Ries: &quot;All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
+none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
+had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
+his life, but it was &quot;not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
+impracticability, a chimera.&quot; Still, he said, his love was as strong as
+ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
+could never get her out of his mind.</p>
+
+<p>In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
+devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.</p>
+
+<p>Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
+from &quot;a Bremen maiden,&quot; a pianist, Elise M&uuml;ller. And there was a poetess
+who also annoyed him.</p>
+      <a name="img20" id="img20"></a><img src="images/img20.jpg" alt="Bettina Brentano von Arnim" align="right" />
+      <p>In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of &quot;the beautiful
+and amiable&quot; Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
+1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
+inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817&mdash;he being then
+forty-seven years old&mdash;the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
+who observed it, called it an &quot;autumnal love,&quot; though the woman's son
+later asserted that it was only a kinship of &quot;artistic sympathy,&quot;&mdash;in
+fact, Beethoven called her &quot;a true foster-mother to the creations of his
+brain.&quot; Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
+she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
+Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
+acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
+to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
+said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
+that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
+scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
+Goethe's &quot;garden of girls&quot; before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
+to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
+it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
+fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
+Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
+to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
+recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
+Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
+life, &quot;a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
+her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
+always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
+&quot;promiscuous lover,&quot; because he once used to stare amorously at a
+handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
+mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
+Ries, who wrote: &quot;Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
+lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
+respectable daughters.&quot; In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
+to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
+were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
+was a cook.</p>
+
+<p>Ries describes him as a sad flirt. &quot;Beethoven had a great liking for
+female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
+met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
+and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
+observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
+generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
+conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
+him longest, and most seriously of all&mdash;namely, seven whole months!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
+Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
+piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions&mdash;
+&quot;<i>amoroso,&quot; &quot;a malinconico</i>&quot; and the like.</p>
+
+<p>Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
+the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
+one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
+capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
+discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
+repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
+the head of the suggester of the mischief.</p>
+
+<p>Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as <i>&quot;postillon
+d'amour&quot;</i> by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.</p>
+      <a name="img21" id="img21"></a><img src="images/img21.jpg" alt="Countess Therese von Brunswick" align="right" />
+      <p>Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
+dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
+inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
+Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake &quot;der Verliebte.&quot; Other
+&quot;gewidmets&quot; were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
+Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erd&ouml;dy, von Brunswick,
+Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his &quot;liebe, werthe, Dorothea
+C&auml;cilia&quot;), and to Eleonora von Breuning.</p>
+
+<p>All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
+and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
+Juan's conquests, &quot;but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve.&quot; I find I have
+catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
+one). And more are to come.</p>
+
+<p>And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
+Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that &quot;Beethoven was
+never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
+passages in his life,&quot; while Francis Hueffer can speak of &quot;his grand,
+chaste way.&quot; On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
+adopts both sides at once by saying: &quot;In the main, authorities concur in
+Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
+however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
+acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
+without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side.&quot; Thayer
+takes a middle ground,&mdash;that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
+grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
+while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
+endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
+him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
+and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
+he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
+say, &quot;Poor Beethoven!&quot; is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
+what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
+was no Fr&auml;ulein Androcles to take it away.</p>
+
+<p>Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
+aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
+early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
+says: &quot;She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
+Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
+of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
+mute image of her that my fancy paints.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
+his life-long griefs&mdash;lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
+no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
+wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
+friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.</p>
+
+<p>And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
+began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
+nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
+communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
+said, <i>inter lacrimas et luctum</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
+the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
+themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
+this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
+bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
+his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
+trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
+that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.</p>
+
+<p>To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
+longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
+glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
+two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
+whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
+of his &quot;Moonlight Sonata&quot; (Op. 27, No. 2)&mdash;&quot;<i>alla damigella contessa
+Giulietta Guicciardi.&quot;</i> It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
+eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
+sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
+passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
+Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
+Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
+his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
+her own name over the &quot;Moonlight Sonata&quot; instead.</p>
+
+<p>It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
+inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
+more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
+intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
+deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
+from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
+you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
+fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
+again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
+what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
+my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
+I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
+compassed half the world with my art&mdash;I must do it still. There exists
+for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
+will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
+sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
+father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
+Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
+afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
+which his deafness compelled him to use: &quot;I was well beloved of her,
+more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
+scorned her.&quot; (He wrote it in French, &quot;J'&eacute;tais bien aim&eacute; d'elle, et plus
+que jamais son &eacute;poux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
+m&eacute;prisais&quot;), and he added: &quot;If I had parted thus with my strength as
+well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
+things?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
+three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
+in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
+his &quot;unsterbliche Geliebte.&quot; They were written in pencil, and either
+were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
+passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
+in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
+with a few literalising changes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My angel, my all, my self&mdash;only a few words to-day, and they with a
+pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
+to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
+grief when Necessity decides?&mdash;can our love exist without sacrifices,
+and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
+you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
+beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
+demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
+toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
+for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
+as I should.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
+yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
+another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
+warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
+but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
+broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
+and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
+wayside. Esterh&aacute;zy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
+eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
+which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
+I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
+again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
+during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
+ever, none of these would occur to me.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
+moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
+Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
+rest the gods must ordain&mdash;what must and shall become of us.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Your faithful LUDWIG.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Monday Evening, July 6th.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
+be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
+post goes to K----from here.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
+shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
+Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
+there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve&mdash;the
+servility of man towards his fellow man&mdash;it pains me&mdash;and when I regard
+myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
+the greatest?&mdash;and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
+weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
+probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
+fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
+at these baths, I must now go to rest.&quot; [A few words are here effaced by
+Beethoven himself.] &quot;Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
+celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>&quot;Good Morning, July 7th.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
+Beloved!&mdash;now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
+whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
+all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
+your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
+unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
+will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
+my heart&mdash;never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
+loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
+made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
+life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
+relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
+so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
+for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
+contemplation of our existence. Be calm&mdash;love me&mdash;to-day&mdash;yesterday&mdash;
+what longings with tears for you&mdash;you! you!&mdash;my life!&mdash;my all! Farewell!
+Oh! love me well&mdash;and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever thine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever mine.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Ever each other's.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>These impassioned letters to his &quot;immortal beloved&quot; were believed by
+Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
+in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
+Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
+could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
+Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
+life he hoped to share.</p>
+
+<p>Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
+been another Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, the Countess Th&eacute;r&egrave;se von Brunswick. She was the
+cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+&quot;adored him.&quot; About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
+&quot;Kiss your sister Th&eacute;r&egrave;se,&quot; and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
+Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, Thayer says that she lived to a great age&mdash;&quot;<i>&ccedil;a va sans
+dire</i>!&mdash;&quot; and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
+character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
+words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
+she did not dare?</p>
+
+<p>Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
+more definite to Thayer's argument&mdash;if one is to believe a book I
+stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
+the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
+truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
+Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Th&eacute;r&egrave;se well for many
+years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
+her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her &quot;the most remarkable
+woman I have ever known.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
+Beethoven,&quot; he went on, &quot;and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
+in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
+her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
+because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
+beatified spirit.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He told Fr&auml;ulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se and
+Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
+he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
+the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
+but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
+obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
+her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
+bareheaded into the storm.</p>
+
+<p>Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
+&quot;Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!&quot; she cried. Seizing them,
+she rushed after him&mdash;she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
+a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
+give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
+ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's
+diary Beethoven appeared constantly as &quot;mon ma&icirc;tre,&quot; &quot;mon ma&icirc;tre ch&eacute;ri.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
+her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
+saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for &quot;that
+beautiful horrible Beethoven&mdash;if it were not such a come-down.&quot; She did
+not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
+dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
+of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
+the flower growing by the way.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
+Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
+thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
+delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
+of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
+furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
+snapped the bond with Th&eacute;r&egrave;se. As she herself told Fr&auml;ulein Tenger, &quot;The
+word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
+frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
+love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
+her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
+art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
+He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
+&quot;immortal beloved,&quot; which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
+betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
+Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
+Fr&auml;ulein Tenger:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have read it so often that I know it by heart&mdash;like a poem&mdash;and was
+it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
+loved thee,' and thank God for it.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
+on it an inscription from Ludwig:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;L'immortelle &agrave; son Immortelle. LUIGI.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
+that it be placed under her head in her coffin.</p>
+
+<p>When Fr&auml;ulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
+asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
+Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
+long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
+her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
+reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.</p>
+
+<p>Th&eacute;r&egrave;se von Brunswick was Beethoven's &quot;Immortal Beloved,&quot; and the
+picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
+when Th&eacute;r&egrave;se was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
+the words:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from</p>
+
+<p>T.B.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
+Museum at Pesth is a bust of Th&eacute;r&egrave;se in her later years, erected in her
+honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
+school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
+pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
+muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
+was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.</p>
+
+<p>Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's portrait and
+muttering: &quot;Thou wast too noble&mdash;too like an angel.&quot; The baron withdrew
+silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
+mood. He explained: &quot;My good angel has appeared to me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 he wrote in his diary:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
+longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
+longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
+and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
+he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
+life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
+and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.</p>
+
+<p>But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
+Gleichenstein:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one&mdash;one who may
+perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
+must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
+could, I should fall in love with myself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
+fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
+who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
+own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
+individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
+And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
+Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
+of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
+indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
+best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
+become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
+thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
+Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
+publication after her death, adds the words: &quot;I will not repeat my
+answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
+made his life unhappy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
+of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
+of fate?</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap15"></a><h2>CHAPTER XV.</h2>
+      <h3>VON WEBER&mdash;THE RAKE REFORMED</h3>
+      <a name="img22" id="img22"></a><img src="images/img22.jpg" alt="Carl Maria von Weber" align="left" />
+      <p><span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">&quot;Though
+        thou hast now offended like a man.</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Do not persever
+        in it like a devil;</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Yet, yet, thou
+        hast an amiable soul,</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">If sin by custom
+        grow not into nature.&quot;</span><br />
+        <span style="layout-flow: horizontal; margin-left: 0.5em;">Christopher
+        Marlowe's &quot;Doctor Faustus&quot;</span><br />
+        <br />
+</p>
+      <p>Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the
+life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.
+For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake
+the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any
+such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last
+the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of
+frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their
+confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly
+find surpassed outside of Dickens.</p>
+
+<p>The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We
+have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which
+Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of
+Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a
+strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his
+orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought
+home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many
+musicians have earned distinction as soldiers&mdash;what, indeed, would the
+soldiers do without music?</p>
+
+<p>Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position
+of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful
+daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he
+used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his
+large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the
+neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he
+decided that his large family should help in its own support, and
+dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her
+fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later.
+Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though
+he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von
+Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that
+the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to
+realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a
+musical genius into the world.</p>
+
+<p>While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once
+more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his &quot;Weber's
+Company of Comedians.&quot; Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself
+about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her
+health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and
+consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton
+was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.</p>
+
+<p>Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into
+the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music,
+though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's
+character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial
+life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his
+relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his
+first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the
+sixth year of his age; N&uuml;remberg, the 10th of September, 1792.&quot; We
+hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was
+seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into
+dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, &quot;through
+carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice
+spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling.&quot; The intoxicating draught of
+pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the
+ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female
+beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His
+teacher, Abb&eacute; Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at
+the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a
+sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with
+him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through
+his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for
+himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its
+walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale,
+slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst
+his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an
+unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This
+woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple
+were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young
+Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the
+feeling next akin.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very
+clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his
+slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties
+nigh equal to her own.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of
+his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a
+Fr&auml;ulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of W&uuml;rtemberg, who
+took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical
+director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning
+Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he
+secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother,
+Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of W&uuml;rtemberg, a monster of
+corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he
+might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable
+figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown,
+plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was
+known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the
+chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price
+were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the
+times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the
+government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was
+'Apr&egrave;s moi, le deluge!'&quot; The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift,
+and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor
+Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head
+the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron
+Max:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent
+king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his
+arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired
+incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his
+favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas
+vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,&mdash;would have been
+inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an
+autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But
+there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it
+did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed
+daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink
+bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in
+thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer
+the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to
+hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the
+utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was
+nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of
+Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he
+had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met
+him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the
+court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the
+door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently
+assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she
+stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed
+her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated
+monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the
+spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it
+must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed
+sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art
+during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated
+old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common
+door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808,
+composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser
+Leben.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young
+man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the
+king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison
+cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated
+monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to
+himself.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a
+university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts,
+with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men,
+who called themselves by the gentle name of &quot;Faust's Ride to Hell.&quot; He
+now began also the composition of an opera, &quot;Sylvana.&quot; This brought him
+into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of
+that &quot;coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would
+have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised
+circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump
+seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her
+undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly
+humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She
+became the central point of all his life and aspirations.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl
+away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the
+money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and
+reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on
+Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen
+played Antony.</p>
+
+<p>The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father,
+who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his
+beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased
+luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay
+off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal
+of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in
+the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had
+been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the
+increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a
+reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's
+household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be
+concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him
+arrested during a rehearsal of his opera &quot;Sylvana,&quot; and had him thrown
+into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was
+nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released
+from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt,
+and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage
+and driven across the border to exile.</p>
+
+<p>This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of
+disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of,
+and every mention of it was forbidden.</p>
+
+<p>Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an
+occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete
+laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally
+settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible,
+in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless
+legs, of which he writes: &quot;And, oh, my calves, they might have done
+honour to a poodle!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Eight months after his banishment, his opera &quot;Sylvana&quot; was produced at
+Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of
+Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At
+Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers.
+They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties
+exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple
+flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became &quot;All women
+are good for nothing&quot; (&quot;<i>Alle Weiber taugen nichts</i>&quot;), which he used so
+often that he abbreviated it to &quot;A.W.T.N.&quot; In the columns of his
+account-book he was provoked to write: &quot;A. coquettes with me, though she
+knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid
+stories of her, and says I must not go home with her.&quot; He took a journey
+to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart
+long enough to inspire him to the scene in &quot;Athalie,&quot; and to his song,
+&quot;The Artist's Declaration of Love.&quot; He wandered here and there, for
+about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet,
+insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing
+figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting
+the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person
+uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with
+indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits
+and deep depression,&mdash;in all ways he resembled a figure from some
+romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of
+German art.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to
+the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart;
+one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was
+Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several
+children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine,
+plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no
+improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this
+entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of
+exposure and its writhing humiliation:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which
+seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and
+reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the
+cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to
+conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark;
+excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in
+a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the
+slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh
+dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless
+husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination
+for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held
+out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in
+her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers,
+balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to
+discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would
+be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave.
+Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain,
+frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business
+for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she
+desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would
+receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes,
+when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed
+him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would
+cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right
+to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in
+every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling
+ever present&mdash;'How will she receive me?'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the
+lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again,
+but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on
+him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his
+better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A
+fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is
+lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful
+explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This
+reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt
+better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the
+happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near
+me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is
+mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but
+I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own
+heart, and work&mdash;work&mdash;work!'&quot; It was in the fall of 1813&mdash;<i>prosit
+omen!</i>&mdash;that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still
+clinging to her whom the biographer calls &quot;the rotten plant,&quot; and wrote
+in a note-book: &quot;I found Calina with Th&eacute;r&egrave;se, and I could scarcely
+conceal the fearful rage that burned in me.&quot; Or an elegy like this: &quot;No
+joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Th&eacute;r&egrave;se's birthday, Carl
+presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of
+trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets,
+something very rare and costly in Prague&mdash;oysters. Th&eacute;r&egrave;se
+glanced&mdash;merely glanced&mdash;at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.
+Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure
+a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: &quot;On a sudden the scales
+fell from his eyes.&quot; Ought he not rather have said, the shells?</p>
+
+<p>Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even
+music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.
+Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the
+Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the
+frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him
+casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to
+writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had
+more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she
+had formerly been <i>insouciante</i> and amused at his pain, her pain hurt
+him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a
+leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away,
+he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps
+embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had
+reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new
+leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no
+means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while
+happiness.</p>
+
+<p>In the year 1810 his opera &quot;Sylvana&quot; had been sung, as I have said, with
+Caroline Brandt in the title r&ocirc;le. When, in 1813, he was given the
+direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of
+the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner
+experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this
+same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be
+&quot;at liberty,&quot; as they say.</p>
+
+<p>Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the
+daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight.
+She is described as &quot;small and plump in figure, with beautiful,
+expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in
+her movements.&quot; She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified
+with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine
+skill, &quot;her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible.&quot; She did
+not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January,
+1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Th&eacute;r&egrave;se Brunetti in a fresher
+edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The
+oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the <i>coup de disgr&acirc;ce</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt
+suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the
+head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow
+to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother,
+and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the
+stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a
+certain banker, saying: &quot;He is worth the trouble, for he is rich.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to
+keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we
+have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to
+the baths in Friedland.</p>
+
+<p>Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and
+her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not
+hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But
+what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have
+heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when
+Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left
+behind &quot;a sweet, beloved being who might&mdash;who may&mdash;make me happy.&quot; &quot;The
+absence of three months shall test our love.&quot; They wrote each other long
+and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled
+with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, &quot;a sweet poison harmful to the
+soul.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d
+in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague.
+He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's &quot;Leier
+und Schwert.&quot; These choruses for men were sung throughout the
+Fatherland, as they still are sung.</p>
+
+<p>But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living
+voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little
+hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous
+enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving
+from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.</p>
+
+<p>Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could
+have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of
+herself and her career and her large following among the public was a
+deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice
+her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at
+last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream,
+and break their troth.</p>
+
+<p>In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a
+drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to
+Gansbacher, &quot;I see now that her views of high art are not above the
+usual pitiful standard&mdash;namely, that art is but a means of procuring
+soup, meat, and shirts.&quot; To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more
+solemnly:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken
+man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason
+would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my
+heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last
+chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,&mdash;marry
+perhaps some day,&mdash;who knows? But love and trust again, never more.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in
+person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the
+subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of
+marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and
+her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself
+would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day
+bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.
+Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.
+But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion
+of stage marriages.</p>
+
+<p>Even his patriotic songs, &quot;The Lyre and the Sword,&quot; were a cause of
+disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and
+her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him
+her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the
+Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running,
+Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress,
+Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and
+make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the
+two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl
+who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.</p>
+
+<p>How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from
+the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of
+his sturdiest works, &quot;Kampf und Sieg.&quot; He settled in Munich, and
+continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute
+descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him
+with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his
+spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.</p>
+
+<p>At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the
+eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said
+she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced
+that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This
+blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he
+could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the
+blow so long:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow
+again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish
+than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back
+in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then
+acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest
+life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have
+woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care.
+Forgive me for my excess of love&mdash;forgive the passion that may have torn
+many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed&mdash;forgive me all
+the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will
+of mine&mdash;forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your
+precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I
+but buy it back for you.... Farewell&mdash;farewell.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline
+was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too
+much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must
+frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her,
+she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.</p>
+
+<p>Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the
+autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze
+blended; their hands blended; the war was over.</p>
+
+<p>Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music
+began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his
+health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her
+house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of
+Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was
+hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for
+Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance.
+Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a
+curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just
+after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the
+darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.</p>
+
+<p>On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover,
+a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as
+Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.</p>
+
+<p>At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl
+assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a
+subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the
+world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto
+based on the old national legend, &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz.&quot; Kind, the
+librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great
+enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it
+back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and
+her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for
+cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious
+old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and
+wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular
+element. Begin with the scene before the tavern.&quot; This seemed
+outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took
+it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book
+completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to
+her, whom he called his &quot;Public with two eyes.&quot; Would to heaven, that
+there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner
+concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, during the composition of &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; which was to mean
+so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera
+generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was
+spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring
+than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his
+bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of
+&quot;chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and
+mustard-pot.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating
+soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his &quot;pug, his
+duck, his bird.&quot; He answered a letter she wrote him describing her
+success in the &quot;Magic Flute:&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberfl&ouml;te,' but you know I
+hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your
+satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be
+only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench,
+and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking,
+I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar
+of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with
+his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline,
+who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the
+travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in
+Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of
+Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long
+and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his
+advice. Her savings were quite swept away.</p>
+
+<p>But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had
+in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and
+fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that
+Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love
+for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress
+he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of &quot;Der
+Freisch&uuml;tz.&quot; The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet
+between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed,
+through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw
+Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every
+note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over
+what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This
+spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have
+rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of
+art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the
+artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the
+composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual
+presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an
+accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters,
+painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the
+kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The
+longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which
+he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was
+driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent
+on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by
+coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married.
+Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though
+her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts
+here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal
+commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty
+forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and
+at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played
+the guitar.</p>
+
+<p>Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new
+home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in
+perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year
+1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there
+were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and
+training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and
+solemnity.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the
+blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the
+power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour
+and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in
+the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a
+<i>Haus-frau.</i> She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound,
+reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute
+care with which she kept all her &quot;account-books, housekeeping-books,
+cellar-books.&quot; Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household
+became a dove-cote!</p>
+
+<p>The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and
+Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high
+favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally
+attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with
+unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though
+Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of
+desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought
+home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a
+signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a
+permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.</p>
+
+<p>Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two
+sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised
+accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and
+hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a
+country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose
+society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a
+starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.</p>
+
+<p>On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was
+dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health,
+always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be
+about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition
+of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his
+firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent
+into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and &quot;the unhappy
+couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!'
+to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night,
+each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might
+not hear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on
+the final ebb&mdash;the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal
+tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable
+optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour.
+They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost
+unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could
+not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion
+fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was
+stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the
+baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place
+again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg,
+Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a
+mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her
+daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their
+married life.</p>
+
+<p>Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more
+into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for
+her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other
+hand, hated them. But Weber said:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I
+relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, &quot;Ce
+n'est pas que la premi&egrave;re huitre qui coute.&quot; Afterward Weber would
+groan, &quot;Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at
+Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's &quot;Olympic&quot; was
+given first with enormous success, and &quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; in which
+Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two,
+was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious
+beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician
+has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every
+one looked for the composer, who was &quot;sitting in a dark corner of his
+wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined
+by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to
+be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An
+accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving
+Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one
+who should disturb his wishes.</p>
+
+<p>Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when
+his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever.
+One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he
+turned pale and sighed: &quot;God's will be done.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early
+death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When &quot;Der
+Freisch&uuml;tz&quot; was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl
+arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news
+of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave
+Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened
+in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his
+affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many
+tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life.
+Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be
+in that which gives you joy too.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always
+tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the
+fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two
+children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave
+them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the
+grave that yawned just before his weary feet.</p>
+
+<p>It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against
+fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl
+Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he
+jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before
+uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with
+him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They carry me in triumph,&quot; he wrote to Caroline: &quot;they watch for every
+wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I
+can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or
+turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.
+&quot;I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve,&quot; he wrote, &quot;But that I
+never cease to do. All my labours are for you&mdash;all my joy is with you.&quot;
+&quot;Can I but be with you on New Year's eve,&quot; he wrote again, with that
+tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character,
+&quot;I shall be with you all the year.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to
+whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from
+pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease;
+hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt
+that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with
+aching heart in the biography:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to
+London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no,
+I must. Money must be made for my family&mdash;money, man. I am going to
+London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright,
+cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freisch&uuml;tz,'
+was already dead and gone.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most
+punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end
+rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his
+last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure
+the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.
+During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully
+changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find
+strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice
+was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of
+which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the
+charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill,
+good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel
+agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small
+remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She
+manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to
+renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to
+this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
+I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
+father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
+be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
+more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
+God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
+bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
+time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
+see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
+man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children&mdash;another
+long lingering kiss&mdash;the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
+carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs&mdash;the door was closed&mdash;and he
+rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
+shattered chest might almost burst at once.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
+'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
+horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
+voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
+and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
+fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
+as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
+repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
+sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
+whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
+the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
+weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
+personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
+&quot;Der Freisch&uuml;tz,&quot; and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
+always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.</p>
+
+<p>His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
+seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
+to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
+the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
+worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
+was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he
+cried:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is
+shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold
+together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!&quot; His
+effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she
+wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long
+away, he answered:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to
+him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after
+day.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!&quot; he wrote once more. &quot;I count
+days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted
+before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible
+yearning I have never known before.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his
+wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing
+his home again.</p>
+
+<p>At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and
+furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody,
+but, as his son writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting
+genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss
+upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death&mdash;for
+the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more
+than the notes for the voice.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes
+upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to
+his future.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This day week is my concert,&quot; he wrote on the 19th of May. &quot;How my poor
+heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last
+chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all
+they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest
+expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail
+me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to
+us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on
+this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose
+of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for
+so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my
+life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are
+all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest
+itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the
+skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The
+enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the
+end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a
+complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife;
+still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to
+London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting
+homeward&mdash;homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as
+he had planned. He writes:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What should I do there? I cannot walk&mdash;I cannot speak. I will have
+nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better
+I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels,
+Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming
+journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half
+a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end
+of June I hope to be in your arms.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my
+joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my
+best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase
+souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so
+impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his
+starting.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I must go back to my own, I must!&quot; he sobbed incessantly. &quot;Let me see
+them once more&mdash;and then God's will be done.&quot; The attempt appeared
+impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's
+request to have a consultation of physicians. &quot;Be it so,&quot; he answered.
+&quot;But come of it what may, I go!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His only thought, his only word, was &quot;Home!&quot; On the 2d of June he wrote
+his last letter to his beloved,&mdash;the last lines his hand ever traced.
+&quot;What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness
+to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer,
+it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to
+answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst
+you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one!
+Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves
+you above all, your Carl.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he
+could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to
+be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal
+of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, &quot;Now let me sleep.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for
+hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had
+added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great
+benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking
+him in his grave,&mdash;the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!</p>
+
+<p>A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to
+be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the
+committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians
+volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music
+was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien
+land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to
+Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, F&uuml;rstenau:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made
+two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the
+noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they
+were orphaned. No wonder that F&uuml;rstenau had not the courage to address
+Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest
+friend, Fr&auml;ulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to
+Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the
+impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a
+little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived
+close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels&mdash;had looked
+out&mdash;had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and
+disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her&mdash;she
+rushed toward the spot&mdash;she saw the two standing in the little garden,
+wringing their hands and weeping&mdash;she knew all&mdash;and she lay senseless at
+their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh
+forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the
+sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her
+swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a
+flood of tears.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached
+the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to
+haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for
+the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The
+idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by
+the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of
+Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son,
+Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's
+body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of
+Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once
+would have meant so much: &quot;Weber in Dresden.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the
+theatre, with Schr&ouml;der-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and
+covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The
+torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two
+candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small,
+now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale
+young man knelt praying by her side.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we
+owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love,
+strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this
+character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side
+convincing, complete, alive.</p>
+
+<p>Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and
+ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation
+amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle
+for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect
+of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have
+written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But,
+if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of
+music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of
+the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best
+managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and
+life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.</p>
+
+<p>Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater
+Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these
+words:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever
+distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
+German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
+child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
+Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
+German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
+warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart&mdash;and who shall blame
+us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
+part of our dear German soil.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap16"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVI.</h2>
+      <h3>THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN</h3>
+      <a name="img23" id="img23"></a><img src="images/img23.jpg" alt="Felix Mendelssohn" align="left" />
+      <p>Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
+man whose love affairs make tame reading.</p>
+
+<p>It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
+Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
+him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
+thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
+and rebuffs,&mdash;being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
+the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
+human lives go, one of complete felicity.</p>
+
+<p>Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
+if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
+so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
+that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
+described as having been &quot;enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
+his father,&quot; who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
+remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
+and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
+children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
+degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
+fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
+Overture to &quot;A Midsummer-Night's Dream,&quot; a wonderful fabric of harmony
+and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
+written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
+of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
+sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
+of the sort.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
+like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
+she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
+compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
+things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
+the age of forty-two she died.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
+excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
+degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
+riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
+scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
+enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
+such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
+the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
+wrote his mother: &quot;If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
+years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
+holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
+and childlike a mind.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: &quot;He was
+always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
+bedimmed the shining brightness of his character.&quot; &quot;He wore his heart
+upon his sleeve,&quot; says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
+and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
+joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
+Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
+have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
+burned all the letters he had written her.</p>
+
+<p>We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
+old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
+spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
+wrote home: &quot;Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
+English.&quot; Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
+womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, &quot;the
+darling in every house, the centre of every circle.&quot; The
+fifteen-year-old Josephine or &quot;Peppi&quot; Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
+seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
+piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
+forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
+in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
+case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
+first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
+Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
+occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
+alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
+the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
+Stratton says, &quot;on the most excellent terms with himself,&quot; as with the
+world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
+friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
+poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
+of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
+that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
+wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: &quot;My music is the product
+of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
+distress is that which the world seems to like best.&quot; Grove moralises
+thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
+morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
+other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
+Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
+aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
+It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
+Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
+let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
+and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
+turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
+point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
+and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
+pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
+goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
+being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
+had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
+alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
+told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.</p>
+
+<p>In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
+a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
+widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (<i>n&eacute;e</i> Souchay); she was so well preserved
+and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
+But it was her second daughter, C&eacute;cile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
+the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
+seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw C&eacute;cile, and described her:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
+fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
+rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
+hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
+transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
+bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
+eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
+so beautifully calls <i>Marienhaft</i>. Her manner was generally thought too
+reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
+In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
+deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of C&eacute;cile.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
+girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
+really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
+Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
+emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
+9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
+at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
+so rich and happy.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
+when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
+Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
+&quot;Fidelio,&quot; &quot;He who has gained a charming wife&quot; (&quot;<i>Wer ein holdes Weib
+errungen</i>&quot;). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
+enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
+and extemporise upon the theme.</p>
+
+<p>Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
+Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
+a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
+honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
+humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
+Hensel visited them, and found C&eacute;cile possessed not only of &quot;the
+beautiful eyes&quot; Felix had raved over so much, &quot;but possessed also of a
+wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
+promised to cure him of his irritability.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
+had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
+and regretted being a conductor at all.</p>
+
+<p>In February, 1838, the first child was born, and C&eacute;cile was dangerously
+ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
+bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
+was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
+married:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
+may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
+every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
+my happiness.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: &quot;Eating and
+sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
+without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
+music-paper and sketch-book, with C&eacute;cile and the children.&quot; Again, in
+1844, he writes of a return home:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. C&eacute;cile looks
+so well again,&mdash;tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
+former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
+room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
+at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
+garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
+paper that C&eacute;cile painted for me, to write to you.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
+children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
+Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
+breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
+evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
+pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
+propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
+Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
+the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as <i>Punch</i> does
+with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
+passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
+women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
+bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
+Rhenish air,&mdash;this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
+these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
+learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
+has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
+tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
+own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
+which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
+slices of bread and jam&mdash;'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
+comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
+geography&mdash;and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
+is gone if C&eacute;cile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
+picture.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
+young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
+for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
+the strange reward of his art as follows:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
+soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
+and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
+Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
+his own Germany.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>On one of the home festivals, C&eacute;cile and her sister gave and acted a
+comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
+Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
+his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
+vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
+rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
+dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
+Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
+it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
+on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
+the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
+his wife, his brother, and three friends.</p>
+
+<p>His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
+C&eacute;cile died at Frankfort of consumption.</p>
+
+<p>Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
+was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
+who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
+saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
+let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
+conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
+me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
+am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
+earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
+character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
+but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
+understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
+hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
+them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
+towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
+an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
+human being, or anything on earth,&mdash;then God be praised! such a one I am
+not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
+sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
+does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
+people should select precisely <i>this</i> time to say such a thing, when I
+am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
+outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
+really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
+wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
+never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
+lot.&quot;</p>
+
+
+
+<br /><hr style="width: 45%;" /><br />
+<a name="chap17"></a><h2>CHAPTER XVII.</h2>
+      <h3>THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN</h3>
+      <a name="img24" id="img24"></a><img src="images/img24.jpg" alt="Frederick Chopin" align="left" />
+      <p>He wrote to his parents:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant,
+well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is
+something in it that repels me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his
+piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned
+full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would
+say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely
+unlike&mdash;of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied;
+she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent
+woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse
+she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that,
+while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was
+certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from
+her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot,
+who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of
+Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like
+bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was&mdash;well,
+some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was
+angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal
+manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any
+non-effeminate man&mdash;outside of books.</p>
+
+<p>The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of
+presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and
+believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the
+Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was
+followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but
+resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of
+George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter
+surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco&mdash;though he
+neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at
+cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars&mdash;as
+did Liszt's princess.</p>
+
+<p>Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the
+credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire
+not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she
+conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.</p>
+      <a name="img25" id="img25"></a><img src="images/img25.jpg" alt="George Sand" align="right" />
+      <p>Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish
+fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.
+She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska&mdash;a good name to
+change for the shorter tinkle of &quot;Chopin.&quot; It was from her that Chopin
+took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his
+music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to
+be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally
+the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the
+darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the
+loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!</p>
+
+<p>As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a
+public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa
+Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia
+Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was
+Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with
+a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her
+case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted
+himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska,
+however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as
+full of vague morose yearning as his Pr&eacute;ludes. He left Warsaw for
+Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell
+concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a
+singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing
+the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians
+and poets of that day.</p>
+
+<p>To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and
+he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in
+appearance at least, athletic&mdash;even if he must ask his tailor to furnish
+the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with
+to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew
+from his familiar and d&aelig;mon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote
+about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her
+mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not
+cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be
+strewn under her feet.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been
+finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's
+Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a
+few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the
+incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James
+Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
+subject of Chopin:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
+lady was married in 1832&mdash;preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
+genius&mdash;to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
+a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
+blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
+must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
+from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
+memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
+waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
+and rivers of ink have been spilt.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
+residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
+brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
+called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
+avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
+hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
+amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
+praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
+that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
+gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
+manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
+next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
+declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
+and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
+says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
+man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
+himself in Paris very much <i>en prince</i>, according to Von Lenz, and such
+a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.</p>
+
+<p>The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
+whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
+Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
+which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
+was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
+long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen
+years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
+her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on &quot;Chopin's Three Love
+Affairs,&quot; Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
+charm.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
+smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
+magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
+mantle.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
+little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
+biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
+of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
+deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
+brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
+was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
+has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
+family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
+were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
+living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
+was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
+In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
+carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
+furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.</p>
+
+<p>But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
+until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
+public.</p>
+
+<p>M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and <i>La Revue Musicale</i> of
+Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
+but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
+two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
+admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
+pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,&mdash;advice
+which met the usual fate of good advice.</p>
+
+<p>Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: &quot;In his letters to his family,
+Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
+always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
+the plural, for instance, 'Elles si ch&egrave;res, elles rirent pour tous,' or,
+'Here the vigil is sad, because <i>les malades</i> do not wish a doctor.'&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The first letter, signed &quot;Fritz,&quot; is a most cordial welcome to a man
+about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand
+and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in
+1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever
+had, and writes to the whole family: &quot;Tell them all that I love them,
+too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my
+roof.&quot; Chopin refers to Sand as &quot;My hostess,&quot; and signs himself &quot;Ton
+vieux.&quot; In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade
+of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving
+manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that &quot;le t&eacute;l&eacute;graphe
+&eacute;lectro-magn&eacute;tique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats
+extraordinaires.&quot; He revels in puns and gossip.</p>
+
+<p>Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin
+called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849,
+with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the
+last tendernesses in her power.</p>
+
+<p>This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come
+from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick,
+and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of
+Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the
+plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared
+joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a
+biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody
+which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it
+unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick
+the use of them.</p>
+
+<p>Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love
+requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as
+his music.</p>
+
+<p>Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: &quot;As his talent,
+so did his heart mature early.&quot; It was at Warsaw, in his early youth,
+that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had
+married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society,
+Fr&eacute;d&eacute;ric moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had
+always the princely way with him.</p>
+
+<p>One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose
+majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of
+Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke
+Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most
+welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music.
+Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would
+send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at
+the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his
+temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin
+was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor
+was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in
+whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully
+as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret.
+He was often teased on account of the beautiful &quot;Mariolka,&quot; as he called
+her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove
+that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love
+was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams
+for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
+<i>&agrave; la Mazur</i>, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.</p>
+
+<p>In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George
+Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this
+time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty,
+vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria
+Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the &quot;rag and the bone
+and the hank of hair&quot; of contention.</p>
+
+<p>It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling
+similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of
+feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were
+like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering
+through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up
+their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these
+twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.</p>
+
+<p>The &quot;black-eyed demoiselle,&quot; as she was called by the poet and the
+musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same
+time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and
+found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town,
+and to pass several weeks with each.</p>
+
+<p>It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to
+much verse, especially his &quot;In der Schweiz.&quot; But all this while the
+little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes
+she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki
+hovering at her piano.</p>
+
+<p>When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his
+F-minor &Eacute;tude which he called &quot;the soul-portrait&quot; of the comtesse. A
+year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he
+proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he
+composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor
+Nocturne.</p>
+
+<p>In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying
+Chopin's fianc&eacute;e in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The
+distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he
+wrote to his mother:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental
+to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says
+that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls
+but out of all three only one angel can be created.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself
+deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to
+Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has
+contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader.
+It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even
+for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation.
+For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely
+blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which
+her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either
+the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could
+hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least
+as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount
+what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction
+would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar,
+I can be brief with it here.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every
+conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as
+Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to
+him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity
+that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain
+others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some
+hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the
+nursery.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme,
+and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years
+devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion,
+and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed
+by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless,
+and by nature&mdash;for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame&mdash;a
+voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted
+him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was
+as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the
+brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most
+of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was
+drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his
+gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.</p>
+
+<p>Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall
+out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that
+form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day.
+In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and
+daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious,
+the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset
+by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the
+place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant,
+her ch&acirc;teau. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of
+life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his
+art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion
+both to his health and to his music.</p>
+
+<p>The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a
+liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the
+&quot;detestable invalid&quot; she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from
+one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There
+should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman
+infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart
+and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the r&ocirc;le of nurse
+as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an
+invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
+on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
+fame.</p>
+
+<p>After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
+sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
+he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
+in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
+of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
+who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.</p>
+
+<p>Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
+not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
+deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
+mental support for ten long years.</p>
+
+<p>George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
+that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her &quot;Histoire de
+ma Vie,&quot; as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
+the affair:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
+first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (<i>se reprenant</i>)
+incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
+object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
+affections.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
+friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
+me.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
+enough of his own ills to bear.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
+was the first and the final time.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
+obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
+the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
+the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
+full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
+versa.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
+himself, he seemed almost to choke and die.&quot;</p>
+<br />
+
+<p>It is generally believed that in the character of <i>Prince Karol</i> in her
+novel, &quot;Lucrezia Floriani,&quot; published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
+weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
+Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated
+the charge in his &quot;Life of Chopin,&quot; and though Karasovski says that
+Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
+None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
+(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
+mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
+proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
+a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
+full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
+good faith. I have traced in <i>Prince Karol</i> the character of a man
+determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
+exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
+however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
+not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
+because it is too limited to reproduce them.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;Chopin was a r&eacute;sum&eacute; of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
+can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
+was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
+instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
+itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
+fix themselves on a determined object.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;However, <i>Prince Karol</i> is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
+more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
+a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
+of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
+desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,&mdash;he who,
+nevertheless, was so suspicious.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
+the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
+friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
+made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
+that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
+why did he not re-read it?</p>
+
+<p>&quot;This history is so little ours&mdash;It was the very reverse of it. There
+were between us neither the same raptures <i>(envirements)</i>, nor the same
+sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
+simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel
+with each other <i>&agrave; propos</i> of each other.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people
+tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George
+Sand's own version:</p>
+
+<p>&quot;After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely
+gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was
+suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling
+subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand
+had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell
+there, one after another&mdash;all this was borne; but at last, one day,
+Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That
+could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate
+and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer
+loved him.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the
+poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that
+some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound,
+and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the
+revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to
+this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.
+Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had
+preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family,
+whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and
+deformed (<i>d&eacute;natur&eacute;</i>). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from
+liberty.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling
+and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my
+turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction,
+and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There
+were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous
+ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.</p>
+
+<p>&quot;I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me
+filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that
+I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me
+till then.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much
+credence.</p>
+
+<p>The cause of their&mdash;&quot;divorce,&quot; one might call it&mdash;is blurred by the
+usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be
+that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her
+daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All
+accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles
+that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not
+Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts
+it, &quot;had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically
+speaking, out-of-doors.&quot;</p>
+
+<p>The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at
+best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him
+with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a
+relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find
+herself free.</p>
+
+<p>But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had
+leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was
+eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the
+chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his
+haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was
+unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and
+a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it
+is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to
+see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, &quot;She said I
+should die in no other arms than hers&quot; (<i>Que je ne mourrais que dans ses
+bras</i>).</p>
+      <a name="img26" id="img26"></a><img src="images/img26.jpg" alt="Countess Potocka" align="right" />
+      <p>But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty
+countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was
+the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's
+loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him,
+at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman
+sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait
+that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism
+undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever
+having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims
+that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.</p>
+
+<p>But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of
+his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of
+stars, one nocturne.</p>
+
+<p>END OF VOLUME I.</p>
+<br />
+
+</td>
+  </tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
+Volume 1, by Rupert Hughes
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@@ -0,0 +1,6827 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume
+1, by Rupert Hughes
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Release Date: February 6, 2004 [EBook #10957]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS MUSICIANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Lisa Richards, Sjaani and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+By Rupert Hughes
+
+Illustrated
+
+Volume I.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+1903
+
+
+
+NOTE
+
+Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in _The
+Criterion_, and the last chapter was published in _The Smart Set_.
+
+While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the
+subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that
+advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for
+the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a
+revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the
+letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to
+have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate
+friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the
+publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full
+life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much
+that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara
+Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful
+love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive
+paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or
+misunderstood.
+
+  Love it is an hatefulle pees,
+  A free acquitaunce without re lees.
+  An hevy burthen light to here,
+  A wikked wawe awey to were.
+  It is kunnyng withoute science,
+  Wisdome withoute sapience,
+  Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,
+  Right eville savoured good savour;
+  A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,
+  And feblenesse fulle of myght.
+  A laughter it is, weping ay;
+  Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.
+  Also a swete helle it is,
+  And a soroufulle Paradys.
+
+  Romaunt of the Rose.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I. THE OVERTURE
+
+    II. THE ANCIENTS
+
+   III. THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+    IV. ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+     V. HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+    VI. THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+   VII. GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+  VIII. BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+    IX. PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+     X. THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+    XI. GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR,
+        AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+   XII. A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY
+        --PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL
+
+  XIII. MOZART
+
+   XIV. BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+    XV. VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+   XVI. THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+  XVII. THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+PRINCESS LICHTENSTEIN (Frontispiece)
+
+DAPHNE
+
+HELOISE
+
+MARY STUART
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS (Roland de Lattre)
+
+HENRY PURCELL
+
+JOHN SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+MORNING PRAYER IN THE FAMILY OF SEBASTIAN BACH
+
+JOSEPH HAYDN
+
+MRS. BILLINGTON
+
+GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL
+
+CHRISTOPH WILLIBALD VON GLUCK
+
+JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
+
+NICOLA PICCINNI
+
+JEAN BAPTISTE DE LULLY
+
+WOLFGANG MOZART
+
+MOZART, AT VIENNA, PLAYING HIS OPERA "DON JUAN" FOR THE FIRST TIME
+
+LUDWIG VON BEETHOVEN
+
+BETTINA BRENTANO VON ARNIM
+
+COUNTESS THERESE VON BRUNSWICK
+
+CARL MARIA VON WEBER
+
+FELIX MENDELSSOHN
+
+FREDERICK CHOPIN
+
+GEORGE SAND
+
+COUNTESS POTOCKA
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+
+
+VOLUME I.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+THE OVERTURE
+
+Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of
+amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys
+that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while
+he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the
+inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit
+youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the
+dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills
+and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords
+melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are
+music's very own.
+
+So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost
+wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have
+expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And
+if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that
+corner.
+
+Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover;
+that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual
+conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be
+sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can
+know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all
+existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in
+tune.
+
+But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the
+world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune;
+and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were
+tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which
+begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.
+
+If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that
+I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and
+condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And
+incidentally--to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be
+skipped--let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred
+to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.
+
+In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous
+fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of
+hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to
+be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the
+aim throughout. Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say
+so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic
+imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference
+without frankly branding it as such.
+
+Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians
+tell their own stories in their own words.
+
+For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all
+the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all
+the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I
+have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books
+at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the
+subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it
+catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the
+reader could consult with pleasure.
+
+It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional
+necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a
+matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral
+verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags
+marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's
+heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in
+wholesale blame--"_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_." So, without
+pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I
+have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence,
+and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.
+And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I
+think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two,
+and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and
+blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or
+of fame, or of amorous experience.
+
+As a last chapter to this series of "true stories," I have ventured to
+sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has
+compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music
+on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I
+had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or
+warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a
+dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither
+saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary
+clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is
+lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is
+true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be
+collected.
+
+And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as
+Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+THE ANCIENTS
+
+The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a
+certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular
+god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were
+hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted,
+ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a god, he was
+denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one
+knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many
+another woman, was soon blase of divine courtship, and, for variety,
+turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her
+son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always
+claimed.
+
+Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second
+wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's
+influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on
+mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to
+be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no
+corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a
+gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever
+corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately
+suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections
+more open than that of hearing."
+
+The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This
+instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant
+turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft,
+that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with
+his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is
+frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far
+from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him,
+and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of
+a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of
+personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.
+Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of
+Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He
+pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat
+on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms
+filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some
+charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!
+But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut
+seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A
+wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.
+
+The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs--a fact which
+should not be cherished against him--seems to have loved no one except
+himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the
+effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain
+mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only
+Jonah's adventure turned inside out.
+
+Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose
+life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate
+that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and
+violinists at the hands of the matinee Bacchantes.
+
+The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable
+married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused
+her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer
+can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all
+his poesy.
+
+The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished
+much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to
+the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians
+to be monks. This banishes them from a place here--not by any means
+because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but
+because it greatly prevented a record of most of them--though happily
+not all. Abelard, for instance, was a monk, and his Heloise became a
+nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in
+literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also
+an abbe? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hele, who about 1585
+gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name
+Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their
+sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the
+epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th
+century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Tres-Haut, ministre du
+Christ, il sut garder la chastete et se preserver du contact de l'amour
+sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always
+necessarily so.
+
+Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music,
+tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who
+flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the
+children of Lorenzo dei Medici.
+
+"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who passed for the
+finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his
+criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily
+became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an illustrious
+family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by
+the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this
+disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in
+the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object
+with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised
+himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice
+in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second
+couplet."
+
+
+Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played
+Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was
+compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he
+died.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+THE MEN OF FLANDERS
+
+The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded
+shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siecle,"
+with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless
+minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the
+old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the
+fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.
+Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537--1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels.
+All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he
+died--so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only
+twenty-six at the time--so we can imagine how young and lithely
+beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia--a sweet
+name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone
+she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good
+and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless,
+like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.
+
+Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty
+interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the
+frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of
+charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in
+these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle
+for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and
+sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public
+ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free
+man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the
+chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling
+servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that
+marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit
+or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.
+
+Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy
+(1680--1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,--which
+was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of
+twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at
+ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a
+pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is
+asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes
+a pitiful letter still preserved.
+
+"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for
+thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.
+Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great
+cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in
+indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years
+gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of
+succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.
+
+"The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me
+go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my
+absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration,
+have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save
+for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy
+circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life.
+The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and
+work, prevent me from gaining my own living."
+
+Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from
+Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this
+pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old
+wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for
+his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid
+poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the
+eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity
+because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to
+support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it
+is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.
+
+Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana
+Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to
+Flanders with her children.
+
+The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century;
+they were famous marriers, too,--but one of them met his match, Jean,
+called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The
+widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles
+Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who
+ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When
+he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was
+compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she
+naively points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had
+married with three of his Majesty's servants. (_Casada con tres criados
+de V.M._) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal
+navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal
+organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she
+achieved.
+
+Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert
+(1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the
+Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin
+Despres (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him),
+Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from
+his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his
+marriage).
+
+We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been
+happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all
+preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he
+never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk
+of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by
+bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.
+
+As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man
+vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day
+approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard."
+
+Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his
+daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted
+daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself
+disinherited.
+
+One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician,
+one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor
+music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the
+Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown
+upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian
+managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy
+Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer.
+He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he
+became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such
+odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was
+dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in
+the year 1566.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
+
+A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in
+his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di
+Lassus or Orlandus Lassus, the "Belgian Orpheus," "_le Prince des
+Musiciens_." There is as much dispute over the date of his birth as over
+the early conditions of his life. But he was born in either 1520 or 1530
+at Mons in Hainault, and, according to the old Annales du Hainault, he
+changed his name from Roland de Lattre to Orland di Lassus because his
+father had been convicted of making spurious coin and, as a "false
+moneyer," had to wear a string of his evil utterances round his neck.
+
+Rarely in history has a composer held a more lofty position than that of
+this son of a criminal, and even to-day he rivals Palestrina in the
+esteem of historians as one of the pillars of his art.
+
+He was in the service of the Duke of Bavaria, who gave him as much
+honour as the later King of Bavaria gave Wagner; he stood so high at
+court that a year later he won the hand of a maid of honour, Regina
+Weckinger. She bore him two daughters and four sons. One of the
+daughters was named after her, Regina, and when she grew up married a
+court painter. Two of the sons became prominent composers. The mother
+was probably beautiful, since an old biographer, Van Ouickelberg,
+described her children as _elegantissimi_.
+
+There is every reason to believe that the wedded life of these two was
+thoroughly happy, save that Lassus was an indefatigable fiend of work.
+As his biographer Delmotte says, "His life indeed had been the most
+toilsome that one could think of, and his fecund imagination, always
+alert, had _enfante_ a multitude of compositions so great that their
+very number astounds us (they exceeded two thousand), and forbids us
+almost to believe them the work of one man. This incessant tension of
+soul made imperious demands for the distraction of repose; far from
+this, he redoubled his work till nature, worn out, refused to Lassus the
+aid she had lavished. His mental powers abandoned him abruptly.
+
+"Regina, one day when she returned, found him in a very precarious
+state; he had lost his mind and knew her no more. In her terror, she
+sent word at once to the Princess Maximilienne, sister of the Duke
+William, who sent at once to the invalid her own physician, the doctor
+Mermann. Thanks to his care, the health of Orland improved, but his
+reason did not return. From that moment he became sad, dreamy, absorbed
+in melancholy. 'He is no longer,' said Regina, 'what he was before, gay
+and content; but is become sombre, and speaks always of death.'"
+
+While Lassus was in this sad condition he grew petulant over his
+imagined ill-treatment at the hands of the new duke, and wrote a letter
+bitterly complaining that he had not carried out his father's promises.
+In fact, Orland in his condition of semi-insanity threatened to resign,
+and when the insulted Duke Maximilian showed signs of accepting the
+resignation, it was the wife that saved the family from disgrace and
+poverty. Regina made a fervent appeal (quoted in Mathieu's poem on
+Lassus) that "his _Altesse Serenissime_ be pleased not to heap on the
+poor family of Orland the wrongs that the unhappy father may have
+deserved through his _fantaisies bizarres_, the result of too much
+thought for his art and too incessant zeal; but that the duke deign to
+continue his former treatment; for to put him out of the service of the
+court chapel would be to kill him."
+
+He was left undisturbed in his post, but, before long, death forced the
+acceptance of his resignation. Over his grave was placed a tomb on which
+besides the effigy of himself, are shown also his devoted wife and some
+of their children.
+
+Regina two years later founded a perpetual annual funeral service for
+him. By a later intercession, she secured for her son, Ferdinand, the
+succession to his father's dignities at the court of Bavaria. She died
+June 5, 1600, and on her tomb she is named, "la noble et vertueuse dame
+Regina de Lassin, veuve de feu Orland de Lassus." She had been a good
+wife to a good husband. The sadness of her latter years with her beloved
+and demented husband reminds one of the pathetic fate of Robert Schumann
+and his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+
+HENRY AND FRANCES PURCELL
+
+If Lassus deserved the name of the Netherlandish Orpheus, Henry Purcell
+deserved the name his "loveing wife Frances Purcell" gave him when she
+published after his death a collection of his songs under the name of
+"Orpheus Britannicus." The analogy holds good also in the devotion of
+these married couples, for Henry willed to Frances the whole of his
+property absolutely.
+
+Yet the legend of the cause of his death would verify the old theory
+about the joltiness of the course of true love. For Sir John Hawkins
+passes along the gossip that Purcell met his death by "a cold which he
+caught in the night waiting for admittance into his own house. It is
+said that he used to keep late hours, and that his wife had given orders
+to his servants not to let him in after midnight; unfortunately he came
+home heated with wine from the tavern at an hour later than that
+prescribed him, and, through the inclemency of the weather, contracted
+a disorder of which he died. If this be true, it reflects but little
+honour on Madam Purcell, for so she is styled in the advertisements of
+his works; and but ill agrees with those expressions of grief for her
+dear lamented husband which she makes use of to Lady Elizabeth Howard in
+the dedication of the "Orpheus Britannicus". It seems probable that the
+disease of which he died was rather a lingering than an acute one,
+perhaps a consumption; and that, for some time at least, it had no way
+affected the powers of his mind, since one of the most celebrated of his
+compositions, the song 'From Rosy Bowers,' is in the printed book said
+to have been the last of his works, and to have been set during that
+sickness which put a period to his days."
+
+Hawkins guesses that Purcell was married young, because at the age of
+twenty-five he was advertising the sale of his first sonatas at his own
+house; also that, musician-like, he left his family dependent upon the
+favour of his benefactors, particularly upon the graciousness of his
+pupil and patroness, Lady Elizabeth Howard, who placed on his tomb in
+Westminster Abbey the famous inscription often credited to Dryden: "Here
+lyes Henry Purcell, Esq.; who left this life, and is gone to that
+blessed place, where only his harmony can be exceeded."
+
+We now know that Purcell's marriage was either in 1680 or 1681, when he
+was twenty-two or twenty-three years old. August 2d, 1682, Purcell's
+father, a venerable and distinguished musician and a friend of Pepys,
+the diarist, was buried in Westminster Abbey, where later his more
+distinguished son was laid. A few days after the elder Purcell's burial,
+Henry and his wife came to Westminster Abbey again, for the baptism of a
+son new-born. He died in a few months and a third time they came to the
+sad old abbey to lay their child in the cloisters there.
+
+The next year, 1683, a second son died, and in 1687 a third boy two
+months old was buried in the cloisters of the abbey. This monotonous
+return of the hand of death must have embittered the life of these two,
+who seem to have remained lovers always. But in May, 1688, a daughter
+was born, named Frances after her mother; and she outlived both parents.
+She married a poet, when she and her lover were each nineteen, and named
+a child Frances after the grandmother. On Sept. 6th, 1689, Henry
+Purcell's son Edward was baptised, and he also lived to attain some
+distinction as an organist. In 1693 a daughter, Mary Peters, was born.
+
+Two years later, on May 21st, 1695, the young father died--on the eve of
+St. Cecilia's Day. At his bedside were his old mother, his young wife,
+and the two little children. Purcell was buried under the organ of
+Westminster Abbey and the anthems he had composed for the funeral of
+Queen Mary were sung at his own. And there he rests near his fellow
+musician, Pelham Humphries, who lies, as Runciman says, "by the side of
+his younger wife in the Thames-sodden vaults of Westminster Abbey."
+
+Purcell's will, made the very day of his death, was as follows:
+
+"In the name of God, Amen. I, Henry Purcell, of the Citty of Manchester,
+gent., being dangerously ill as to the constitution of my body, but in
+good and perfect mind and memory (thanks be to God), doe by these
+presents publish and declare this to be my last Will and Testament.
+
+"And I do hereby give and bequeath unto my loving Wife, Frances Purcell,
+all my Estate both reall and personall of what nature and kind soever,
+to her and to her assigns for ever. And I doe hereby constitute and
+appoint my said loveing Wife my sole Executrix of this my last Will and
+Testament, revokeing all my former Will or Wills. Witnesse my hand and
+scale this twentieth first day of November, Annoq. Dni. One thousand six
+hundred ninety-five, and in the seventh yeare of the Raigne of King
+William the Third, &c.
+
+H. PURCELL."
+
+As to Hawkins's theory that Purcell left his wife in needy
+circumstances, Cummings, his biographer, believes the thought refuted by
+the will left by the widow herself, who outlived her husband by eleven
+years, and on St. Valentine's Day, 1706, was buried at his side. In her
+will she says that: "According to her husband's desire she had given
+her deare son (Edward) a good education, and she alsoe did give him all
+the Bookes of Musicke in generall, the Organ, the double spinett, the
+single spinett, a silver tankard, a silver watch, two pair of gold
+buttons, a hair ring, a mourning ring of Dr. Busby's, a Larum clock, Mr.
+Edward Purcell's picture, handsome furniture for a room, and he was to
+be maintained until provided for. All the residue of her property she
+gave to her said daughter Frances."
+
+Cummings also assails Hawkins's story that Purcell was dissipated and
+caught his death from being locked out. But Runciman objects that if
+Purcell had not been dissipated in those days, he would have been called
+a Puritan, and says: "I picture him as a sturdy, beef-eating Englishman,
+a puissant, masterful, as well as lovable personality, a born king of
+men, ambitious of greatness, determined, as Tudway says, to excel every
+one of his time."
+
+The love Frances Purcell bore her husband was kept green by her anxiety
+for his fame. She was, in her littler way, a Cosima Wagner. In 1696 she
+published a collection of harpsichord lessons by her husband; three
+editions being sold quickly. The next year she issued ten sonatas and a
+"Collection of Ayres." In 1698 she issued (or reissued) the "Orpheus
+Britannicus." In all of these she wrote dedications breathing devotion
+to her husband. In an ode printed in the second volume of the "Orpheus,"
+in 1704, Purcell's personality is thus limned:
+
+  "Nor were his Beauties to his Art confin'd
+  So justly were his Soul and Body join'd
+  You'd think his Form the Product of his Mind.
+  A conquering sweetness in his Visage dwelt,
+  His Eyes would warm, his Wit like lightning melt.
+  But those must no more be seen, and that no more be felt.
+  Pride was the sole aversion of his Eye,
+  Himself as Humble as his Art was High."
+
+Purcell died at the age of thirty-seven--being granted only two years
+more of life than Mozart and only six years more than Schubert. He is
+the moon of English music and his melodies are as exquisite and as
+silvery and as full of enamoured radiance as the tintinnabulations of
+the moonbeams themselves. But unfortunately for English music this
+beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers
+England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding
+glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the
+east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from
+dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of Haendel as a lover, we
+must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious
+morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have
+affected Purcell very deeply.
+
+The story concerns the strenuous career of Alessandro Stradella, and
+when you read it you will not wonder that it should have made a great
+success as an opera, or that it gave Flotow his greatest popularity next
+to "Martha," even though its conclusion was made tamely theatrical.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+
+THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF STRADELLA
+
+There are historians, sour and cynical, who have tried to contradict the
+truth of the life story of Stradella as Bourdelot tells it in his
+"Histoire de la Musique et de ses Effets," but they cannot offer us any
+satisfactory substitute in its place, and without troubling to give
+their merely destructive complaints, and without attempting to improve
+upon the pompously fascinating English of old Sir John Hawkins, I will
+quote the story for your delectation.
+
+Certain it is that there was a composer named Stradella, and that he was
+an opera composer to the Venetian Republic, as well as a frequent singer
+upon the stage to his own harp accompaniments. He occupies a position in
+musical history of some importance. The following story of his
+adventures is no more improbable than many a story we read in the daily
+newspapers--and surely no one could question the credibility of the
+daily newspapers. But here is the story as Hawkins tells it. As the
+cook-books say, salt it to your taste.
+
+"His character as a musician was so high at Venice, that all who were
+desirous of excelling in the science were solicitous to become his
+pupils. Among the many whom he had the instruction of, was one, a young
+lady of a noble family of Rome, named Hortensia, who, notwithstanding
+her illustrious descent, submitted to live in a criminal intimacy with a
+Venetian nobleman. The frequent access of Stradella to this lady, and
+the many opportunities he had of being alone with her, produced in them
+both such an affection for each other, that they agreed to go off
+together for Rome. In consequence of this resolution they embarked in a
+very fine night, and by the favour of the wind effected their escape.
+
+"Upon the discovery of the lady's flight, the Venetian had recourse to
+the usual method in that country of obtaining satisfaction for real or
+supposed injuries: he despatched two assassins, with instructions to
+murder both Stradella and the lady, giving them a sum of money in hand,
+and a promise of a larger if they succeeded in the attempt. Being
+arrived at Naples, the assassins received intelligence that those whom
+they were in pursuit of were at Rome, where the lady passed as the wife
+of Stradella. Upon this they determined to execute their commission,
+wrote to their employer, requesting letters of recommendation to the
+Venetian embassador at Rome, in order to secure an asylum for them to
+fly to, as soon as the deed should be perpetrated.
+
+"Upon the receipt of letters for this purpose, the assassins made the
+best of their way toward Rome; and being arrived there, they learned
+that on the morrow, at five in the evening, Stradella was to give an
+oratorio in the church of San Giovanni Laterano. They failed not to be
+present at the performance, and had concerted to follow Stradella and
+his mistress out of the church, and, seizing a convenient opportunity,
+to make the blow. The performance was now begun, and these men had
+nothing to do but to watch the motions of Stradella, and attend to the
+music, which they had scarce begun to hear, before the suggestions of
+humanity began to operate upon their minds; they were seized with
+remorse, and reflected with horror on the thought of depriving of his
+life a man capable of giving to his auditors such pleasure as they had
+just then felt.
+
+"In short, they desisted from their purpose, and determined, instead of
+taking away his life, to exert their endeavours for the preservation of
+it; they waited for his coming out of the church, and courteously
+addressed him and the lady, who was by his side, first returning him
+thanks for the pleasure they had received at hearing his music, and
+informed them both of the errand they had been sent upon; expatiating
+upon the irresistible charms, which of savages had made them men, and
+had rendered it impossible for them to effect their execrable purpose;
+and concluded with their earnest advice that Stradella and the lady
+should both depart from Rome the next day, themselves promising to
+deceive their employer, and forego the remainder part of their reward,
+by making him believe that Stradella and his lady had quitted Rome on
+the morning of their arrival.
+
+"Having thus escaped the malice of their enemy, the two lovers took an
+immediate resolution to fly for safety to Turin, and soon arrived there.
+The assassins being returned to Venice, reported to their employer that
+Stradella and Hortensia had fled from Rome, and taken shelter in the
+city of Turin, a place where the laws were very severe, and which,
+excepting the houses of embassadors, afforded no protection for
+murderers; they represented to him the difficulty of getting these two
+persons assassinated, and, for their own parts, notwithstanding their
+engagements, declined the enterprise. This disappointment, instead of
+allaying, served to sharpen the resentment of the Venetian: he had found
+means to attach to his interest the father of Hortensia, and, by various
+arguments, to inspire him with a resolution to become the murderer of
+his own daughter. With this old man, no less malevolent and vindictive
+than himself, the Venetian associated two ruffians, and dispatched them
+all three to Turin, fully inspired with a resolution of stabbing
+Stradella and the old man's daughter wherever they found them. The
+Venetian also furnished them with letters from Mons. l'Abbe d'Estrades,
+then embassador of France at Venice, addressed to the Marquis of
+Villars, the French embassador at Turin. The purport of these letters
+was a recommendation of the bearers of them, who were therein
+represented to be merchants, to the protection of the embassador, if at
+any time they should stand in need of it.
+
+"The Duchess of Savoy was at that time regent; and she having been
+informed of the arrival of Stradella and Hortensia, and the occasion of
+their precipitate flight from Rome; and knowing the vindictive temper of
+the Venetians, placed the lady in a convent, and retained Stradella in
+her palace as her principal musician. In a situation of such security as
+this seemed to be, Stradella's fears for the safety of himself and his
+mistress began to abate, till one evening, walking for the air upon the
+ramparts of the city, he was set upon by the three assassins above
+mentioned, that is to say, the father of Hortensia, and the two
+ruffians, who each gave him a stab with a dagger in the breast, and
+immediately betook themselves to the house of the French embassador as
+to a sanctuary.
+
+"The attack on Stradella having been made in the sight of numbers of
+people, who were walking in the same place, occasioned an uproar in the
+city, which soon reached the ears of the duchess: she ordered the gates
+to be shut, and diligent search to be made for the three assassins; and
+being informed that they had taken refuge in the house of the French
+embassador, she went to demand them. The embassador insisting on the
+privileges which those of his function claimed from the law of nations,
+refused to deliver them up. In the interim Stradella was cured of his
+wounds, and the Marquis de Villars, to make short of the question about
+privilege, and the rights of embassadors, suffered the assassins to
+escape.
+
+"From this time, finding himself disappointed of his revenge, but not
+the least abated in his ardour to accomplish it, this implacable
+Venetian contented himself with setting spies to watch the motions of
+Stradella. A year was elapsed after the cure of his wounds; no fresh
+disturbance had been given to him, and he thought himself secure from
+any further attempts on his life. The duchess regent, who was concerned
+for the honour of her sex, and the happiness of two persons who had
+suffered so much, and seemed to have been born for each other, joined
+the hands of Stradella and his beloved Hortensia, and they were married.
+
+"After the ceremony Stradella and his wife having a desire to visit the
+port of Genoa, went thither with a resolution to return to Turin: the
+assassins having intelligence of their departure, followed them close at
+their heels. Stradella and his wife, it is true, reached Genoa, but the
+morning after their arrival these three execrable villains rushed into
+their chamber, and stabbed each to the heart. The murderers had taken
+care to secure a bark which lay in the port; to this they retreated, and
+made their escape from justice, and were never heard of more.
+
+"Mr. Berenclow says that when the report of Stradella's assassination
+reached the ears of Purcell, and he was informed jealousy was the motive
+to it, he lamented his fate exceedingly; and, in regard of his great
+merit as a musician, said he could have forgiven him any injury in that
+kind; which, adds the relater, 'those who remember how lovingly Mr.
+Purcell lived with his wife, or rather what a loving wife she proved to
+him, may understand without farther explication.'"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+
+GIOVANNI AND LUCREZIA PALESTRINA
+
+Almost exactly a century before Purcell died in England, there died in
+Italy, at Rome, a composer who has made his birthplace immortal, though
+his own name has almost been lost to public recognition in the process.
+That is the man whose name in English would be John Peter Lewis, or as
+his father called him, Giovanni Pier Luigi, who was born at Palestrina,
+at some date between 1514 and 1530, and who died in the fulness of his
+fame February 2, 1594, when Shakespeare was thirty years old, and was,
+it seems, just getting into print for the first time.
+
+The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as
+Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He
+was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And
+all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first
+appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina
+from 1544 to 1551.
+
+Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he
+married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought
+him the greatest shock of his life. His wife's name was Lucrezia, "his
+equal and an honest damsel" (_donzella onesta e sua para_), according to
+the biographer Baini, who adds:
+
+"With her, Giovanni divided the pleasure of seeing himself elected the
+first Maestro of the Vatican; with her he suffered the most strait
+penuries of his life; with her he sustained the most cruel afflictions
+of his spirit, and with her also he ate the hard crust of sorrow: yet
+with her again he rested in the sunlight that beamed from time to time
+to his glory and to his gain. And so they passed together, these two
+faithful consorts, nearly thirty years."
+
+Lucrezia bore him four children, all sons, Angelo, Ridolfo, Silla, and
+Igino. The first three died in early manhood, after showing themselves
+in some sort heirs of their father's genius: in the second book of his
+motets Palestrina has included some of their compositions. The last son,
+Igino, outlived his parents and his own welfare; he was "_un' anima
+disarmonica"_ After his father's death he attempted to complete and
+market an unfinished and rejected composition of his father's, but he
+was legally restrained. He lost some of his father's unpublished works,
+while certain noddings of genius, better lost, and refused even by the
+Pope, Palestrina dedicated them to, still remain, with a dedication to
+yet another Pope, put on them by the scapegrace Igino.
+
+A certain writer Pitoni, by a bit of careless reading, multiplied
+Palestrina's wives by two, and divided his sons by the same number,
+claiming that Lucrezia, the first wife of Palestrina, was the mother of
+Angelo, that after her death he married one Doralice, and that she was
+the mother of Igino. But Baini exposes Pitoni's carelessness, proves the
+existence of Ridolfo and Silla by the inclusion of their works in the
+father's book, and shows that Doralice was the wife of Palestrina's son
+Angelo.
+
+It being established, then, that Palestrina was married but once, and it
+being assumed that he was happily married, it is strange to see how this
+happy marriage came near proving fatal to him. Palestrina, who was, like
+Michelangelo, intimate with various Popes, dedicated in 1554 his first
+printed book of masses to Pope Julius III. As a reward, the careless
+pontiff made him one of the singers of his Sistine Chapel, omitting the
+usual severe examination, and overlooking as a small matter the fact
+that Palestrina was so far from being a priest that he was very much
+married and very much the father, and furthermore had no voice. But
+Palestrina resigned his post as maestro at Saint Peter's and entered
+the chapel. The Pope died shortly afterward and was succeeded by a
+cardinal who was a patron of Palestrina's and continued his favour as
+Pope Marcellus II. Three weeks later this Pope also died, and was
+followed by Paul IV.
+
+Unfortunately for Palestrina, the new Pope was a strict constructionist,
+and he found it "indecent that there should be married men
+(_ammogliati_) interfering in holy offices." In spite of the action of
+the two previous pontificates, he determined to expel the three
+Benedicks who had entered the choir, Leonardo Bare, Domenico Ferrabosco,
+and Palestrina, "uomini ammogliati, e chi con grandissimo scandalo, ed
+in vilipendio del divin culto, contro le disposizioni dei sagri canoni,
+e contro le costituzioni e le consuetudini della cappella apostolica
+cantano i medesimi tre ammogliati imitamente ai capellani cantori." He
+then declares that, after mature deliberation, "cassiamo, discacciamo, e
+togliamo" from the list of chappellary singers these three, and that
+they ought to be "cassati, discacciati, e tolti dalla cappella," and
+that after the present order they "cassino, discaccino, e tolgano." And
+excommunication was threatened if any more married men (_uxorati_) were
+received in the chapel.
+
+This was on the 30th of July, 1555, just six months after Palestrina had
+resigned his important post at Saint Peter's. He was a young man with a
+family, and apparently keenly sensitive, for when this sonorous
+thunderbolt was launched at his head, he immediately fell ill of a fever
+and came nigh to death. But he recovered, and two months later found
+another post as canon of the Lateran, of which by the 1st of October,
+1555, he was maestro. Eleven years later, a year after he had written
+his immortal Improperia, we find him begging on account of the needs of
+his family to be given an increase of salary, or the acceptance of his
+resignation. They gave him the acceptance. Again he found another post,
+and ten years later was back again as maestro of the Vatican after his
+many wanderings and vicissitudes.
+
+In the meanwhile he had written his famous mass named after his old
+friend, Pope Marcellus II. The ten years between 1561 and 1571 had
+marked an epoch not merely in the life of Palestrina, but in the history
+of religious music.
+
+The reform Palestrina undertook, or was entrusted with, was the ending
+of the old scandal brought upon the Church by the elaborate lengths to
+which contrapuntal composers had gone in using popular melodies, and
+often even street songs of an obscene nature, as a foundation melody or
+cantus firmus for their vocal gymnastics. The churchmen of that day did
+in a more elaborate fashion what Wesley did in his day and the
+Salvation Army in ours for the popular ballad of the streets. The
+trouble was that many of the congregation would think only of the
+original words of these catchy tunes, and in the general uproar some of
+the priests would sing the actual texts, thinking that the people would
+not hear them, and forgetting that they were supposed to be for an
+all-hearing ear.
+
+I find an interesting example of this custom in the career of a
+musician, a contemporary of Palestrina's mentioned by Van der Straeten;
+his name was Ambrosio de Cotes. He was the Maestro de Capilla of the
+King's Chapel at Grenada; he was of either Flemish or English birth,
+and, though he was a churchman, was a gambler and drunkard; he kept a
+mistress, who ought to have been pretty to fit her pretty name, Juana de
+Espinosa. Besides, De Cotes caroused miscellaneously, he ran the streets
+at night, in bad company, and singing bad songs. In 1591 he was
+officially reproved for these habits, and for singing improper words to
+sacred music (_y cantan muchos rezes letras profanas, yndecentes_).
+
+So great was the scandal throughout the whole world of church music that
+contrapuntal music came near being abandoned entirely. It was given a
+last chance in a proposition to Palestrina to see if it were worthy and
+capable of redemption. He composed three masses, and the third of them,
+dedicated to the memory of Pope Marcellus II., was accepted, not only as
+the rescue of the old school of vocal worship, but also as the final
+word and ultimate model for future church music.
+
+Some years later, at the very height of his glory, Palestrina's heart
+suffered its final blow. In the words of Baini, "Lucrezia, _la sua dolce
+consorte_, after having piously accompanied the solemn procession for
+the transport of the body of Saint Gregory Nazianzeno from the church of
+the monks of S. Maria Campa Marzo to the Vatican the fourth of June,
+1580, was assailed by a most oppressive malady."
+
+The attentions of her husband and the remedies of the medical art of
+that day kept her alive up to the first of July. Then the sickness began
+anew and "neither the tears nor the voice of the loving companion
+prevailed against the inexorable scythe of death." On the 21st of July
+Lucrezia died. The next day her body was received at the Vatican,
+Giovanni watching in the schoolroom of the chapel.
+
+It is easy to picture the wild grief of this man, whom a previous
+anxiety had thrown into an almost mortal fever. Yet he lived fourteen
+busy years, and in his old age he felt both fatigue and want, and was
+compelled to join the long list of those musicians who have appealed to
+their patrons for charity. But at least his life, like Bach's and that
+of many another, had proved that marriage is not always and necessarily
+a failure when set to music.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+
+BACH, THE PATRIARCH
+
+The genealogy of the Bachs shows them to have been in the habit of
+marrying at least two or three times apiece, and of being very prolific.
+
+Johann Ambrosius Bach, the father of "the Father of Modern Music," had a
+twin brother, Johann Cristoph. They were astonishingly alike in mind and
+manner and mien. They suffered the same disorders and died nearly
+together. Their wives, it is said--_horresco referens_!--could not tell
+them apart. J. Christoph was sued for breach of promise by a girl whom
+he said he had discussed matrimony with and exchanged rings with, but
+tired of. The Consistory ordered him to marry her, but he appealed to a
+higher court and was absolved from the tenacious woman whom he said he
+"hated so that he could not bear the sight of her." He married another
+woman four years later.
+
+The great Bach, Johann Sebastian, was the youngest of six children. His
+mother died when he was nine years old, but with Bachic haste his
+father remarried; the new wife was a widow and seemed to be in the habit
+of it, for she buried J. Ambrosius two months after the wedding. The boy
+Sebastian was put in charge of an uncle.
+
+At eighteen he was organist at Arnstadt--at twenty-one he went on foot
+fifty miles to Luebeck to hear the great Buxtehude play the organ. He had
+been given four weeks' leave and took sixteen. He was severely reproved
+for this by the Consistory; and the reproof is in existence still. While
+they were about it, they reproved him for his wild modulations and
+variations, also for having played too long interludes, and then, when
+rebuked, playing them too short. He was given eight days to answer, and
+waited eight months. Then they remonstrated with him mildly again,
+adding, that they "furthermore remonstrate with him on his having
+latterly allowed the stranger maiden to show herself and to make music
+in the choir." His answer to this was simply that he had spoken about it
+to the parson. Further explanation we have none.
+
+Spitta speculates on the identity of this "stranger maiden." In the
+older church-cantata women did not sing: in the newer form they
+occasionally did. She might have been a professional from the Brunswick
+opera. But Spitta decides that it must have been Maria Barbara Bach, his
+cousin from a neighbouring town. She is known to have had relatives and
+friends in Arnstadt, and Bach married her a year later. Assuming this to
+be true, Spitta notes that a delightful episode in the courtship of the
+young couple is disclosed to our view. Perhaps, too, when Bach "spoke to
+the parson," he confessed his love and his betrothal.
+
+Further Spitta comments: "The plan on which Bach wished to found his own
+family shows how he, too, was filled with that patriarchal feeling by
+which his race was distinguished and brought to such flourishing
+conditions. Without straying into foreign circles he found, in a
+relation who bore his name, the person whom he felt to be the most
+certain of understanding him. If we must call it a coincidence, it is,
+at any rate, a remarkable one, that Sebastian, in whom the gifts of his
+race reached their highest perfection, should also be the only one of
+its members to take a Bach to wife. If we are right in regarding the
+marriage union of individuals from families not allied in blood as the
+cause of a stronger growth of development in the children, Bach's choice
+may signify that in him the highest summit of a development had been
+reached, so that his instinct disdained the natural way of attempting
+further improvement, and attracted him to his own race. His second wife,
+indeed, was not allied with him in blood, but that with the first he
+found, in some respects, his more natural development may perhaps be
+concluded from the fact that the most remarkable of his sons were all
+the children of his first marriage."
+
+Upton says that Bach loved Maria Barbara when he was only eighteen and
+they agreed to wait till he got a better post. This was not till three
+years had passed and then his salary was only eighty-five gulden (about
+L7, or $35) besides a little corn and wood and some kindling-wood.
+
+It was on October 17, 1707, that, according to the record, "the
+respectable Herr J.S. Bach, the surviving lawful son of the late most
+respectable Herr Ambrosius Bach, the famous town-organist and musician
+of Eisenach, was married to the virtuous maiden Maria Barbara Bach, the
+youngest surviving unmarried daughter of the late very respectable and
+famous artist Herr Johann Michael Bach."
+
+A little inheritance of fifty gulden (L4 or $20) aided the new couple.
+But it is small wonder that we find Bach sighing later: "Modest as is my
+way of life, with the payment of house-rent and other indispensable
+articles of consumption, I can with difficulty live." A year after his
+marriage, however, he was appointed court organist to the Grand Duke of
+Weimar, a post he held nine years. Then he became musical director with
+the Prince of Anhalt-Koethen. In 1720 he went to Carlsbad with his
+prince. When he returned to the bosom of his family, he found that his
+wife was not only dead, but buried. Spitta imagines his grief as he
+stood over the grave of the woman who had followed him from humility to
+success and had not been able to wish him a last Godspeed. She had borne
+him seven children, three of whom died; of the sons were Wilhelm
+Friedemann, the father's favourite, and Karl Philipp Emanuel, whom the
+world long preferred to Sebastian himself, and whom later times
+spitefully underrate.
+
+The shock of coming home to his dead wife did not annul Bach's powers,
+and his next cantata with the suggestive title, "He that exalteth
+himself shall be abased," shows a larger grasp of resource and power. In
+the same year he made a sensation by his playing in Hamburg, winning the
+high praise of the eminent organist Reinken (whom by the way Mattheson
+accused of being "a constant admirer of the fair sex, and much addicted
+to the wine-cellar of the Council").
+
+For all they may say of the superior genius of Bach's first wife's
+children, it was in his second wife that he seems to have found his more
+congenial and appreciative helpmeet. Bach's father had remarried after
+seven months of widowering, and lived two months longer. Bach waited
+from July 7, 1720, to December 3, 1721, and he lived nearly thirty years
+more. His new wife bore him thirteen children, six of them sons, none of
+whom were remarkable musically, though their mother was more musical
+than the mother of Bach's first children. Perhaps the newcomers thought
+it time to take the name out of the rut.
+
+Anna Magdalena Wuelken was the daughter of the court trumpeter in the
+ducal band at Weissenfels. She was twenty-one years old while Bach was
+thirty-six. They were betrothed as early as September, 1721, and
+together stood sponsor to the child of the prince's cellar-clerk. The
+wedding took place at Bach's own house.
+
+The new wife was very musical, a gifted singer and a devoted student.
+She made the Bach home a little musical circle. It is evident that she
+kept up her singing, for October 28, 1730, he wrote of his family, "They
+are one and all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already
+form a concert, both vocal and instrumental, of my own family,
+particularly as my present wife sings a very clear soprano and my eldest
+daughter joins in bravely."
+
+Soon after the marriage Sebastian and Anna started to keep a musical
+book together. Her name appears in her own hand, then her husband's
+cheery note that it was "_Anti-Calvinismus_ and _Anti-Melancholicus_."
+In this book and another begun in 1725 are compositions by himself and
+other men, copied in the handwritings of both husband and wife. There
+are arias written apparently for Anna Magdalena, and when in an
+unusually domestic humour he wrote in a song, "Edifying Reflections of a
+Smoker" in D minor, she transposed it up to G minor in her own
+hand--doubtless that she might sing it to him while he puffed
+contentment in uxorious ease. Later on is a wedding-poem, gallantly
+beginning,
+
+  "Irh Diener, werthe Jungfer Braut
+  Viel Gluecke zur heutgen Freude!"
+
+and exclaiming that at the sight of her in her garland and wedding-garb
+the heart laughs out in rapture;--and what wonder that lips and breast
+overflow with joy. There are rules he wrote out for her instruction in
+thorough-bass with a note that others must be taught orally, and there
+is a love-song for soprano, which he must have written for her, to judge
+from the words, "Willst du dein Herz mir schenken." Upton declares this
+song to have been written during and for their first courtship. A
+portrait of this ideal wife was painted by Cristofori and passed into
+the keeping of her stepson, Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but alas, it is
+lost while so many a less interesting face is repeated in endless
+pictures.
+
+Twenty-eight years after her marriage this faithful woman stood by her
+husband's side in his blindness and through the two operations by the
+English surgeon in Leipzig. How must she have rejoiced when on July 18,
+1750, he suddenly found that he could see and endure with delight the
+blessed sunshine! How her heart must have sunk when a few hours later he
+was stricken with apoplexy and a high fever that gave him only ten more
+days of life! At his death-bed stood his wife, his daughters, his
+youngest son, a pupil, and a son-in-law. An old chorale of his was, as
+Spitta says, "floating in his soul, and he wanted to complete and
+perfect it." The original name had been, "When we are in the highest
+need," but he changed the name by dictation now to "Before thy throne
+with this I come" (_Vor deiner Thron tret ich hiemit_). The preacher
+said he had "fallen calmly and blessedly asleep in God," and he was
+buried in St. Thomas' churchyard; but later the grave was lost sight of,
+and his bones are now as unhonoured as his memory is revered.
+
+It is a dismal task to write the epilogue to the beautiful life and
+death of this father of music. The woman who had made his life so happy
+and aided him with hand and voice and heart,--what had she done to
+deserve the dingy aftermath of her fidelity?
+
+Bach left no will, and his children seized his manuscripts; what little
+money remained from his salary of 87 thalers a year (L13 or $65) they
+divided with the widow, now fifty years old. Her husband's salary was
+continued half a year longer, but the sons all went away to other towns,
+some of them to considerable success. The mother and three daughters
+were left to shift for themselves. Two years later they must sell a few
+musical remains and the town must aid them out of its funds.
+
+In the winter ten years after her husband's death, on Feb. 27, 1760,
+Anna Magdalena died, an alms-woman. Her only mourners were her daughters
+and a fourth of the public school children, who were forced by the
+custom of the day to follow to the grave the body of the very poor. In
+1801 Bach's daughter Regina was still living, a "good old woman," who
+would have starved had there not been a public subscription, to which
+Beethoven contributed the proceeds of a composition.
+
+Gradually the name and fame of Johann Sebastian Bach were obliterated
+almost from man's memory. Half a century of oblivion was followed by the
+great revival and the apotheosis of his genius. In that apotheosis some
+radiance must always be vouchsafed the sweet memory of her to whom he
+owed so much of his life's delight and his art's inspiration, to whom
+also he dedicated his life and his music--Anna Magdalena.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+
+PAPA AND MAMMA HAYDN
+
+"Such music by such a nigger!" exclaimed one prince. Another called him
+a Moor. And two others could not endure him at all. He was undersized
+and slender as well; and his legs were so very short that they hardly
+reached the ground. His nose was long and beaked and disfigured, with
+nostrils of different shape, and he was undershot like a bulldog, and
+unusually pitted with smallpox even for those ante-vaccination days,
+when it was the ordinary thing to show the marks of this plague. He
+always wore a wig, too; beginning when he was a child of six, "for the
+sake of cleanliness"! and continuing to the day of his death, even when
+wigs were out of style.
+
+This does not read like the portrait of a man particularly successful in
+his love affairs. It does not certainly read like a description of the
+hero of a novel written by The Duchess or even by Miss Jane Austen. Yet
+this is the picture of a man plentifully beloved, large-minded but
+strangely naif; a revolutionist of childlike directness.
+
+Everybody knows the story of the early life of Joseph Haydn, one of the
+twelve children of a journeyman wheelwright, and throughout his youth a
+shuttlecock of ill treatment and contempt.
+
+Love seems to have reached his heart at a late day but with compensating
+suddenness. It is nearly incredible that a man whose after life was so
+heart-busy should not have felt the tender passion till he was nearly
+thirty, but stranger things have happened, and the anecdote given by his
+friend Griesinger of his wild agitation when at the age of twenty-seven
+he was accompanying a young countess, and her neckerchief became
+disarranged for a moment, would seem to indicate a remarkably
+unsophisticated nature.
+
+A year later he found himself somewhat relieved of the burden of poverty
+that had always hampered him, and he remembered him of the two daughters
+of a Viennese wig-maker named Keller. Keller had frequently been kind to
+Haydn, and the younger daughter seems to have inspired him with an
+ardent love, but she took the veil. Elise Polko has worked up an
+elaborate fiction on this affair with her usual saccharinity. When the
+convent closed the younger Keller from the world, her father ingeniously
+suggested to Haydn that he might marry the elder sister.
+
+As Louis Nohl says, "Whatever may have been the reason, gratitude,
+ignorance, helplessness in practical matters, or wish to have a wife at
+once--whatever may have been the motive, he married, and sorely
+suffered for it."
+
+Anna Keller was older than Haydn, and the family religiousness that led
+the younger daughter to enter the convent, led Anna to contribute more
+of money to the Church, of food and society to the churchmen, and of her
+husband's compositions to the choir, than even so pious a Catholic as
+Haydn could afford or endure.
+
+An account of the married life of these two is given by Haydn's friend
+Carpani, which incidentally brings up a bit of literary thievery of
+unusual quaintness. Carpani wrote his "Le Haydine" in the form of
+letters from Vienna; they were published in Milan. Some time after one
+Marie Henri Beyle published in Paris what purported to be an original
+series of "Letters written from Vienna." He published these under the
+pen name of L.A.C. Bombet. Carpani exposed the theft, but a little later
+the imperturbable Beyle published a second edition of his work under the
+name De Stendhal. An English translation from the French work is
+commonly seen, though never with credit to Carpani. Carpani, in his
+account of the home life of the Haydns, says they were happy for a
+honeymoon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"But soon the caprices of Mrs. Anna turned the knot to a chain, the
+bliss to torment, and affairs went so far that, after suffering many
+years, this new Socrates ended by separating from his Xantippe. Mrs.
+Anna was not pretty, nor yet ugly. Her manners were immaculate, but she
+had a wooden head, and when she had fixed on a caprice, there was no way
+to change it. The woman loved her husband but was not congenial. An
+excess of religious piety badly directed came to disturb this happy
+harmony. Mrs. Anna wanted the house always full of priests, to whom she
+furnished good dinners, suppers, and luncheons. Haydn was a bit
+economical; but rather for cause than desire. At this time he had hardly
+enough to live on discreetly, and he began to look with evil eye on this
+endless procession of holy grasshoppers (_locuste_) who ravaged his
+larder. Nor was it appropriate to the house of a studious man, this
+ceaseless clatter of a numerous, genial, and lazy society; therefore,
+solidly religious as he was, he could not enjoy these sacred repasts and
+he had to close the door of the refectory. After that the deluge (_inde
+irae_). Mrs. Anna had a religious brother. Haydn couldn't keep him from
+visiting his sister.
+
+"Monks are like cherries; if you lift one from the basket, ten come
+along with it. Haydn's convent was not depopulated. Nor did the demands
+decrease. Every now and then Mrs. Anna had a new request; to-day a
+responsory, to-morrow a motet, the day after a mass, then hymns, then
+psalms, then antiphons; and all _gratis_. If her husband declined to
+write them, there appeared on the scene the great confederates of
+capricious women; the effects of hysteria, spleen (_gli insulti di
+stomaco_), spasms; then shrieks, then criminations, weepings, quarrels,
+and bad humour unceasing. Haydn ended with having to appease the woman,
+to lose his point, and pay the doctor and the druggist to boot. He had
+always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true
+miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful
+works that all the world knows.
+
+"It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted
+that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in
+the service of Prince Esterhazy. This friendship, rousing jealous
+suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable.
+The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's
+marriage." [On this point Haydn once opened his heart to Griesinger,
+saying: "My wife was incapable of bearing children, and therefore I was
+less indifferent to the charms of other womankind."] "Lacking its most
+solid link, the marital chain could not stand such shocks, and grew
+fatally weaker. The pair ceased to live together, and only that
+sacramental knot remained indissoluble and strong, which Haydn had
+contracted at the age of twenty-seven. Mrs. Anna lived to seventy years
+on a sufficient pension which her husband faithfully paid, and she died
+in 1800. These vicissitudes in great part explain why Haydn, though he
+earned much, could not for a long while put aside a penny and make
+himself a little ease."
+
+It is not a pretty picture that Carpani draws of this home life, and
+Anna is made out to be far from a lovable creature. She is compared to
+the patron saint of shrews, Xantippe. But even Xantippe had her side of
+the story to tell; and with all possible admiration for that man
+Socrates, of such godlike wisdom and such great heart, it must be
+remembered that Socrates had many habits which would not only cause
+ostracism from society to-day, but would have tried the temper of even
+such a wife as the meek Griselda of Chaucer's poem.
+
+We constantly meet these husbands who are seemingly rich in geniality
+and yet are mysteriously unhappy at home. It is the custom of the
+acquaintances of these fellows to put all the blame on the wife. But
+there is a distinct type of mind which always enjoys dining abroad and
+appreciates a few herbs in a stranger's house more than a stalled ox at
+home. These people are gentle and genial and tender only out-of-doors.
+You might call them extra-mural saints.
+
+I have a strong suspicion that Haydn, who was so dear and good a soul
+that he was commonly called "Papa" by his friends and disciples, was one
+of the souls that shrivel up inside the house. In any case he can never
+be forgiven for publishing his domestic miseries as he did. He talked
+inexcusably to his friends about his wife; he complained everywhere of
+her extravagances and of her quarrelsomeness. When Griesinger wished to
+make Haydn's wife a present, Haydn forbade him, saying:
+
+"She does not deserve anything! It is little matter to her whether her
+husband is an artist or a cobbler."
+
+As he passed in front of a picture of her once, he seized the violinist
+Baillot by the arm, and pointing to the picture said, "That is my wife.
+Many a time she has maddened me."
+
+In 1792 he wrote to his mistress from London:--"My wife, the infernal
+beast" (_bestia infernale_--Pohl translates this _hoellische Bestie_)
+"has written so much stuff that I had to tell her I would not come to
+the house any more; which has brought her again to her senses."
+
+This was thirty-two years after his marriage, and a year later he writes
+again:
+
+"My wife is ailing most of the time and is always in the same miserable
+temper, but I do not let it distress me any longer. There will sometime
+be an end of this torment."
+
+Louis Nohl speaks of this as written in a gentle and almost sorrowful
+tone! As his biographers find gentleness in such writing, it is easy to
+see why Mrs. Haydn has had few defenders.
+
+Heaven forbid that I should be considered as throwing all the blame for
+the unhappiness upon the husband. Anna Keller had a remarkably long and
+sharp tongue whose power she did not neglect; she once complained to her
+husband that there was not money enough in the house to bury him in case
+he died suddenly. He pointed to a series of canons which he had written
+and framed. When he was in London revelling in his triumph, she sent him
+a letter in which she asked him for money enough to buy a certain little
+house she had set her heart on, naively adding that it was just a cosy
+size for a widow.
+
+Haydn bought it later for himself, and lived in it several years as a
+widower. Carpani in his thirteenth letter draws a pleasant picture of
+Haydn's life with his mistress Boselli, and incidentally describes how
+various composers composed: Gluck with his piano in a summer meadow and
+the bottled sunshine of Champagne on each side; Sarti in a dark room at
+night with a funereal lamp pendant from the ceiling; Salieri in the
+streets eating sweets; Paer while joking with his friends, gossiping on
+a thousand things, scolding his servants, quarrelling with his wife and
+children and petting his dog; Cimarosa in the midst of noisy friends;
+Sacchini with his sweetheart at his side and his kittens playing on the
+floor about him; Paesiello in bed; Zingarelli after reading the holy
+fathers or a classic; Anfossi in the midst of roast capons, steaming
+sausages, gammons of bacon and ragouts.
+
+"But Haydn, like Newton, alone and obscure, voyaged the skies in his
+chair; on his finger the ring of Frederick like the invisible ring of
+Angelica. When he returned among mortals, Boselli and his friends
+divided his time. For thirty years he led this life, _monotona ma
+dolcissima_, not knowing his growing fame nor dreaming of leaving
+Eisenstadt, save when he mused on Italy. Then Boselli died and he began
+to feel the ennui (_le noje_) of a void in his days. It was then that he
+went to London."
+
+This mistress of Haydn's, whom Carpani and Fetis call Boselli and whom
+Dies calls Pulcelli, is now generally called Polzelli, following the
+spelling in Haydn's own handwriting. The pleasant legend Carpani gives
+of Haydn's life with this woman, undisturbed by ambition until her
+death, is as much upset by later writers as is the spelling of her name.
+Pohl, closely followed by Haydn's recent biographer, Schmidt, describes
+Luigia Polzelli as a Neapolitan who was nineteen when she was engaged to
+sing at the theatre of the Prince Esterhazy. She was the wife of Anton
+Polzelli, an insignificant and sickly violinist, with whom she was
+apparently not in love. Luigia is pictured--doubtless by guesswork--as
+not beautiful, but of a pleasing appearance, showing the indications of
+her Italian birth in "her small slim face, her dark complexion, her
+black eyes, her chestnut-coloured hair; her body of medium height and
+elegant form."
+
+"To this woman," says Schmidt, "Haydn fetched his own deep and lasting
+sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily
+with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be
+known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good
+nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by
+the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout
+twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she
+was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London
+the master wrote her the tenderest letters. Both, as their
+correspondence shows, only postponed their union, till the day when
+'four eyes shall be closed,'
+
+"Yet when finally both were free, Time had worked his almighty
+influence; Haydn had grown gray; outwardly as well as spiritually an
+estrangement had widened between them, and of their once so dear a
+desire there is no more word. Yet Haydn never ceased to provide for his
+friend, as well as to care for the education and the success of her
+sons. The elder, Pietro, Haydn's favourite, on whom he hung with his
+whole heart, died early." [Pohl quotes many allusions to him in Haydn's
+letters.] "The younger, Anton, who was reported without proper
+foundation to be Haydn's natural son, later became musical director of
+the prince's chapel, but then gave up music and turned farmer, finally
+dying of the plague in sad circumstances."
+
+Pohl is somewhat fuller upon this alliance than Schmidt, who, in fact,
+merely condenses and paraphrases him. He says that Polzelli's maiden
+name was Moreschi [which, being interpreted, is "Moor," a name once
+given to Haydn]; she was a mezzo-soprano, who played secondary roles in
+the operas. She earned the same salary as her husband, 465 gulden a
+year. The letters Haydn wrote her were always in Italian, and in one of
+them he wishes her better roles, and "a good master who will take the
+same interest as thy Haydn." Haydn had come to her for sympathy, since,
+as Pohl says and we have seen, "thanks to his wife he had hell at home"
+[_die Holle im House_].
+
+When increasing fame took Haydn by the hand and led him away to royal
+triumphs in London, he did not take jealousy along with his other
+luggage. He seems to have heard that his place was promptly filled in
+Polzelli's heart, but with all his geniality, he could write of the
+rumoured rival as "this man, whose name I do not know, but who is to be
+so happy as to possess thee." Then there was a recrudescence of the old
+ardour:
+
+"Oh, dear, dear Polzelli, thou lingerest always in my heart; never,
+never shall I forget thee (_O cara Polzelli, tu mi stai sempre nel
+core, mal, mal scordeo di te_)."
+
+When some one in London told him that Polzelli had sold the piano he had
+given her, he could not believe it, and only wrote her, "See how they
+tease me about you" (_vedi come mi seccano per via di te_). Still less
+will he believe that she has spoken ill of him, and he writes:
+
+"May God bless thee, and forgive thee everything, for I know that love
+speaks in thee. Be careful for thy good name, I beg thee, and think
+often of thy Haydn, who cherishes and tenderly loves thee and to thee
+will always be true."
+
+Even to Bologna, whither Polzelli went with her two sons, says Pohl,
+"followed Haydn's love--and his gold." He intended after his first
+London visit to go to Italy to visit her, and wrote further:
+
+"I cherish thee and love thee as on that first day, and am always sad
+that I cannot do more for you. Yet have patience. Surely the day will
+come when I can show thee how much I love thee."
+
+Loisa's choice of a spouse had been unhappy, as so many marriages have
+been where the wife is a singer on the stage, and the husband a fiddler
+in the band. Haydn seems to have sympathised with Loisa in her unhappy
+domestic affairs, as cordially as she had sympathised with him in his.
+He had sympathy, too, for her similarly ill-matched sister, Christine
+Negri, for he writes of her as--
+
+"Already long separated from her husband, that beast, she has been as
+unhappy as even you, and awakes my sympathy."
+
+Also in March, 1791, he wrote Loisa about her husband in a manner
+implying that he was a brute or a maniac: "Thou hast done well to have
+him taken to the hospital to save thy life." Haydn and Loisa, being
+Catholics, never thought of seeking divorce: their only hope of
+celebrating a formal marriage lay in the death of both her brutish
+husband and his shrewish wife--"when four eyes shall close." Loisa's
+husband was the first to oblige, for in August, 1791, his death wrings a
+charitable word from even Haydn:
+
+"Thy poor husband! I tell thee that Providence has managed well in
+freeing thee from thy heavy burden, for it is better to be in the other
+world, than useless in this one. The poor fellow has suffered enough."
+
+Later he writes:
+
+"DEAR POLZELLI:--Probably that time will come which we have so often
+longed for. Already two eyes are closed. But the other two--ah, well, as
+God wills!" Eight years more, and the reluctant and wide-eyed Anna
+Haydn was foiled of her desire to be a widow in the snug cottage of her
+choice. The lovers at last were both single. But now, freed of their
+shackles, why do they not rush to each other's arms? The only answer we
+receive is this chill and shocking document found long after Haydn's
+death; it is written in Italian and dated shortly after Frau Haydn's
+death:
+
+"I, the undersigned, promise Signora Loisa Polzelli (in case I shall be
+disposed to marry again) to take no other for wife than the said Loisa
+Polzelli; and if I remain a widower, I promise the said Loisa Polzelli
+after my death to leave her a life pension of 300 gulden, that is 300
+florins in Vienna money. Valid before every court. I sign myself,
+
+"JOSEPH HAYDN,
+
+"_Maestro di Cappella of his Highness, the Prince Esterhazy_.
+
+Vienna, May 23, 1800."
+
+On this sad and icy postscript to the ardent love affair, Schmidt
+comments: "The form of this writing leaves the conclusion plain, that
+Haydn was forced to this act by the Polzelli. This throws a poor light
+on her character, and we dare not evade the conclusion that, for twenty
+years in this love affair for life, she had in mind a business
+arrangement with the master."
+
+Thus cynically writes Schmidt of the woman who for a score of years
+occupied Haydn's affections. And all of the biographers are inclined to
+heap upon her more or less contempt; but as you shall see a little
+later, the genial master himself was not above reproach, and Loisa's
+anxiety was not unfounded, for her Joseph was casting amorous glances
+elsewhere. Thus after the long ardour, the love letters have frozen into
+a hard and fast negative betrothal in which Haydn promises to marry no
+one else. This, Schmidt says, was dragged out of Haydn. But, if such a
+bond were necessary, it speaks surely as ill for Haydn as for the woman
+who had given her life and her good name to brighten his joyless heart.
+
+Yet, dead as his love was, honour remained with him, though it was a
+rather close-reckoning honour. Three months later he answered with money
+her request for house-rent, and in a will dated May 5, 1801, occurs this
+clause, cancelling his former agreement, and making new provisions:
+
+"To the widow Aloysia Polzelli, formerly singer at Prince Nikolaus
+Esterhazy's, payable in ready money six months after my death, 100
+florins, and each year from the date of my death, for her life ... 150
+florins. After her death her son, Anton Polzelli, to receive 150 florins
+for one year, having always been a good son to his mother and a grateful
+pupil to me. N.B.--I hereby revoke the obligation in Italian, signed by
+me, which may be produced by Mme. Polzelli; otherwise so many of my poor
+relations with greater claims would receive too little. Finally Mme.
+Polzelli must be satisfied with the annuity of 150 florins." Two years
+later we find him writing to her (and, rumour said, his) son: "I hope
+thy mamma finds herself well." In a new will, dated 1809, the year of
+his death, Haydn withdraws the cash gift to Loisa, and leaves her only
+150 florins annuity. She still remains, however, his chief heir.
+Meanwhile, without waiting for his death, she had married again to Luigi
+Franci, like herself a singer and an Italian. She outlived him and Haydn
+also, only to die in poverty and senility, far away in Hungary. Poor,
+eighty-two year old Loisa! Her affairs had been sadly mismanaged.
+
+Why had Loisa given up all hope of marrying Haydn, even when his wife
+was dead and she was possessed of his agreement, signed, sealed, and
+delivered, to marry no one but her? Awhile ago I stooped to repeating
+the scandal that during Signora Polzelli's life, Haydn had been casting
+sheep's eyes elsewhere. But it is such a pretty scandal! Besides, these
+old contrapuntists were trained from youth to keep two or more tunes
+going at once.
+
+I am not referring to Haydn's friendship with Frau von Genzinger. It was
+Karajan who discovered and published this pleasant correspondence with
+her. She was the wife of a very successful physician, a "ladies' doctor"
+(_Damen Doktor_). She was the daughter of the Hofrath von Kayser; her
+name was Maria Anna Sabina; she was born Nov. 6th, 1750, and had been
+married some seventeen years, and was the mother of five children when
+Haydn began taking his every Sunday dinner with the family. Karajan says
+that she was an _ausgezeichnete_ singer and pianist.
+
+A deep friendship sprang up at once between them and they corresponded
+freely. Haydn's letters to her were published by Nohl, and you may read
+them in Lady Wallace's translation. They are full of the most
+interesting lights upon Haydn's life and experiences, and are brimful of
+affection for Frau von Genzinger. But the husband and the children are
+almost always referred to in the letters, and the friendship seems to
+have been entirely and only a friendship,--as Schmidt calls it, "_eine
+tiefe und zugleich respectvolle Neigung_."
+
+Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as "honourable," finds in Frau von
+Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for
+composition. "We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and
+truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best
+work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any
+benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally."
+
+But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with
+Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many
+a billet-doux fragrant with charm.
+
+It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's
+supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata
+and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his
+canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called
+"the loveliest woman I ever saw." Nor yet again the fascinating actress,
+Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he
+went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him
+painting Mrs. Billington as "Saint Cecilia listening to the angels," and
+protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels
+listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a
+fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The
+skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790,
+a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good
+and famous story.
+
+The true woman in the case makes her _entree_ in this innocent style:
+
+"Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him
+that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him
+whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.
+
+"James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791."
+
+This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters
+preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been
+lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to
+light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of
+oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting
+personage. May we be there to see!
+
+Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter
+was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came
+to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of
+Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe
+made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen
+as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English
+Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of
+London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a
+son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most
+aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was,
+according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings
+that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a
+pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape
+notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of
+consumption.
+
+Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in
+London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated
+by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she
+becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But
+whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover
+Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.
+
+Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, "In London, I fell in love with
+a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time." But Mr. Krehbiel
+shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn.
+To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not "though
+she was sixty years old," but "though I was sixty years old." I think we
+are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than
+thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics,
+as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times
+of their most potent beauty.
+
+Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline
+D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter
+that she was "an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a
+somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no
+disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to
+Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have
+not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer
+in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him
+and Frau Haydn in Vienna." We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do
+with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the
+charge of "vulgarity."
+
+The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an
+Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on "Mozart
+und Haydn in London" quoted from them. But for their complete
+publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's
+"Music and Manners in the Classical Period." This captivating work
+contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with
+amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the
+time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of
+Pepys.
+
+I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through
+such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in
+all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain
+themselves. M.L. is "my love," D.L. is "dear love," M.D. is "my dear,"
+and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to
+the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied
+into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may
+have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.
+
+Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs.
+Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor
+her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she
+encloses him "the words of the song you desire." This letter is dated
+February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792,
+and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased
+to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being
+suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.
+
+  "Io vi mando questo foglio
+  Dalle lagrime rigato,
+  Sotto scritto dal cordoglio
+  Dai pensieri sigillato
+  Testimento del mio amore
+  (Io) vi mando questo core."
+
+Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate
+that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give
+them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets
+that they must be incomplete.
+
+"Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.
+
+"M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish
+much to know _how you do_ to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure
+of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come
+tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not
+fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and
+best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity
+M.D. your &c."
+
+"March the 7th 92.
+
+"My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night,
+our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand
+affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of
+_tenderness_ for you but no language can express _half_ the _Love_ and
+_Affection_ I feel for you. you are _dearer_ to me _every Day_ of my
+life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my
+_Dearest_ it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned
+my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am
+truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had
+happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with
+the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you
+will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the
+Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best
+wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and
+invariable Regard my D,
+
+"Your truly affectionate--
+
+"my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when
+you will come."
+
+"April 4th 92.
+
+"My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons
+for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse
+me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be
+happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to
+you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your
+Concert. may all _success_ attend you my ever D H that Night and always
+is the sincere and hearty wish of your "Invariable and Truly
+affectionate--"
+
+"James St. Thursday, April 12th
+
+"M.D. I am so _truly anxious_ about _you_. I must write to beg to know
+_how you do_? I was very sorry I _had_ not the pleasure of Seeing you
+this Evening, my thoughts have been _constantly_ with you and my D.L. no
+words can express half the tenderness and _affection I feel for you_. I
+thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always
+remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the
+most perfect sympathy in _all your sensations_ and my regard is
+_Stronger every day_. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my
+D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc."
+
+"M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were
+indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday,
+indeed _my D.L._ I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have
+already produced So many _wonderful_ and _Charming_ compositions Still
+fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your
+health let me prevail on you my _much-loved_ H. not to keep to your
+Studys so long at _one time_, my D. love if you could know how very
+precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to
+preserve it for my sake as well as _your own_. pray inform me how you do
+and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and
+on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time
+my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with
+the _tenderest_ regard your most &c.
+
+"J.S. April the 19th 92"
+
+"April 24th 1792.
+
+"My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my
+thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably
+attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the
+March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I
+hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you
+the _Dear_ original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write
+Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the
+occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of
+your _health_. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday
+to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours
+etc."
+
+"M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I
+shall be very happy to see you and _particularly_ wish for the pleasure
+of _your_ company _my Dst Love_ before our other friends come. I hope to
+hear you are in _good Health_. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are
+your constant attendants and I _ever_ am with the _firmest_ Attachment
+my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,
+
+"R.S."
+
+"James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d."
+
+"M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten
+thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from _your
+ever Enchanting_ compositions and your _incomparably Charming_
+performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among _all_ your numerous
+admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can
+have Such high veneration for your most _brilliant Talents_ as I _have_,
+indeed my D.L. no tongue _can express_ the gratitude I _feel_ for the
+infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted
+thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that
+I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the
+_Chief_ Blessings of my life, and it is the _Sincer_ wish of my heart to
+preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you
+are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you _can_
+come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be
+particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come.
+God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect
+attachment your &c.
+
+"Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792."
+
+"My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me
+and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of
+them, pray inform me _how you do_, and let me know my _Dst L_ when you
+will dine with me; I shall be _happy_ to _See_ you to dinner either
+tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am _truly
+anxious_ and _impatient_ to _See you_ and I wish to have as much of
+_your company_ as possible; indeed _my Dst H_. I _feel_ for you the
+_fondest_ and _tenderest_ affection the human Heart is capable of and I
+ever am with the _firmest_ attachment my Dst Love
+
+"most Sincerely, Faithfully
+
+"and most affectionately yours
+
+"Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792"
+
+"M.D.
+
+"I was _extremely sorry_ I had not the pleasure of _seeing you to-day,_
+indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every
+moment of your company is _more_ and _more precious_ to me now your
+_departure_ is so near. I hope to hear you are _quite well_ and I shall
+be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one
+o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of
+Seeing _you_ on _Monday_. You will receive this letter to-morrow
+morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home
+and I _wish_ to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more
+I repeat let me See you as _Soon_ as possible. I _ever_ am with the most
+_inviolable attachment_ my Dst and most beloved H.
+
+"most faithfully and most
+
+"affectionately yours
+
+"R.S."
+
+
+"I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with
+your _delightful_ and enchanting _Compositions_ and your Spirited and
+interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the
+great pleasure I _always_ receive from your _incomparable_ Music. My D:
+I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any _Sleep_ to
+Night. I am _extremely anxious_ about your health. I hope to hear a good
+account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be
+happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the
+tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate
+
+"Friday Night, 12 o'clock."
+
+
+This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the
+barbarous word "yearnful," once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to
+London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the
+acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious
+guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old
+lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.
+
+This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the
+considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought
+him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes
+through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St.
+James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the
+house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to
+letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind
+him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady,"
+probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn
+dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly
+she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies
+probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was
+asked what the letters were. "They are letters from an English widow in
+London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty
+years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have
+married had I then been single."
+
+Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded
+affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing
+to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes
+that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian
+woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius
+so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the
+enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?
+
+When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to--even the fable
+that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl,
+who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in
+Haydn's will.
+
+Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that
+Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson--and that points to us as a by-path,
+which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of
+Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art,
+that pet of artists.
+
+As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement
+in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of
+now as a musician.
+
+"On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I
+saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in
+diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can
+put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of
+which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The
+king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He
+gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor
+Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven
+years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many
+years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned,
+however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary
+instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and
+studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with
+him, married him, and gave him a dowry of L100,000. Besides this he has
+L500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him
+with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is
+of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits
+from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+
+THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
+
+Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and
+the other eighteen, strike the town of Luebeck in 1703. They are drawn
+thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition
+is to be friendly.
+
+Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Luebeck as soon as can
+be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the
+daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the
+pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see,
+and her years were thirty-four--just six years less than the total years
+of the two young candidates.
+
+Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship
+suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing
+"Cleopatra," an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing
+the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and
+presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is
+another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For
+it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to
+come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.
+
+But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years,
+and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to
+yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that
+narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is
+postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a
+duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor;
+he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove
+fatal,--but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves
+its wearer for a better fate.
+
+By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is
+healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting
+with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way
+toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of
+versatility--which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a
+writer than aught else.
+
+The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their
+wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann
+Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose
+compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the
+son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who
+had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring
+candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain
+J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter,
+and "got the pretty job" ("_erhielt den schoenen Dienst_").
+
+The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681--1764), a sort
+of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings,
+daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral.
+That is all of his story that belongs here.
+
+The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage
+whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler
+and Handel--the later form being preferred by the English, who, as
+somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glueck." It is not
+needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events
+it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His
+friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon
+of deafness. Haendel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same
+year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations
+having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two
+men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life
+of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's
+bachelorhood.
+
+Haendel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though
+he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.
+
+The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the
+occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his
+the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window,
+threatened to throw her out, thundering, "I always knew you were a
+devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils."
+
+Haendel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the
+memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760,
+the author says that Haendel was "always habituated to an uncommon
+portion of food and nourishment," and accuses him of "excessive
+indulgence in this lowest of gratifications."
+
+"He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but
+it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution,
+so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him
+to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he
+hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have
+been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous."
+
+A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three.
+Noting that the servant dawdled about, Haendel demanded why; the servant
+answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Haendel
+stormed, in his famous broken English, "Den pring up der tinner
+prestissimo. I am de gombany."
+
+In his later years Haendel was not so beautiful as he might have been,
+and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and
+his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that "in his youth he was the
+most handsome man of his time."
+
+Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of
+the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography
+states "that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long
+career of his life." And yet contradicts himself in his very next
+sentence, for he adds:
+
+"When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with
+him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes
+Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess
+Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the
+part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that
+period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and
+princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts.
+Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a
+young man twenty-four years old; but Haendel disdained her love. All the
+English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment
+which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never
+prudent."
+
+This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring
+says that Haendel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great
+biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and
+represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that
+Vittoria was "an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand
+Duke of Tuscany"--which gives a decidedly different look to Haendel's
+"prudence."
+
+Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the
+famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, "a contralto of masculine strength," as
+one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her
+chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave
+higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen
+years old when Haendel's "Roderigo" was produced there in 1707. That she
+should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be
+mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the
+time of her immortal amour. Love _a l'Italienne_ is precocious.
+
+Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom
+Haendel never brought to London among all his importations--and with
+good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger
+account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar
+method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her
+to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong
+prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious
+appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man
+she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from
+dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money
+she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to
+the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.
+
+In London Haendel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He
+is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical
+independence.
+
+He was a lordly man in his day was Haendel; and dared to cut that
+terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of
+all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: "I admire Haendel
+principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such
+perfection." This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the
+dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other
+man's straight; or that Haendel was really more of a flirt than
+tradition makes him out.
+
+Rockstro said that Haendel was engaged more than once; once to the
+aforementioned Vittoria Tesi--this in spite of the tradition that woman
+proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases
+this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book,
+"Anecdotes of Haendel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith."
+This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to
+have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith _(ne_ Schmidt) was Haendel's
+secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on
+his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every
+emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy,
+in due time she married him.
+
+Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that Haendel lacked
+social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first
+would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a
+fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles
+were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she
+fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second
+woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry Haendel if he
+would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and
+died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.
+
+In his will Haendel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and
+one other woman.
+
+He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances
+would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance,
+the creator of "Samson." He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady
+Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died
+fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later
+he married the daughter of a harlequin.
+
+Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain
+were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of
+vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers
+would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+
+GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+While Haendel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was
+visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a
+revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance.
+To the lordly Haendel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and
+people who know nothing else of either genius, know that Haendel said,
+"Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook."
+
+Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise
+both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness
+that resulted in a determination to "reform it altogether." From London
+he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance,
+moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among
+the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich
+banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business
+with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's
+not particularly novel expression, "passionately fond of music." Gluck
+was soon made thoroughly at home there.
+
+"Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder
+daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave
+her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in
+which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also
+turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This
+man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was
+only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient
+promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers
+accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising
+themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve
+unbroken fidelity."
+
+Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that
+the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release
+himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna--as Schmid puts
+it--"_auf dem Fluegeln der Liebe nach Wien zurueck_" On the 15th of
+September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he
+dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal
+journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him
+Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and
+strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protege
+of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.
+
+No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a
+niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.
+
+"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure
+whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said
+in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the
+appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von
+Gluck, _nee_ Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts
+may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine
+or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables
+to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my
+previous bequests,'"
+
+None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his
+married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his
+operatic warfare.
+
+Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and
+niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at
+Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description
+by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played,
+_con amore_, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself;
+his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of
+November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his
+home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to
+take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden
+sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose.
+Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to
+leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the
+carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set
+before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne
+when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each
+wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his
+compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand _Fine_. But now
+he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.
+
+On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing
+the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it
+at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came
+back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and
+the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful
+farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked
+him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few
+hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and
+whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could
+have procured,--indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for
+eleven thousand florins,--outlived him less than three years, dying
+March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and
+her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:
+
+"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born
+Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to
+the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."
+
+
+ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR
+
+During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent
+partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way,
+wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and
+other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical
+notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does
+not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and
+curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal
+"Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his
+book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his
+ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled
+frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's
+first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who
+kiss and tell."
+
+
+THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
+
+In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris
+upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to
+the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.
+
+The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any
+way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in
+the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that
+his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into
+consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck
+made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no
+mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was
+not a genius of the first order.
+
+But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the
+intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so
+beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have
+been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither
+inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an
+Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His
+biographer Ginguene says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most
+beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous
+study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher
+and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned
+for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that
+which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni.
+He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her
+the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost
+every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all
+the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her
+husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and
+I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara
+Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art,
+so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."
+
+In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support
+of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protege,
+Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like
+Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and
+kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of
+Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he
+happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of
+Piccinni's home life.
+
+"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the
+tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born
+that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him
+tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in
+dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene
+himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his
+indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great
+a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter"
+[one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"
+
+The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling
+conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely
+than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December
+day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest
+daughter, aged eighteen. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue,
+to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the
+country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself
+quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made
+to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his
+work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of
+these intrigues."
+
+In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera,
+"Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre.
+He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife,
+and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was
+perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than
+so good a man merited.
+
+Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of
+his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered
+the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna,
+Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.
+
+He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must
+be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution
+broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of
+the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples,
+where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But
+everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris
+had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there;
+whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This
+brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not
+dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.
+
+In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family
+gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with
+pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme.
+Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light,
+without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise
+as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these
+eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which
+Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested."
+So says Ginguene of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see,
+so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to
+believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too
+old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguene has this last picture
+of him:
+
+"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his
+home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember
+the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan.
+They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due
+expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' _Lasciami, o ciel pietoso_!
+composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old
+and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with
+eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not
+forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in
+Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two
+daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in
+accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices,
+so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which
+had animated him when he produced those sublime works."
+
+Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb
+said that he was "_Cher aux Arts et a l'Amitie_." He left to his widow
+and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame
+Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it
+purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be
+assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two
+sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had
+a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.
+
+Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much
+to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life,
+but I do not find that he married. Salieri--whom Gluck assisted in the
+most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's
+operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when
+it was a success--was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon
+him much affection. Mehul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and
+married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted
+a nephew.
+
+It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to
+take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with
+the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera
+should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of
+Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+
+A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY--PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.
+
+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-god by
+his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fetis, Peri was
+very avaricious. Of noble 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 Schuetz, 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
+passion, 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 Haendel, 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 brandishing 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 crushing 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, Haendel, he attempted
+management, and like Haendel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but
+quite unlike the woman-hater Haendel, he married his way out of poverty.
+In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership 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 Haendel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though
+Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess of Marlborough, who
+gave him a pension of L500 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 destitution, from which the famous
+artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+
+MOZART
+
+As we come nearer to our own day, the documents 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 documents 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 attitude 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 constitute 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 assistance 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 God 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 God 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 God and myself. Please God 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 God that my opera may be successful."
+The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was
+only fourteen years old!
+
+Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later
+as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn
+messages as these:
+
+"Don't, I entreat, forget about _the one other_, where no other can ever
+be."
+
+"Say to Fraulein W. von Moelk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg,
+in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the
+minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all
+about it."
+
+"Carissima Sorella,--Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi
+gia sapete."
+
+"My dearest Sister,--I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to
+perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my
+reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in
+the most impressive and tender manner,--the most tender; and, oh,--but I
+need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to
+drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to
+Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before
+my eyes in her fascinating _neglige_. I have seen many pretty girls
+here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers." The
+daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his
+heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was "the magnet." And Wendling's
+daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.
+
+These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the
+father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous
+activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When,
+therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest
+in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing,
+and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was
+Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little
+ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.
+
+There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this
+letter to his father, dated 1777--he was born in 1756:
+
+"As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all
+this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and
+finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time
+known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the
+matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father
+on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the
+convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg."
+
+Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Baesle, or
+cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a
+concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the
+daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with
+certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his
+father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation
+of visiting the town. He found her "pretty, intelligent, lovable,
+clever, and gay," and, like him, "rather inclined to be satirical."
+
+They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods.
+His letters are full of that _possenhaften Jargon_ with which he
+sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name
+of Baesle, with which he rhymes "Haesle," a colloquial word for "rabbit."
+His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes,
+puns, and quibbles, such as:
+
+"Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief--trief, welchen
+ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben--schaben.
+Desto besser, besser desto!"
+
+Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense
+if not literally the sense. This is a sample:
+
+"My dear Coz-Buzz:--I have safely received your precious
+epistle--thistle, and from it I perceive--achieve, that my
+aunt--gaunt, and you--shoe, are quite well--bell. I have
+to-day a letter--setter, from my papa--ah-ha, safe in my
+hands--sands."
+
+A week later he writes her a letter beginning:
+
+"My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!--Potz
+Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz
+Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America!
+Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans,
+Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons
+regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and
+villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls,
+and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such
+a packet and no portrait!"
+
+It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and
+it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have
+a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds,
+"Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing." It is certain that
+in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his
+kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this
+very letter, "love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease
+loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?
+
+"Je vous baise vos mains,--votre visage--afin, tout ce que vous me
+permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.
+
+His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who
+met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy
+farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Baesle."
+
+His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who
+was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the
+more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with
+Aloysia Weber--of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated
+him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own
+dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:
+
+"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent
+intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but
+it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."
+
+A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his
+letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:
+
+"You may think or believe that I have croaked (_crepirt_)
+or kicked the bucket (_verreckt_). But I beg you not to think
+so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"
+
+Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have
+her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.
+
+In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for
+Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin
+frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long
+absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin
+should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I
+would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any
+deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows
+him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is
+inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to
+drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.
+
+And yet his flirtation with the Baesle certainly went past mere bantering
+and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished
+Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to
+Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him
+writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as--
+
+"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest,
+by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."
+
+With her name he puns on _Baesle_ and _Bass_, thence, "_Baeschen oder
+Violoncellchen_"--a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he
+says, to appease her "alluring beauty (_visibilia et invisibilia_)
+heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes
+her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in
+circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies
+neither beauty on her part nor art on his.
+
+This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a
+business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation
+which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her
+mood. Biographer Jahn says:
+
+"The Baesle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at
+least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that
+there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke
+neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not
+have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity
+and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later
+life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite
+in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of
+eighty-three."
+
+So much for the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the
+bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more
+serious--for Mozart a very serious--affair, was his infatuation with
+Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little
+heart.
+
+When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the
+Baesle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before
+the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The
+copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but
+hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father
+of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.
+
+The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart.
+Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was
+gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It
+was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer
+Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on
+Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:
+
+"He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she
+is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not
+for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a
+downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very
+reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,--five girls and
+a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the
+last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already
+done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer
+for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis
+she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages."
+
+He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who
+had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a
+disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The
+deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, "Friends
+who have no religion cannot long be our friends." Then, with man's usual
+consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break
+off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he
+wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter
+Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has
+written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy
+principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says,
+because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him
+greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial
+friend for Nannerl.
+
+Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his
+father he declares:
+
+"I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish
+is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be
+answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my
+recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty
+zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I
+don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what
+is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans."
+
+How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the
+postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying
+a slight touch of motherly jealousy:
+
+"No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang
+makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she
+does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own
+interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I
+don't wish him to know it."
+
+Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend
+who married for money and commenting:
+
+"I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but
+not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from
+love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other
+considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife
+after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his
+property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a
+wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a
+one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the
+contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife,
+for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can
+deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing
+more."
+
+Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the
+Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for
+fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to
+pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought
+of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame
+the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!
+
+Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and
+tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He
+asks him to decide whether he wishes to become "a commonplace artist
+whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom
+posterity will read years after in books,--whether, infatuated with a
+pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and
+children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian
+life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided
+for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of
+really great people. _Aut Caesar ant nihil_."
+
+Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in
+the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that
+his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother
+went to Paris.
+
+He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck.
+Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him.
+For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone
+there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in
+Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply
+concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure
+her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this,
+however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the
+star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.
+
+What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell.
+The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's
+tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her.
+But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the
+favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be
+held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence
+she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It
+was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other
+who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to
+love elsewhere.
+
+When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and
+dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with
+black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of
+her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal
+German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake
+once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself
+upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, "Ich
+lass das Maedel gern das mich nicht will,"--which you might translate,
+"Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me." It was on Christmas Day
+that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the
+Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took
+it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend
+he locked himself in a room and wept for days.
+
+Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair
+before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and
+his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have
+answered with rebuking him for his foolish "dreams of pleasure." To this
+ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:
+
+"What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up
+dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not
+often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure--peaceful dreams, sweet,
+cheering dreams, if you will--dreams which, if realised, would have
+rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable."
+
+In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his
+cousin the Baesle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich,
+followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.
+
+As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the
+greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She
+married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to
+Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after,
+Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The
+lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least,
+Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, "Otherwise
+he would hardly have taken the role of Pierrot in the pantomime in which
+his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin."
+
+Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: "Neither happiness nor riches
+brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from
+the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman,
+and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she
+liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the
+brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to
+revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any
+intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her
+freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her
+readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion
+of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into
+her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years
+of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from
+her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto
+regarded her was no longer the same."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth,
+there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so
+sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her
+youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his
+readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities
+belong exclusively to the historian.
+
+The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a
+prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the
+part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop
+was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious
+Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a
+declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long
+in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at
+the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to
+present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally
+kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but
+seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation
+only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that
+it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count
+Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count
+went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.
+
+The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the
+humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken
+heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of
+course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that
+the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to
+punch the critic's head.
+
+Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that
+he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was
+so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those
+who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit
+to the artist and his art.
+
+Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The
+emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the
+composition of his "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail." In the first moment
+of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and
+sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the
+household of the Webers?--now more than ever in poverty since the good
+father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new
+engagement.
+
+The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a
+series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and
+gentleness.
+
+"What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a
+fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in
+love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not
+indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband
+is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an
+opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber
+is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her
+kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so."
+
+A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in
+a strange hand as follows:
+
+  "Your good son has just been summoned by Countess
+  Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear
+  father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you
+  know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be
+  without a letter from him. Next post he will write again.
+  I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable
+  to you as what your son would have written. I beg
+  my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your
+  obedient friend,
+
+  "CONSTANZE WEBER."
+
+
+This is the first appearance in Mozart's correspondence of this name.
+Constanze Weber was the younger sister of Aloysia. She had no dramatic
+or vocal ambition, though she had musical taste and sang and played
+fairly well, especially at sight. Strangely enough, she had an unusual
+fondness for fugues and made Mozart write down many of his
+improvisations.
+
+The gossips of Vienna lost no time in construing his renewal of
+friendship with the Webers. The buzz became so noisy that it reached the
+alert ears of the father in Salzburg, and he wrote demanding that
+Wolfgang should move at once.
+
+Mozart answered that he had been planning to move, but only to quiet the
+gossip that he is to marry Constanze--ridiculous gossip, he calls it.
+
+"I will not say that, living in the same house with the young lady to
+whom people have married me, I am ill-bred and do not speak to her, but
+I am not in love with her. I banter and jest with her when time permits
+(which is only in the evenings when I chance to be at home, for in the
+morning I write in my room, and in the afternoon am rarely in the
+house), but nothing more. If I were obliged to marry all those with whom
+I have jested, I should have at least two hundred wives."
+
+Among the rooms elsewhere offered to Mozart was one at Aurnhammer's. The
+daughter of the family threw herself at Mozart's head with a vengeance.
+According to his picture of her, she was so ugly and untidy that even
+Mozart could not flirt with her. He draws an amusing picture of his
+predicament--a sort of Venus and Adonis affair, with a homely Venus:
+
+"She is not satisfied with my being two hours every day with her,--I am
+to sit there the livelong day while she tries to be agreeable. But,
+worse still, she is seriously smitten with me. I thought at first it was
+a joke, but now I know it to be a fact. When I first observed it--by her
+beginning to take liberties, such as reproaching me tenderly if I came
+later than usual, or could not stay long, and similar things--I was
+obliged, to prevent her making a fool of herself, to tell her the truth
+in a civil manner. This, however, did no good, and she became more
+loving than ever. At last I was always very polite, except when she
+began any of her pranks, and then I snubbed her bluntly; but one day she
+took my hand and said, 'Dear Mozart, don't be so cross; you may say what
+you please I shall always like you.' All the people here say that we are
+to be married, and great surprise is expressed at my choosing such a
+face. She told me that when she heard anything of the sort she always
+laughed at it. I know, however, from a third person, that she confirms
+it, adding that we are to travel immediately afterwards. This did enrage
+me. I told her my opinion pretty plainly, and warned her not to take
+advantage of my good nature. Now I no longer go there every day, but
+only every two days, so the report will gradually die away. She is
+nothing but an amorous fool."
+
+Life in Vienna has always been gay enough. In those days it was far from
+prudish and Mozart was always of unusual fascination for women. He loved
+frivolity and went about much, but he seems by no means to have deserved
+the reputation given him by the gossip of that time and this, that he
+was a confirmed rake. It is impossible for any one acquainted with
+Mozart's career and letters to accuse him of studious hypocrisy, and
+this accusation is necessary to support the theory that he was anything
+but a serious-minded toiler, and for his time and surroundings a
+well-behaved and conscientious man.
+
+He finally left the home of the Webers and had previously written his
+father, as we have seen, that he was not at all in love with Constanze.
+But he was either in love with her without knowing it, or he soon
+tumbled headlong in love with her; for, soon after leaving the house, he
+plighted his troth with her.
+
+He was some time, however, in mustering courage enough to break the news
+to his father. To a letter dated December 5, 1781, he added a vague hint
+of new ideas. This was enough to provoke his father's curiosity. It was
+satisfied in Mozart's long reply of December 15th:
+
+"My very dearest father, you demand an explanation of the words in the
+closing sentence of my last letter. Oh! how gladly long ago would I have
+opened my heart to you; but I was deterred, by the reproaches I dreaded,
+from even thinking of such a thing at so unseasonable a time, although
+merely thinking can never be unseasonable. My endeavours are directed at
+present to securing a small but certain income, which, together with
+what chance may put in my way, may enable me to live--and to marry! You
+are alarmed at this idea; but I entreat you, my dearest, kindest father,
+to listen to me. I have been obliged to disclose to you my purpose; you
+must therefore allow me to disclose to you my reasons also, and very
+well-grounded reasons they are.
+
+"My feelings are strong, but I cannot live as many other young men do.
+In the first place, I have too great a sense of religion, too much love
+for my neighbour to do so, and too high a feeling of honour to deceive
+any innocent girl. My disposition has always inclined me more to
+domestic life than to excitement; I never have from my youth upward been
+in the habit of taking any charge of my linen or clothes, etc., and I
+think nothing is more desirable for me than a wife. I assure you I am
+forced to spend a good deal owing to the want of proper care of what I
+possess. I am quite convinced that I should be far better off with a
+wife (and the same income I now have), for how many other superfluous
+expenses would it save! An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only
+half of life.
+
+"But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat
+you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,--not
+Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with
+such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle,
+coarse, and deceitful--crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange
+(Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is
+still too young to have her character defined,--she is merely a good
+humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation!
+
+"The third, however, namely, my good and beloved Constanze, is the
+martyr of the family, and, probably on this very account, the kindest
+hearted, the cleverest, and, in short, the best of them all; she takes
+charge of the whole house, and yet does nothing right in their eyes. Oh!
+my dear father, I could write you pages were I to describe to you all
+the scenes I have witnessed in that house. She is not plain, but at the
+same time far from being handsome; her whole beauty consists of a pair
+of bright black eyes and a pretty figure. She is not witty, but has
+enough of sound good sense to enable her to fulfil her duties as a wife
+and mother. Her dress is always neat and nice, however simple, and she
+can herself make most of the things requisite for a young lady. She
+dresses her own hair, understands housekeeping, and has the best heart
+in the world. I love her with my whole soul, as she does me. Tell me if
+I could wish for a better wife. All I now wish is, that I may procure
+some permanent situation (and this, thank God, I have good hopes of),
+and then I shall never cease entreating your consent to my rescuing this
+poor girl, and thus making, I may say, all of us quite happy, as well as
+Constanze and myself; for, if I am happy, you are sure to be so, dearest
+father, and one-half of the proceeds of my situation shall be yours.
+Pray, have compassion on your son."
+
+
+This news was answered by a simoom of rage from Salzburg. The father had
+a partial justification for his wrath in the fact that a busybody had
+carried to him all manner of slander about Mozart and, likewise, slander
+about Constanze. He writes reminding Wolfgang of his mistake about
+Aloysia, and mentions a rumour that Wolfgang had been decoyed into
+signing a written contract of marriage with Constanze. To this Mozart
+writes very frankly and in a manner that shows Constanze in a beautiful
+light:
+
+
+"You are well aware that, her father being no longer alive, a guardian
+stands in his place. To him (who is not acquainted with me) busybodies
+and officious gentlemen must have no doubt brought all sorts of reports,
+such as, that he must beware of me, that I have no fixed income, that I
+would perhaps leave her in the lurch, etc., etc. The guardian became
+very uneasy at these insinuations. We conversed together, and the result
+was (as I did not explain myself so clearly as he desired) that he
+insisted on the mother putting an end to all intercourse between her
+daughter and myself until I had settled the affair with him in writing.
+What could I do? I was forced either to give a contract in writing or
+renounce the girl. Who that sincerely and truly loves can forsake his
+beloved? Would not the mother of the girl herself have placed the worst
+interpretation on such conduct? Such was my position. The contract was
+in this form:
+
+"'I bind myself to marry Madlle. Constanze Weber in the course of three
+years, and if it should so happen, which I consider impossible, that I
+change my mind, she shall be entitled to draw on me every year for 300
+florins.'
+
+"Nothing in the world could be easier than to write this, for I knew
+that the payment of 300 florins never would be exacted, because I could
+never forsake her; and if unhappily I altered my views, I would only be
+too glad to get rid of her by paying the 300 florins; and Constanze, as
+I knew her, would be too proud to let herself be sold in this way.
+
+"But what did the angelic girl do when her guardian was gone? She
+desired her mother to give her the written paper, saying to me, 'Dear
+Mozart, I require no written contract from you. I rely on your promise.'
+She tore up the paper. This trait endeared Constanze still more to me."
+
+
+The correspondence between father and son waxed fast and furious. Mozart
+does not attempt to defend Madame Weber or the guardian, but he will not
+have a word said against the devotion and honour of his Constanze.
+Jealous perhaps of the activity of the prospective father-in-law, Madame
+Weber now began to go into training for a traditional rendition of the
+role of mother-in-law. She made the life of her daughter and of Mozart
+as miserable as possible, and fixed in them the determination that,
+whatever happened, they would not live with her after they were married.
+Mozart and his sweetheart made a determined combination to win the
+affection of Mozart's sister, and Constanze sent to Nannerl many a
+little present, apologising because she was too poor to send anything
+worth sending. Finally she was bold enough to enclose a letter to
+Nannerl. The composition of such a letter under such circumstances is,
+at best, no easy matter, and I cannot help thinking that Constanze has
+evolved a little model:
+
+"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND:--I never should have been so bold as to
+yield to my wish and longing to write to you direct, if your brother had
+not assured me that you would not take amiss this step on my part. I do
+so from my earnest desire to make acquaintance, by writing at least,
+with a person who, though as yet unknown to me, bears the name of
+Mozart, a name so precious to me. May I venture to say that, though I
+have not had the pleasure of seeing you, I already love and esteem you
+as the sister of so excellent a brother? I therefore presume to ask you
+for your friendship. Without undue pride I think I may say that I partly
+deserve it, and shall wholly strive to do so. I venture to offer you
+mine, which, indeed, has long been yours in my secret heart. I trust I
+may do so, and in this hope I remain your faithful friend, CONSTANZE
+WEBER.
+
+"My compliments to your papa."
+
+With so much quarrelling going on around them and concerning them, it is
+small wonder that the two lovers were finally nagged into the condition
+of such nervousness that they fell to quarrelling with each other. One
+feud adds spice to the very first of these letters to Constanze, which
+she so carefully guarded,--Aloysia Weber seems never to have preserved
+any of Mozart's correspondence. It throws also a curious light on the
+social diversions of Vienna society at that time.
+
+"VIENNA, April 29, 1782.
+
+"MY DEAR AND BELOVED FRIEND:--You still, I hope, allow me to give you
+this name? Surely you do not hate me so much that I may no longer be
+your friend, nor you mine? And even if you do not choose henceforth to
+be called my friend, you cannot prevent my thinking of you as tenderly
+as I have always done. Reflect well on what you said to me to-day. In
+spite of my entreaties, you have met me on three occasions with a flat
+refusal, and told me plainly that you wished to have no more to do with
+me. It is not, however, a matter of the same indifference to me that it
+seems to be to you, to lose the object of my love; I am not, therefore,
+so passionate, so rash, or so reckless, as to accept your refusal. I
+love you too dearly for such a step. I beg you then once more to weigh
+well and calmly the cause of our quarrel, which arose from my being
+displeased at your telling your sisters (N.B., in my presence) that at a
+game of forfeits you had allowed the size of your leg to be measured by
+a gentleman. No girl with becoming modesty would have permitted such a
+thing. The maxim to do as others do is well enough, but there are many
+things to be considered besides,--whether only intimate friends and
+acquaintances are present,--whether you are a child, or a girl old
+enough to be married,--but, above all, whether you are with people of
+much higher rank than yourself. If it be true that the Baroness
+[Waldstaedten] did the same, still it is quite another thing, because she
+is a _passee_ elderly woman (who cannot possibly any longer charm), and
+is always rather flighty. I hope, my dear friend, that you will never
+lead a life like hers, even should you resolve never to become my wife.
+But the thing is past, and a candid avowal of your heedless conduct
+would have made me at once overlook it; and, allow me to say, if you
+will not be offended, my dearest friend, will still make me do so. This
+will show you how truly I love you. I do not fly into a passion like
+you. I think, I reflect, and I feel. If you feel, and have feeling,
+then I know I shall be able this very day to say with a tranquil mind:
+My Constanze is the virtuous, honourable, discreet, and faithful darling
+of her honest and kindly disposed,
+
+"MOZART."
+
+This letter seems to have ended the quarrel--the only one we know of
+their having. For, a week later in a letter to his father, Mozart
+implies that Constanze and he are once more on excellent terms; also
+that Nannerl had answered Constanze's letter with appropriate courtesy.
+
+Meanwhile, in spite of the excitement of producing his opera and
+fighting the strong opposition to it, Mozart is still more deeply
+absorbed in gaining his father's consent to his marriage. He briefly
+dismisses his account of his opera's immense success and bends all his
+ardour to winning over his father. The agony of his soul quivers in
+every line. Vienna is alive with gossip. Some say that he and Constanze
+are already married. He fears to compromise the woman he loves. He hints
+that if he cannot wed her with his father's blessing he will wed her
+without it.
+
+Meanwhile, the young woman's mother had by this time, got the bit fast
+in her teeth. Now, the Baroness Waldstaedten had been touched by the
+troubles of the young lovers and had invited Constanze to visit her for
+some weeks. This excited the mother's apprehension, perhaps not unwisely
+in view of the levity of the baroness' standards of conduct, and she
+insisted upon Constanze cutting her visit short.
+
+When Constanze refused this, Frau Weber sent word that if she did not
+return immediately, the law would be sent for her. This threat drove
+Mozart to desperation, and the marriage degenerated into a race between
+the priest and the policeman. Fortunately the priest won. The baroness
+wrote in person to the father for his consent, advancing Mozart 1,000
+gulden to cover the 500 gulden which Constanze would have as a marriage
+portion; and secured their release from the delayful necessity of
+publishing the banns.
+
+Romeo and his Juliet were married on August 4, 1782. Shortly after the
+wedding the father's consent arrived. It was a rather stingy consent
+however, and warned Mozart that he could not expect pecuniary assistance
+and that he ought to tell Constanze of this fact.
+
+There was an implied insult to the girl's love in this ungracious
+remark, and it stung Mozart deeply. For Constanze, who had torn up the
+contract of betrothal on a previous occasion, had not been the girl to
+take money into account.
+
+Three days after the wedding Mozart wrote to his father a long account
+of it with a promise that he and his bride would take the first
+opportunity of asking forgiveness in person. "No one attended the
+marriage but Constanze's mother and youngest sister, Herr von Thorwarth
+in his capacity of guardian, Herr von Zetto (Landrath) who gave away the
+bride, and Gilofsky, as my best man. When the ceremony was over, both my
+wife and I shed tears; all present (even the priest) were touched on
+seeing the emotion of our hearts. Our sole wedding festivities consisted
+of a supper, which Baroness Waldstaedten gave us, and indeed it was more
+princely than baronial. My darling is now one hundred times more joyful
+at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake--ay, my very
+life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really
+know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled,
+honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."
+
+Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion--this wedlock of
+the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married
+in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty
+that awaited them. There are many accounts of the domestic career of
+these two, written in a tone of patronage or cynicism. But this tone is
+gratuitous on the part of those who assume it. As thorough a study of
+the facts and documents as I can make, shows no ground whatsoever for
+refusing to accept this love-match as an ideal wedding of ideal
+congeniality, and mutual and common devotion.
+
+Poverty came with all its vicissitudes and settled upon the hearth, but
+we ought not to forget that both Wolfgang and Constanze had always been
+poor; that they were used to poverty, and were light-hearted in its
+presence. When they had no money to buy fuel, they were found dancing
+together to keep warm. Surely, for two such hearts, poverty was only a
+detail, and could in no sense be counted of sufficient weight to
+counterbalance the affection each found in each.
+
+As for Mozart's career we must feel that no amount of wealth would have
+availed against his improvidence and his extravagance in the small way
+in which fate permitted him to be extravagant. Nor could a life of
+bachelorhood or a life with some woman married for money conceivably
+have made him produce greater compositions--for no greater compositions
+than those he produced during his married life have ever been produced
+by any composer under any circumstances. Let us then read without
+conviction such accounts as we may find tending to belittle the goodness
+or cheapen the virtues of Constanze or of Mozart.
+
+The Webers had lived at Vienna in a house called Auge Gottes, and Mozart
+used to refer to his elopement as "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Auge Gottes,"
+as a pun on the name of the opera that had made his marriage possible,
+"Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail." It is a curious coincidence that the
+name of the principal character of this opera was Constanze, and that
+she was a model of devotion through all trials. Once away from the
+wrangling mother-in-law, the young couple enjoyed domestic bliss to the
+height. Later, mother Weber seems to have reformed and to have become a
+welcome guest in Mozart's house, where Aloysia herself became also a
+cherished friend.
+
+Nothing could exceed the tenderness of the lovers for each other. It
+continued to the last. Constanze was so watchful of him that she cut up
+his meat at dinner when his mind was on his compositions, lest he might
+cut himself. She used to read aloud to him and tell him stories and hear
+his improvisations and insist upon their being written out for
+permanence. While the wife was showing all this solicitude, the husband,
+genius though he was, was showing equal tenderness to the wife.
+
+All Vienna gossiped about his devotion. When she was ill, he was the
+most assiduous of nurses, and on one occasion got so into the habit of
+putting his fingers to his lips and saying "Psst!" to any one who
+entered the room where she was sleeping, that, on one occasion, on being
+spoken to in the street, he involuntarily placed his finger on his lips
+and gave the warning signal. When he was called away from home early,
+before she was awake, he would leave such a note for her as this:
+"_Guten Morgen, liebes Weibchen, Ich wuensche, dass Du gut geschlafen
+habest_" etc., or, as it runs in English: "Good morning, my darling
+wife! I hope that you slept well, that you were undisturbed, that you
+will not rise too early, that you will not catch cold, nor stoop too
+much, nor overstrain yourself, nor scold your servants, nor stumble over
+the threshold of the adjoining room. Spare yourself all household
+worries till I come back. May no evil befall you! I shall be home
+at--o'clock punctually."
+
+Two weeks after the marriage we find Mozart writing to his father in
+this tone:
+
+"Indeed, previous to our marriage we had for some time past attended
+mass together, as well as confessed and taken Holy Communion; and I
+found that I never prayed so fervently nor confessed so piously, as by
+her side; and she felt the same. In short, we were made for each other,
+and God, who orders all things, and consequently this also, will not
+forsake us."
+
+They looked forward with great eagerness to visiting Salzburg, and it is
+not the least evidence of the kindness of Constanze's heart that one of
+her chief ambitions seems to have been the winning over of the father
+and the sister. The visit home was to be in November, 1782, but the
+weather grew very cold, and the wife's condition forbade. Mozart writes
+to his father that his wife "carries about a little silhouette of you,
+which she kisses twenty times a day at least." His letters are full of
+little domestic joys, such as a ball lasting from six o'clock in the
+evening until seven in the morning,--a game of skittles of which
+Constanze was especially fond,--a concert where Aloysia sang with great
+success an aria Mozart wrote for her,--and financial troubles of the
+most petty and annoying sort.
+
+In June, 1783, Mozart writes his father asking him to be godfather to
+the expected visitor, who was to be named after the grandfather, either
+"Leopold" or "Leopoldine," according as fate decided. Fate decided that
+the first-born should be a son, and the young couple started gaily to
+Salzburg, for a visit.
+
+But fate also decided that the visit should not be in any sense a
+success. Even as they set forth, they were stopped at the carriage by a
+creditor who demanded thirty gulden [about $15], a small sum, but not in
+Mozart's power to pay. At Salzburg, Mozart's father and sister seemed
+not to have outdone themselves in cordiality, and, worst of all, "the
+poor little fat baby" died after six months of life.
+
+There is little profit and less pleasure in describing the financial
+troubles of the young couple. They are generally blamed for extravagance
+and bad management, for which Constanze is chiefly held responsible; but
+there are many reasons for disbelieving this charge, perhaps the chief
+of all being old Leopold Mozart's own statement that when he visited
+them he found them very economical. That was praise from Sir Hubert.
+
+Of Mozart's devotion to his wife in the depths of his heart, there can
+be no doubt. But the circle he moved in, and his volatile, mischievous,
+beauty-idolising nature played havoc with his good intentions, though
+not to the extent implied by some critics who have pictured him as a
+reckless voluptuary. But just herein is the final proof of Constanze's
+devotion and her understanding of him, for, while there never was a
+breath of slander against herself, she found heart to forgive Mozart's
+ficklenesses. He actually made her the confessional of his excursions
+from the path of rectitude, and found forgiveness there! "He loved her
+dearly, and confided everything to her, even his little sins, and she
+requited him with tenderness and true solicitude."
+
+She always said, "One had to forgive him, one had to be good to him,
+since he was himself so good."
+
+Four children were born to the devoted couple, all sons; the first child
+lived, as we have seen, only six months; the second was named Carl; the
+third was named Leopold; the fourth, Wolfgang Amadeus. Nohl says, "His
+wife's recovery on these occasions was always very tedious."
+
+In 1787 Mozart's father died, and his letters to his sister show the
+depth of his grief. Nannerl had married three years before. Her first
+lover had relinquished her on account of her poverty, but she had
+captured a widower of means and position.
+
+Mozart's letters to Constanze are not very numerous, because he was
+away from home neither often nor long. But they make up in tenderness
+and radiant congeniality what they lack in numbers. In 1789 he decided
+that a concert tour was necessary to replenish his flattened resources
+and to take him out of the rut in which the emperor was gradually
+dropping him as a mere composer of dance music for masked balls at the
+court. Mozart travelled in the carriage of his friend and pupil, Prince
+Carl Lichnowsky; and those who consider railroad travelling unpoetical
+will do well to read in Mozart's and Beethoven's letters the vivid
+pictures of the downright misery and tedium of the traveller of that
+time, even in a princely carriage, to say nothing of the common
+diligence. Mozart wrote to his wife frequently, and always in the most
+loverly fashion. He ends his first letter on this journey as follows:
+
+"At nine o'clock at night we start for Dresden, where we hope to arrive
+to-morrow. My darling wife, I do so long for news of you! Perhaps I may
+find a letter from you in Dresden. May Providence realise this wish! [_O
+Gott! mache meine Wuensche wahr!_] After receiving my letter, you must
+write to me Poste Restante, Leipzig. Adieu, love! I must conclude, or I
+shall miss the post. Kiss our Carl a thousand times for me, and [_ich
+bin Dich von ganzem Herzen kuessend, Dein ewig getreuer Mozart_] I am,
+kissing you with all my heart, your ever faithful,
+
+MOZART."
+
+_"Adieu! aime-moi et gardez votre sante, si precieuse a votre epoux."_
+In his next, three days later, he says:
+
+"MY DARLING WIFE:--Would that I had a letter from you! If I were to tell
+you all my follies about your dear portrait, it would make you laugh.
+For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say to it, God bless
+you, my Stanzerl! God bless you Spitzbub, Krallerballer, Spitzignas,
+Bagatellerl, schluck, und druck! and when I put it away again, I let it
+slip gently into its hiding-place, saying, Now, now, now, now!
+[_Nu--nu--nu--nu!_] but with an appropriate emphasis on this significant
+word; and at the last one I say, quickly, 'Good night, darling mouse,
+sleep soundly!' I know I have written something very foolish (for the
+world at all events), but not in the least foolish for us, who love each
+other so fondly. This is the sixth day that I have been absent from you,
+and, by heavens! it seems to me a year. Love me as I shall ever love
+you. I send you a million of the most tender kisses, and am ever your
+fondly loving husband."
+
+Again three days, and we find him writing at midnight to his "_liebstes
+bestes Weibchen_" an account of his activities:
+
+"After the opera we went home. Then came the happiest of all moments to
+me; I found the long ardently wished-for letter from you, my darling, my
+beloved! I went quickly in triumph to my room, and kissed it over and
+over again before I broke it open, and then rather devoured than read
+it. I stayed a long time in my room, for I could not read over your
+letter often enough, or kiss it often enough.
+
+"Darling wife, I have a number of requests to make of you:
+
+"1st. I beg you not to be melancholy. 2d. That you will take care of
+yourself, and not expose yourself to the spring breezes. 3d. That you
+will not go out to walk alone,--indeed, it would be better not to walk
+at all. 4th. That you feel entirely assured of my love. I have not
+written you a single letter without placing your dear portrait before
+me. 5th. I beg you not only to be careful of your honour and mine in
+your conduct, but to be equally guarded as to appearances. Do not be
+angry at this request; indeed, it ought to make you love me still
+better, from seeing the regard I have for my honour. 6th. Lastly, I wish
+you would enter more into details in your letters. Now farewell, my best
+beloved! Remember that every night before going to bed I converse with
+your portrait for a good half-hour, and the same when I awake. O _stru!
+stru!_ I kiss and embrace you 1,095,060,437,082 times (this will give
+you a fine opportunity to exercise yourself in counting), and am ever
+your most faithful husband and friend."
+
+Some of his letters are apparently lost, for one dated May 23d gives a
+list of the letters he had written to his wife--eleven in all (one of
+them in French)--between April 8th and May 23d. He complains bitterly
+that in this same time he had only six from her. There is worse news yet
+to add, seeing how poor they were:
+
+"My darling little wife, when I return, you must rejoice more in me than
+in the money I bring. 100 Friedrichs-d'or don't make 900, but 700,
+florins,--at least so I am told here. 2d. Lichnowsky being in haste left
+me here, so I am obliged to pay my own board (in that expensive place,
+Potsdam). 3d.----borrowed 100 florins from me, his purse being at so
+low an ebb. I really could not refuse his request--you know why. 4th. My
+concert at Leipzig turned out badly, as I always predicted it would; so
+I went out of my way nearly a hundred miles almost for nothing. You must
+be satisfied with me, and with hearing that I am so fortunate as to be
+in favour with the king. What I have written to you must rest between
+ourselves."
+
+His disappointment at the meagre financial returns from his tour was
+embittered by the serious illness of his Constanze and the drain upon
+his sympathy, his time, and his money. It was necessary for him to
+despatch in various directions a series of those pathetic begging
+letters that make up so much of his later correspondence.
+
+Shortly after the failure of his concert tour, desperation goaded him to
+set forth again. He writes again to his _Herzens Weibchen_ or his
+_Herzaller-liebstes_ with renewed hope:
+
+"I am quite determined to do the best I can for myself here, and shall
+then be heartily glad to return to you. What a delightful life we shall
+lead! I will work, and work in such a manner that I may never again be
+placed by unforeseen events in so distressing a position. Were you with
+me, I should possibly take more pleasure in the kindness of those I meet
+here, but all seems to me so empty. Adieu, my love! I am ever your
+loving Mozart.
+
+"P.S.--While writing the last page, many a tear has fallen on it. But
+now let us be merry. Look! Swarms of kisses are flying about--Quick!
+catch some! I have caught three, and delicious they are."
+
+This tour was again unsatisfactory. He came back almost poorer than he
+went.
+
+In March, 1791, Constanze had to go to Baden to take the waters for her
+health. Mozart wrote a letter in advance engaging rooms for her, and
+taking great care that they were on the ground floor. While Constanze
+was at Baden, Mozart was getting deeper and deeper into financial hot
+water, but his letters betrayed great anxiety that she should not be
+worried, especially as she was about to become a mother again. One of
+his letters to her was as follows; part of it is French, which I have
+not translated, and the rest in German, part of which also it seems more
+vivid to leave in the original:
+
+"MA TRES-CHERE EPOUSE:--J'ecris cette lettre dans la petite chambre au
+Jardin chez Leitgeb [a Salzburg horn-player]; ou j'ai couche cette nuit
+excellement--et j'espere que ma chere epouse aura passe cette nuit aussi
+bien que moi. J'attend avec beaucoup d'impatience une lettre que
+m'apprendra comme vous avez passe le jour d'hier; je tremble quand je
+pense au baigne de St. Antoine; car je crains toujours le risque de
+tomber sur l'escalier en sortant--et je me trouve entre l'esperance et
+la crainte--une situation bien desagreable! Si vous n'eties pas grosse,
+je craignerais moins--mais abandonons cette idee triste!--Le ciel aura
+eu certainement soin de ma chere Stanza Maria!...
+
+"I have this moment received your dear letter, and find that you are
+well and in good spirits. Madame Leitgeb tied my neck-cloth for me
+to-day--but how? Good heavens! I told her repeatedly, 'This is the way
+my wife does it,' but it was all in vain. I rejoice to hear that you
+have so good an appetite;... You must walk a great deal, but I don't
+like you taking such long walks without me. Pray do all I tell you, for
+it comes from my heart. Adieu, my darling, my only love! I send you
+2,999 and 1/2 kisses flying about in the air till you catch them. Nun
+sag ich dir etwas ins Ohr--du nun mir--nun machen wir dass Maul auf und
+zu immer mehr--und mehr--endlich sagen wir;--es ist wagen
+Slampi--Strampi, du kannst dir nun dabei denken was du willst das ist
+ebben die Comoditaet. Adieu, 1,000 tender kisses. Ever your Mozart."
+
+It is evident that during her stay in Baden some person attempted
+familiarity with Constanze and was rewarded with a box on the ears.
+Mozart wrote playfully to her advising her to be even more generous with
+her punishment, and suggesting that the man's wife would probably assist
+her if informed.
+
+It was about this time that Mozart was implicated by the gossips in a
+domestic tragedy. Frau Hofdaemmel was a pupil of Mozart's whose husband
+grew fiendishly jealous of her, attacked her with a razor, wounded her
+almost to death, and then committed suicide. The story gradually grew up
+that Mozart was the cause of the man's jealousy, and Otto Jahn, in his
+first edition of his monumental biography, accepted the story, which he
+later discarded after Koechel, another biographer, had succeeded in
+proving that the assault and suicide took place five days after Mozart's
+death. Hofdaemmel seems to have been so far from jealousy of Mozart that
+he was one of the elect to whom Mozart applied for a loan. There was,
+however, a young and beautiful singer, Henriette Baranius, in Berlin,
+who seems to have woven a stray web around Mozart while he was there in
+1789--90. She sang in his "Entfuehrung," and it was said that his friends
+had to help him out of his entanglement with her. But Jahn scouts the
+idea.
+
+Among the most dramatic, and therefore the most familiar incidents of
+Mozart's life, is the strange story of the anonymous commission he
+received to write a Requiem Mass. We are sure now that it was Count
+Walsegg who wished to palm off the composition as one of his own. To
+Mozart, however, there was something uncanny in the whole matter, and he
+could not work off the suspicious dread that the death-music he was
+writing was an omen of his own end. Shortly before his father had died,
+Mozart had written him a letter begging him to be reconciled to death
+when it should come, and speaking of death as "this good and faithful
+friend of man," and adding: "I never lie down at night without thinking,
+young as I am, that I may be no more before the morning dawns."
+
+Constanze, having been away for the cure at Baden, returned to find him
+suddenly declining in health. To divert him, she took him for a drive,
+but he could talk only of his death and of his morbid conviction that he
+had been poisoned. Constanze, greatly alarmed, called in the family
+physician, Doctor Closset. He blamed Mozart's state to overwork and
+overabsorption in the composition of the Requiem Mass, which he toiled
+at and brooded over until he swooned away in his chair.
+
+After a brief recovery of spirits, he sank rapidly again and could not
+leave his bed. Constanze attended him devoutly, and her younger sister,
+Sophie, and her mother, now much endeared to Mozart, were very
+solicitous and attentive. It is Sophie who described in a letter the
+last hours of this genius, who died at the age of thirty-five. Mozart,
+even in his ultimate agonies, was most solicitous for his wife, and said
+to Sophie that she must spend the night at the house and see him die.
+When she tried to speak more cheerfully, he would only answer:
+
+"I have the taste of death on my tongue; I smell the grave. And who can
+comfort my Constanze if you do not stay here?"
+
+Sophie went home to tell her mother, and Constanze followed her to the
+door, begging her, for God's sake, to go to the priests at St. Peter's
+and ask one of them to call, as if by chance. But the priests hesitated
+for some time, and she had great difficulty in persuading one of "these
+unchristian Fathers" to do as she wished.
+
+After a long search the family doctor was found at the theatre, but he
+would not come until the end of the piece, and then ordered cold
+applications to Mozart's feverish head, which shocked him into
+unconsciousness. He died at one o'clock in the morning of November 5,
+1791, and the last movement of his lips was an effort to direct where
+the kettledrums should be sounded in his Requiem. The ruling passion!
+
+Crowds, the next day, passed the house of Mozart and wept before his
+windows. As for Constanze, her grief was boundless, and she stretched
+herself out upon his bed in the hope of being attacked by his disease,
+thought to be malignant typhus. She wished to die with him. Her grief
+was indeed so fierce that it broke her health completely. She was taken
+to the home of a friend, and by the time of his funeral she was unable
+to leave the house. On that day so furious a tempest raged that the
+friends decided not to follow the coffin through the driving rain and
+sleet. So the body went unattended to the cemetery and was thrust into a
+pauper's grave, three corpses deep.
+
+It was some time before Constanze was strong enough to leave the house.
+She then went to the cemetery to find the grave. It could not be
+identified, and never since has it been found. No one had tipped the old
+sexton to strengthen his memory of the resting-place, and it was a new
+and ignorant sexton that greeted the anxious Constanze.
+
+There are those who speak ill of this devoted wife, and even Mr.
+Krehbiel, whose book of essays I have quoted from with such pleasure,
+speaks of Constanze as "indifferent to the disposition of the mortal
+remains of her husband whose genius she never half appreciated."
+
+For this and other slighting allusions to Constanze in other
+biographies, there exists absolutely no supporting evidence. But for the
+highest praise of her wifely devotion, her patience and unchanging
+love, and for her lofty admiration of Mozart, both as man and musician,
+there is a superfluity of proof.
+
+After his death she found herself in the deepest financial distress and
+was compelled to appeal to the emperor for a small pension, which he
+granted. Her nobility of character can be seen also in the concert of
+her husband's works, which she arranged, and with such success that she
+paid all Mozart's debts, some three thousand gulden ($1,500). Thus she
+took the last stain from his memory. She also interested herself, like
+Mrs. Purcell, in the publication of her husband's compositions. She was
+only twenty-seven when he died, and her interest in his honour, as well
+as the conspicuous motherliness she showed to the children he had left
+her, were all the more praiseworthy. Neimtschek, who published a
+biography of Mozart in 1798, emphasises her fidelity to "our Raphael of
+Music," her grief still keen for him, and her devotion to the children
+he left fatherless and penniless.
+
+For eighteen years Constanze mourned her husband. Indeed, she never
+ceased to mourn him. But, after nearly a score of years, in 1809, when
+she had reached the age of forty-five, she was sought in marriage by a
+councillor from Denmark, George Nicolaus von Nissen. He undertook the
+education of her two boys, and won her hand. She lived with him in
+Copenhagen till 1820, when she returned to Salzburg. The quaintness of
+this affair should not blind us to the unusual depth of affection it
+revealed. Constanze inspired even her new husband with such devotion to
+Mozart's fame that Nissen wrote a biography of his predecessor in her
+affections.
+
+There cannot be many instances of a second husband writing a eulogistic
+biography of the first, but Nissen wrote his with a candour and
+enthusiasm that spoke volumes for his goodness and for that of
+Constanze. He died, however, before the biography was completed, and
+Constanze finished it herself. She includes in the publication a
+portrait of Nissen and a tender tribute to his memory. Many of the most
+beautiful anecdotes of Mozart's life we owe to Nissen's gentle
+unjealousy, and Constanze could frankly sign herself "widow of
+Staatsrath Nissen, previously widow of Mozart."
+
+She includes an anonymous poem on Mozart's death, beginning:
+
+"Wo ist dein Grab? Wo duften die Cypressen?"
+
+Which is in its way evidence enough that she did not hold herself, or
+her "indifference," responsible for the dingy entombment of this genius,
+and the disappearance of his grave. As her last words to the public she
+says: "May the reader accept this apologetic, this intimate
+love-offering, in the spirit in which it is given. Salzburg, 1828."
+What reader can refuse this sympathy to one who felt and gave so much to
+one who craved sympathy as the very food of his soul?
+
+When Constanze was elderly and the second time widowed, she was,
+according to Crowest, visited by an English lady and her husband--an
+eminent musician--both of whom were anxious to converse with the relict
+of the great master. Notwithstanding the years that had passed, Frau
+Nissen's enthusiasm for her first husband was far from extinguished. She
+was much affected at the regard which the visitors showed for his
+memory, and willingly entered into conversation about him.
+
+"Mozart," she said, "loved all the arts and possessed a taste for most
+of them. He could draw, and was an excellent dancer. He was generally
+cheerful and in good humour; rarely melancholy, though sometimes
+pensive. Indeed," she continued, "he was an angel on earth, and is one
+in heaven now."
+
+Constanze outlived her second husband by sixteen years, and died in
+March, 1842, at the age of seventy-eight. Composers' widows live long.
+
+Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights,
+for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a
+sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a
+tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze
+Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of
+the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+
+BEETHOVEN: THE GREAT BUMBLEBEE
+
+"No artist has ever penetrated further, for none has ever thrust the
+thorn of life deeper into his own heart, and won, by the surrender of
+it, his success and his immortality."
+
+So says the profuse Ludwig Nohl in his reprint of the diary of a young
+Spanish-Italian woman, Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, who knew Beethoven
+well and loved him well, and as mutely as "a violet blooming at his feet
+in utter disregard."
+
+Beethoven the man would be voted altogether impossible either as friend
+or as lover, if he had not had so marvellous, so compulsive, a genius.
+He was short, pock-marked, ugly, slovenly, surly to the point of
+ferocity, whimsical to the brink of mania, egotistic to the environs of
+self-idolatry, diseased and deaf, embittered, morose--all the brutal
+epithets you wish to hurl at him. But withal he had the majesty of a
+Prometheus chained to the rocks; like Prometheus, he had stolen the very
+fires of heaven; like Prometheus, he did not suffer in silence, but
+roared or moaned his demigodlike anguishes in immortal rhythms.
+
+A strange contrast he made with the versatile, the catholic, the elegant
+and cheerful Goethe, his acquaintance, and his rival in collecting
+women's loves into an encyclopaedic emotional life.
+
+Beethoven, unlike his fellow giant Haendel, despised the pleasures of the
+table; he substituted a passion for nature. "No man on earth can love
+the country as I do!" he wrote; and proved it in his life. His mother
+died when he was young, and he found a foster-mother in Frau von
+Breuning, of Bonn. Her daughter Eleonore, nicknamed "Lorchen," seems to
+have won his heart awhile; she knitted him an Angola waistcoat and a
+neckcloth, which brought tears to his eyes; they spatted, and he wrote
+her two humbly affectionate notes which you may read with much other
+intimate matter in the two volumes of his published letters. He still
+had her silhouette in 1826, when he was fifty-six.
+
+Three years before, he had succumbed, at the age of twenty, to the
+charms of Barbara Koch, the daughter of a widow who kept the cafe where
+Beethoven ate; she made it almost a salon of intellectual conversation.
+Barbara later became a governess in the family of Count von Belderbusch,
+whom eventually she married. Next was the highborn blonde and coquettish
+Jeannette d'Honrath, who used to tease him by singing ironical love
+ditties. Then came Fraeulein Westerhold, whom he loved vainly in the
+Wertherlike fashion.
+
+Doctor Wegeler, who married Eleonore von Breuning, said that "In Vienna,
+at all events while I was there, from 1794 to 1796, Beethoven was always
+in love with some one, and very often succeeded in making a conquest
+where many an Adonis would have found it most difficult to gain a
+hearing. I will also call attention to the fact that, so far as I know,
+each of Beethoven's beloved ones was of high rank."
+
+To continue the catalogue. There is a picture extant of a Cupid singeing
+Psyche's wings with a torch; it is inscribed: "A New Year's gift for the
+tantalising Countess Charlotte von Brunswick, from her friend,
+Beethoven."
+
+There was Magdalena Willmann, a singer, whom he as a youth befriended
+and proposed to in later days, only to be refused, "because he was very
+ugly and half crazy," as she told her niece.
+
+An army captain cut him out with Fraeulein d'Honrath; his good friend
+Stephan von Breuning won away from him the "schoene und hochgebildete"
+Julie von Vering, whom Beethoven loved and by whom he was encouraged;
+she married Stephan in 1808, and died eleven months later, after
+Beethoven had dedicated to her part of a concerto. He wrote a letter
+beautiful with sympathy to poor Stephan. Then he loved Fraeulein Therese
+von Malfatti and begged her in vain to marry him. He called her the
+"volatile Therese who takes life so lightly." She married the Baron von
+Droszdick. We have a letter wherein Beethoven says: "Farewell, my
+dearest Therese; I wish you all the good and charm that life can offer.
+Think of me kindly, and forget my follies." She had a cousin
+Mathilde--later the Baroness Gleichenstein--who also left a barb in the
+well-smitten and accessible target of his heart. Even Hummel, the
+pianist, was his successful rival in a love affair with Fraeulein
+Roeckel.
+
+The Hungarian Countess Marie Erdoedy (_nee_ Countess Niczky) is listed
+among his flames, though Schindler thinks it "nothing more than a
+friendly intimacy between the two." Still, she gave Beethoven an
+apartment in her house in 1809, and he writes that she had paid a
+servant extra money to stay with him--a task servants always required
+bribing to achieve. But Thayer says that such a menage could not last,
+as Beethoven was "too irritable, too freakish and too stubborn, too
+easily injured and too hardly reconciled." Beethoven dedicated to her
+certain trios, and she erected in one of her parks in Hungary a handsome
+temple in his honour, with an inscription of homage to him. In his
+letters he calls her his "confessor," and in one he addresses her as
+"Liebe, liebe, liebe, liebe Graefin," showing that she was his dearie to
+the fourth power.
+
+Also there was Amalie Sebald, "a nut-brown maid of Berlin," a
+twenty-five-year-old singer, of beauty and brain. In a letter to Tiedge
+in 1812, Beethoven says:
+
+"Two affectionate words for a farewell would have sufficed me; alas! not
+even one was said to me! The Countess von der Recke sends me a pressure
+of the hand; it is something, and I kiss her hands as a token of
+gratitude; but Amalie has not even saluted me. Every day I am angry at
+myself in not having profited by her sojourn at Teplitz, seeking her
+companionship sooner. It is a frightful thing to make the acquaintance
+of such a sweet creature, and to lose her immediately; and nothing is
+more insupportable than thus to have to confess one's own
+foolishness.... Be happy, if suffering humanity can be. Give, on my
+part, to the countess a cordial but respectful pressure of the hand, and
+to Amalie a right ardent kiss--if nobody there can see."
+
+In Nohl's collection of Beethoven's letters is an inscription in the
+album of the singer, Mine. "Auguste" Sebald (a mistake for "Amalie").
+The inscription reads, as Lady Wallace ungrammatically Englishes it:
+
+  "Ludwig van Beethoven:
+  Who even if you would
+  Forget you never should."
+
+In another work, Nohl mentions the existence of a mass of short notes
+from Beethoven to her, showing "not so much the warm, effervescent
+passion of youth, as the deep, quieter sentiment of personal esteem and
+affection, which comes later in life, and, in consequence, is much more
+lasting." One of the letters he quotes. It runs:
+
+"What are you dreaming about, saying that you can be nothing to me? We
+will talk this over by word of mouth. I am ever wishing that my presence
+may bring peace and rest to you, and that you could have confidence in
+me. I shall hope to be better to-morrow, and that we shall be able to
+pass a few hours together in the enjoyment of nature while you remain
+here. Good night, dear Amalie; many, many thanks for the proof you give
+me of your attachment to your friend,
+
+"BEETHOVEN."
+
+There are other of these notes in Thayer's biography. She seems to have
+called the composer "a tyrant," and he has much playfulness of allusion
+to the idea, and there is much about the wretchedness of his health.
+Amalie Sebald seems to have been of great solace to him, but, like all
+the rest, she married some one else, Justice-councillor Krause.
+
+It was for her that Beethoven composed his cycle of songs, "To the
+far-away love" _[An die ferne Geliebte],_ according to Thayer; and of
+her that he wrote to Ries: "All good wishes to your wife. I, alas, have
+none; I have found but one, and her I can never possess."
+
+Years later he said to his friend Giannatasio that five years before he
+had loved unhappily; he would have considered marriage the happiness of
+his life, but it was "not to be thought of for a moment, almost an utter
+impracticability, a chimera." Still, he said, his love was as strong as
+ever; he had never found such harmony, and, though he never proposed, he
+could never get her out of his mind.
+
+In 1812 Carl Maria von Weber was in Berlin, and became ever after a
+devoted admirer of Amalie's virtues, her intellect, and her beauty.
+
+Five years later we learn of Beethoven's receiving letters and presents
+from "a Bremen maiden," a pianist, Elise Mueller. And there was a poetess
+who also annoyed him.
+
+In this same year, 1817, he was much in the society of "the beautiful
+and amiable" Frau Marie L. Pachler-Koschak, of Gratz. He had met her in
+1812, and admired her playing. As late as 1826 we have letters from her,
+inviting him to visit her in Gratz. But in 1817--he being then
+forty-seven years old--the acquaintance was so cordial that Schindler,
+who observed it, called it an "autumnal love," though the woman's son
+later asserted that it was only a kinship of "artistic sympathy,"--in
+fact, Beethoven called her "a true foster-mother to the creations of his
+brain." Thayer says, however, that Beethoven never met her till after
+she married. Beethoven is implicated in the riddle of the letters of
+Bettina Brentano von Arnim. This freakish young woman had some
+acquaintance with Goethe, and after his death published letters alleged
+to have been sent to her by him. She also gave the world certain letters
+said to have come to her from Beethoven. It has been pretty well proved
+that the naive Bettina was an ardent and painstaking forger on a large
+scale. She included a series of sonnets which were written to another of
+Goethe's "garden of girls" before he ever met Bettina. But she appears
+to have vitiated her clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and
+it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on
+fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but
+Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters
+to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and
+recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with
+Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's
+life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty,
+her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths."
+
+Wegeler has alluded to the fact that Beethoven's love affairs were
+always with women of high degree. But others have called him a
+"promiscuous lover," because he once used to stare amorously at a
+handsome peasant girl and watch her labouring in the garden, only to be
+mocked by her; and more especially because of a memorandum of his pupil
+Ries, who wrote: "Beethoven never visited me more frequently than when I
+lived in the house of a tailor with three very handsome but thoroughly
+respectable daughters." In 1804 Beethoven wrote him a twitting allusion
+to these girls. But such a flirtation means little, and besides they
+were beauties, these daughters of the tailor. And Beethoven's own mother
+was a cook.
+
+Ries describes him as a sad flirt. "Beethoven had a great liking for
+female society, especially young and beautiful girls, and often when we
+met out-of-doors a charming face, he would turn round, put up his glass,
+and gaze eagerly at her, and then smile and nod if he found I was
+observing him. He was always falling in love with some one, but
+generally his passion did not last long. Once when I teased him on his
+conquest of a very beautiful woman, he confessed that she had enchanted
+him longest, and most seriously of all--namely, seven whole months!"
+
+Ries also records a humourous scandal of an occasion when he found
+Beethoven flirting desperately with a fair unknown; Ries sat down at the
+piano and improvised incidental music to Beethoven's directions--
+"_amoroso," "a malinconico_" and the like.
+
+Once a devoted admirer, wife of a Vienna pianist, longed for a lock of
+the composer's outrageously unkempt hair, and asked a friend to get her
+one. At his suggestion, Beethoven, who was a practical joker of boorish
+capabilities, sent her a tuft from the chin of a goat. The trick was
+discovered, and the scorned woman vented her fury in a letter; the
+repentant Beethoven made ample apology to her, and spent his wrath on
+the head of the suggester of the mischief.
+
+Crowest spins a pretty yarn of Beethoven's acting as _"postillon
+d'amour"_ by carrying love letters for a clandestinely loving couple.
+
+Many of his own love-longings were couched in the form of the
+dedications prefixed to his compositions. The piano sonata, Op. 7, was
+inscribed to the Countess Babette von Keglevics, later the Princess
+Odeschalchi, and is called for her sake "der Verliebte." Other
+"gewidmets" were to the Princesses Lichtenstein and von Kinsky, to the
+Countesses von Browne, Lichnowsky, von Clary, von Erdoedy, von Brunswick,
+Wolf-Metternich, the Baroness Ertmann (his "liebe, werthe, Dorothea
+Caecilia"), and to Eleonora von Breuning.
+
+All these make a fairly good bead-roll of love-affairs for a busy, ugly,
+and half-savage man. It is not so long as Leporello's list of Don
+Juan's conquests, "but, marry, t'will do, t'will serve." I find I have
+catalogued twenty-six thus far (counting the tailor's three daughters as
+one). And more are to come.
+
+And yet, in the face of such a directory of desire, you'll find Von
+Seyfried and Haslinger venturing the statement, that "Beethoven was
+never married, and, what was more marvellous still, never had any love
+passages in his life," while Francis Hueffer can speak of "his grand,
+chaste way." On this latter point there is room for debate. Crowest
+adopts both sides at once by saying: "In the main, authorities concur in
+Beethoven's attachments being always honourable. There can be no doubt,
+however, that he was an impetuous suitor, ready to continue an
+acquaintance into a more serious bond on the slenderest ground, and
+without the slightest regard to the consequences on either side." Thayer
+takes a middle ground,--that, in the Vienna of his time and his social
+grade, it was impossible that Beethoven should have been a Puritan,
+while he was, however, a man of distinctly clean mind. He could not
+endure loose talk, and he once boxed the ears of a barmaid who teased
+him. All his life he had a horror of intrigue with another man's wife,
+and he once snubbed a man who conducted such an affair.
+
+Why, then, thus warm-hearted and clean-hearted, thus woman-loving, did
+he never marry? Ah, here is one of the sombrest tragedies of art. To
+say, "Poor Beethoven!" is like pitying the sick lion in his lair. Yet
+what is more pitiful? Love was the thorn in this lion's flesh, and there
+was no Fraeulein Androcles to take it away.
+
+Beethoven was born to the humblest station and the haughtiest
+aspirations, was left to a sot and a slave-driver for a father, and was
+early orphaned of his mother. In the first letter we have of his, he
+says: "She was a good and tender mother to me; she was my best friend.
+Ah, who was more happy than I when I could still breathe the sweet name
+of 'mother!' to ears that heard? Whom now can I say it to? Only to the
+mute image of her that my fancy paints."
+
+This same letter, written when he was seventeen, tells three other of
+his life-long griefs--lack of funds, ill health, and melancholia. He had
+no childhood; his salad days were bitter herbs; his later life was one
+wild tempest of ambition frustrated, of love unsated or unreturned, of
+friendship misprized or thought to be misprized.
+
+And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence
+began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and
+nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real
+communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he
+said, _inter lacrimas et luctum_.
+
+The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of
+the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of
+themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of
+this giant soul against his doom; nothing more heartrending than his
+bitter outcries; nothing loftier than his high determination to serve
+his turn on earth in spite of all. He was the very King Lear of music,
+trudging his lonely way with heart broken and hair wild in the storms
+that buffeted him vainly toward the cliffs of self-destruction.
+
+To such a man a home was a refuge pitifully needed, and for a while
+longingly sought. I have mentioned various women to whom he offered the
+glorious martyrdom that a life with him must needs have been. There were
+two others whom he deeply loved. One of these was the famous Italienne,
+whose very name is honey and romance as he writes it in the dedication
+of his "Moonlight Sonata" (Op. 27, No. 2)--"_alla damigella contessa
+Giulietta Guicciardi."_ It was in 1802, when he was thirty-two and she
+eighteen, that he wrote her so luscious name on the lintel of that
+sonata, so deep with yearning, so delicious in its middle mood, and so
+passionately despairing in its close. She had been his pupil. She told
+Otto Jahn long years after, when she was sixty-eight years old, that
+Beethoven had first inscribed to her the Rondo, Op. 51, No. 2, but, in
+his fickle way, he transcribed it to the Countess Lichnowsky, and put
+her own name over the "Moonlight Sonata" instead.
+
+It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that
+inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:
+
+"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled
+more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how
+intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My
+deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee
+from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though
+you know I am not one by nature. This change has been wrought by a dear,
+fascinating girl, whom I love, and who loves me. After two years, I bask
+again in the sunshine of happiness, and now, for the first time, I feel
+what a truly happy state marriage might be. Unfortunately, she is not of
+my rank in life. Were it otherwise, I could not marry now, of course; so
+I must drag along valiantly. But for my deafness, I should long ago have
+compassed half the world with my art--I must do it still. There exists
+for me no greater happiness than working at and exhibiting my art. I
+will meet my fate boldly. It shall never succeed in crushing me."
+
+But Giulietta went over to the great majority of Beethoven's
+sweethearts, and married wisely otherwise. Three years after, at her
+father's behest, she wedded a writer of ballet music, the Count
+Gallenberg, to whom Beethoven later advanced money. Twenty years
+afterward, in 1823, Beethoven wrote in one of those conversation-books
+which his deafness compelled him to use: "I was well beloved of her,
+more than ever her husband was loved. She came to see me and wept, but I
+scorned her." (He wrote it in French, "J'etais bien aime d'elle, et plus
+que jamais son epoux.... Et elle cherche moi pleurant, mais je la
+meprisais"), and he added: "If I had parted thus with my strength as
+well as my life, what would have remained to me for nobler and better
+things?"
+
+Giulietta was long credited with being the woman to whom he wrote those
+three famous letters, or rather the one with the two postscripts, found
+in the secret drawer of an old cabinet after his death, and addressed to
+his "unsterbliche Geliebte." They were written in pencil, and either
+were copies or first draughts, or were never sent. They show his Titanic
+passion in full flame, and are worth quoting entire. Thayer gives them
+in an appendix, in the original, but I quote Lady Wallace's translation,
+with a few literalising changes:
+
+"My angel, my all, my self--only a few words to-day, and they with a
+pencil (with yours!). My lodgings cannot be surely fixed until
+to-morrow. What a useless loss of time over such things! Why this deep
+grief when Necessity decides?--can our love exist without sacrifices,
+and by refraining from desiring all things? Can you alter the fact that
+you are not wholly mine, nor I wholly yours? Ah, God! contemplate the
+beauties of Nature, and reconcile your spirit to the inevitable. Love
+demands all, and rightly; so it is with me toward you and with you
+toward me; but you forget so easily that I must live both for you and
+for myself. Were we wholly united, you would feel this sorrow as little
+as I should.
+
+"My journey was terrible. I did not arrive here till four o'clock
+yesterday morning, as no horses were to be had. The drivers chose
+another route; but what a dreadful one it was! At the last stage I was
+warned not to travel through the night, and to beware of a certain wood,
+but this only incited me to go forward, and I was wrong. The carriage
+broke down, owing to the execrable roads, mere deep rough country lanes,
+and had it not been for the postilions I must have been left by the
+wayside. Esterhazy, travelling the usual road, had the same fate with
+eight horses as I with four. Still I felt a certain degree of pleasure,
+which I invariably do when I have happily surmounted any difficulty. But
+I must now pass from the outer to the inner man. We shall soon meet
+again; to-day I cannot impart to you all the reflections I have made,
+during the last few days, on my life; were our hearts closely united for
+ever, none of these would occur to me.
+
+"My breast is overflowing with all I have to say to you. Ah! there are
+moments when I find that speech is nothing at all. Take courage!
+Continue to be ever my true and only love, my all! as I am yours. The
+rest the gods must ordain--what must and shall become of us.
+
+"Your faithful LUDWIG."
+
+"Monday Evening, July 6th.
+
+"You grieve! My dearest being! I have just heard that the letters must
+be sent off very early. Mondays and Thursdays are the only days when the
+post goes to K----from here.
+
+"You grieve! Ah! where I am, there you are also with me; how earnestly
+shall I strive to pass my life with you, and what a life will it be!!!!
+Now!!!! without you and persecuted by the kindness of people here and
+there, which I as little wish to deserve as they do deserve--the
+servility of man towards his fellow man--it pains me--and when I regard
+myself as a part of the universe, what am I? what is he who is called
+the greatest?--and yet herein is shown the godlike part of humanity! I
+weep in thinking that you will receive no intelligence from me till
+probably Saturday. However dearly you may love me, I love you more
+fondly still. Never disguise yourself from me. Good night! As a patient
+at these baths, I must now go to rest." [A few words are here effaced by
+Beethoven himself.] "Oh, God, so near! so far! Is not our love a truly
+celestial mansion, but firm as the vault of heaven itself?"
+
+
+"Good Morning, July 7th.
+
+"Even in my bed, still my thoughts throng to you, my immortal
+Beloved!--now and then full of joy, and yet again sad, waiting to see
+whether Fate will hear us. I must live either wholly with you, or not at
+all. Indeed, I have resolved to wander far from you till I can fly into
+your arms, and feel that they are my home, and send forth my soul in
+unison with yours into the realm of spirits. Alas! it must be so! You
+will take courage, for you know my fidelity. Never can another possess
+my heart--never, never! Oh, God! why must one fly from what he so fondly
+loves? and yet my existence in W----was as miserable as here. Your love
+made me at once the most happy and the most unhappy of men. At my age,
+life requires a uniform equality; can this be found in our mutual
+relations? Angel! I have this moment heard that the post goes every day,
+so I must conclude, that you may get this letter the sooner. Be calm!
+for we can only attain our object of living together by the calm
+contemplation of our existence. Be calm--love me--to-day--yesterday--
+what longings with tears for you--you! you!--my life!--my all! Farewell!
+Oh! love me well--and never doubt the faithful heart of your beloved L.
+
+"Ever thine.
+
+"Ever mine.
+
+"Ever each other's."
+
+These impassioned letters to his "immortal beloved" were believed by
+Schindler to have been intended for Giulietta, and dated by him at first
+in 1803 and then in 1806. But Thayer, after showing how careless
+Beethoven was of dates, and how inaccurate, decides that these letters
+could not have been written before 1804. Since Giulietta was married
+Nov. 3, 1803, to Count Gallenberg, she could not have been the one whose
+life he hoped to share.
+
+Who then remains? Thayer suggests that the woman thus honoured may have
+been another Therese, the Countess Therese von Brunswick. She was the
+cousin of Giulietta, whose husband said of Beethoven that Therese
+"adored him." About the time of these letters, he wrote to her brother,
+"Kiss your sister Therese," and later he dedicated to her his sonata,
+Op. 78. Some months after this he gave up his marriage scheme. Of
+Therese, Thayer says that she lived to a great age--"_ca va sans
+dire_!--" and was famed for a noble and large-hearted, but eccentric
+character. As for remembrance of Beethoven, one may apply to her the
+words of Shakespeare, 'She died and gave no sign.' Was it perhaps that
+she did not dare?
+
+Even after seeing the above words in type, I am able to add something
+more definite to Thayer's argument--if one is to believe a book I
+stumbled on in an old bookshop, and have not found mentioned in any of
+the Beethoven bibliographies. The book bears every sign of telling the
+truth, as it makes no effort at the charms of fiction. It is by Miriam
+Tenger, who claims to have known the Countess Therese well for many
+years, and who describes the adoration with which her friends regarded
+her, the painter Peter von Cornelius calling her "the most remarkable
+woman I have ever known."
+
+"She was a scholar in the classics, a piano pupil of Mozart and
+Beethoven," he went on, "and a woman who must have been rarely beautiful
+in her youth. Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in
+her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness,
+because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a
+beatified spirit."
+
+He told Fraeulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Therese and
+Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror
+he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give
+the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him,
+but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. He was under the
+obsession of one of his savageries. He grew more and more impatient with
+her, and finally struck her hand from the keys, and rushed out
+bareheaded into the storm.
+
+Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health.
+"Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them,
+she rushed after him--she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like
+a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to
+give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and
+ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Therese's
+diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maitre," "mon maitre cheri."
+
+She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with
+her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice,
+saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that
+beautiful horrible Beethoven--if it were not such a come-down." She did
+not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly.
+
+The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to
+dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of
+Therese. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song
+of love to her. One day he said, suddenly:
+
+"I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe
+the flower growing by the way."
+
+It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother
+Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell
+Therese's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and
+thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the
+delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years
+of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew
+furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy
+snapped the bond with Therese. As she herself told Fraeulein Tenger, "The
+word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly
+frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled."
+
+Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Therese
+had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed
+love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of
+her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his
+art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters.
+He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his
+"immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the
+betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for
+Therese, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told
+Fraeulein Tenger:
+
+"I have read it so often that I know it by heart--like a poem--and was
+it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man
+loved thee,' and thank God for it."
+
+She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and
+on it an inscription from Ludwig:
+
+"L'immortelle a son Immortelle. LUIGI."
+
+
+These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request
+that it be placed under her head in her coffin.
+
+When Fraeulein Tenger had first met the countess as a child she had been
+asked to go every year on March 27th and lay a wreath of immortelles on
+Beethoven's grave. The acquaintance continued, and they met again at
+long intervals till the countess's death in 1861. Fraulein Tenger wrote
+her book in her old age when she had lost her diaries, but enough of her
+reminiscences remain to prove Thayer's ingenious guesses correct.
+
+Therese von Brunswick was Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved," and the
+picture found with the letter was her portrait. It was painted by Lampi,
+when Therese was about twenty-eight; and on the frame can be seen still
+the words:
+
+"To the rare genius, to the great artist, to the good man, from
+
+T.B."
+
+The picture is in the Beethoven Museum at Bonn, and in the National
+Museum at Pesth is a bust of Therese in her later years, erected in her
+honour because she organised out of her charity the first infants'
+school in the Austrian empire, and did many other good works. It is both
+pity and solace that the noble woman did not wed Beethoven. She was his
+muse for years. That was, as she said, something to thank God for. She
+was also a beautiful spiritual influence on him.
+
+Once the Baron Spaun found Beethoven kissing Therese's portrait and
+muttering: "Thou wast too noble--too like an angel." The baron withdrew
+silently, and returning later found Beethoven extemporising in heavenly
+mood. He explained: "My good angel has appeared to me."
+
+In 1813 he wrote in his diary:
+
+"What a fearful state to be in, not to be able to trample down all my
+longings for the joys of a home, to be always revelling in these
+longings. O God! O God! look down in mercy upon poor, unhappy Beethoven,
+and put an end to this soon; let it not last much longer!"
+
+And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom
+he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for
+life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self
+and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.
+
+But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to
+Gleichenstein:
+
+"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one--one who may
+perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she
+must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful; if I
+could, I should fall in love with myself."
+
+One feels here a touch of disdain and frivolity. Yet he could grow
+fervid in such an outcry as that of his forty-sixth year:
+
+"Love, and love alone, can give me a happy life. O God! let me find her
+who will keep me in the path of virtue, the one I may rightly call my
+own."
+
+Again, he could coldly rejoice that he had not sacrificed any of his
+individuality, or any of his devotion to music, to Giulietta Guicciardi.
+And the diary of Fanny Giannatasio, whose father took care of
+Beethoven's nephew, quotes a conversation Beethoven held on the subject
+of wedlock. According to this, he said that marriage should not be so
+indissoluble, liberty-crushing a bond; that a marriage without love was
+best, but that no marriages were happy. He added:
+
+"For himself he was excessively glad that not one of the girls had
+become his wife, whom he had passionately loved in former days, and
+thought at the time it would be the highest joy on earth to possess."
+
+To this cynic wisdom, the poor Fanny Giannatasio del Rio, whose love for
+Beethoven would never have been known had not her diary enambered it for
+publication after her death, adds the words: "I will not repeat my
+answer, but I think I know a girl who, beloved by him, would not have
+made his life unhappy."
+
+Ay, there's the rub! Could any one have woven a happiness about the life
+of that ferocious master of art, that pinioned, but struggling, victim
+of fate?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+
+VON WEBER--THE RAKE REFORMED
+
+  "Though thou hast now offended like a man.
+  Do not persever in it like a devil;
+  Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul,
+  If sin by custom grow not into nature."
+
+  Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus"
+
+
+Few novels are so brilliantly written, or so variously absorbing, as the
+life of Von Weber, written by his son, the Baron Max Maria von Weber.
+For years the son had resisted the urgence of his mother to undertake
+the work, fearing that partiality would warp, and indelicacy stain, any
+such memorial of a father who had lived so lively a life. When at last
+the work was begun and done, it was a miracle of impartiality, of
+frankness which seems complete, of sins confessed and expiated in their
+confession, and of trenchant characterisation, which one will hardly
+find surpassed outside of Dickens.
+
+The Von Webers are the most numerous musical dynasty after the Bachs. We
+have already seen something of the fortunes of the family into which
+Mozart married. The father of Mozart's wife was the older brother of
+Franz Anton von Weber, father of Carl Maria. This Franz Anton was a
+strange mixture of stalwart and shiftless qualities. He gave up his
+orchestral position to fight against Frederick the Great, and brought
+home a red badge of courage. It is wonderful, by the way, how many
+musicians have earned distinction as soldiers--what, indeed, would the
+soldiers do without music?
+
+Later Franz Anton entered civil service, and succeeded to the position
+of Court Financial-Councillor Fumetti, and married his beautiful
+daughter, Maria Anna. But Franz Anton was so rabid a fiddler that he
+used to be seen playing his violin in public places, followed by his
+large family of children, or even sawing away in the open fields, to the
+neglect of his work and finally the loss of his position. Thereupon he
+decided that his large family should help in its own support, and
+dragged them one and all upon the stage. The proud mother saw her
+fortune squandered, and her pride massacred. She died some years later.
+Franz Anton's heart was too industrious to remain idle long, and, though
+he was now fifty years of age, he somehow won the hand of Genofeva von
+Brenner, who was only sixteen years old. It is gratuitous to say that
+the young girl was not happy. In 1786 she bore him the child who was to
+realise the father's one great and vicarious ambition: to bring a
+musical genius into the world.
+
+While Carl Maria von Weber was still a babe, Franz Anton started once
+more after the will-o'-the-wisp of theatrical fame, with his "Weber's
+Company of Comedians." Genofeva, sickly and melancholy, dragged herself
+about with the troupe until Carl Maria was ten years old, when her
+health gave way, and the travel was discontinued. Poverty and
+consumption ended her days two years later. Within a year Franz Anton
+was betrothed to a widow, whom, strange to say, he never married.
+
+Again Franz Anton, the Bedouin that he was, dragged his son back into
+the nomad life. The boy seemed astonishingly stupid in learning music,
+though the father encouraged him with intemperate zeal. Meanwhile Carl's
+character was forming, and he was becoming as brilliant as the mercurial
+life he was leading, and at the same time as irresponsible. Like his
+relative, Mozart, he was precocious at falling in love. Perhaps his
+first flame was Elise Vigitill, in whose autograph album he wrote:
+
+"Dearest Elise, always love your sincere friend, Carl von Weber; in the
+sixth year of his age; Nueremberg, the 10th of September, 1792." We
+hear of no more sweethearts for eleven long years. When Carl Maria was
+seventeen, Franz Anton left him in Vienna, where he plunged into
+dissipation at a tempo presto appassionato. As his son writes, "through
+carolling, kissing, drinking Vienna, he wandered with a troop of choice
+spirits, drinking, kissing, carolling." The intoxicating draught of
+pleasure quaffed in the lively capital fevered the lad's blood, and the
+ardent imaginative temperament burst forth in that adoration of female
+beauty which strewed his life's path with roses, not without thorns. His
+teacher, Abbe Vogler, however, secured him a position as conductor at
+the Breslau opera, and he was compelled to tear himself away from a
+sweetheart of rank, who was somewhat older than he. His father went with
+him, and by his bumptiousness brought the boy many enemies, and, through
+his speculations, many debts in addition to those he acquired for
+himself. Here another entanglement awaited him. His son tells it thus:
+
+"Many a female heart, no doubt, both within the theatre and without its
+walls, was allured by the sweet smile and seductive manners of the pale,
+slender, languishing, but passionately ardent young conductor; whilst
+his own heart seems to have been more seriously involved in an
+unfortunate and misplaced attachment for a singer in the theatre. This
+woman was married to a rough drunkard who mishandled her. The couple
+were daily falling more and more into an abject state of poverty. Young
+Carl Maria pitied the woman; and pity was soon transformed in the
+feeling next akin."
+
+"That she was an unworthy object of either pity or affection is very
+clear: she misused his goodness of heart, gnawed incessantly at his
+slender purse, and quickly plunged him into a slough of difficulties
+nigh equal to her own."
+
+Various misfortunes and indiscretions brought Von Weber to the loss of
+his post. But a woman intervened to save him from disaster. This was a
+Fraeulein von Belonda, maid of honour to the Duchess of Wuertemberg, who
+took a deep interest in Carl, and persuaded the duke to make him musical
+director. The continual successes of the French armies overrunning
+Europe forbade the duke to keep up his retinue of artists. But he
+secured Weber a post at Stuttgart as private secretary to his brother,
+Ludwig, another younger brother of the King of Wuertemberg, a monster of
+corpulence, who had to have his dining-table made crescent-wise that he
+might get near enough to eat. Into the circle of these two unlovable
+figures and their ugly court Weber was thrust.
+
+"Thus then the fiery young artist, his wild oats not yet fully sown,
+plunged into a new world, where no true sense of right or wrong was
+known; where virtue and morality were laughed to scorn; where, in the
+chaotic whirlpool of a reckless court, money and influence at any price
+were the sole ends and aims of life; where, in the confusion of the
+times, the insecurity of conditions, and the ruthless despotism of the
+government, the sole watchword of existence, from high to low, was
+'Apres moi, le deluge!'" The Prince Ludwig was a great spendthrift,
+and was continually appealing to his brother for funds. It was poor
+Weber's pleasant task to be the go-between, and to receive on his head
+the rage of Behemoth. Again to quote the vivid language of the Baron
+Max:
+
+"The stammering, stuttering, shrieking rage of the hideously corpulent
+king, who, on account of his unwieldy obesity, was unable to let his
+arms hang by his side, and who thus gesticulated wildly, and perspired
+incessantly, and had the habit, moreover, of continually addressing his
+favourite, generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas
+vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,--would have been
+inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an
+autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But
+there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it
+did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder to his heart's core.
+
+"Weber hated the king, of whose wild caprice and vices he witnessed
+daily scenes, before whose palace-gates he was obliged to slink
+bareheaded, and who treated him with unmerited ignominy. He was wont, in
+thoughtless levity of youth, to forget the dangers he ran, and to answer
+the king with a freedom of tone which the autocrat was all unused to
+hear. In turn he was detested by the monarch.
+
+"The royal treatment roused young Carl Maria's indignation to the
+utmost; and his irritation led him one day to a mad prank, which was
+nigh resulting in some years' imprisonment in the fortress of
+Hohenasberg, or of Hohenhaufen. Smarting under some foul indignity, he
+had just left the private apartment of the king, when an old woman met
+him in the passage, and asked him where she could find the room of the
+court washerwoman. 'There!' said the reckless youth, pointing to the
+door of the royal cabinet. The old woman entered, and was violently
+assailed by the king, who had a horror of old women; in her terror, she
+stammered out that a young gentleman who had just come out had informed
+her that there she would find the 'royal washerwoman,' The infuriated
+monarch guessed who was the culprit, and despatched an officer on the
+spot to arrest his brother's secretary, and throw him into prison.
+
+"To those who have any idea how foul a den was then a royal prison, it
+must appear almost marvellous that Carl Maria should have possessed
+sufficient equanimity to have occupied himself with his beloved art
+during his arrest. But so it was. He managed to procure a dilapidated
+old piano, put it in tune with consummate patience, by means of a common
+door-key, and actually, then and there, on the 14th of October, 1808,
+composed his well-known beautiful song, 'Ein steter Kampf ist unser
+Leben.'
+
+"The storm passed over. Prince Ludwig's influence obtained the young
+man's pardon and release. But the insult was never forgotten by the
+king: he took care to remember it at his own right time. Nor had prison
+cured Carl Maria of his boyish desire to play tricks upon the hated
+monarch, when he conceived that he could do so without danger to
+himself."
+
+Carl proceeded to make himself an appropriate graduate of such a
+university of morals, and devoted himself to wine, women, and debts,
+with a small proportion of song. He belonged to a society of young men,
+who called themselves by the gentle name of "Faust's Ride to Hell." He
+now began also the composition of an opera, "Sylvana." This brought him
+into acquaintance with operatic people, and he fell under the charm of
+that "coquettish little serpent Margarethe Lang."
+
+"To stem such a passion, or even to have given it a legal form, would
+have been merely ridiculous and absurd in the eyes of the demoralised
+circle by which he was surrounded. Gretchen possessed a little plump
+seductive form, was about twenty years of age, and, in addition to her
+undoubted musical talent, was endowed with a fund of gay, sprightly
+humour, wholly in sympathy with the youth's own joyous nature. She
+became the central point of all his life and aspirations."
+
+Thus the biographer describes the new dissipation, which carried Carl
+away from his old riots; the new magnet that dragged from him all the
+money he could earn, and more than he could borrow. It was a wild and
+reckless crew and addicted to such entertainments as the travesty on
+Marc Antony, with music by Carl, who played Cleopatra, while Gretchen
+played Antony.
+
+The last straw upon Carl's breaking back was the arrival of his father,
+who descended upon him with a bass viol, an enormous basket-bed for his
+beloved poodles, and a large bundle of debts, as well as an increased
+luggage of eccentricities. While Weber was trying to secure loans to pay
+off one of his father's debts, he was innocently implicated in a scandal
+of bribery, by which it was made to seem that he had offered a post in
+the prince's household, in return for an advance of money. The king had
+been driven to despair by the disasters of the German army, and the
+increase of discontent of the German people, and desired to gain a
+reputation for virtue by the comfortable step of reforming his brother's
+household. Learning of the proffered bribe, in which Weber seemed to be
+concerned, but of which he was perfectly innocent, the king had him
+arrested during a rehearsal of his opera "Sylvana," and had him thrown
+into prison for sixteen days. When at last he was examined, there was
+nothing found to justify the accusation of dishonesty, he was released
+from the prison for criminals, and transferred to the prison for debt,
+and then a little later he and his father were placed into a carriage
+and driven across the border to exile.
+
+This sudden plunge from the froth of dissipation to the dregs of
+disgrace was a fall that Weber could never thereafter think or speak of,
+and every mention of it was forbidden.
+
+Almost from this moment Weber's life is one of seriousness, with an
+occasional relapse into some of his old qualities, but never a complete
+laying aside of earnestness. He gained friends elsewhere, and finally
+settled in Darmstadt, where he still found women's hearts susceptible,
+in spite of his small, weak frame, his great long neck, and his calfless
+legs, of which he writes: "And, oh, my calves, they might have done
+honour to a poodle!"
+
+Eight months after his banishment, his opera "Sylvana" was produced at
+Frankfort, the first soprano being Gretchen Lang, and the part of
+Sylvana being taken by Caroline Brandt, of whom much more later. At
+Munich the next year, he found himself in high favour with two singers.
+They were vying with each other for him, while two society beauties
+exerted their rival charms. Weber was kept busy with his quadruple
+flirtation. He was driven into cynicism, and his motto became "All women
+are good for nothing" ("_Alle Weiber taugen nichts_"), which he used so
+often that he abbreviated it to "A.W.T.N." In the columns of his
+account-book he was provoked to write: "A. coquettes with me, though she
+knows I am making love to her friend. B. abuses N., tells me horrid
+stories of her, and says I must not go home with her." He took a journey
+to Switzerland, where the beautiful Frau Peyermann occupied his heart
+long enough to inspire him to the scene in "Athalie," and to his song,
+"The Artist's Declaration of Love." He wandered here and there, for
+about three years, and his biographer, Spitta, thus portrays him:
+
+"Roving restlessly from place to place, winning all hearts by his sweet,
+insinuating, lively melodies, his eccentricities making him an imposing
+figure to the young of both sexes, and an annoyance to the old, exciting
+the attention of everybody, and then suddenly disappearing, his person
+uniting in the most seductive manner aristocratic bearing and tone with
+indolent dissipation, his moods alternating between uproarious spirits
+and deep depression,--in all ways he resembled a figure from some
+romantic poem, wholly unlike anything seen before in the history of
+German art."
+
+In 1813 he found himself at Prague, with the post of musical director to
+the opera. In the company were two women who took hold of his heart;
+one, a spirit of evil, the other an angel of good. The former was
+Theresa Brunetti, wife of a ballet-dancer, and mother of several
+children, the acquisition of which had robbed her of neither her fine,
+plump figure, nor her devotion to the arts of coquetry. There is no
+improving upon the description of Max von Weber as given of this
+entanglement, so here it is at length, with all its frankness of
+exposure and its writhing humiliation:
+
+"He soon conceived for the handsome seductive woman a passion, which
+seemed to have deprived his otherwise clear mind of all common sense and
+reason, and which neither the flood of administrative affairs nor the
+cold breath of duty could extinguish. Vain were all his efforts to
+conceal it. In a very short time it became the topic of general remark;
+excited the ridicule or grave anxieties of his friends; involved him in
+a thousand disagreeable positions; lowered his character, without the
+slightest compensating advantage to his artistic career; and nigh
+dragged him down into an abyss beyond hope of rescue.
+
+"The new opera-director was soon lodged in the house of the careless
+husband of the light woman. She herself may have had some inclination
+for the man. But as soon as she felt her true power over him, she held
+out her fair hand only to lead him into a life of torment.
+
+"The woman's power over her poor victim was immense. He was dragged in
+her train, against his better reason, to country excursions, suppers,
+balls, at which, whilst he watched her every look, her every breath, to
+discover her slightest wish, although nigh dead with fatigue, she would
+be bestowing her attention on other men, wholly regardless of her slave.
+Now again he would scour the town, in scorching heat or drenching rain,
+frequently sacrificing the only moments he could snatch from business
+for his dinner, to procure a ribbon, a ring, or some dainty, which she
+desired, and which was difficult to obtain; and on his return she would
+receive him perhaps with coldness and toss the prize aside. Sometimes,
+when the proof became too evident that she had duped, deceived, betrayed
+him, the scenes between the two were fearful; and then she would
+cleverly find means of asserting that it was she who had the best right
+to be jealous, and thus turn the tables on him. By every thought, in
+every action, in every moment of his life, there was but one feeling
+ever present--'How will she receive me?'
+
+"Even in his account-book, now so often neglected, are to be found the
+lamentations of his despairing heart over her unworthiness; and again,
+but a few hours later, expressions of delight that she had smiled on
+him. There is something terrible in the bitter slavery to which his
+better nature was condemned by this wild passion. One day he writes: 'A
+fearful scene.... The sweetest dream of my life is over. Confidence is
+lost for ever. The chain is broken,' On the next: 'A painful
+explanation. I shed the first tears my grief has wrung from me.... This
+reconciliation has cleared the thunder from the air. Both of us felt
+better,' And then again: 'My dream is over! I shall never know the
+happiness of being loved. I must for ever be alone! ... She can sit near
+me, hours long, and never say one word; and when some other man is
+mentioned, burst out in ecstasy. I will do all I can to please her; but
+I must withdraw within myself, bury all my bitter feelings in my own
+heart, and work--work--work!'" It was in the fall of 1813--_prosit
+omen!_--that Von Weber met the Brunetti. In the next year he was still
+clinging to her whom the biographer calls "the rotten plant," and wrote
+in a note-book: "I found Calina with Therese, and I could scarcely
+conceal the fearful rage that burned in me." Or an elegy like this: "No
+joy without her, and yet with her only sorrow."
+
+Cupid has always been jealous of the cook. On Therese's birthday, Carl
+presented her with a double gift, first a gold watch with a cluster of
+trinkets, each of them a symbol of love; with this cluster of trinkets,
+something very rare and costly in Prague--oysters. Therese
+glanced--merely glanced--at the jewelry; she fairly gobbled the oysters.
+Carl's love had survived his jealousy of Calina, but he could not endure
+a rivalry with mollusks. As his son explains: "On a sudden the scales
+fell from his eyes." Ought he not rather have said, the shells?
+
+Lacking even this ogress for an idol, poor Carl was lonely indeed. Even
+music turned unresponsive, and success was only ashes on his tongue.
+Then faith gave him, unsought, ability to revenge himself on the
+Brunetti. She had despised him as a mere genius toddling after the
+frou-frou of her skirts, but she began to prize him when she saw him
+casting interested looks in another direction. Now it was her turn to
+writhe with jealousy, and to writhe in vain. Her storms and tirades had
+more effect upon him than his pleas had had upon her. But whereas she
+had formerly been _insouciante_ and amused at his pain, her pain hurt
+him to distraction, broke down his health, and drove him to ask for a
+leave of absence, that he might recover his strength. When he went away,
+he carried with him in his heart a new regret, sweetened, or perhaps
+embittered, by a tinge of new hope. But he could not know that he had
+reached the end of the worthless pages of his life, and that the new
+leaf was to be inscribed with a story of happiness, which was by no
+means untroubled, but yet was constructive happiness, worth-while
+happiness.
+
+In the year 1810 his opera "Sylvana" had been sung, as I have said, with
+Caroline Brandt in the title role. When, in 1813, he was given the
+direction of the opera at Prague, though he fell into the clutches of
+the Brunetti, he had unconsciously prepared himself a better, cleaner
+experience by engaging for the very first member of his new company this
+same Caroline Brandt, who happened to write him that she happened to be
+"at liberty," as they say.
+
+Like Carl himself, she had known stage-life from childhood, being the
+daughter of a tenor, and appearing on the stage at the age of eight.
+She is described as "small and plump in figure, with beautiful,
+expressive gray eyes and fair wavy hair, and a peculiar liveliness in
+her movements." She was a woman of large and tender heart, electrified
+with a temper incisive and immediate. She was an actress of genuine
+skill, "her sense of grace and beauty in all things infallible." She did
+not appear at the theatre in Prague until the first day of January,
+1814. She bore a curious resemblance to Therese Brunetti in a fresher
+edition, and was not long in giving that lady a sense of uneasiness. The
+oysters, as we have seen, had given the Brunetti the _coup de disgrace_.
+
+Caroline won the poor director's gratitude first by being quick to adopt
+suggestions, and to rescue him from the embarrassments buzzing about the
+head of an operatic manager. She was glad to undertake tasks, and slow
+to show professional jealousy. She lived in seclusion with her mother,
+and received no visits. Even the young noblemen could not woo her at the
+stage door, though the Brunetti advised her to accept the advances of a
+certain banker, saying: "He is worth the trouble, for he is rich."
+
+Having failed to drag Caroline into her own game, the Brunetti tried to
+keep Von Weber from breathing the better air of her presence. As we
+have seen, she drove him almost to distraction, and sent him a wreck to
+the baths in Friedland.
+
+Caroline's mother had permitted Von Weber to pay his court to her, and
+her father and brother had found his intentions worthy. Caroline had not
+hesitated to confess that her affection was growing with Carl's. But
+what she had seen of his life with the Brunetti, and what she must have
+heard of his magnificent dissipations, gave her pause. Therefore, when
+Carl went away for his health, he took with him a riddle, and left
+behind "a sweet, beloved being who might--who may--make me happy." "The
+absence of three months shall test our love." They wrote each other long
+and daily letters; his were all of yearning, while hers were mingled
+with fear, lest he be, as she wrote him, "a sweet poison harmful to the
+soul."
+
+After taking the baths, he went on to Berlin, arriving there August 3d
+in the very ferment of rapture over the downfall of Napoleon at Prague.
+He was moved to write a number of patriotic songs from Koerner's "Leier
+und Schwert." These choruses for men were sung throughout the
+Fatherland, as they still are sung.
+
+But from the height of glory to which he was now borne, as the living
+voice of the nation, he was dragged back to the depths by the little
+hand and the little finger-nails of Caroline, who could be jealous
+enough to suspect that not all the adoration Von Weber was receiving
+from the women of Berlin was pure and impersonal patriotism.
+
+Von Weber had from the first insisted that no marriage of theirs could
+have hope of success, unless she left the stage. This sacrifice of
+herself and her career and her large following among the public was a
+deal to ask, and a deal to grant. Her combined reluctance to sacrifice
+her all, and her jealous fears that he would not find her all in all, at
+last led her to write him that they would better give up their dream,
+and break their troth.
+
+In his first bitterness at this inopportune humiliation, coming like a
+drop of vinegar in the honey of royal favour, he wrote furiously to
+Gansbacher, "I see now that her views of high art are not above the
+usual pitiful standard--namely, that art is but a means of procuring
+soup, meat, and shirts." To another friend, Lichtenstein, he wrote more
+solemnly:
+
+"All my fondest hopes are vanishing day by day. I live like a drunken
+man who dances on a thin coating of ice, and spite of his better reason
+would persuade himself that he is on solid ground. I love with all my
+heart and soul; and if there be no truth in her affection, the last
+chord of my whole life has been struck. I shall still live on,--marry
+perhaps some day,--who knows? But love and trust again, never more."
+
+In September he returned to Prague with an anxious heart, and took up in
+person a new battle for Caroline's hand. They were agreed upon the
+subject of affection, but wrangled upon the clauses in the treaty of
+marriage. While this debate was waging, Weber took care of her money and
+her mother's. A benefit being given her, he announced that he himself
+would sell the tickets at the box-office, and he spent a whole day
+bartering his quick wit and his social influence, for increased prices.
+Such public devotion brought scandal buzzing about the ears of the two.
+But still Caroline would not give up her career, nor Weber his opinion
+of stage marriages.
+
+Even his patriotic songs, "The Lyre and the Sword," were a cause of
+disagreement, for Caroline, like so many women, deified Napoleon, and
+her lover's lyric assaults upon him were so much sacrilege; while to him
+her adoration of that personified prairie-fire, who had devastated the
+Fatherland, was treason. The Brunetti, being well out of the running,
+Caroline found new cause of jealousy in the newly engaged actress,
+Christine Bohler. Indeed, Carl and Caroline did little but fight and
+make up for months, until even Caroline was convinced that one of the
+two must leave Prague, at least for a period of probation. It was Carl
+who left, and in a condition of almost complete spiritual collapse.
+
+How little music has to do with one's state of mind, may be seen from
+the fact that in his weak and complaining despair, he composed one of
+his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and
+continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute
+descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him
+with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his
+spirits, and gradually stifled his creativeness.
+
+At length it became time for him to return to Prague again, and on the
+eve of his home-going he received a letter from Caroline, which she said
+she had been for weeks trying in vain to write. She was now convinced
+that they must absolutely give up all thought of love and marriage. This
+blow smote him to the ground. He had no strength even for wrath; he
+could only write in abject meekness, as if thanking her for delaying the
+blow so long:
+
+"Be not angry, my beloved one, that I repeat my words of love and sorrow
+again and again. They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish
+than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back
+in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then
+acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest
+life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have
+woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care.
+Forgive me for my excess of love--forgive the passion that may have torn
+many a wound, when it should have soothed and healed--forgive me all
+the sorrow I have caused you, though Heaven knows it was through no will
+of mine--forgive me for having stolen one whole sweet year of your
+precious life, for which I would willingly give ten of my own, could I
+but buy it back for you.... Farewell--farewell."
+
+
+On the 7th of September he arrived in Prague. His first view of Caroline
+was as she sang the Cinderella on the stage. The sight of her was too
+much; he broke down and ran home. But still, as director, he must
+frequently meet her in more or less familiar situations. And as for her,
+she later confessed that she was suffering even more than Carl.
+
+Her every strength and resolution melted away one afternoon in the
+autumn, at a reception, where the lovers met face to face. Their gaze
+blended; their hands blended; the war was over.
+
+Instantly, with the resumption of his love-life, his interest in music
+began again. Caroline, apparently alarmed at the condition of his
+health, never robust, persuaded her mother to let him board at her
+house. New health and old-time gaiety began again. But he was tired of
+Prague, and determined to find a larger field elsewhere. While he was
+hunting for a place for himself, he secured a starring engagement for
+Caroline at the then high salary of ten gold louis, per performance.
+Before he left Prague, he announced his engagement publicly. By a
+curious coincidence, the engagement was announced at a reception, just
+after a total eclipse of the sun. When the daylight came out of the
+darkness, Carl rose and proclaimed his conquest.
+
+On Christmas morning he received a costly ring from the King of Hanover,
+a splendid snuff-box from the King of Bavaria, and an appointment as
+Kapellmeister to the King of Saxony.
+
+At Dresden there were honours enough and jealousies more. But Carl
+assailed them with new strength. And now, he took up an opera on a
+subject he had thought of but discarded, fortunately for himself and the
+world. He wrote Caroline that a friend of his was writing a libretto
+based on the old national legend, "Der Freischuetz." Kind, the
+librettist, wrote night and day for ten days, and Carl, in great
+enthusiasm, forwarded the libretto for Caroline's opinion. She sent it
+back with violent criticisms, based upon her long stage experience and
+her intuition of stage effects. We can never thank her sufficiently for
+cutting out endless pages of songs and recitative by the melancholious
+old Hermit who, in the original version, was to commence the opera, and
+wander in and out of it incessantly. Caroline wrote, like Horace:
+
+"Away, with all these scenes.... Plunge at once into the popular
+element. Begin with the scene before the tavern." This seemed
+outrageous mutilation at first to the composer, and the librettist took
+it with still more violence; threatening for a time to withdraw his book
+completely. But often, thereafter, did Carl express his gratitude to
+her, whom he called his "Public with two eyes." Would to heaven, that
+there had been some Caroline Brandt to give similar advice to Wagner
+concerning his Wotan and his King Mark!
+
+Meanwhile, during the composition of "Der Freischuetz," which was to mean
+so much for the happiness of Germany and the betterment of opera
+generally, Carl, the genius who struck out the magnificent work, was
+spending almost less time upon the details of composition and scoring
+than upon the purchase of articles for the home he was making for his
+bride-to-be. He wrote her long letters, describing his purchases of
+"chairs, crockery, curtains, knives, forks, spoons, pails, brooms, and
+mustard-pot."
+
+She had ceased to be in his mind the brilliant and fascinating
+soubrette, and had become in the silly lover's-Latin, his "pug, his
+duck, his bird." He answered a letter she wrote him describing her
+success in the "Magic Flute:"
+
+"I was amused with your account of the 'Zauberfloete,' but you know I
+hope soon to see you lay by all your pretty Papagena feathers. All your
+satins and ermines must give place to a coarse apron then. You will be
+only applauded by my hungry stomach, called out before the cook-wench,
+and saluted with 'da capo' when you kiss your Carl. It is very shocking,
+I know. What will my own pearl say to be dissolved in the sour vinegar
+of domestic life, and swallowed by a bear of a husband?"
+
+In March, 1817, Weber was called to Prague, on business connected with
+his opera company; he was overjoyed at the thought of seeing Caroline,
+who was still singing there. Just as he was stepping into the
+travelling-carriage, a letter was handed him, saying that the firm in
+Prague, with which he had deposited all his savings and those of
+Caroline, was about to go into bankruptcy. There was indeed, of his long
+and careful hoardings only as much left as Caroline had deposited on his
+advice. Her savings were quite swept away.
+
+But, without saying a word to her, he transferred the last penny he had
+in the world to her name, and left himself, except for his strength and
+fame, a pauper. It was many years after, and then only by chance, that
+Caroline learned the beautiful sacrifice he had made from his great love
+for her. When he reached Prague, he concealed from her all the distress
+he had suffered, and there was nothing but happiness in their reunion.
+
+Returning to Dresden, he took up more seriously the composition of "Der
+Freischuetz." The first note of it that he wrote was the second act duet
+between Agathe and Aennchen; he took Caroline as his ideal. Indeed,
+through the whole composition of the work, he declared that he saw
+Caroline always presiding. He seemed to hear her voice singing every
+note, and saw her fingers playing it on the piano; now smiling, over
+what she liked; now shaking her head over what displeased her. This
+spirit he took as the critic and judge of the whole work. There have
+rarely been such instances of actual personal inspiration in any work of
+art, and certainly none which do more credit to the absorption of the
+artist-mind in the worship of its idol. Furthermore, much of the
+composition was done at the home preparing for Caroline's actual
+presence, and he wrote those suave and optimistic pages of music to an
+accompaniment of hammers and saws, the wrangling of carpenters,
+painters, upholsterers, and scrub-women; sleeping at nights in the
+kitchen, and glad to find a kitchen-table to compose upon. The
+longed-for marriage could not take place until a court wedding for which
+he was writing music. This was postponed and postponed, until he was
+driven to distraction. But at last, when the royal bridegroom was sent
+on his way the composer fled toward Prague. Caroline surprised him by
+coming part way to meet him. On November 4, 1817, they were married.
+Carl gave Caroline's mother a pension of nine hundred thalers, though
+her husband and son were living. The honeymoon was paid for by concerts
+here and there, in which both took part, and by a benevolent royal
+commission to hunt for artists. Caroline, though her matrimonial treaty
+forbade her singing on the stage, was allowed to sing at concerts, and
+at some of them she sang duets, with Carl at the piano, while she played
+the guitar.
+
+Carl had often told Caroline that she must expect a chaos in her new
+home in Dresden. When she arrived, and found everything beautiful and in
+perfect order, she wept with rapture. Late on the last night of the year
+1817, Carl wrote in a diary these words; they show what depths there
+were in the soul and what heights in the ambition of one whose youth and
+training and early recklessness had promised so little of solidity and
+solemnity.
+
+"The great important year has closed. May God still grant me the
+blessing He has hitherto so graciously accorded me; that I may have the
+power to make the dear one happy; and, as a brave artist, bring honour
+and advantage to my Fatherland! Amen!"
+
+As for Caroline, who had been so volatile a soubrette and so happy in
+the footlight glitter, she turned out to be even a greater success as a
+_Haus-frau._ She began to win a more limited, but an equally profound,
+reputation for her perfect dinners and receptions, and for the minute
+care with which she kept all her "account-books, housekeeping-books,
+cellar-books." Finally, she even learned to cook, and the household
+became a dove-cote!
+
+The instinct of jealousy is one that is not easily uprooted, and
+Caroline did not permit Carl's life to grow too monotonous. His high
+favour at court kept her in subjects for uneasiness. He finally
+attempted a violent cure. He began to absent himself from the house with
+unusual frequence, but would not explain where he had been, even though
+Caroline wept and wailed. At length he wrought her to the pitch of
+desperation by his heartless indifference; then, one day, he brought
+home a portrait bust which a sculptor friend had made and with it a
+signed record of every hour and minute of his absence. This, if not a
+permanent cure, was at least a partial remedy.
+
+Weber's home became a proverb of hospitality and good cheer. The two
+sang duets, or Caroline recited poems, while Carl improvised
+accompaniments; excursions to the fields, and water parties, and
+hilarious reunions of the opera-troupe kept life busy. Later, he took a
+country home, where he surrounded himself with the dumb animals whose
+society he so enjoyed; these included a large hound, a raven, a
+starling, an Angora cat, and an ape.
+
+On December 22, 1818, the first child, a girl, was born. Caroline was
+dangerously ill; the child was not strong, and Carl's own health,
+always at the brink of wreckage, broke down. Caroline, hardly able to be
+about, nursed her husband and concealed from him the serious condition
+of the child. Just as he was beginning to recover, in April, his
+firstborn died. The news could not be kept from him, and he was sent
+into delirium. Caroline's health gave way completely, and "the unhappy
+couple lay in neighbouring rooms, where they could only cry 'Comfort!'
+to each other through the wall; and where, in the still hours of night,
+each smothered the sobs of grief in the pillows, that the other might
+not hear."
+
+Caroline was the first to recover. Carl's health and strength were on
+the final ebb--the long, slow ebb that made of his last years one dismal
+tragedy, which only his superb devotion to his wife and his immitigable
+optimism could brighten. In July, 1820, they decided to take a tour.
+They met with great success, but he found his weakness almost
+unbearable. At Hanover, he and Caroline were both prostrated, and could
+not join in the concert planned. On the road to Bremen, the postilion
+fell asleep and the coach was overturned into the ditch. The driver was
+stunned and the sick Carl had himself to revive the man, untie the
+baggage from the roof, unharness the horses, put everything in place
+again, and drive the postilion to the next station. At Hamburg,
+Caroline was too ill to continue the tour; she was about to become a
+mother, and Carl was compelled to go on without her, but he wrote her
+daily letters full of devotion. It was the first separation of their
+married life.
+
+Later she rejoined him, and at Hamburg, the oyster entered once more
+into Weber's domestic career. The Brunetti had cured him of his love for
+her by her inordinate fondness for bivalves. Caroline, on the other
+hand, hated them. But Weber said:
+
+"There can be no true sympathy between us while you detest a food I
+relish. For the love of me, swallow this oyster."
+
+The first three were a severe trial, but, as the French might say, "Ce
+n'est pas que la premiere huitre qui coute." Afterward Weber would
+groan, "Alas, why did I ever teach you the trick?"
+
+In 1821, there rose a famous operatic war between Spontini and Weber at
+Berlin. Caroline was prostrated with terror. Spontini's "Olympic" was
+given first with enormous success, and "Der Freischuetz," in which
+Caroline had had so large a share, and which meant so much to the two,
+was forced into a dramatic comparison. In spite of a somewhat dubious
+beginning, the first night was one of the greatest ovations a musician
+has ever lived to see. In the midst of the tempestuous applause, every
+one looked for the composer, who was "sitting in a dark corner of his
+wife's box and kissing away her tears of joy."
+
+When they returned to Dresden in July, Caroline's health was undermined
+by the emotions of the Berlin triumph, and it was necessary for her to
+be taken to Switzerland, where Carl was compelled to leave her. An
+accident in crossing the Elbe led him to write his will, leaving
+Caroline everything without reserve, and his dying curse upon any one
+who should disturb his wishes.
+
+Now consumption began to fasten its claws more deeply on him, and when
+his wife returned she found him constantly racked with cough and fever.
+One day he saw the first fatal spot of blood upon his handkerchief; he
+turned pale and sighed: "God's will be done."
+
+From that moment neither his conviction that he was doomed to an early
+death, nor his courage to die pluckily, ever left him. When "Der
+Freischuetz" was given in Dresden, Caroline was ill at home. Carl
+arranged a courier service by which he received, after every scene, news
+of his wife. In February of the next year, he was compelled to leave
+Dresden; he placed in his wife's hands a sealed letter only to be opened
+in case of his death. This letter gave a complete account of all his
+affairs, and a last expression of his immense love for her. On his many
+tours, he met almost uninterrupted triumph, but as he wrote to Caroline:
+
+"I would rather be in my still chamber with you, my beloved life.
+Without you all pride is shorn of its splendour; my only real joy can be
+in that which gives you joy too."
+
+From now on he spent a large part of his time away from her, always
+tormented to the last degree by homesickness, always harrowed by the
+fear that he might die out of the reach of his adored wife and two
+children, and never feeling that he had laid by money enough to leave
+them free of the danger of want, after he should have drifted into the
+grave that yawned just before his weary feet.
+
+It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against
+fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl
+Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he
+jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before
+uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with
+him.
+
+"They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every
+wink to do me kindnesses. But I feel I can only be happy there, where I
+can hear my lambs bleat, and their mother low, and can beat my dog, or
+turn away my maids, if they are at all too troublesome."
+
+In 1825, Christmas found him at a distance, and he could not reach home.
+"I shall think of you all on Christmas-eve," he wrote, "But that I
+never cease to do. All my labours are for you--all my joy is with you."
+"Can I but be with you on New Year's eve," he wrote again, with that
+tinge of superstition which always more or less pervaded his character,
+"I shall be with you all the year."
+
+Now London beckoned to him, as she had to so many German musicians, to
+whom she always has stood for the city of gold and of rescue from
+pauperdom. Ghastly as Von Weber looked in the clutches of his disease;
+hungry as his heart and body were for a long, an eternal rest, he felt
+that he must not shrink from this final goal. As his son writes with
+aching heart in the biography:
+
+"To Gublitz, who doubted of his ability to undertake the journey to
+London, he replied, in a tone of melancholy irony: 'Whether I can or no,
+I must. Money must be made for my family--money, man. I am going to
+London to die there. Not a word! I know it as well as you.' The bright,
+cheery, lively Weber, who revelled in the triumph of his 'Freischuetz,'
+was already dead and gone.
+
+"Before his departure, Weber regulated all his affairs in the most
+punctilious manner. The presentiment of the fast-approaching end
+rendered him doubly careful that all should be in order; and, in his
+last conferences with his legal friends, he was always anxious to insure
+the presence of his wife, whose strong practical good sense he knew.
+During these painful duties his personal appearance became so fearfully
+changed, that most of his friends began to fear he would no longer find
+strength sufficient for his journey. His form sank together: his voice
+was almost totally gone: his cough was incessant.
+
+"In the circle of intimates who still visited him at that tea-table, of
+which his wit, and pleasantry, and genial humour had so long made the
+charm, he would often murmur, with a faint smile, 'Don't take it ill,
+good people, if I drop asleep: indeed I cannot help it.'
+
+"And his head would fall upon his breast. His poor wife suffered cruel
+agonies: she could not but feel that he was really spending the small
+remaining breath of life for the sake of her and the children. She
+manoeuvred in secret to induce friends to persuade him that he ought to
+renounce his fearful journey, when all her own affectionate efforts to
+this intent had failed. But the response was ever the same sad one.
+
+"'Whether I undertake this journey, or no, it is all one! Within a year
+I am a dead man. But if I go, my children will have bread, when their
+father is gone: if I do not, want may stare them in the face. What is to
+be done?' On one occasion he added, 'I should like to come back once
+more and see my dear ones' faces again: and then, in God's name, let
+God's will be done! But to die there, it would be hard, very hard!'
+
+"The morning of the 7th of February had not yet dawned, after a night of
+bitter tears, when Weber's travelling-carriage drove up to his door. The
+time was come for the separation of the husband, who scarcely hoped to
+see his home again, from the loving wife, who felt that he was a dying
+man. Another tear upon the forehead of his sleeping children--another
+long lingering kiss--the suffering man dragged his swollen feet into the
+carriage, huddled feverishly in his furs--the door was closed--and he
+rolled away from home, on that cold winter's morning, sobbing till the
+shattered chest might almost burst at once.
+
+"Caroline rushed back to her room, and sank on her knees, with the cry:
+'It is his coffin I have closed upon him!'
+
+"At the first post, Weber parted with his own coachman and his own
+horses. It was the last wrench from home and its remembrances. His
+voluminous correspondence with his wife was the only tie left to Weber;
+and nothing can be more touching than these letters, amounting in all to
+fifty-three, in which the sufferer was always trying to conceal, as far
+as he could, his sufferings; the anxious woman left behind, always
+repressing her own bitter anguish lest it should increase the other's
+sorrow."
+
+Carl had been lured to London by reports of the enormous craze of the
+whole people over his work. It was his fate to reach there just after
+the tide of enthusiasm had turned, and was lapsing into the ebb of
+weariness and impatience. After the first rapturous curiosity of
+personal greeting, he found that the public would take little of him but
+"Der Freischuetz," and of this opera he had grown weary, as composers
+always grow of their spoiled children of fortune.
+
+His health, too, was in tragic state. Frightful spasms and hemorrhages
+seemed to tear him asunder. At a dinner given him, two of the guests had
+to carry him up the stairs. He was hardly strong enough to stand during
+the cheers that greeted him when he came before his audience. But the
+worst disease of all, the one that would not cease gnawing at his heart,
+was his homesickness. To a doctor who offered him a new remedy, he
+cried:
+
+"Go! go! no doctor's tinkering can help me now. The machine is
+shattered. But, ah, would but God in His mercy grant that it might hold
+together till I could embrace my Lina and my boys once more!" His
+effort to keep Caroline from knowing his illness was kept up. When she
+wrote him that the children were begging to know why he remained so long
+away, he answered:
+
+"Yes, the father is long, long away; ah, and how long is the time to
+him! how every day is counted! Patience! patience! Day crawls after
+day."
+
+"God bless you, my deeply beloved ones!" he wrote once more. "I count
+days, hours, minutes, until we meet again. We have often been parted
+before, and loved each other dearly, God knows. But this terrible
+yearning I have never known before."
+
+At last he grew so desperately sad that he broke his rule and wrote his
+wife full details of his suffering; he had given up hope of ever seeing
+his home again.
+
+At this time, a singer wished to bring out a new song of his, and
+furnished him with words. His once alert fancy groped long for a melody,
+but, as his son writes:
+
+"At last on the morning of the 18th of May, the great artist's flitting
+genius came back to him, and for the last time gave him a farewell kiss
+upon that noble forehead now bedewed with the cold sweat of death--for
+the last time! But the trembling hands were unable to write down more
+than the notes for the voice."
+
+Fate had still reserved a bitter blow for him. He had fastened his hopes
+upon a farewell concert, and grew morbid upon the importance of it to
+his future.
+
+"This day week is my concert," he wrote on the 19th of May. "How my poor
+heart beats when I think of it! What will be the result? The last
+chances left me are this concert and my benefit. When I think on all
+they cost me, should they not turn out so as to meet my modest
+expectations, it were hard indeed. But I must not let my courage fail
+me. I will rely on Him, who has already been so infinitely merciful to
+us. You will think, my beloved life, that I lay far too much stress on
+this. But remember that my hope of fortune for us was the only purpose
+of this weary journey. Can you not comprehend, then, why I now hold for
+so important that which has always played but a subordinate part in my
+life? Pray, dearest heart, pray that poor old papa's wishes, which are
+all for your dear sakes, may yet be fulfilled."
+
+To complete the mockery of his last days, fashion declined to interest
+itself in his concert, and, to keep even the common public away, the
+skies poured down floods of rain. The house was almost empty. The
+enthusiasm of the few good hearts there were Job's consolation. At the
+end of the concert he was led to his room, where he sank down, a
+complete wreck in mind and hope, muttering:
+
+"What do you say to that? That, that is 'Weber in London'!"
+
+His hand trembled so that he could hardly write any more to his wife;
+still, in a quivering scrawl, he bade her address her answer not to
+London, but to a city on the way home, for he is starting
+homeward--homeward at last! But he is not coming home through Paris, as
+he had planned. He writes:
+
+"What should I do there? I cannot walk--I cannot speak. I will have
+nothing more to do with business for years to come. So it is far better
+I should take the straight way home by Calais, through Brussels,
+Cologne, Coblenz, and thus by the Rhine to Frankfort. What a charming
+journey! I must travel very slowly, however, and probably rest for half
+a day now and then. I shall gain a good fortnight thus; and by the end
+of June I hope to be in your arms.
+
+"How will you receive me? In Heaven's name, alone. Let no one disturb my
+joy of looking again upon my wife and my children, my dearest and my
+best... Thank God! the end of all is fast approaching."
+
+The end of all was fast approaching. He sent his friends out to purchase
+souvenirs of unhappy London, as gifts for his family. He was so
+impatient to be off that he would listen to no advice to postpone his
+starting.
+
+"I must go back to my own, I must!" he sobbed incessantly. "Let me see
+them once more--and then God's will be done." The attempt appeared
+impossible to all. With great unwillingness he yielded to his friend's
+request to have a consultation of physicians. "Be it so," he answered.
+"But come of it what may, I go!"
+
+His only thought, his only word, was "Home!" On the 2d of June he wrote
+his last letter to his beloved,--the last lines his hand ever traced.
+"What a joy, my own dear darling, your letter gave me! What a happiness
+to me to know that you are well! ... As this letter requires no answer,
+it will be but a short one. What a comfort it is not to have to
+answer... God bless you all and keep you well! Oh, were I but amongst
+you all again! I kiss you with all my heart and soul, my dearest one!
+Preserve all your love for me, and think with pleasure on him who loves
+you above all, your Carl."
+
+He was to leave London on the 6th of June; on the night of the 4th he
+could talk to his friends only of their kindness and of his eagerness to
+be home. To a friend, who stayed to help him through the painful ordeal
+of undressing, he murmured his thanks and said, "Now let me sleep."
+
+The next morning, when they came to his room, he had been dead for
+hours. London was full of words of regret for the man whose music had
+added so much to the beauty and cheerfulness of the world. A great
+benefit for his family was arranged, but fate would not cease mocking
+him in his grave,--the receipts hardly equalled the expenses!
+
+A committee petitioned the Dean of Westminster to allow the funeral to
+be held in the Abbey. The courteous answer of regret reminded the
+committee that Von Weber was a Roman Catholic! The musicians
+volunteered, however, to give him a splendid funeral, and at least music
+was not wanting when his body was lowered into the grave in an alien
+land. Von Weber's son, Max, describes how the news was sent to
+Caroline by Von Weber's devoted friend, Fuerstenau:
+
+"It was the death-warrant of the purest wedded bliss that had ever made
+two mortals happy; it was nigh a fatal cup of poison to one of the
+noblest hearts of womankind: it told two little blooming boys that they
+were orphaned. No wonder that Fuerstenau had not the courage to address
+Caroline von Weber herself: his letter had been sent to her dearest
+friend, Fraeulein von Hanmann. The sad messenger of death went down to
+Kosterwitz, the letter in hand.
+
+"But she, too, had not the courage to break the fearful news to the
+impulsive little woman, unaided and alone. She stopped her carriage at a
+little distance from the house, to beg the support of Roth, who lived
+close by. But Caroline had heard the carriage-wheels--had looked
+out--had seen her friend descend on that unaccustomed spot, and
+disappear into Roth's house. A fearful presentiment seized her--she
+rushed toward the spot--she saw the two standing in the little garden,
+wringing their hands and weeping--she knew all--and she lay senseless at
+their feet. Her little boy Max had followed her in childish alarm. Nigh
+forty years have gone by since then; but he has never forgotten the
+sound of that terrible cry, when his mother, slowly recovering from her
+swoon, clasped him convulsively in her arms, and wetted his face with a
+flood of tears."
+
+Nearly twenty years later it was before Von Weber's body at last reached
+the Fatherland. The agonies of homesickness he had endured seemed to
+haunt even the cold clay. In 1841, a writer made an ardent appeal for
+the restoration of this glory of German song, to the German soil. The
+idea became a crusade. But it was not until 1844, and then chiefly by
+the aid of Wagner, then conductor in Dresden, and a close friend of
+Caroline and her children, that success was attained. The younger son,
+Alexander, had already been buried; on December 14, 1844, the father's
+body was placed by his side. It had been carried through the streets of
+Dresden behind a black banner, on which were inscribed words which once
+would have meant so much: "Weber in Dresden."
+
+"In the richly decorated chapel of the cemetery, all the ladies of the
+theatre, with Schroeder-Devrient at their head, awaited the body, and
+covered the coffin with their laurels. The ceremony was at an end. The
+torches were extinguished; the crowd dispersed. But, by the light of two
+candles still burning on the altar, might be seen the form of a small,
+now middle-aged woman who had flung herself upon the bier, whilst a pale
+young man knelt praying by her side."
+
+This pale young man was the Baron Max Maria von Weber, to whose pen we
+owe a wonderful portrait of a wonderful man. It was the son's love,
+strangely tempered with wisdom, that showed us all the phases of this
+character, which, by revealing its worser side, made the better side
+convincing, complete, alive.
+
+Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and
+ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation
+amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle
+for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect
+of music upon life, and of life upon music. Too many sorts of man have
+written too many sorts of music and lived too many sorts of life. But,
+if you wish to use Von Weber's life as an example of the influence of
+music, surely, you would write Von Weber's name on the credit side of
+the ledger, for he reached his best music when his life was best
+managed. He took a musician for his wife, and her high ideals of art and
+life made him a man and a soldier against Fate.
+
+Home they brought his body, a pride to his Fatherland, and the greater
+Wagner who owed the great Weber so much, spoke over his grave these
+words:
+
+"Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever
+distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the
+German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a
+child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the
+Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the
+German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a
+warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart--and who shall blame
+us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a
+part of our dear German soil."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+
+THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN
+
+Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the
+man whose love affairs make tame reading.
+
+It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as
+Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called
+him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only
+thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments
+and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither
+the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as
+human lives go, one of complete felicity.
+
+Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved
+if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was
+so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts,
+that it has almost passed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is
+described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of
+his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a
+remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist,
+and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the
+children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost
+degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early
+fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his
+Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony
+and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was
+written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed
+of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty
+sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence
+of the sort.
+
+Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was
+like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when
+she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her
+compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many
+things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at
+the age of forty-two she died.
+
+Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and
+excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual
+degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess,
+riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a
+scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so
+enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in
+such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on
+the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once
+wrote his mother: "If God spare him, his letters will in long, long
+years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a
+holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure
+and childlike a mind."
+
+His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was
+always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal
+bedimmed the shining brightness of his character." "He wore his heart
+upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen,
+and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and
+joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in
+Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters
+have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death
+burned all the letters he had written her.
+
+We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years
+old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he
+spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he
+wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in
+English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in
+womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the
+darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The
+fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth
+seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a
+piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a
+forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy,
+in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's
+case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he
+first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the
+Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on
+occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer
+alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.
+
+Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with
+the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as
+Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the
+world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false
+friendship, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which
+poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some
+of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order
+that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove
+wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product
+of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest
+distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises
+thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
+
+"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a
+morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the
+other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or
+Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure,
+aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?
+It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his
+Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But
+let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict
+and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can
+turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to
+point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters,
+and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and
+pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such shining heights of
+goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."
+
+In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes
+being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already
+had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition
+alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn
+told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.
+
+In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of
+a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The
+widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_nee_ Souchay); she was so well preserved
+and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.
+But it was her second daughter, Cecile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck
+the first pin of permanence through his butterfly heart. She was
+seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.
+
+The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cecile, and described her:
+
+"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly
+fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and
+rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown
+hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of
+transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most
+bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and
+eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach
+so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too
+reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'
+In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impassioned,' and this I
+deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cecile."
+
+Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young
+girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was
+really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at
+Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his
+emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the
+9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:
+
+"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late
+at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel
+so rich and happy."
+
+It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that,
+when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the
+Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in
+"Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib
+errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its
+enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano
+and extemporise upon the theme.
+
+Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French
+Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with
+a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the
+honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote
+humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where Fanny
+Hensel visited them, and found Cecile possessed not only of "the
+beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a
+wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and
+promised to cure him of his irritability."
+
+The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband
+had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously,
+and regretted being a conductor at all.
+
+In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cecile was dangerously
+ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She
+bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together
+was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be
+married:
+
+"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood
+may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel
+every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to God for
+my happiness."
+
+In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and
+sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards,
+without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with
+music-paper and sketch-book, with Cecile and the children." Again, in
+1844, he writes of a return home:
+
+"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cecile looks
+so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her
+former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the
+room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look
+at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the
+garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of
+paper that Cecile painted for me, to write to you.
+
+"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the
+children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to
+Koenigstein passes here twice every day. We have early strawberries for
+breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the
+evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with
+pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all
+propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the
+Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and shirt-buttons;
+the list of visitors, which comes out every Saturday, as _Punch_ does
+with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he
+passes to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the
+women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a
+bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure
+Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"
+
+Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:
+
+"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in
+these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is
+learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and
+has taught her to pass her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul
+tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his
+own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower
+which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their
+slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl
+comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and
+geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure
+is gone if Cecile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the
+picture."
+
+Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the
+young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him
+for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes
+the strange reward of his art as follows:
+
+"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were
+soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments,
+and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.
+Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of
+his own Germany."
+
+On one of the home festivals, Cecile and her sister gave and acted a
+comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.
+Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down
+his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous
+vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister Fanny was conducting a
+rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands
+dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to
+Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless;
+it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time
+on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until,
+the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of
+his wife, his brother, and three friends.
+
+His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later
+Cecile died at Frankfort of consumption.
+
+Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it
+was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man
+who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few
+saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But
+let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:
+
+"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I
+conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead
+me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I
+am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater
+earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this
+character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint,
+but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however,
+understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their
+hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for
+them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on
+towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with
+an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any
+human being, or anything on earth,--then God be praised! such a one I am
+not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am
+sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this
+does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that
+people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I
+am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and
+outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I
+really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you
+wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I
+never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my
+lot."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+
+THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN
+
+He wrote to his parents:
+
+"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant,
+well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is
+something in it that repels me."
+
+And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his
+piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned
+full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would
+say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely
+unlike--of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied;
+she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent
+woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coarse
+she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that,
+while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was
+certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from
+her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot,
+who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of
+Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like
+bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was--well,
+some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was
+angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal
+manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any
+non-effeminate man--outside of books.
+
+The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of
+presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and
+believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the
+Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was
+followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but
+resisted the superstitious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of
+George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter
+surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco--though he
+neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at
+cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars--as
+did Liszt's princess.
+
+Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the
+credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire
+not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she
+conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.
+
+Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish
+fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.
+She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska--a good name to
+change for the shorter tinkle of "Chopin." It was from her that Chopin
+took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his
+music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to
+be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally
+the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the
+darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the
+loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!
+
+As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a
+public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa
+Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia
+Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was
+Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with
+a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her
+case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted
+himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska,
+however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as
+full of vague morose yearning as his Preludes. He left Warsaw for
+Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell
+concert in Warsaw, and made a ravishing success as a picture and as a
+singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing
+the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians
+and poets of that day.
+
+To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and
+he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in
+appearance at least, athletic--even if he must ask his tailor to furnish
+the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with
+to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew
+from his familiar and daemon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote
+about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:
+
+"God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. Set her
+mind at rest, and tell her that as long as my heart beats I shall not
+cease to adore her. Tell her that even after my death my ashes shall be
+strewn under her feet."
+
+While Chopin was thus mooning over her memory, she seems to have been
+finding consolation elsewhere than in her music, even as Mozart's
+Aloysia had done. This letter was sent on New Year's Day, 1831. After a
+few more references to her, her name vanishes from his letters, and the
+incident is closed. It may best be summed up in the words of James
+Huneker, who is one of the few writers who has kept his sanity on the
+subject of Chopin:
+
+"He never saw his Gladkovska again, for he did not return to Warsaw. The
+lady was married in 1832--preferring a solid merchant to nebulous
+genius--to Joseph Grabovski, a merchant at Warsaw. Her husband, so saith
+a romantic biographer, Count Wodzinski, became blind; perhaps even a
+blind country gentleman was preferable to a lachrymose pianist. Chopin
+must have heard of the attachment in 1831. Her name almost disappears
+from his correspondence. Time as well as other nails drove from his
+memory her image. If she was fickle, he was inconstant, and so let us
+waste no pity on this episode, over which lakes of tears have been shed
+and rivers of ink have been spilt."
+
+This same year, 1831, brought Chopin to Paris, thenceforward his
+residence and home. His great elegance of manner, as well as of music,
+brought him into the most aristocratic dove-cotes, or salons, as they
+called them, and it is small wonder that he found himself unable to
+avoid accepting and buttonholing for a while some of the countless
+hearts that were flung like roses at his feet. Even George Sand was
+amazed at his dexterity in juggling with hearts, and, in this matter,
+praise or blame from George Sand was praise from Lady Hubert. It seems
+that he could modulate from one love affair to another as fleetly and as
+gracefully as from one key to its remotest neighbour. She says he could
+manage three flirtations of an evening, and begin a new series the very
+next day. Apparently even distance was no barrier, for George Sand
+declares that he was at the same moment trying to marry a girl in Poland
+and another in Paris. The Parisienne he cancelled from his list because,
+says Sand, when he called on her with another man, she offered the other
+man a chair before she asked Chopin to be seated. Chopin conducted
+himself in Paris very much _en prince_, according to Von Lenz, and such
+a sacrilege to the laws of precedence naturally was unpardonable.
+
+The Polish woman whom Sand refers to may have been the one woman with
+whom Chopin is definitely known to have planned marriage. This was Maria
+Wodzinska. Her two brothers had boarded years before at the pension
+which Chopin's father kept at Warsaw. The acquaintance with the brothers
+was renewed in Paris, and when, in 1835, Chopin visited Dresden after a
+long journey to see his parents, he met the sister, Maria, then nineteen
+years old, and fell deeply and seriously in love with her. According to
+her brother, who wrote a biographical romance on "Chopin's Three Love
+Affairs," Maria, while not classically a beauty, had an indefinable
+charm.
+
+"Her black eyes were full of sweetness, reverie, and restrained fire; a
+smile of ineffable voluptuousness played around her lips, and her
+magnificent hair was as dark as ebony and long enough to serve her as a
+mantle."
+
+They flirted at the piano and behind a fan, and he dedicated her a
+little waltz, and she drew his portrait. As usual, the different
+biographers tell different stories, but from them the chief biographer
+of all, Frederick Neicks, decides that Chopin proposed and Maria
+deposed. And here endeth the second of Chopin's three romances. So this
+brings us back to Paris and George Sand, and the year 1837, when Chopin
+was twenty-eight and George Sand thirty-three.
+
+Thus far we have followed the standard authorities, but the year 1903
+has done much in the way of unveiling Chopin's life. His letters to his
+family, and their letters to him, were believed to have perished. They
+were in the possession of his sister Isabella Barcinska, and she was
+living in the palace of Count Zamoyski at Warsaw, in 1863, when a bomb
+was thrown from a window as the Russian lieutenant-general was passing.
+In revenge the soldiers sacked the palace, and burned what they did not
+carry off. Chopin's portrait by Ary Scheffer, his piano, and his Paris
+furniture perished, and his papers were believed to be among the lost.
+
+But all the while the family was keeping their very existence secret
+until, after forty years, it was thought proper to give them to the
+public.
+
+M. Karlovicz was entrusted with this honour, and _La Revue Musicale_ of
+Paris chosen as the medium. The letters are said to make a large bulk,
+but I have been able to see only the first three instalments, of which
+two are family letters to him. They are exuberant with tenderness,
+admiration, and of hope for his great fame; the father constantly
+pleading with the son to lay up his sous against a rainy day,--advice
+which met the usual fate of good advice.
+
+Karlovicz says, with some exaggeration: "In his letters to his family,
+Chopin, as if he wished to avoid pronouncing the name of George Sand,
+always calls her 'My hostess,' sometimes even employing, strange to say,
+the plural, for instance, 'Elles si cheres, elles rirent pour tous,' or,
+'Here the vigil is sad, because _les malades_ do not wish a doctor.'"
+
+The first letter, signed "Fritz," is a most cordial welcome to a man
+about to marry his sister. The third is a double letter from George Sand
+and Chopin to Louise, who had just visited the two lovers at Nohant in
+1844. Sand tells her that her visit has been the best tonic he has ever
+had, and writes to the whole family: "Tell them all that I love them,
+too, and would give my life to unite them with him one day under my
+roof." Chopin refers to Sand as "My hostess," and signs himself "Ton
+vieux." In his next he details with much amusement a scandalous escapade
+of Victor Hugo's, a husband's discovery, and Madame Hugo's forgiving
+manner. He announces (July 20, 1845) that "le telegraphe
+electro-magnetique entre Baltimore et Washington, donne des resultats
+extraordinaires." He revels in puns and gossip.
+
+Karlovicz mentions the existence of a despairing letter in which Chopin
+called his sister Louise to Paris where he was dying; she came in 1849,
+with her husband and daughter, and remained till the end, giving him the
+last tendernesses in her power.
+
+This is all I have gleaned from Karlovicz. More immediate help has come
+from a new biography published in Warsaw in 1903 by Ferdinand Hoesick,
+and, according to Alfred Nossig, destined to upset the supremacy of
+Nieck's biography. This latest work is really the carrying out of the
+plans of Chopin's friend and fellow student, Julian Fontana, who shared
+joy and sorrow with him in Paris, and collected letters and data for a
+biography. On Chopin's death Liszt sprang into print with a rhapsody
+which led Fontana to defer his work. At his death in 1869 he left it
+unfinished, bequeathing his documents to his son, who permitted Hoesick
+the use of them.
+
+Hoesick blames Chopin's notable melancholy to early experiences of love
+requited, indeed, but not united in marriage. His love was as rathe as
+his music.
+
+Alfred Nossig, reviewing the biography, says of Chopin: "As his talent,
+so did his heart mature early." It was at Warsaw, in his early youth,
+that he found his first ideal. Although his father, a Frenchman who had
+married a Polish woman, did not occupy a foremost position in society,
+Frederic moved in the highest circles. In addition to his genius he had
+always the princely way with him.
+
+One of his admirers was the Duchess Ludvika Czetvertynska, whose
+majestic figure and aureole of hair reminded one of the pictures of
+Giorgione. Her friend, the Governor of Poland, the Grand Duke
+Konstantin, through her introduction accepted Chopin as one of his most
+welcome guests; he was musical, and greatly admired Chopin's music.
+Whenever his violent temper carried him away, the grand duchess would
+send secretly for Chopin, who would seat himself at the piano, and at
+the first notes the grand duke would appear in the drawing-room with his
+temper cured. Thus was Chopin another David to a latter-day Saul. Chopin
+was an intimate friend of the grand duke's son, Paul, whose instructor
+was a Count Moriolles. It was his daughter, the Comtesse Alexandra, in
+whose eyes Chopin found inspiration; he improvised never so beautifully
+as when she sat next to him at the piano. His adoration was no secret.
+He was often teased on account of the beautiful "Mariolka," as he called
+her. In his letters to his friends, we find many allusions that prove
+that the young comtesse loved him in turn. But both knew that this love
+was hopeless, and therefore Chopin's musical expressions of his dreams
+for her are melancholy. One remembrance of this attachment is the Rondo
+_a la Mazur_, Op. 5, which he dedicated to the Comtesse de Moriolles.
+
+In 1830 Chopin toured the continent. As in his later relation to George
+Sand, the passion of a poet, Alfred Musset, rivalled his, so at this
+time he found a rival in the Polish poet, Julius Slovaki. The pretty,
+vivacious, and perhaps somewhat flirtatious girl, Comtesse Maria
+Wodzinska, was the bone of contention, or, rather, the "rag and the bone
+and the hank of hair" of contention.
+
+It chanced that Chopin and Slovaki, whose works showed most startling
+similarity, were also much alike in looks, in slenderness, dreaminess of
+feature, and even in expression of countenance. Their very fates were
+like: both left their country never to return. In their wandering
+through Europe, they stopped in the same capitals; both at last took up
+their residence in Paris, where both died of consumption. It was these
+twins of fate whom fate put in love with the same teasing girl.
+
+The "black-eyed demoiselle," as she was called by the poet and the
+musician, managed so well, that her two admirers never met at the same
+time. She travelled through Europe with her mother and brothers, and
+found an opportunity to meet Chopin in one, and Slovaki in another town,
+and to pass several weeks with each.
+
+It was Slovaki's turn to meet her in Geneva. Here she inspired him to
+much verse, especially his "In der Schweiz." But all this while the
+little vixen corresponded with Chopin. He improvised in Paris on themes
+she composed, and then she repeated his inspirations to keep Slovaki
+hovering at her piano.
+
+When Chopin met the Wodzinskis in Dresden, he composed for Maria his
+F-minor Etude which he called "the soul-portrait" of the comtesse. A
+year later he passed a month with the family at Marienbad, where he
+proposed for her hand and was accepted. In his bridegroom mood he
+composed the graceful F-minor Waltz, and later the C-sharp minor
+Nocturne.
+
+In the meantime, Slovaki travelled on in blissful ignorance, glorifying
+Chopin's fiancee in poetic songs full of passionate admiration. The
+distant Slovaki finally learned that Chopin had won his muse, and he
+wrote to his mother:
+
+"They say that Chopin and 'my Maria' are to be a pair. How sentimental
+to marry a person who is the image of one's first love. Swedenborg says
+that in a case of this kind, after death, not out of two of the souls
+but out of all three only one angel can be created."
+
+But this tripartite angel died unborn, for in 1837 Chopin found himself
+deserted by her. So much we learn from Hoesick. And now we may return to
+Chopin's immortal, if immoral, affair with George Sand.
+
+George Sand will be remembered for the famous love affairs she has
+contributed to history long after her books have lost their last reader.
+It has been my habit in these papers to take the woman's side, and even
+for George Sand there is much to be said in praise and in palliation.
+For her peculiar views of life her peculiar husband may be largely
+blamed, along with the peculiar ideals of the literary circle into which
+her unhappy married life drove her. That she showed good taste in either
+the management or the publication of her amorous entanglements one could
+hardly maintain, and yet the men in the case seem to have been at least
+as caddish as she was unwomanly. But it would take volumes to recount
+what volumes have already recounted, and bewilderment and contradiction
+would still be the chief result. Since so much of the story is familiar,
+I can be brief with it here.
+
+George Sand's relations with Chopin have been accepted in almost every
+conceivable manner. There have even been writers of such intelligence as
+Hadow who have maintained that she was entirely and solely a mother to
+him. Before a trust in humanity as bland as this, before a credulity
+that can deny itself to certain records and stretch itself to certain
+others, there is nothing to say except to express gratitude that in some
+hearts, at least, the belief in fairy stories is not left behind in the
+nursery.
+
+On the other hand, it is not necessary to fly to the opposite extreme,
+and condemn the years that Chopin and Sand spent together as years
+devoid of very earnest sympathy, intellectual and artistic communion,
+and of mutual advantage. The relations were irregular, and were harrowed
+by the temperaments of each. Sand was masculine, energetic, restless,
+and by nature--for which she was surely not thoroughly to blame--a
+voluptuary. Chopin, while not the whining mooncalf some have painted
+him, was never of truly virile character. He was a man whose genius was
+as limited in scope as a diamond's lustre, even while it had the
+brilliance, the firmness, and the solitariness of that jewel. And, most
+of all, he was that most pathetic of wretches, a sick man. He was
+drifting down the current of that stream which had carried off his
+gifted and adored sister when she was half his present age.
+
+Sand was the former of the two to fall in love, and the earlier to fall
+out. After the first meeting, there was little delay in beginning that
+form of unchurched marriage so fashionable in the art world of that day.
+In 1838 they went to Majorca with Sand's two children, a son and
+daughter, who had been born to her husband. The weather was atrocious,
+the accommodations primitive, and Chopin's health wretched. He was beset
+by presentiments and fierce anxieties, and tormented by a hatred of the
+place and the clime. In June of the next year they went back to Nohant,
+her chateau. We owe to Sand herself the account of Chopin's manner of
+life, his petulance, his self-inflicted torments, and the agonies of his
+art and his disease. We owe to her, also, the picture of her devotion
+both to his health and to his music.
+
+The tendency, of course, is to take her praises of herself with a
+liberal sprinkling of salt, and to feel that Chopin was not the
+"detestable invalid" she painted him. But need we withdraw charity from
+one, to give to the other? Need we rob Pauline to pay Peter? There
+should be easily a plenty of sympathy for both, for the woman
+infatuated with a strange, exotic genius, gathering him into her heart
+and home, only to find that she had taken upon herself the role of nurse
+as well as mistress; and to find her time and her vitality devoted to an
+invalid, while her own life-work as a famous writer was making demands
+on her as wild as those of a sick musician her junior in years as in
+fame.
+
+After granting her this justice, there should still be no stint of
+sympathy for the poor Chopin, wrought to a frenzy with the revolutions
+he was so gorgeously effecting, not only in the music of the piano, but
+in all harmony; racked with pain and unmanned with the weakening effects
+of his disease; struggling vainly against the chill and clammy Wrestler
+who was to drag him to his grave before his life was half complete.
+
+Our feeling, again, should not be wrath at George Sand because she did
+not eternally resist the centrifugal forces of such a life, but rather a
+deep sense of gratitude that she gave Chopin some sort of home and
+mental support for ten long years.
+
+George Sand's books are full of allusions to Chopin, and from the many
+that are quoteworthy, the following may be cited from her "Histoire de
+ma Vie," as throwing a few flecks of light on the woman's attitude in
+the affair:
+
+"He was the same in friendship (as in love), becoming enthusiastic at
+first sight, getting disgusted and correcting himself (_se reprenant_)
+incessantly, living on infatuations full of charm for those who were the
+object of them and on secret discontents which poisoned his dearest
+affections."
+
+"Chopin accorded to me, I may say, honoured me with, a kind of
+friendship which was an exception in his life. He was always the same to
+me."
+
+"The friendship of Chopin was never a refuge for me in sadness. He had
+enough of his own ills to bear."
+
+"We never addressed a reproach to each other, except once, which, alas,
+was the first and the final time."
+
+"But if Chopin was with me devotion, kind attention, grace,
+obligingness, and deference in person, he had not for all that abjured
+the asperities of character towards those who were about me. With them
+the inequality of his soul, in turn generous and fantastic, gave itself
+full course, passing always from infatuation to aversion, and vice
+versa."
+
+"Chopin when angry was alarming, and, as, with me, he always restrained
+himself, he seemed almost to choke and die."
+
+
+It is generally believed that in the character of _Prince Karol_ in her
+novel, "Lucrezia Floriani," published in 1847, Sand used that lethal
+weapon of revenge novelists possess, and portrayed or caricatured
+Chopin. It is only fair to give her disclaimer, though Liszt repeated
+the charge in his "Life of Chopin," and though Karasovski says that
+Sand's own children told Chopin that he was pictured as Prince Karol.
+None the less, hearken to the novelist's own defence:
+
+"It has been pretended that in one of my romances I have painted his
+(Chopin's) character with a great exactness of analysis. People were
+mistaken, because they thought they recognised some of his traits; and,
+proceeding by this system, too convenient to be sure, Liszt himself, in
+a life of Chopin, a little exuberant as regards style, but nevertheless
+full of very good things and very beautiful pages, has gone astray in
+good faith. I have traced in _Prince Karol_ the character of a man
+determined in his nature, exclusive in his sentiments, exclusive in his
+exigencies. Chopin was not such. Nature does not design like art,
+however realistic it may be. She has caprices, inconsequences, probably
+not real, but very mysterious. Art only rectifies these inconsequences,
+because it is too limited to reproduce them.
+
+"Chopin was a resume of these magnificent inconsequences which God alone
+can allow himself to create, and which have their particular logic. He
+was modest on principle, gentle by habit, but he was imperious by
+instinct and full of unlegitimate pride, which was unconscious of
+itself. Hence sufferings which he did not reason out and which did not
+fix themselves on a determined object.
+
+"However, _Prince Karol_ is not an artist. He is a dreamer and nothing
+more; having no genius, he has not the right of genius. He is therefore
+a personage more true than amiable, and the portrait is so little that
+of a great artist that Chopin, in reading the manuscript every day on my
+desk, had not the slightest inclination to deceive himself,--he who,
+nevertheless, was so suspicious.
+
+"And yet, afterwards, by reaction, he imagined, I am told, than this was
+the case. Enemies (he had such about him who call themselves his
+friends; as if embittering a suffering heart was not murder), enemies
+made him believe that this romance was a revelation of his character. At
+that time his memory was no doubt enfeebled; he had forgotten the book,
+why did he not re-read it?
+
+"This history is so little ours--It was the very reverse of it. There
+were between us neither the same raptures _(envirements)_, nor the same
+sufferings. Our history had nothing of a romance; its foundation was too
+simple and too serious for us ever to have had occasion for a quarrel
+with each other _a propos_ of each other."
+
+As to the final separation, following my principle of letting the people
+tell their own stories so far as possible, I may turn again to George
+Sand's own version:
+
+"After the last relapse of the invalid, his mind had become extremely
+gloomy, and Maurice [her son], who had hitherto tenderly loved him, was
+suddenly wounded by him in an unexpected manner about a trifling
+subject. They embraced each other the next moment, but the grain of sand
+had fallen into the tranquil lake, and little by little the pebbles fell
+there, one after another--all this was borne; but at last, one day,
+Maurice, tired of the pin-pricks, spoke of giving up the game. That
+could not be, and should not be. Chopin would not stand my legitimate
+and necessary intervention. He bowed his head and said that I no longer
+loved him.
+
+"What blasphemy after these eight years of maternal devotion! But the
+poor bruised heart was not conscious of its delirium. I thought that
+some months passed at a distance and in silence would heal the wound,
+and make his friendship again calm and his memory equitable. But the
+revolution of February came, and Paris became momentarily hateful to
+this mind incapable of yielding to any commotion in the social form.
+Free to return to Poland, or certain to be tolerated there, he had
+preferred languishing ten (and some more) years far from his family,
+whom he adored, to the pain of seeing his country transformed and
+deformed (_denature_). He had fled from tyranny, as now he fled from
+liberty.
+
+"I saw him again for an instant in March, 1848. I pressed his trembling
+and icy hand. I wished to speak to him, he slipped away. Now it was my
+turn to say that he no longer loved me. I spared him this infliction,
+and entrusted all to the hands of Providence and the future.
+
+"I was not to see him again. There were bad hearts between us. There
+were good ones, too, who were at a loss what to do. There were frivolous
+ones who preferred not to meddle with such delicate matters.
+
+"I have been told that he had asked for me, regretted me, and loved me
+filially up to the very end. It was thought fit to conceal from him that
+I was ready to hasten to him. It was thought fit to conceal this from me
+till then."
+
+This, then, is George Sand's story, which has not been granted very much
+credence.
+
+The cause of their--"divorce," one might call it--is blurred by the
+usual discrepancies of gossip. The most probable account seems to be
+that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her
+daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All
+accounts agree that this was to her only a pretext for breaking shackles
+that had begun to be irksome. All are agreed that it was Sand and not
+Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts
+it, "had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically
+speaking, out-of-doors."
+
+The woman seems easily to have forgotten the man who had proved, at
+best, of little joy to her, for, as she says, she could never go to him
+with her troubles, since he had always a plenty of his own. It was a
+relief, then, to her, being a far busier woman than he a man, to find
+herself free.
+
+But Chopin was robbed of his last support. The strong woman he had
+leaned upon was gone, and he was alone with the consumption that was
+eating his life away. He started forth upon a concert tour, but the
+chill climates of England and Scotland were not refuges from his
+haunting disease. He died slowly and in poverty, though he was
+unconscious of want, thanks to the generosity of a Russian countess and
+a Scotch woman. Dependent upon women to the last! In his dying hours it
+is said that George Sand called at his house, but was not admitted to
+see him, though, as he wailed two days before his death, "She said I
+should die in no other arms than hers" (_Que je ne mourrais que dans ses
+bras_).
+
+But even the story of her visit is denied. Turgeniev said that fifty
+countesses had claimed that he died in their arms. Among the number was
+the Countess Potocka, who is cherished traditionally as one of Chopin's
+loves, and who was much with him during his last days, and sang for him,
+at his request, as he lay dying. Poor genius! he must even have a woman
+sing his swan-song for him! Potocka is best known by a familiar portrait
+that you will find in a thousand homes. But how the higher criticism
+undermines the gospel of tradition! The truth is that Chopin denied ever
+having been in love with her or she with him, and Huneker even claims
+that the famous portrait of her is not of her at all.
+
+But however attended, visited, caressed, Chopin died at the threshold of
+his prime, his life, lighted at most with a little feverish twinkling of
+stars, one nocturne.
+
+END OF VOLUME I.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
+Volume 1, by Rupert Hughes
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+example an eBook of filename 10234 would be found at:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org/1/0/2/3/10234
+
+or filename 24689 would be found at:
+     https://www.gutenberg.org/2/4/6/8/24689
+
+An alternative method of locating eBooks:
+     https://www.gutenberg.org/GUTINDEX.ALL
+
+
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