initial commit of ebook 11419HEADmain

1 files changed, 7570 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/11419.txt b/11419.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..24db6b4
--- /dev/null
+++ b/11419.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7570 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume
+2, 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 2
+
+Author: Rupert Hughes
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11419]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Harry Jones, Sjaani and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS
+
+OF
+
+GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+
+_By_ RUPERT HUGHES
+
+
+
+Author of "Contemporary American Composers," "The Musical Guide", etc.
+
+
+_ILLUSTRATED_
+
+
+VOLUME II.
+
+
+
+_1903_
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+
+I.      FRANZ LISZT
+
+II.     RICHARD WAGNER
+
+III.    TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER
+
+IV.     THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST
+
+V.      AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
+
+VI.     ROBERT SCHUMANN AND CLARA WIECK
+
+VII.    MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+
+MISS SMITHSON _Frontispiece_
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+GEORGE SAND, FROM THE PORTRAIT BY L. COLAMATTA
+
+PRINCESS CAROLYNE VON SAYN-WITTGENSTEIN AND CHILD
+
+RICHARD WAGNER
+
+RICHARD AND COSIMA WAGNER
+
+RICHARD WAGNER AT BAYREUTH
+
+DESIREE ARTOT
+
+LOUIS SPOHR
+
+NICOLO PAGANINI
+
+HENRIETTA SONTAG
+
+MADAME MALIBRAN
+
+GEOFFREY RUDEL
+
+MARTIN LUTHER AND CATHERINA VON BORA
+
+MUZIO CLEMENTI
+
+HECTOR BERLIOZ
+
+CHARLES GOUNOD
+
+GIOACCHINO A. ROSSINI
+
+OLYMPE PELISSIER, AS "JUDITH" IN THE PAINTING BY VERNET
+
+GIUSEPPE VERDI
+
+FRANZ SCHUBERT
+
+ROBERT SCHUMANN
+
+CLARA WIECK, AT THE AGE OF FOURTEEN
+
+CLARA AND ROBERT SCHUMANN
+
+CLARA (WIECK) SCHUMANN
+
+
+
+
+
+THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS
+
+VOLUME II.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+FRANZ LISZT
+
+
+"Liszt, or the Art of Running after Women."--NIETSCHE.
+
+
+Liszt's life was so lengthy and so industriously amorous, that it is
+possible only to float along over the peaks, to touch only the high
+points. Why, his letters to the last of his loves alone make up four
+volumes! And yet, for a life so proverbially given over to flirtations
+as his, the beginnings were strangely unprophetic. He had reached the
+mature age of six before he began to study the piano; compared with
+Mozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert--namely,
+nine years. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of his
+father found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and he
+was sent to Vienna to study. When he was eleven years old, after one of
+his concerts, Beethoven kissed him. He survived. Then on to Paris and
+duchesses and princesses galore. Here he became a proverb of popularity
+as "Le petit Litz"--the French inevitably gave some twist to a foreign
+name, then as to-day, when two of their favourite painters are
+"Wisthler" and "Seargent."
+
+Liszt's childhood was therefore largely fed upon the embraces and
+kisses of rapturous women, even as was the young Mozart's, the
+difference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Even then he
+used to throw money among the gamins, as later he scattered it in how
+many directions, with what liberality, and with what princeliness, and
+from what a slender purse!
+
+The father and mother had gone to Paris with him; but soon the mother
+went back to Austria--she was a German, the father alone being
+Hungarian. With his father the lad remained, and found him a severe and
+domineering master. But in 1827 he died, leaving his sixteen-year-old
+son alone in Paris. That stalwart self-reliance and sense of honour,
+which gave nobility to so much of Liszt's character, now showed itself;
+he sold his grand piano to pay the debts his father had left him, and
+sent for his mother to come to Paris, where he supported her by giving
+piano lessons. Then, as later, he found plenty of pupils, the
+difference being that then, as not later, he took pay for his lessons,
+though not even then from all.
+
+Here he was at sixteen, tall and handsome, and with a face
+of winsomeness that never lost its spell over womankind.
+Sixteen-year-older that he was, he was a man of great fame, and the
+grind of acquiring technic was all passed. Moscheles had already said
+of him in print: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses everything yet heard,
+in power and the vanquishing of difficulties." Here he was, then,
+young, beautiful, famous, a dazzling musician, and Hungarian. What do
+you expect?
+
+It makes small difference what you expect, for the reality was that his
+heart was eager for the seclusion of a monastery; his soul pined for
+religious excitement only! At fourteen he had begun to rebel against
+his nickname, "Le petit Litz." It was with the utmost difficulty that
+his father had been able to keep him from making religion his career,
+and giving up his already glittering fame. Never in his life did he
+cease to thrill with an almost hysterical passion for churchly affairs
+and ceremonies.
+
+At fourteen he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It
+was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella,
+a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his
+first love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his
+mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really
+his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior,
+had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. The young
+comtesse' mother gave her into Liszt's charge for musical education.
+The young comtesse was, they say, of slender frame and angelic beauty,
+and deeply imbued with that religious ardour which, as in Liszt's case,
+often modulates as imperceptibly into love, as an organist can
+gradually turn a hymn into a jig, or an Italian aria into a hymn.
+
+The mother was fond of presiding at the music lessons, and of leading
+the young teacher to air his views about religion and life, and she
+watched with pleasure the gradual development of what was inevitable, a
+more than musical sympathy between the daughter and the teacher. But
+the romance seemed to win her approval, and when suddenly she saw that
+she was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that he
+should not refuse the young lovers their happiness. He allowed his wife
+to die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without the
+faintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of his
+daughter with an untitled musician. His business affairs, however, kept
+him away from home, and from thought upon the subject. After the death
+of the mother, the comtesse and the pianist met and wept together; then
+resumed their music lessons, reading much between the lines, and far
+preferring dreamy duets to difficult solos.
+
+Liszt had read little but music and religion; the slim, fair comtesse
+had read much verse and romance. So she was his teacher in that
+literature which would most interest a brace of young lovers. There was
+no one at home to note how late he stayed of evenings, and one night he
+returned to his own house to find it locked and his mother asleep.
+Rather than disturb her, he spent the night on the steps. Another
+evening, Franz and Caroline found parting such sweet sorrow, that when
+he reached her outer door, he found it locked for the night. He was
+compelled to call the porter from those slumbers which only doorkeepers
+know, and this man was doorkeeperishly wrathful at having his
+beauty-sleep broken; he growled his rage. This is the only time
+recorded when Franz Liszt failed to respond to a hint for money. His
+head was too high in the clouds, no doubt. The servant, thus suddenly
+awakened to the impropriety of affairs, hastened the next morning to
+inform the comte that his daughter was studying the music of the
+spheres as well as that of the piano, and that her lessons were
+prolonged till midnight.
+
+The next time Franz came to teach, the ghoulish porter gleefully
+informed him that his master wished to speak to him. The comte was most
+politely firm, and murdered the young love with most suave apologies
+for the painful amputation. The difference in rank, it went without
+saying, put marriage out of the question, and, therefore, all things
+considered, he could not derange monsieur to the giving of more music
+lessons,--for the present, at least.
+
+The young musician took the _coup de grace_ bravely; without a word he
+gave the comte his hand in mute acceptance of his fate, and bowed
+himself out. The true bitterness of his loss he sought to hide by
+fleeing to the Church. His love had been pure and ardent. It had been
+found impossible. His hopes had been put to death; therefore an end to
+the world. He bent his burning head low upon the cold steps of Saint
+Vincent de Paul, and resolved to renounce the world. He wrote ten years
+later, and still with suffering: "A female form chaste and pure as the
+alabaster of holy vessels, was the sacrifice I offered with tears to
+the God of Christians. Renunciation of all things earthly was the only
+theme, the only word of that day."
+
+Caroline, too, sank under the bitterness of the loss. She fell
+dangerously ill, and when she recovered she thought only of the
+convent; but her father, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew how
+to persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madame
+d'Artigou; they say she gave her husband no affection, and that her
+heart was still, and always, Liszt's; while in his heart she was for
+ever niched as the young Madonna of his life.
+
+For the present the shock of sacrifice threatened his whole career, and
+his life and mind as well. Again the monastery beckoned him, and now it
+was his mother's turn to oppose the Church in its effort to engulf this
+brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a
+time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his
+health; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituary
+eulogies actually were published. But as Mark Twain wrote of himself:
+"The reports of his death were greatly exaggerated."
+
+When Liszt gave up all hope of entering the Church, he began a restless
+orgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foibles
+allured him.
+
+As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with all
+the needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot where
+the good God cooks the future." The theatre offered for a time another
+form of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, and
+compared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took up
+with the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he
+fell under the spell of the Abbe Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris
+and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with
+his unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to
+the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next
+Berlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, the
+twenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck up
+their historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in the
+most artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the Polish
+Countess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and the
+two cronies:
+
+"I would choose Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband, Liszt for
+my lover."
+
+There seems to have been a snow-storm of love affairs at this period.
+It is impossible even to name the flakes. Gossip of course gathered
+into the catalogue every woman whom Liszt saw more than once; but we
+need not pay this tribute to malice by mentioning the names of all of
+Liszt's hostesses. Among those who may be more definitely suspected of
+being made victims by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse Adele
+Laprunarede, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as De
+Beaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful." Her home was
+lonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was a
+musician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him to
+spend the winter months at his chateau. For a whole winter Liszt was
+kept there in her castle a prisoner, with fetters of silk. The old
+comte seems never to have suspected. When Liszt eventually, like
+Tannhaeuser, mutineered against the charms of the Venusberg and returned
+to Paris, he wrote many letters to the comtesse, in which, as he
+himself said, he gained his "first practice in the lofty French style."
+
+But this intrigue was followed by his appearance in the procession of
+George Sand's lovers. Ramann, in his biography, writes of the curious
+state of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women were
+beginning to demand freedom and to experiment with the writing of
+perfervid romances, which questioned the very foundation principles of
+marriage and made a religion of Affinity."
+
+George Sand was a chief crusader against the curse of monogamy. She
+practiced this anarchy in the guise of religion, as the old crusaders
+out-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisation in the name of
+the Cross. George Sand's gospel, summed up briefly by Ramann, is as
+follows:
+
+
+"'Love,' says the authoress, 'is Christian compassion concentrated on a
+single being. It belongs to the sinner, and not to the just; only for
+the former it moves restlessly, passionately, and vehemently. When
+thou, O noble and upright man,' she continues, with deceitfully
+fantastic warmth, 'when thou feelest a violent passion for a miserable
+fallen creature, be reassured that is genuine love; blush not
+therefore! so has Christ loved who crucified him.' According to this
+view, the love that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely be
+alarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the more
+genuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steeped
+in passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty,
+exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you have
+never loved my personal self.' It also appears to correspond with this
+casuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, of
+sky-storming earnestness, but adorned with all unnatural qualities,
+give themselves up to the latter as to an intoxicating spell, and in
+the delirium of self-delusion hold sin for virtue, and the unnatural
+for higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was a
+logical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressive
+stubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself,' said Sand in 'Lelia';
+'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man should
+therefore be transitory.'"
+
+If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand was
+the most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large and
+roomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only. It was in
+1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caught
+in the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry." Alfred de
+Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to
+Chopin--or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as
+later the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite as
+true. Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of George
+Sand. But soon he was entangled in that "cameraderie" which was the
+fashionable name for liaison in that time.
+
+From her the Comtesse de Laprunarede had borrowed him for her
+snow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was another
+woman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off. This was the Comtesse
+Marie Catherine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in
+1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in
+1834. It was not till six years later that the comtesse took up
+literature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an art
+critic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine and
+English pen-name, "Daniel Stern."
+
+The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was
+signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost
+equal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems
+to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion
+in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time she
+seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with
+her own fascinations.
+
+
+Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the more
+strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramann
+has thus pictured her:
+
+"The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:
+slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in
+her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair
+tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular,
+classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with
+the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her
+countenance; these were the general features which rendered it
+impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or
+the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the
+elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the
+Faubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the
+purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft
+melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that
+her connection with the young artist began."
+
+Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as the
+mainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquest
+that made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 she
+captured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation were
+hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of
+passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each
+other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his
+constitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, death
+entered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. For
+awhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems to
+have had a moment's pause, but only to return.
+
+Now, however, it had for Liszt something of unfreshness and monotony.
+He determined to break loose, and in the spring of 1835 told the
+comtesse that he was going to leave her. She, however, would not
+consent. He yielding as gracefully as he could, took a lodging in a
+quiet part of the city, where his life consisted of music, literature,
+and the comtesse, who visited him incessantly. Her love had quite
+infatuated her, to take the tone of the time; nowadays we might say
+that she found it so serious that she desired to make it honest. The
+means she hit upon were such as might strike a foolish woman as an
+inspiration. Believing that the long way round was the short way home,
+she thought to atone for her past foibles by casting them into sudden
+insignificance--to clear the sultry air by a thunder crash.
+
+When Liszt heard that the comtesse planned to leave her husband, and
+even her children, and go into foreign exile with him, he felt that the
+comtesse was taking the bit into her teeth with a vengeance, but saw as
+he would on the lines, and cry "whoa" as he would, the runaway
+comtesse still insisted on running away.
+
+Liszt called on her mother to interfere; she was run over. He appealed
+to her former confessor; his staying hand was shaken loose. He called
+on the venerable family notary; the old man was upset by the
+roadside--as I shall be also if I do not release this runaway metaphor.
+
+The comtesse's mother persuaded the daughter to leave Paris for Basle,
+hoping that a change of scene would bring a change of mind; Liszt
+followed. It seems to me, however, more probable that the mother,
+learning that her daughter was determined to leave Paris with Liszt,
+went with her in the desperate effort to save appearances. But, however
+that may be, we find the comtesse and the mother at one hotel, and
+Liszt at another. A few days later, Liszt returned to his hotel to find
+his room choked with the comtesse' trunks, and to learn that the mother
+had gone back to Paris in despair. The comtesse had, as they say,
+"brought her knitting" and come to stay.
+
+Paris is not easily excited over an intrigue conducted according to the
+established codes by which the intriguers bury their heads in the sand,
+as a form of pretence that nobody knows that they are billing and
+cooing beneath the sand, though of course everybody knows it, and they
+know that everybody knows it, except possibly the one other person most
+interested. But Paris was dumbfounded that a very prominent and
+beautiful comtesse should leave her husband and her children in broad
+daylight, and go visiting the most famous pianist in the world. The
+pianist was to blame, of course, in the public eye, and the whole
+affair was branded as a flagrant case of abduction. But, as we know
+now, it was the pianist who was the victim of this Sabine procedure.
+
+Liszt's actions in this affair seemed, as usual, to be an outrage upon
+the ordinary laws of decency, but when the truth was learned, we find,
+as the world found--as usual, too late to change its opinion of
+him--that he did everything in his power to undo the evil into which
+his passion had hurried him, and to set himself right with the usual
+standards of society. And, as usual, he failed absolutely, because of
+the curious and insane stubbornness of the woman.
+
+Some years later, even the Comte d'Agoult, as well as the comtesse'
+brother, the Comte Flavigny, confessed that Liszt had acted as a man of
+honour. The comte had obtained a legal separation from his wife,
+retaining their daughter. Liszt now proposed marriage. Both being
+Catholics, it was necessary to experience a change of heart and become
+Protestants. He exclaimed one day: "_Si nous etions Protestants"_ but
+the comtesse crushed this hope with a sharp "_La Comtesse d'Agoult ne
+sera jamais Madame Liszt_."
+
+Liszt bowed to the inevitable, and kept together his many patches of
+honour as well as he was permitted. The comtesse had a personal income
+of four thousand dollars a year, which was as nothing. According to
+Liszt's secretary, during the time of her stay with Liszt, she spent
+sixty thousand dollars, the most of which Liszt earned himself by his
+concerts. The pianist and the comtesse soon left Basle for Geneva,
+where they remained till 1836, with the exception of one journey to
+Paris, which Liszt made for a concert. But he returned rather to
+literature than to music, as on another occasion did Wagner.
+
+For five years Liszt and the comtesse travelled about Switzerland and
+Italy, he occasionally being convinced that he was seriously in love
+with the woman who had been so imperious and unreasonable. A few
+conservatives outlawed him, but there were people enough who forgave
+him, or approved him, to give him an abundance of society of the
+highest and most aristocratic sort.
+
+In 1836 his old flame, George Sand, visited Liszt and the comtesse.
+They toured Switzerland on mules. George Sand has described the
+wanderings in her "Lettres d'un Voyageur," where _Franz_ represents
+Liszt, _Arabella_, the comtesse, and where one may read a poetic
+description of the comtesse' beauty even after being drenched with
+rain. Beauty that is water-proof is beauty indeed!
+
+It is in this book of hers that Sand prints such illuminating epigrams
+as these:
+
+"There are great errors which are nearer the truth than little truths."
+
+"The most beautiful creations of genius are those which succeed to the
+epoch of the passions. The experience of life ought to precede art; art
+requires repose, and does not suit with the storms of the heart. The
+finest mountains of our globe are extinguished volcanoes."
+
+"If you wish to arrive at truth, be reconciled to what is contrary; the
+white light only results from the union of the coloured rays of the
+spectrum."
+
+"The oyster boasts and says: 'I have never gone astray,' Alas, poor
+oyster! thou hast never walked."
+
+When Liszt had made his concert trip to Paris, the comtesse had awaited
+him at Sand's home. Then, after his famous duel with Thalberg--the
+weapons being pianos--he joined the group at Nohant, where Chopin and
+Sand, and Liszt and D'Agoult, and such guests as they gathered there,
+led a life of elaborate entertainment which made Nohant as famous as
+another Trianon. Meanwhile, there was going on a duel, the weapons of
+which were not pianos, but those invisible stilettos with which two
+women conduct a deadly feud, and politely tear each other's eyes out.
+George Sand was famous then beyond her present-day esteem, and she was
+a woman of vigour almost masculine and of a straightforwardness which
+was almost an affectation. She loved to go about in boots and blouse,
+and to ride bareback; she smoked cigars, and wrote at night. The
+Comtesse d'Agoult was eminently feminine. She would rather have spent
+one thousand francs on a gown than on anything else under heaven,
+except another gown. She had in her certain literary capabilities, not
+very marvellous, to be sure, but strong enough to provoke jealousy of
+the overpraised Sand, who had also, incidentally, been on very intimate
+terms with the present lover of the comtesse.
+
+Unhappy is the lover who tries to play peacemaker between two of his
+mistresses. This is enough to bring lava from any "extinguished
+volcano." Liszt, after almost vain efforts to avoid downright
+hair-pulling, decided to take the comtesse away from Nohant. He seems
+to have sided with her against Sand, and said afterward: "I did not
+care to expose myself to her insolence" (_sottise_). Chopin, however,
+took sides with Sand, and it is said that his heart chilled toward
+Liszt, who spoke bitterly of this estrangement, but on Chopin's death
+wrote a biographical sketch full of affection, and of an admiration
+better balanced than the over-flowery style which marks all of Liszt's
+writings.
+
+When the comtesse left Nohant, which Liszt never saw again, they went
+to Lyons, where he gave a concert for the benefit of the poor and
+working people. For what purposes of benevolence indeed did Liszt not
+give concerts! So great and so discriminating and so self-sacrificing
+was his charity, that it would almost plead atonement for a million
+such unconventionalities as his. He was not content to devote the
+proceeds of a single concert to some object of charity, but even gave
+money, and whole tours. Besides this concert at Lyons, and various
+others, one might mention the concert given for the flood sufferers at
+Pesth, and for the poor of his native town, and the concert tour by
+which he made Beethoven's monument possible at Bonn. Add to this the
+other sums he scattered to poor artists like Wagner from his meagre
+purse, and you will see one reason why women, who are more susceptible
+and perceptive of such qualities of character, were almost as helpless
+to resist Liszt's personality as he theirs. Even when he was "la petit
+Litz," he was found holding a street-cleaner's broom while he went to
+change a gold piece. And in his later years, his servant always filled
+two of his pockets with coin, one with copper, and one with silver; and
+the man used to say that when his master came home at night, the copper
+mine was usually untouched, but the silver deposit exhausted.
+
+It was in Lyons that the comtesse began her literary career, by a
+French translation of Schubert's "Erl-Koenig." She later obtained a
+considerable fame, as I have said, under the name of Daniel Stern. In
+the fall of 1837 Liszt and the comtesse went to Italy, where,
+especially at Bellaggio, they appear to have been genuinely happy. He
+seems to be describing himself when he writes:
+
+"Yes, my friend, when the ideal form of a woman floats before your
+dreaming soul, a woman whose heaven-born charms bear no allurement for
+the senses, but only wing the soul to devotion, and if you saw at her
+side a youth of sincere and faithful heart, weave these forms into a
+moving story of love, and give it the title, 'On the Shores of the Lake
+of Como.'"
+
+To us, who think of Liszt always by his last pictures, presenting him
+in his venerable age, it is hard to remember that at this time he was
+only twenty-seven. It was at this time, too, that he wrote the only
+composition he ever dedicated to the comtesse. In later years, it was
+almost the only composition of his that she would praise; it was a
+fantasia on the "Huguenots." The two lovers continued their wanderings
+through Italy and Austria, he giving concerts for the flood sufferers
+and the Beethoven monument and she travelling with him. While in Rome
+in 1839, the comtesse had borne him a son, Daniel, having previously
+given him two daughters,--Blandine, who married the French statesman,
+Emile Olivier, and died in 1862; and Cosinia, the famous wife of
+Wagner. All three children had been legitimised immediately upon their
+birth.
+
+Meanwhile, he and the comtesse were drifting apart, in spite of these
+three hostages to fortune. It is difficult to justify Liszt's desertion
+of the woman, except by slandering her memory, and it is difficult to
+save her memory without slandering his. The cause, as explained by
+Ramann, is, that she cherished an ambition to be Liszt's Muse, and made
+strong demands for the acceptance of her opinions upon his works. We
+can easily imagine the situation: A sensitive, fiery composer, who is
+incidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeous
+composition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to his
+companion. She, desirous of asserting her importance, listens to it
+with that frame of mind which makes it easy to criticise any work of
+art ever created--the desire to find fault. Benevolent and sincere as
+her intentions may have been, the criticisms of this shallow and
+musically untrained woman must have driven Liszt to desperation.
+
+It is a rare musician that can tolerate the faintest disapproval of
+even his poorest work, and frequently a critic lauds to the skies all
+of the composer's works except one or two, and then, in order to give
+his eulogy an appearance of discrimination and remove the taste of
+unadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or these
+two compositions are not the greatest works in existence--that unhappy
+critic is practically sure to find that his eulogy has been accepted as
+a mere matter of course, and his criticism bitterly resented as a
+gratuitous and unwarranted assault upon beautiful creations which his
+small skull and hickory-nut heart are unable to grasp.
+
+Liszt was never especially philosophical under fault-finding, and to
+have a fireside critic after him, nagging him day and night, must have
+soured all the milk of human kindness in his heart. The comtesse was
+stubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Liszt
+degenerated into violent brawls. The young French poet, De Rocheaud,
+"assisted," as the French say, at one of these combats between an
+hysterical woman and a thin-skinned musician. The poet believed in
+Muses and such things, using as an argument that beautiful fable which
+Dante built on the most slender foundations.
+
+"Think of Dante and Beatrice," exclaimed De Rocheaud. "Think how the
+divine poet listened to her words as to revelations. Be thou Dante, and
+she Beatrice." "Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!" cried Liszt, "the Dantes
+create the Beatrices. The genuine die when they are eighteen years
+old."
+
+At length the gipsy spirit moved Liszt to make a long continental tour
+to complete the depletions in his purse. He did not care to take the
+comtesse and the children with him. With much difficulty he persuaded
+her to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad terms
+with her own family. Later he succeeded in reconciling the comtesse
+with these, also. After the death of her mother, the comtesse inherited
+a fortune, but Liszt continued to support the children.
+
+The comtesse died of pleurisy in 1876, at the age of seventy-one. How
+long these sweethearts of musicians last!
+
+Thus closes the chapter of Liszt's affairs with the Comtesse d'Agoult.
+It had lasted, all things considered, surprisingly long--five years.
+
+A pleasant note of character was sounded by Liszt, which rings him to
+the difficult love affair of Robert Schumann. In one of his letters,
+Liszt tells how fond he had been of Schumann and Wieck and his daughter
+Clara. Then came the famous struggle between father and suitor for the
+possession of the girl. Liszt took Schumann's side, because he thought
+he was in the right; he even went so far as to break off all
+intercourse with Wieck--who took his revenge by publishing ferocious
+criticisms on Liszt's playing.
+
+In 1845 Liszt wrote a letter of calm, cool friendship to George Sand,
+his "Dear George." For years he roved Europe, flitting from ovation to
+ovation, from flirtation to flirtation. But he was drifting unwittingly
+toward the grand affair of his life. A woman--the woman--was waiting
+for him in Russia. Mr. Huneker says of Liszt and the Comtesse d'Agoult:
+"Every one knows that he was as so much dough in her hands." So, in a
+more than different way, we shall find him--who had slain his hecatomb
+of hearts--helpless in the power of his one great love. Again he is
+first compelling, then compelled.
+
+February 8, 1819, in Monasterzyka in Kiev, Carolyne von Ivanovska was
+born. She was the only daughter of a rich Polish nobleman. The parents
+soon separated, and the child's life was divided between them. The
+father brought her up, as La Mara tells, as if she were a boy. He made
+her the companion of his conversations late into the night; and, in
+order to make her the more congenial a comrade, he taught her to ride
+wild horses and smoke strong cigars. Then the other half of the year,
+she was the ward of her "beautiful, lovely, elegant" mother, who doted
+on society, and introduced her daughter to the capitals and the salons
+of Europe.
+
+So, says La Mara, "under constantly changing surroundings, now in the
+midst of the world, now in the deep solitude, Carolyne von Ivanovska
+lived her first years."
+
+When she was seventeen, her father bought her a husband, the son of the
+Field Marshal Fuerst Wittgenstein, and on May 7, 1836, she gave her hand
+to the Prince Nicolaus von Sayn-Wittgenstein, seven years her senior.
+He was at the time a cavalry captain in the Russian army, a handsome,
+but intellectually unimpressive man. To quote La Mara again: "From this
+marriage the Princess Carolyne gained only one happiness: the birth of
+a daughter, the Princess Marie, on whom she centred the glowing love of
+her heart."
+
+While the two fathers-in-law lived, the children-in-law were kept
+together; but the old men soon went their way. Then the young wife gave
+up attempting to endure the unhappiness of her home, and sought solace
+from her loneliness in the full blaze of literary and artistic society.
+In February, 1847, Franz Liszt floated in across her horizon, "_auf
+Fluegeln des Gesanges_." Of course, he gave a concert in Kiev for
+charity. Among the contributions, he received a one-hundred-rouble
+note--about $75. Liszt desired to thank the good-hearted one in
+person--Kismet!
+
+Even if the princess had not been beautiful, La Mara thinks she would
+have overwhelmed Liszt with "her wonderful eloquence and her
+unbelievable intellectuality." It was a case of congeniality at
+first sight. There were many meetings. The concert affected the
+princess deeply (when she died she bequeathed that programme to her
+daughter). The day after the concert, she heard a Pater Noster of his
+sung in the church. Liszt talked of his plans for compositions. He said
+he wished to express in music his impressions of Dante's "Divina
+Commedia," with a diorama of scenic effects. To fit out the diorama, it
+needed about $15,000.
+
+The princess, carried away with the idea, offered him the money from
+her own purse. The diorama was never built, but it required a great
+many conferences, and it seemed appropriate that Liszt should visit her
+at her estate, Woronince. He arrived on the tenth birthday of her
+little daughter, Marie. This was in February, the same month of their
+first meeting. But he could not stay many days, as his concert tour
+took him to Constantinople and elsewhere. But in the summer and again
+in the autumn they met, and they celebrated together his birthday and
+her saint's day.
+
+She there and then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marry
+him as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, and
+felt that she recognised her mission in the world--to follow and aid
+this maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was
+a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse
+d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the
+less, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after she
+had provided herself, by the sale of a portion of her dowry, with a
+sum, as La Mara says, of a million roubles--equal to about $750,000--a
+tidy little parcel for an eloping couple.
+
+For her husband and mother-in-law she left letters--it would seem that
+there must have been little else to leave--explaining that she would
+never return. At the same time she instituted divorce proceedings, and
+announced that she was asking the Church to grant her freedom. Being a
+Catholic, it was necessary for her to persuade the Pope himself to
+permit her to wed Liszt. In the meanwhile, her husband went to the Czar
+and loudly bewailed the loss of his daughter and all his money. The old
+story--"My daughter! Oh, my ducats! Oh, my daughter! Oh, my Christian
+ducats! Justice! the law! My ducats and my daughter!"
+
+The princess fled across the Russian border, just at the time of the
+Revolution of 1848. At the Austrian boundary Liszt's faithful valet met
+her; in Ratibor she found Liszt's friend, the Prince Lichnovski, who
+some months after fell a martyr to the revolution. He conducted her to
+Liszt. A few days later they visited the prince for two weeks at one of
+his castles. The troubles of the revolution and the barricaded streets
+drove them from the country to Weimar, where Liszt had been given the
+post of Kapellmeister.
+
+It was this third-rate town that became the birthplace of a new school
+of German opera, for years the hub of the musical universe. Here in
+Weimar the princess lived thirteen years. She placed herself under the
+protection of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, Maria Polovna, the sister of
+the Czar and a friend of her childhood. She chose the Altenburg chateau
+for her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hotel
+too remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the chateau. Here
+he spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelve
+Symphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his Hungarian
+Rhapsodies, and many other important works, including also literary
+compositions, he achieved here. The irritation he had felt at the
+superficial meddling, and domineering criticism of his would-be Muse,
+the Comtesse d'Agoult, was changed to such a communion as the old Roman
+king Numa enjoyed with his inspiring nymph, Egeria.
+
+During the princess' stay in Weimar, constant pressure was brought upon
+her to return to Russia to arrange a settlement of affairs. She feared
+returning to that great prison-land, which cannot be easily entered or
+left, lest they should forbid her return to Liszt. Even threats to
+declare her an exile and confiscate her goods, would not move her.
+Eventually the property she had inherited from her father was put in
+her daughter's name, by the Czar's order--an arrangement Liszt had long
+pleaded for in vain. The husband's feelings were mollified by the
+appropriation to him of the seventh part of her property, and the
+arrangement of a guardianship for the daughter.
+
+The prince, being a Protestant, now proceeded to get a divorce, which
+he obtained without difficulty. He speedily married a governess in the
+household of Prince Souvaroff. None the less, the struggles went on for
+the freedom of Princess Carolyne. In 1859 her daughter, Marie, was
+married to Prince Constantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst, aid-de-camp
+and later grand steward of the Austrian emperor. Now that the daughter
+was safely disposed of, the princess took active steps for her own
+freedom. She chose, as a pretext for the dissolution of her marriage,
+the statement that she had entered into it unwillingly at her father's
+behest. Her Polish relatives were shocked at the idea of divorce, and
+brought witnesses to prove that the first years of her marriage were
+peaceful and content. But in spite of this the divorce was granted in
+Russia, and the Pope gave it his sanction.
+
+The princess, however, was not satisfied with a merely technical
+success. She would consummate her marriage with Liszt in a blaze of
+glory and with all the blessings of religion upon it. In the spring of
+1860, she had gone to Rome to further her divorce proceedings. Liszt
+was to arrive and be married on his fiftieth birthday, the princess
+then being forty-two. All went merrily as a marriage bell. It is
+generally believed that Liszt's "Festklaenge" was written for this
+occasion as a splendid orchestral wedding festival of triumph.
+
+Accordingly, at the proper time, Liszt went to Rome--as he thought.
+Really, he was going to Canossa. The priest was bespoken, and the altar
+of the church of San Carlo al Corso decorated. On the very eve of the
+wedding, when Liszt was with the princess, they were startled to
+receive a messenger from the Pope, demanding a postponement of the
+marriage, and the delivery for review of the documents upon which the
+divorce had been granted. The papers were surrendered, and the
+disconsolate princess gave way to a superstitious resignation to fate.
+
+It seems that the amiable relatives of the princess, chancing to be in
+Rome and hearing of the wedding, determined to prevent it at all cost.
+Before the Pope they charged her with securing the divorce by perjury.
+The princess had friends at court, who could have procured the
+satisfactory conclusion of the matter. The Cardinal Hohenlohe offered
+his own chapel for the marriage. But the princess was as immovable in
+her new determination as she had been in her old.
+
+She had resisted for thirteen years the efforts of the Russian court to
+decoy her back to Russia. For the next fifteen years she resisted
+Liszt's ardent wooing to marriage. Even when, on the 10th of March,
+1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome
+considers sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in the
+Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society and
+Church politics. She turned her voracious intellect toward theology;
+and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes far
+more important than the petty ambitions of art.
+
+The woman with a mission had changed her mission. Knowing how powerful
+was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at
+home, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchly
+seductions.
+
+In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother to
+keep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the
+evening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to the
+candle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield.
+
+Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been a
+religion. By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders on
+the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been
+granted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege of
+shaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbe.
+
+There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty years
+before run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and in
+full regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The critic
+and dictionary-maker, Fetis, declared that the whole affair was simply
+an advertising scheme of Liszt's. But Liszt was taking himself
+seriously. The Pope had called him "My dear Palestrina," and he desired
+to reform church music as Palestrina had done.
+
+The fact that this ecclesiastical passion was brief, does not prove
+that it was not sincere; in Liszt's case it would rather prove its
+sincerity. And by corollary the fact that it was sincere, rather proved
+that it would be brief.
+
+The artistico-ecclesiastical life, or, as the German puts it so much
+more patly, "_das kloesterlich-kuenstlerische Leben_," began to wear upon
+him. For a time Liszt remained in Rome, taking a dwelling in the Via
+Felice; later, in June of the year 1863, he moved to the Oratorio of
+the Madonna del Rosario, where the Pope, Pius IX., visited him to hear
+his miraculous music. He saw the princess often, usually dining with
+her, and letters fluttered thickly between his home and hers in the
+Piazza di Spagna, and later in the Via del Babuino.
+
+Liszt was never a man for one of your gray existences. He was homesick
+for Weimar, and was a constant truant from Rome. But he had duties
+enough with his ambition as a composer and conductor, and his cloud of
+pupils whom he taught without price. To his excursions we owe four
+volumes of letters to the princess. The volumes average over four
+hundred pages each of smallish type. They are in French, and have been
+all published, the last volume appearing in 1902, under the editorship
+of La Mara. Also a publication of the princess' letters has been
+announced by her daughter, who wisely believes that in a matter which
+has become the gossip of the world, the best defence is the fullest
+possible presentation.
+
+In Liszt's letters there is not much of the grand style he had affected
+after his first elopement with De Laprunarede, though there is much
+that is hysterical:
+
+"How it is written above that you should be my Providence and my good
+angel here below! I incessantly have recourse to you with prayers,
+supplications, and benedictions."
+
+"My words flow always to you as my prayer mounts to God."
+
+"Since I must not have the bliss of seeing you again this evening, let
+me at least tell you that I will pray with you before I sleep. Our
+prayers are united as our souls." (Nov. 4, 1864)
+
+"Next to my hours in the church the sweetest and dearest are those I
+spend with you." (Feb. 18, 1869.)
+
+"My ancient errors have left me a residue of chagrin that preserves me
+from temptation. Be well assured that I tell you the truth and all the
+truth." (Nov. 10, 1870.)
+
+But to attempt a quotation from these letters would be like proffering
+a spoonful of brine, and saying, "Here is an idea of the ocean." The
+letters are full of minute details of their busy lives and of other
+notable people. There is much, of course, about music and travel, and a
+vast amount of religious ardour. There is also much expression of the
+utmost devotion and loneliness. Years of this life of reunion and
+separation went on.
+
+Writing to the princess on the 21st of June, 1872, he mentions Wagner,
+whose marriage to Cosima von Buelow (_nee_ Liszt) scandalised the world
+and alienated even Liszt. There are biographers who deny this, but in
+this letter to the princess, Liszt encloses Wagner's letter of most
+affectionate appeal for reconciliation, and with it his answer, giving
+his long-withheld blessing. Describing this reunion with Wagner, Liszt
+is moved to say to the princess:
+
+"God will pardon me for leaning to the side of mercy, imploring his and
+abandoning myself entirely to it. As for the world, I am not uneasy as
+to its interpretation of that page of what you call 'my biography.' The
+only chapter that I have ardently desired to add to it, is missing. May
+the good angels keep you, and bring me to you in September."
+
+Through many others of his letters rings this vain "_leit-motif_" like
+the wail of Tristan. But nothing could remove the spell the Church had
+cast upon the princess.
+
+She sank deeper and deeper into seclusion, and during the twenty-seven
+years she lived in Rome she left her home in the Via del Babuino only
+once for twenty-four hours. She grew more and more immersed in the
+Church and its affairs. Gregororius said she fairly "sputtered
+spirituality." She began to write, and certain of her essays were
+revised by Henri Lasserre, under the name, "Christian Life in Public,"
+and were widely read, being translated into English and Spanish. Her
+chief work was a twenty-four-volume study bearing the thrilling title,
+"Interior Causes of the Exterior Weakness of the Church." This
+ponderous affair she finished a few days before her death, with hand
+already swollen almost beyond the power of holding the pen.
+
+Here in Rome, as in Russia and at Weimar, where she was, there was a
+salon. But she grew wearier and wearier of life, and weaker and weaker,
+until she spent months and months in bed, and would rarely cross her
+door-sill. To the last she and Liszt were lovers, however remote. And
+his letters are rarely more than a few days apart. He continues to sign
+himself, even in the final year of his life, "Umilissimo sclavissimo."
+His last letter concerned the marriage of his granddaughter Daniela von
+Buelow to a man with the ominous sounding name of "Thode." Daniela was
+the daughter of Liszt's daughter, Cosima, by her first husband. The
+marriage took place at Wagner's home, "Wahnfried," in Bayreuth.
+
+It was appropriate that Liszt should spend his last years in the
+company of this Wagner, for whose success he had been the chief
+crusader, as for the success of how many another famous musician, and
+for the charitable comfort of how numberless a throng, and in what
+countless ways! It was doubly appropriate that his last appearance in
+public should be at the performance of "Tristan and Isolde"--that
+utmost expression of love that was fiery and lawless and yet worthy of
+the peace it yearned for and never found.
+
+Liszt died on the 31st of July, 1886. His will declared the princess to
+be his sole heir and executrix. She outlived him no long time. On the
+8th of March, 1887, she died of dropsy of the heart. She was buried in
+the German cemetery next to St. Peter's, in Rome. Her grave bore the
+legend:
+
+"Yonder is my hope." At her funeral they played the Requiem, Liszt had
+written for the death of the Emperor Maximilian. She had wished that
+this music should "sing her soul to rest."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+RICHARD WAGNER
+
+
+Surely, one would say, if love were ever to be the woof of any life, it
+must interweave the life of this man Wagner; for he gave to every whim
+and fervour of the passion an expression so nearly absolute that we are
+driven almost to say: Old as music is, and ancient as love songs are,
+music never truly gave full voice to desire in all its throbs until
+Richard Wagner created a new orchestra, a new libretto, a new music, a
+new harmony, and a new fabric of melody.
+
+"Tristan and Isolde" seems to be so nearly the last word in dramatised
+love that it seems also to be nearly the first word. From the
+Vorspiel's opening measures, gaunt and hungry with despair and longing,
+to the last measures of the Liebestod, sublime with resignation and
+divinely sad with the apotheosis of adoration, this opera sounds every
+note of the emotion of man for woman, and woman for man.
+
+Surely, you would say, the creator of this masterwork must have had a
+heart thrilled with mighty passion for womankind; surely he must have
+lived a life of strange devotion.
+
+But how often, how often we must warn ourselves against judging the
+creator from his creations, the artist from his art. In his letter to
+Liszt, announcing his intention to write this very opera, Wagner said:
+
+"As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a
+monument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginning
+to end that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head
+'Tristan and Isolde,' the simplest, but fullest, musical conception.
+With 'the black flag,' which waves at the end, I shall then cover
+myself--to die."
+
+The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spent
+his love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart.
+Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination is
+the Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I have
+shown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellent
+lovers, and there would be documents enough to prove Wagner another,
+but we know it for a fact that his one great passion was for his art.
+There is not recorded anywhere, I think, another such idolater of
+ideals as Richard Wagner. To his theory of the perfect marriage of
+music and poetry, he sacrificed everything,--his heart's blood, his
+sensitiveness to criticisms, his extraordinary fondness for luxuries,
+his sense of pride, and to these he added human sacrifice,--his wife,
+his friends, and any one who stood in his way. He made himself a
+pauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from every
+friend who could be hypnotised into supporting his creeds. As a result,
+after years of humiliation such as few men ever did, or ever cared to,
+endure, after a battle against the highest and the lowest intellects,
+he attained a point of glory which hardly another artist in the world's
+history ever reached. He reached such a pinnacle that critics were not
+lacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more important
+place in the State than Religion.
+
+Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the most
+beneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life as
+Wagner's. Both were eminently justified. He reaped a superb reward, but
+he earned every mite of it. When his days of power and of glory came,
+however, he spent them with another woman than the one who had gone
+through all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered,
+without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or his
+creeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of a
+German _Hausfrau_ to her _Mann_.
+
+Wagner was as plainly destined for war as any Richard the Third, born
+with hair and teeth. For he was born in the midst of the Napoleonic
+wars at Leipzig, in 1813, and the dead bodies on the battle-field were
+so many that they raised a pestilence, which carried off Wagner's
+father when the child was six months old; and also threatened the life
+of his elder brother and of the babe himself. His life was one long
+truceless war. He once said to Edouard Schure: "The only time I ever
+went to sea, I barely escaped shipwreck. Should I go to America, I am
+sure the Atlantic would receive me with a cyclone."
+
+Wagner's first love was his mother. In fact, Praeger, his Boswell,
+said: "I verily believe that he never loved any one else so deeply as
+his _liebes Muetterchen_." She must have been a woman of winning
+manners, for, though she had seven children, the oldest fourteen, she
+got another husband before her first one was a year in his grave; the
+second was an actor. Wagner was so fond of his mother that through his
+life he never could see a Christmas tree alight without tears.
+
+There were other loves that busied his heart. He was remarkably fond of
+animals, particularly of dogs. He suffered keenly when his parrot Papo
+died; he wrote his friend Uhlig: "Ah, if I could say to you what has
+died for me in this devoted creature! It matters nothing to me whether
+I am laughed at for this." His dog Peps died in his arms, and he wrote
+Praeger: "I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and
+sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years, who has walked
+and worked with me." One of Wagner's last plans was to write a book to
+be called "A History of My Dogs." Anecdotes galore there are of his
+humanity to dogs and cats and other members of our larger family.
+
+Wagner had also a famous passion for gorgeous colours; his music shows
+this. He liked fine stuffs peculiarly, and even in his pauperdom wore
+silk next to his skin. When fortune found him, he made a veritable
+rainbow of himself with his dressing-gowns, and even with many-coloured
+trousers. His stomach was not so fond of luxury, and he was not
+addicted to wine or beer, and for long periods drank neither at all. He
+injured his health by eating too fast, though this was not, as in
+Haendel's case, from gluttony, but from absent-minded interest in his
+work. Yet there is something strangely human and captivating in the
+story that, when he was eight years old, he traded off a volume of
+Schiller's poems for a cream puff.
+
+Wagner's career shows a curious growth away from his early ideas. He
+was at first an artistic disciple of Meyerbeer, and not only drew
+operatic inspirations from him, but was saved from starving by
+Meyerbeer's money and by his letters of introduction; later he came to
+abhor Meyerbeer's operas, and to despise the man himself and his ways.
+Wagner earned himself numberless powerful enemies by his fierce hatred
+for the Jewish race, and by his ferocious attack in an article called
+"Judaism in Music." Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and it
+was not his fault that he did not marry her. She lived in Leipzig, and
+was a friend of his sister. She had the highly racial name of Leah
+David, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes and
+hair of jet and her Oriental features. It has been remarked that all of
+Wagner's heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight.
+
+He began it. His first view of Leah plunged him into a frenzy. "Love
+me, love my dog," was an easy task for Wagner, and he was glad of the
+privilege of caressing Leah's poodle, and of mauling her piano. He
+never could fondle a piano without making it howl. Now Leah had a
+cousin, a Dutchman and a pianist. Wagner criticised his execution, and
+was invited to do better. The man hardly lived who played the piano
+worse than Wagner, and the result of the duel was a foregone defeat.
+The last chapter of this romance may be quoted from Praeger:
+
+
+"Wagner lost his temper. Stung in his tenderest feelings before the
+Hebrew maiden, with the headlong impetuosity of an unthinking youth, he
+replied in such violent, rude language, that a dead silence fell upon
+the guests. Then Wagner rushed out of the room, sought his cap, took
+leave of Iago, and vowed vengeance. He waited two days, upon which,
+having received no communication, he returned to the scene of the
+quarrel. To his indignation, he was refused admittance. The next
+morning he received a note in the handwriting of the young Jewess. He
+opened it feverishly. It was a death-blow. Fraulein Leah was shortly
+going to be married to the hated young Dutchman, Herr Meyers, and
+henceforth she and Richard were to be strangers. 'It was my first love
+sorrow, and I thought I should never forget it, but after all,' said
+Wagner, with his wonted audacity, 'I think I cared more for the dog
+than for the Jewess.'"
+
+Wagner entered the university at Leipzig and for a time went the pace of
+student dissipations; he has described them in his "Lebenserinnerungen."
+He took an early disgust, however, for these forms of amusement and was
+thereafter a man, whose chief vices were working and dreaming.
+
+One of his early creeds was free love; and though he gave up this
+theory, his works as a whole are by no means an argument for
+domesticity. In fact they are so devout a pleading for the superiority
+of passion over all other inspirations, that it is astounding to hear
+Wagnerians occasionally complain of modern Italian operas as
+immoral--as if any librettos could be immoral in comparison with the
+Nibelungen Cycle.
+
+Wagner's first libretto, "The Wedding" (Die Hochzeit), horrified his
+sister so, that he destroyed it at her request. His third, "Das
+Liebesverbot," was based on Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," with
+the slight distinction that where Shakespeare's play is a preachment
+for virtue, Wagner himself said that his libretto was "the bold
+glorification of unchecked sensuality." Years afterward, admirers of
+his put the work in rehearsal, but gave it up as too licentious. This
+apostle of unrestrained amours found himself most prosaically married
+and involved in the most commonplace struggle for daily bread, when he
+was only twenty-three.
+
+In 1833, at the age of twenty, Wagner had taken up music
+professionally, and got a position as chorus-master. In 1834, he became
+musical director at the theatre in Magdeburg. The company, made up
+principally of young enthusiasts, who worked day and night, rehearsed
+Wagner's opera, "Das Liebesverbot." The first night there was a crowded
+house, but the troupe went all to pieces. The next night was to be
+Wagner's benefit. Fifteen minutes before the curtain rose, he found the
+audience consisted of his landlady, her husband, and one Polish Jew. A
+free fight broke out behind the scenes; the prima donna's husband smote
+the second tenor, her lover, and every one joined in; even that small
+audience was dismissed. In this company _die erste Liebhaberin_ was
+Wilhelmine Planer, one of twelve children of a poor spindle-maker. When
+the Magdeburg company went to pieces, Wagner went to Leipzig and
+offered the opera to a manager, whose daughter was the chief singer.
+The manager said that he could not permit his daughter to appear in
+such a work. Eventually, Wagner drifted to Koenigsberg, where he became
+director of the theatre, and where Wilhelmine had found a position. The
+two had become engaged in Magdeburg, and they were married at
+Koenigsberg, on November 24, 1836.
+
+The theatre soon followed the example of that at Magdeburg and went
+into bankruptcy. During the honeymoon year, Wagner had composed only
+one work, an overture, based on "Rule Britannia." At that time "The Old
+Oaken Bucket" had not been written. He then drifted to Riga, where he
+became music-director and his wife a singer. Now his relentless
+ambition seized him and he determined to consecrate the rest of his
+life to glory. His wife found herself consecrated to poverty and the
+fanatic ideals of a husband, to whom starvation was only a detail in
+the scheme of his life,--a scheme and a life for which she had neither
+inclination nor understanding.
+
+Wilhelmine, or Minna, as she was called, is described as pretty by some
+and as of a "pleasing appearance," by others. The painter Pecht called
+her very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul.
+Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understood
+her husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reaching
+ideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career by
+anything. Wagner himself seems to have been genuinely fond of her,
+though never, perhaps, deeply in love with her. He called her an
+"excellent housewife," who lovingly and faithfully shared much sorrow
+and little joy with him.
+
+The young couple lived at Riga in an expensive suburb, whence it was
+said they could reach the theatre only by means of a cab, though
+Glasenapp denies this story. Minna brought to her husband not a penny
+of dowry, and he brought to her a number of debts, and a hopeless lack
+of economy. The first year he tried to get an advance of salary, and
+offered to do anything, "except bootblacking and water-carrying, which
+latter my chest could not endure at present." Then he decided that fame
+and fortune awaited him, as they usually do, just over the horizon. The
+only trouble with the horizon, as with to-morrow and the
+will-o'-the-wisp, is that it is always just ahead.
+
+When the Wagners applied for a passport, to leave Riga, they did so in
+the face of certain suits for debt. They were told that they could have
+the passport as soon as they showed receipts for their bills. That was
+too ridiculous a condition to consider, so Minna disguised as a peasant
+woman, and a friendly lumberman took her across the border as his wife.
+The friends of Wagner took up a purse for him, and by elaborate
+manoeuvres got him across the Russian border in disguise. He reached
+the seaport of Pillau, found his wife and his dog there, and set sail
+in a small boat.
+
+Thus he embarked for the future, "with a wife, an opera and a half, a
+small purse, and a terribly large and terribly voracious Newfoundland
+dog." The composer, his wife, and the dog were all three outrageously
+seasick. They arrived finally after violent storms in London, where the
+chief event was the loss of the dog. When he came back, the three
+decided that Paris offered a better chance, so thither they went.
+Meyerbeer befriended them with letters of introduction and much
+encouragement, on the receipt of which the cautious couple diluted
+their few remaining pence in champagne.
+
+Wagner began to write songs, which he offered to sell for prices
+ranging from $2.50 to $4.00; he asked the publisher obligingly to grant
+him the latter sum, "as life in Paris is enormously expensive"!
+
+Wagner was so poor that about the only thing he could afford to keep
+was a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abject
+poverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used to
+come into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by
+1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner's
+door-step. He wrote in his diary that he had invited a sick and
+starving German workman to breakfast, and his wife informed him that
+there was to be no breakfast, as the last pennies were gone.
+
+In one of his moments of desperation, he brought himself to the depth
+of asking Minna to pawn some of her jewelry. She told him that she had
+long ago pawned it all. She faced their distress like a heroine. Wagner
+used to weep when he told of her self-denial, and the cheerfulness with
+which she, the pretty actress of former days, cooked what meals there
+were to cook, and scrubbed what clothes there were to scrub. For
+diversion, when they had no money for theatres and the opera, the
+genius and his wife and the dog could always take a walk on the
+boulevard.
+
+Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he tried
+for a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was not
+found good enough for even that. His long sea voyage had given him an
+idea for an opera, "The Flying Dutchman." He was driven to sell his
+libretto for a hundred dollars to another composer.
+
+It would not do to follow Wagner's artistic progress in this place;
+that is an epic in itself. Finally, however, he managed to get his
+"Rienzi" written and accepted in Dresden. He scraped up money enough to
+go back to his Fatherland, and to take his wife to the baths at
+Teplitz, her health having broken under the strain of poverty. It is at
+this period that he closed an autobiographic sketch, with these words:
+"In Paris I had no prospects for years to come, so in the spring of
+1842 I left there. For the first time, with tears in my eyes, I saw the
+Rhine; poor artist that I was, I swore eternal allegiance to my German
+Fatherland."
+
+But his German Fatherland seems to have sworn everything except
+allegiance at him. From this moment he emerged into fame, or rather
+into notoriety; he thrust his head through the curtain of obscurity, as
+if he were a negro at a country fair, and with remarkable enthusiasm
+the whole critical fraternity proceeded to hurl every conceivable
+missile at him. It was well for him that his skull was hard.
+
+"Rienzi" made an immediate success. But he was in his thirtieth year
+before even this unwelcome success was achieved. It is typical of the
+indomitable greatness of the man that even thus late in life, and after
+all his trials, he could put away from him success of such a sort, and
+turn back into the wilderness of exile and ignominy for years, until he
+could find the milk and honey land of art, which only his own
+magnificent fanaticism and the unsurpassed friendship of one man,
+Liszt, inspired him with the hope of reaching.
+
+To the woman, Minna Planer, who had cooked his meals, washed his
+clothes, and darned his socks, this refusal of prosperity was a final
+blow of disenchantment. She had understood him little enough before,
+but now she lost track of him altogether. Her feelings were those of
+Psyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a mania
+for flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, he
+now disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought to
+embrace his soul, she clasped thin air.
+
+As for Wagner's heroism for his art, has there ever been anything like
+it? Some of his operas he did not see performed for years and years. He
+saw hardly the hope of winning his crusade this side the grave of
+martyrdom. That he believed in presentiments will be understood in his
+powerful feeling throughout the composition of "Tannhauser," that
+sudden death would prevent his finishing it. The world knows the value
+of these presentiments. Mendelssohn, too, in his letters tells of
+receiving on one occasion a letter which he feared to open, so strong
+was his feeling that it contained disastrous news. When at length he
+found courage to rip the envelope, the news was of the best. If, by
+chance, either of these presentiments had proved true, who would have
+been satisfied with the explanation of mere coincidence? The value,
+however, of Wagner's presentiment lies in the fact that, in spite of
+his despairful misgivings, he persevered in his ideals, and, if there
+has been never so great a triumph granted a musician, it is perhaps
+largely because no other musician so relentlessly worshipped his
+artistic ideals or sacrificed to them with such Druidic ruthlessness.
+
+Carl Maria von Weber paid great heed to his wife's artistic advice, and
+called her his "gallery." But there are wives and wives, and however
+deeply our humanity may sympathise with poor Minna Planer, our love for
+evolution can only rejoice that she was not permitted to tie her
+husband down to the narrow-souled ideals of the good-hearted, stupid
+little housewife she was. Wagner understood her far better than she
+understood him. He sympathised with her even in her resistance to his
+career. To the last it made him indignant to hear her spoken of
+slightingly.
+
+Wagner's appeals for money to his friends, who supported him in his
+moneyless art, are constantly mingled with tender allusions to Minna.
+When he would borrow Liszt's last penny, he usually wanted a large part
+of it for Minna. I do not find him convicted of ever using rough
+language to her. She was not so patient. Wagner's friend, Roeckel,
+wrote to Praeger in reference to the agony Wagner suffered from the
+gibes of criticism:
+
+
+"I keep it always from him; Minna is not capable of withholding either
+praise or blame from him, although I have tried hard to prove to her
+that it deeply affects her husband, whose health is none of the
+strongest."
+
+When he was implicated in the revolution of 1849, and was forced to
+flee for his life, he escaped in the disguise of a coachman, and
+finally, with Liszt's ever-ready aid, reached Zurich. As soon as he
+found himself there, he borrowed further money from Liszt, to send for
+Minna, who had remained behind and "suffered a thousand disagreeable
+things."
+
+Wagner had been supporting her parents, and he borrowed sixty-two
+thalers more to help them. When Minna did not come immediately, Wagner
+wrote an anxious letter of inquiry to a friend.
+
+Surely, there can be nothing tenderer than his allusion to her in
+another letter to Liszt:
+
+"As soon as I have my wife I shall go to work again joyfully. Restore
+me to my art! You shall see that I am attached to no home, but I cling
+to this poor, good, faithful woman, for whom I have provided little but
+grief, who is serious, solicitous, and without expectation, and who
+nevertheless feels eternally chained to this unruly devil that I am.
+Restore her to me! Thus will you do me all the good that you could ever
+wish me; and see, for this I shall be grateful to you! yes,
+grateful!... See that she is made happy and can soon return to me!
+which, alas! in our sweet nineteenth-century language, means, send her
+as much money as you possibly can! Yes, that is the kind of a man I am!
+I can beg, I could steal, to make my wife happy, if only for a short
+time. You dear, good Liszt! do see what you can do! Help me! Help me,
+dear Liszt!"
+
+At last she came, and he wrote Heine a letter of rejoicing. But once
+with him, she began again her opposition to his high-flying theories.
+She wanted him to write a popular French opera for Paris. She was
+humiliated at his borrowing for his self-support, and could not see
+much glory in his creed: "He who helps me only helps my art through me,
+and the sacred cause for which I am fighting." He seemed more than
+afraid of her opinion, and wrote to Uhlig:
+
+"She is really somewhat hectoring in this matter, and I shall no doubt
+have a hard tussle with her practical sense if I tell her bluntly that
+I do not wish to write an opera for Paris. True, she would shake her
+head and accept that decision, too, were it not so closely related to
+our means of subsistence; there lies the critical knot, which it will
+be painful to cut. Already my wife is ashamed of our presence in
+Zurich, and thinks we ought to make everybody believe that we are in
+Paris."
+
+At last, she nagged him into her theory, although he fairly loathed
+writing a pot-boiler, and considered it the purest dishonesty. He went
+to Paris, but returned, having been able to accomplish nothing. On his
+return, he wrote in his "A Communication to My Friends," that a new
+hope sprung up within him. His friend Liszt was then directing the
+opera at Weimar.
+
+
+"At the close of my last Paris sojourn, when I was ill, unhappy, and in
+despair, my eye fell on the score of my 'Lohengrin,' which I had almost
+forgotten. A pitiful feeling overcame me that these tones would never
+resound from the deathly pale paper; two words I wrote to Liszt, the
+answer to which was nothing else than the information that, as far as
+the resources of the Weimar Opera permitted, the most elaborate
+preparations were being made for the production of 'Lohengrin.'"
+
+It was in "Lohengrin" that he first put in play his theory of the
+marriage of poetry and music, his idea being their complete devotion,
+with poetry as the master of the situation. He believed in independent
+melodies no more than in strong-minded wives. He lived this artistic
+theory in his own domestic relations, and it was not his fault that
+Minna, his melody, found it impossible to live in the light upper air
+of his poetry. He was so discouraged, however, by this time, by finding
+no encouragement at home, and a frenzy of hostility from the
+critics,--a frenzy almost incredible at this late day, in spite of the
+monumental evidences of it,--that for six years, after the completion
+of "Lohengrin," he wrote no music at all.
+
+He felt that he must first prepare the soil of battle with the critics
+in their own element--ink-slinging. On this fact Mr. Finck comments as
+follows:
+
+"Five years,--nay, six years, six of the best years of his life,
+immediately following the completion of 'Lohengrin,'--the greatest
+dramatic composer the world has ever seen did not write a note! Do you
+realise what that means? It means that the world lost two or three
+immortal operas, which he might have, and probably would have, written
+in these six years had not an unsympathetic world forced him into the
+role of an aggressive reformer and revolutionist."
+
+He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as a
+result of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism. Then he
+took up the Nibelungen idea, planning to devote three years to the
+work; "little dreaming that it would keep him with interruptions for
+the next twenty-three years." For the accomplishment of this vast
+monument he asked only a humble place to work. He wrote Uhlig:
+
+"I want a small house, with meadow and a little garden! To work with
+zest and joy,--but not for the present generation.... Rest! rest! rest!
+Country! country! a cow, a goat, etc. Then--health--happiness--hope!
+Else, everything lost. I care no more."
+
+He found all in Zuerich, where he and his wife rowed about the lake, and
+accumulated friends. He found special sympathy in the friendship of
+Frau Elise Wille, a novelist. Perhaps she was more than a friend, for
+one of his letters to her is superscribed "Precious."
+
+But all the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, and
+was occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, for
+he was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the world
+of music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify. He compared himself
+to Beethoven:
+
+"Strange that my fate should be like Beethoven's! he could not hear his
+music because he was deaf.... I cannot hear mine because I am more than
+deaf, because I do not live in my time at all, because I move among you
+as one who is dead.... Oh, that I should not arise from my bed
+to-morrow, awake no more to this loathsome life!"
+
+Financial troubles and the discouragement of his wife were still among
+the most faithful torments. His letters to Liszt are abundant with
+alternations of artistic ecstasy and material misery. It is worth
+recording that, "my wife has not scolded me once, although yesterday I
+had the spleen badly enough." To add to his misery, Minna became
+addicted to opium. In 1858 he wrote Liszt:
+
+"My wife will return in a fortnight, after having finished her cure,
+which will have lasted three months. My anxiety about her was terrible,
+and for two months I had to expect the news of her death from day to
+day. Her health was ruined, especially by the immoderate use of opium,
+taken nominally as a remedy for sleeplessness. Latterly the cure she
+uses has proved highly beneficial; the great weakness and want of
+appetite have disappeared, and the recovery of the chief functions (she
+used to perspire continually) and a certain abatement of her incessant
+excitement, have become noticeable. The great enlargement of her heart
+will be bearable to her if only she keeps perfectly calm and avoids all
+excitement to her dying day. A thing of this kind can never be got rid
+of entirely. Thus I have to undertake new duties, over which I must try
+to forget my own sufferings."
+
+The young pianist, Tausig, visits him, and he thinks of him as his son,
+saying, "My childless marriage is suddenly blest with an interesting
+phenomenon." But the young Tausig gives him unlimited cares, and
+"devours my biscuits, which my wife doles out grudgingly even to me."
+His allusions to Minna are always full of tender solicitude, though it
+is evident that she wears upon him. His temper, peculiarly violent at
+the slightest opposition, must have been a serious problem under her
+open disbelief in his genius and his creeds; and yet he thought he
+could not prosper without her.
+
+In 1860 he is again borrowing money for her, and writing to Liszt:
+
+"According to a letter; just received, D. thinks it necessary to refuse
+me the thousand francs I had asked for, and offers me thirty louis d'or
+instead. This puts me in an awkward position. On the one hand I am, as
+usual, greatly in want of money, and shall decidedly not be able to
+send my wife to Loden for a cure, unless I receive the subvention I had
+hoped for."
+
+These letters to Liszt make a remarkable literature. The two men were
+bound together by such artistic sympathy, and Liszt was so much a
+soldier for Wagner's crusade, and so ready with financial help, that he
+was more than friend or brother. It was, in Wagner's own phrase, "the
+gigantic perseverance of his friendship," that endeared him beyond
+words to the struggler. Even Minna seems to have been extremely fond of
+Liszt--what woman was not? It was to Liszt that she was indebted for
+rescue from downright starvation. More than this, Minna's parents were
+supported _via_ Liszt, and it somewhat beautifies the otherwise
+unbeautiful spectacle of Wagner's splendid mendicancy that, when he
+borrowed, it was as much for his wife and her parents as for himself.
+
+Liszt was not the only friend in need. There was Frau Julie Ritter, who
+sent him money from Dresden for several years.
+
+This brings us to a time of stress when Minna began to suffer from the
+fickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune. Wagner began to cast
+meaning glances over the garden wall. As Mr. Henderson says: "He was as
+inconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband. His misdoings
+amounted to more than peccadilloes."
+
+It was in Zuerich that Wagner gave Minna some other causes for
+uneasiness than his habit of being late at meals. Hans Belart, in his
+"Wagner in Zuerich," refers to Wagner's flirtation with Emilie Heim, the
+wife of a conductor, who lived so near the Wagners that their
+kitchen-gardens adjoined. Emilie was a beautiful blonde with a
+beautiful voice, and she and Wagner were wont to sing duets together,
+as he wrote them; and she was the soloist in a concert he gave. How
+much cause Minna may have had for jealousy, we can hardly know, but it
+seems certain that she felt she had a sufficiency, and that she made so
+much ado about it that Wagner found it advisable to move. In later
+years he and Emilie met again. Wagner gave her the pet name of
+"Sieglinde," and told her that she should illumine his Walhalla as
+Freia, the eternal, blue-eyed, gold-haired goddess of spring. According
+to Belart, Minna was the inspiration for Wotan's virtuous but nagging
+wife Fricka!
+
+Frau Wille was another torment to Minna, but Frau Wesendonck was more.
+Belart even implies that Minna grew so jealous of the Wesendonck that
+she poured out her woes to a dancing-master named Riese, who revered
+Meyerbeer. When Minna, who was at least, says Mr. Finck, as well
+advanced as the eminent critics of the time, failed to understand the
+music of "The Walkuere," when indeed she called it "immoral amorous
+asininity,"--an opinion for which perhaps the duets with Frau Heim were
+partly responsible,--Wagner used to slam on his hat and go for a walk,
+while Minna would seek Herr Riese.
+
+The affair with the Frau Wesendonck is something of mystery, that is,
+if Wagner's word is good for anything. She died in 1902, and at her
+death Mr. Huneker summed up her affair with Wagner as follows:
+
+"Mathilde Wesendonck is dead. Who was she? Well, she was Isolde when
+Wagner was Tristan down on the beautiful shores of Zurich in the years
+of 1858 and 1859. When he was in sore straits and had not where to lay
+his head, he went to Zuerich, and Mr. Wesendonck rented to him for next
+to nothing a little chalet. There he dreamed out the second and third
+acts of 'Tristan und Isolde,' and succeeded in deeply interesting Mrs.
+Wesendonck in them. There had already been trouble between him and his
+patient first wife, Minna, because of his attentions to this woman, and
+in 1856 the Wagners were on the point of a separation. Richard wrote to
+his friend Praeger in London: 'The devil is loose. I shall leave Zuerich
+at once and come to you in Paris,' But this time the trouble was
+smoothed over.
+
+"In the summer of 1859 the attachment of Wagner and Mrs. Wesendonck had
+reached such a stage that Wesendonck practically kicked the great
+composer out of his paradise. In later years, when questioned about it,
+Wesendonck admitted that he had forced Wagner to go. In 1865 Wagner
+wrote to the injured husband:
+
+"'The incident that separated me from you about six years ago should be
+evaded; it has upset me and my life enough that you recognise me no
+longer and that I esteem myself less and less. All this suffering
+should have earned your forgiveness, and it would have been beautiful
+and noble to have forgiven me; but it is useless to demand the
+impossible, and I was in the wrong.'
+
+"It is thoroughly characteristic of Wagner to regard his sufferings as
+so much more important than those of the husband whom he wronged.
+Wagner always thought well of himself. But poor Isolde is dead at last.
+She must have been very old and very sorry for the past. Let the
+orchestra play the 'Liebestod.'"
+
+Judging from external evidences, there is reason enough to accept such
+a theory of the relations of Wagner and this sympathetic, beautiful
+woman. In fact, it stretches credulity to the bursting point to accept
+any other opinion. And yet, it is only fair to say that Wagner put a
+very different construction upon the friendship, and to confess that
+stranger things have happened in real life than the purely artistic
+wedlock, which Wagner claimed for the intimacy of the two. Mathilde was
+a poet, and Wagner set to music some of her verses, notably his
+beautiful "Traume." Besides, she was the inspiration of his Isolde, and
+she gave him the sympathy Minna denied.
+
+According to a recently published article in a German review, Wagner
+wrote a long letter to his sister Clara, explaining why Minna had left
+him, and making himself out to be as thoroughly misunderstood
+domestically as he had always been musically. It is a long letter, but
+quoteworthy, the italics being mine:
+
+"MY DEAR CLARA:--I promised you further information regarding the
+causes of the decisive step which you now see me taking. I communicate,
+therefore, what is necessary to enable you to contradict various pieces
+of gossip, to which indeed I am indifferent.
+
+"What for six years has kept and comforted me, and especially has
+strengthened me in remaining by Minna's side, in spite of the enormous
+differences in our characters and natures, is the love of that young
+lady who, at first and for a long time, timid, doubting, hesitating,
+and bashful, finally more determinately and surely grew closer to me.
+As there never could be any talk of a union between us, our profound
+affection took the sadly melancholy character which keeps aloof all
+that is common and base, and recognises its fount of happiness only in
+the welfare of the other. From the period of our first acquaintance she
+had displayed the most unwearied and most delicate care for me, and in
+the most courageous way had obtained from her husband everything that
+could lighten my life.
+
+"He could not, in presence of the undisguised frankness of his wife, do
+anything but soon fall into increasing jealousy. Her nobleness now
+consisted in this, that she kept her husband informed of the state of
+her heart and gradually led him to perfect renunciation of her. By what
+sacrifices and struggles this was attained can be easily guessed; what
+rendered her success possible, could only be the depth and sublimity of
+her affection, devoid of every selfish thought, which gave her the
+power to show it to her husband in such a light that he, when she
+finally threatened him with her death, had to abstain from her and had
+to prove his unshakable love for her only by supporting her in her
+cares for me. Finally, he had to retain the mother of his children, and
+for their sake--who invincibly separated us--he assumed his position of
+renunciation. Thus, while he was devoured by jealousy she again
+interested him for me so far that--as you know--_he often supported
+me_. Lastly, when it came to providing me with what I wanted--a house
+and garden--it was she who by the most unheard-of struggles induced him
+to buy a pretty little property near his own.
+
+"The most wonderful thing is, that I never had a suspicion of these
+struggles; her husband, out of love for her, had always to show himself
+friendly and unconcerned toward me. Not a dark look must he cast on me,
+not a hair ruffled; the heavens must arch over me, clear and cloudless,
+soft and smooth must be the path I trod. Such was the unheard-of result
+of the glorious love of the purest, noblest woman, and _this love,
+which always remained unspoken between us_, was compelled finally to
+reveal itself when I composed and gave her 'Tristan,' Then, for the
+first time her self-control failed, and she declared to me that now she
+must die.
+
+"Think, dear sister, what this love must have been to me after a life
+of toil and suffering, of excitement and sacrifice, such as mine had
+been. Yet we at once recognised that a union between us must never be
+thought of, so we resigned ourselves, renounced every selfish wish,
+suffered and endured--but loved each other.
+
+"My wife with true woman's instinct seemed to understand what was going
+on. She behaved indeed often in a jealous, scornful, contemptuous
+manner, yet she tolerated _our mode of life, which otherwise was no
+injury to morality_, but looked only to the possibility of knowing each
+other at the present moment. Consequently I assumed that Minna would be
+sensible and understand that she had nothing to fear really, that a
+union between us could not even be thought of, and that therefore
+forbearance on her side was the most desirable and the best. Now,
+however, I learn that I have perhaps deceived myself on this point;
+bits of gossip came to my ear; and she at last so far lost her senses
+that _she intercepted a letter from me_ and--opened it. This letter, if
+she had been in a position to understand it, would really have soothed
+her in the most desirable way, for our resignation was its theme.
+
+"She dwelt only on the confidential expressions and lost the sense. In
+a rage she came to me and compelled me therefore to declare quietly and
+decisively how matters stood; namely, that she had brought trouble on
+herself by opening such a letter, and that if she could not restrain
+herself, we must part. On this point we agreed; I calm, she passionate.
+Another day I was sorry for her. I went to her and said: 'Minna, you
+are very sick. Compose yourself and let us once more talk about the
+matter.' We concluded with the idea of a Cure for her; she seemed to
+quiet herself, and the day of her departure for the Cure was
+approaching; previously, however, she would speak to Frau Wesendonck I
+firmly forbade her to do so. All my efforts were to make Minna
+gradually acquainted with the character of my relations to Frau
+Wesendonck, in order to convince her that she had no need to fear about
+the continuance of our marriage, and that, therefore, she should behave
+herself sensibly, thoughtfully, and generously; reject any foolish
+revenge and every kind of spying. Ultimately she promised this. Yet she
+could not be quiet. She went behind my back and--without comprehending
+it herself--insulted the gentle lady most grossly. She said to her:
+'Were I like ordinary women, I would go with this letter to your
+husband!' And thus _Frau Wesendonck, who was conscious of never having
+any secrets from her husband_--a thing which a woman like Minna could
+not understand--had nothing to do but at once to inform her husband of
+this scene and its cause.
+
+"Here, then, was an attack, in a rough and vulgar manner, an attack on
+_the delicacy and purity of our relations_, and in many ways a change
+was necessary. I succeeded only after some time in making it clear to
+Frau Wesendonck that, for a nature like that of my wife, relations of
+such elevation and unselfishness as those existing between us could
+never be made intelligible, for I was struck by _her serious, deep
+reproach that I had omitted this, while she had always made her husband
+her confidant_. Whoever can comprehend what I have suffered since (it
+was then the middle of April) must also comprehend in what state of
+mind I am at last, since I must acknowledge that the uninterrupted
+endeavours to continue our disturbed relations were absolutely
+fruitless. I tended Minna at the Cure for three months with the utmost
+care, and in order to quiet her, I, during this period, broke off all
+intercourse with our neighbours; in my anxiety for her health I tried
+everything in my power to bring her to reason and to hold views
+befitting herself and her age. All in vain! She persisted in the most
+trivial remarks, she said she was an injured woman, and she had
+scarcely been quieted, before the old rage broke out again. Since Minna
+returned a month ago, some conclusion had finally to be reached. The
+close proximity of the two women was for the future impossible, for
+Frau Wesendonck could not forget that her highest sacrifices and
+tenderest consideration for me had been met on my side, through my
+wife, so rudely and insultingly. _People, too, had begun to talk_.
+Enough; the most unheard-of scenes and tormentings of me never ceased,
+and out of regard for the one and the other, I was forced finally to
+decide to give up the charming asylum which such tender love had
+prepared for me.
+
+"Now I needed quiet and perfect composure, for what I have to surmount
+is great. Minna is unable to understand what an unhappy married life we
+have led; she imagines the past to have been quite different from what
+it was, and if I found consolation, distraction, and forgetfulness in
+my art, she verily believes I had no need of them. Enough. I have come
+to this resolution with myself: I can no longer bear this everlasting
+squabbling and distrustful temper if I have to fulfil my life's task
+courageously. Whoever has observed me sufficiently must wonder at my
+patience, kindness, even weakness, and if I am condemned by superficial
+judges I am quite indifferent to them. But never had Minna such an
+opportunity to show herself more worthy of _the dignity (wuerde) of
+being my wife_, than now, when it is necessary for me to keep what is
+highest and dearest. It lay in her hands to show whether she really
+loved me. But what such genuine love is, she never once conceived, and
+her temper carried her away beyond everything.
+
+"Yet I excused her on account of her sickness, although this sickness
+would have taken another and milder character if she herself were other
+and milder. The many disagreeable blows of fortune which she
+experienced with me--which my inner genius (which unfortunately I could
+not impart) easily raised me above, rendered me full of regard for her;
+I wished to give her as little pain as possible, for I am very sorry
+for her. Only I feel myself constantly incapable of enduring it by her
+side; moreover, I can do her no good thereby. I shall become always
+unintelligible to her and an object of her suspicion. So--separation!
+But in all kindness and love, I do not desire _her disgrace_. I only
+wished that she herself in time would see that it is better if we do
+not see so much of each other. For the present I hold out to her the
+prospect of returning to Germany as soon as the amnesty is proclaimed;
+for this reason she will take with her all the furniture and things. I
+purpose to make no slips of the tongue and to let everything depend on
+my future resolutions. Do you therefore stick to it that _it is only a
+temporary separation_. What ever you can do to make her quiet and
+reasonable I beg you not to omit. For--as said above--she is
+unfortunate; _with a smaller man she would have been happier_. Join
+with me in pitying her. I will thank you from my heart for so doing,
+dear sister!
+
+"I shall wait here a bit in Geneva till I can go to Italy, where I
+think of passing the winter, presumably in Venice. Already I feel
+quickened by being alone and removed from all tormenting surroundings.
+It was no use talking of work. As soon as I feel myself in a temper to
+go on composing 'Tristan,' I shall regard myself as saved. In fact, I
+must do the best for myself; I ask nothing from the world but that it
+leave me in quiet for the works which one day will belong to it. So let
+it judge me gently! The contents of this letter, dear Clara, you can
+confidently use to give any explanations where they may be necessary.
+On the whole, however, naturally I would not like to have much said of
+the matter. Only very few people will understand what this is about, so
+one must know well the persons introduced here.
+
+"Now, farewell, dear sister. I thank you again from my heart for the
+secret question which, as you can see, I answer confidentially. Treat
+Minna with forbearance, but make her gradually understand how she now
+stands with me.
+
+"Your brother,
+
+"RICHARD WAGNER."
+
+This is Wagner's side of the affair, only recently made public. The
+translation is from the _Musical Courier._ Whatever is discarded, there
+remains enough to disprove Belart's statement that Otto Wesendonck only
+learned of the affair from informants outside, and, finding Wagner and
+Mathilde together, compelled Wagner to leave Zurich immediately.
+Besides, even Belart admits that Wesendonck and his wife continued to
+live together for the sake of the children, and that years after, when
+he had learned to understand, he renewed his acquaintance with Wagner.
+
+Amazing as this story is, both with regard to the strange things it
+asks us to believe of the man and the woman and the husband, it is
+certain that there was a pretty how-d'ye-do in Zurich. Minna became so
+jealous that she drove Wagner, usually so tender in his allusions to
+her, to use the expression of the ungallant Haydn, saying that, "she
+was making a hell out of the home." Her outbursts of temper were so
+violent, and her addiction to opium had become so great, that he began
+to fear for her death by heart disease, and finally for her sanity. He
+wrote of her to his friend Frau Ritter:
+
+"Her condition of mind became such a torment to herself and her
+surroundings, that a radical change of the situation had to be made,
+unless we were all willing to wear ourselves out unreasonably.... The
+state of her education, and her intellectual capacities, make it
+impossible for her to find in me and my endowments the consolation
+which she needed so much by way of compensation for the
+disagreeableness of our material situation. If this is the source of
+great anguish to me, it nevertheless makes me pity her with all my
+heart, and it is my most cordial wish that I may some day be able to
+afford her lasting consolation in her own way."
+
+In 1856 she had left him for a time, ostensibly to take a cure. In 1859
+there had been a short reunion, of which Wagner wrote again to Frau
+Ritter:
+
+"This period I have also chosen for a reunion with my poor wife. May
+Heaven grant that I shall always feel able to carry out patiently my
+firm and cordial determination of treating her in the most considerate
+manner. I confess that my relation to this poor woman, who had so many
+trials, and is now suffering so much, has always spurred me on to
+preserve and develop my moral powers. In all my relations to her I am
+guided only by the deepest pity with her condition, and I hope
+confidently that it will always arm me with the persistent patience
+with which I feel called upon not only to endure the consequences of
+her illness, but personally to allay them."
+
+Then he had gone to Venice to continue work on "Tristan," dreaming
+there in loneliness of his Isolde, the Wesendonck, whose husband has
+been well likened to King Mark. But Venice being within the sphere of
+Saxon influence, he was afraid to remain long, for fear of arrest. In
+1860 he was granted a partial amnesty, and went to Frankfort to meet
+his wife, who had been taking treatment near Wiesbaden. Minna went with
+him to Paris, and was there at the time of the violent riots, which put
+an end to "Tannhaeuser," and doubtless to Minna's hopes of settling in
+the Paris she was so fond of. She began again to vent her indignation
+that he would not write for the gallery, and the storm grew fiercer and
+fiercer. Wagner had written Liszt in 1861 with renewed hope and renewed
+tenderness:
+
+"For the present I spend all the good humour I can command on my wife.
+I flatter her and take care of her as if she were a bride in her
+honeymoon. My reward is that I see her thrive; her bad illness is
+visibly getting better. She is recovering and will, I hope, become a
+little rational in her old age. Just after I had received your 'Dante,'
+I wrote to her that we had now got out of Hell; I hope Purgatory will
+agree with her; in which case, we shall perhaps, after all, enjoy a
+little Paradise."
+
+But the hope was vain, and a friend of the family who wrote under the
+name of the "Idealistin" describes the--
+
+"almost daily trouble in the intercourse, increased by the fact that
+the absence of children deprived them of the last element of
+reconciliation. Nevertheless, Frau Wagner was a good woman, and in the
+eyes of the world decidedly the better half and the chief sufferer. I
+judged otherwise, and felt the deepest pity for Wagner, for whom love
+should have built the bridge by which he might have reached others,
+whereas now it was only making the bitter cup of his life bitterer. I
+was on good terms with Frau Wagner, who often poured her complaints
+into my ears, and I tried to console her, but of course in vain."
+
+And now Minna, whose housewifely meekness had endured the Wesendonck
+tempest and all the other multitudes of trials Wagner went through,
+found herself unable to endure his fidelity to his artistic ideals. The
+quarrels grew fiercer and fiercer, until finally she left Wagner for
+ever, and went back to her people in Dresden, where she spent the rest
+of her life.
+
+Wagner's immortal hope was not even yet dead; as late as 1863 he wrote
+to Praeger from St. Petersburg:
+
+"I would Minna were here with me; we might, in the excitement that now
+moves fast around me, grow again the quiescent pair of yore. The whole
+thing is annoying. I am not in good spirits: I move about freely, and
+see a number of people, but my misery is bitter."
+
+Minna herself seems to have toyed with the idea of reconciliation, for
+she wrote to Praeger, who told Wagner, and received the following
+bitter complaint:
+
+"And so she has written to you? Whose fault was it? How could she have
+expected I was to be shackled and fettered as any ordinary cold common
+mortal? My inspirations carried me into a sphere where she could not
+follow, and then the exuberance of my heated enthusiasm was met by a
+cold douche. But still there was no reason for the extreme step;
+everything might have been arranged between us, and it would have been
+better had it been so. Now there is a dark void, and my misery is
+deep."
+
+A year later, Wagner's regret is not yet dead, and he writes to Frau
+Wille:
+
+"Between me and my wife all might have turned out well! I had simply
+spoiled her dreadfully, and yielded to her in everything. She did not
+feel that I am a man who cannot live with wings tied down. What did she
+know of the divine right of passion, which I announce in the
+flame-death of the Walkuere who has fallen from the grace of the gods?
+With the death-sacrifice of love the Dusk of the Gods (Gotterdammerung)
+sets in."
+
+And again he bewails his loneliness to Praeger:
+
+"The commonest domestic details must now be done by me; the purchasing
+of kitchen utensils and such kindred matters am I driven to. Ah! poor
+Beethoven! now is it forcibly brought home to me what his discomforts
+were with his washing-book and engaging of housekeepers, etc., etc. I
+who have praised woman more than Frauenlob, have not one for my
+companion. The truth is, I have spoiled Minna; too much did I indulge
+her, too much did I yield to her; but it were better not to talk upon a
+subject which never ceases to vex me."
+
+Yet he was destined to know wedded happiness some years later. And he
+showed that he could make happy a woman who could understand him. As
+Mr. Finck comments:
+
+
+"The world is apt to side with the woman in a case like this,
+especially if her partner is of the _irritabile genus_, a man of
+genius. No doubt, Minna had much to endure, and deserves all our pity;
+but that her husband is not to blame in this matter, is shown by the
+extremely happy and contented life he led with his second wife, Cosima,
+the daughter of Liszt, who _did love_ and understand him."
+
+It is a proverb that the woman who marries a genius marries misery, but
+I think there are instances enough in this book to show that genius has
+nothing to do with the case. Wedded happiness is a result of the lucky
+meeting of two natures, one or both of which may be accidentally so
+constituted as to be happy in the other's society without undue
+restlessness. It would be just as easy to prove, by a multitude of
+instances, that plumbers or bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, merchants,
+or thieves make poor husbands as to prove the same of musicians,
+artists, poets, architects, or geniuses of any kind.
+
+The truth of the matter is always overlooked: the geniuses are revealed
+to the public in an intimacy non-historical characters are not
+subjected to. But if you will turn from reading the pages of history,
+biography, or memoirs, and take up any newspaper of the day, you will
+doubtless be astounded to find how small a percentage of the divorces,
+the murders, and other domestic scandals are to be blamed to the
+possession of genius, unless, as one might well, you recognise a
+special and separate genius for trouble.
+
+Patience conquers all things, if one lives long enough, and at length
+even Wagner's innumerable woes were solved by the appearance of a
+veritable _deus ex machina_ let down from heaven. But Wagner was over
+fifty when the tardy god arrived. It was in 1864 that he became the
+idol and the pet of the young king, Ludwig II. of Bavaria, who sent a
+courier ransacking Europe almost in vain for the fugitive, and, at last
+finding him, dumbfounded him with fairy promises, presented him with a
+villa, and treated him to a splendour few musicians have ever known,
+except perhaps Lully, and Farinelli, who became the vocal prime
+minister of the truly good king Ferdinand VI. of Spain. Wagner's
+relations with Ludwig were of a sort which Mr. Finck euphemises as
+"Grecian." This was seemingly not the only instance in his career; but
+it brought him furious enmity as soon as he had found friendship.
+
+Poor Minna never shared with Wagner his period of luxury. But it was of
+such magnificence that his envious foes accused him of aiming to
+dethrone religion from its throne, and substitute art as the Pope!
+Among the attacks made on Wagner at this time was the charge that,
+while he was lolling on a silken couch which had cost him $12,000, his
+neglected wife was starving to death in Dresden. Minna was honourable
+enough to answer this attack with an open letter to those German
+newspapers which, in 1866, outjaundiced that yellow journalism for the
+invention of which New America has been blamed.
+
+Minna wrote as follows:
+
+"The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for some
+time published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declare
+that I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficient
+for my maintenance. I take this opportunity with the more pleasure as
+it enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnies
+launched against my husband."
+
+A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heart
+disease. She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, without
+ever tasting their sweets. To say whether or not she deserved to taste
+the sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict upon
+one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. The
+marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who
+could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more to
+blame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a case of
+connubial astigmatism.
+
+While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young
+king, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbow
+furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made
+Joseph's coat mere negligee, was not altogether his own, but showed the
+unmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Buelow acted as a
+sort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother
+was the Comtesse d'Agoult, who wrote under the name of "Daniel Stern,"
+and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years. Cosima had married Hans
+von Buelow in 1857.
+
+Von Buelow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and
+by Wagner. In 1850, when Von Buelow was about twenty years old, Wagner
+and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced,
+begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, she
+opposed music as a career, but Von Buelow persisted, and became Liszt's
+pupil. Wagner was to Von Buelow a god. It was a pitiful practical joke
+that Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper's
+wife. But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense of
+good form.
+
+As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of Von
+Buelow's misfortunes, and saying: "Add to this a tragic marriage; a
+young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt's
+wonderful image, but of superior intellect." Wagner persuaded the king
+to make Von Buelow court pianist, and later court conductor. There are
+very pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Buelows and
+Wagner.
+
+Then Wagner's popularity with the king eventually raised such hostility
+that, at the king's request, he left the country to save his life. He
+was again an exile. Cosima, with her two children, went with him, and
+later Von Buelow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his living
+as a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne. There exists a
+letter from Wagner's cook, telling a friend of how the king came
+incognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descent
+of Cosima and her children. They had come to stay. At Triebschen, near
+Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Buelow family, and began to know
+contentment.
+
+The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to
+torment even the idolatrous Von Buelow. Riemann says: "Domestic
+misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Buelow left the
+city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth
+of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage were
+imperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desired
+divorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religious
+profession," to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who says
+that Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Liszt
+and Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics of
+which this is not the place to discuss."
+
+Von Buelow secured his divorce in the fall of 1869. He remarried, in
+1882, the actress, Marie Schanzer. Wagner and Cosima were married
+August 25, 1870. This was the twenty-fifth birthday of King Ludwig, and
+Glasenapp comments glowingly upon the meaning of the marriage:
+
+"To the artist, who in the first great rumblings of the war of 1870-71,
+greeted the dawn of a new era for his people, the same hour proved to
+be the beginning of a new chapter. On Thursday, the 25th of August,
+1870, in the Protestant Church of Lucerne, in the presence of two
+witnesses, one, the lifelong friend of the Wagner family, Hans Richter,
+the other, Miss M.v.M., the wedding of Richard Wagner to Cosima, the
+divorced wife of Hans von Buelow, was celebrated.
+
+"There is no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. None
+have ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higher
+impersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who had
+suffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciative
+neglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friend
+of her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement
+_(mit theilnahmvollster Sorge_), until she as well as her husband
+realised that she was the one chosen to heal the wounds which the
+artist had suffered in his restless wanderings and through numberless
+disappointments. The time had arrived when the hand of love prepared
+the last and never-to-be-lost home.
+
+"This knowledge gave the noble-minded woman the courage to sever the
+ties, which in early youth had tied her to one of our most eminent
+artists, and the best of men; to give up herself to her task, to
+consecrate her life to him, to be the helpmeet of the man to whom
+through friendship and the inner voice of her heart, and the knowledge
+of noble duty, she had already belonged. The world did not hesitate to
+malign this holiest act of fidelity. Only the small and the low are
+overlooked, the high and the great are ever the victims."
+
+Just two months before the marriage, Wagner had written to Frau Wille,
+who had invited him and his wife-to-be to visit her, an account of his
+feelings in the matter, which is beautiful enough and sincere enough to
+quote at some length:
+
+"Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shall
+present ourselves as man and wife. To get into this state, great
+patience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to be
+brought about until all manner of suffering. Since last I saw you in
+Munich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, has
+also become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I could
+well be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I 'could
+not be helped' was false! She knew that I could be helped, and she
+helped me: she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herself
+every condemnation. She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful and
+vigorous boy, whom I boldly call 'Siegfried': he is now growing,
+together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last has
+attained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which we
+had retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of the
+sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to
+you the mother of my son as my wedded wife. This will soon be the case,
+and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld."
+
+A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner's life
+is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed with
+great secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll," that most royal musical welcome
+that ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musical
+conspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima's
+birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house,
+and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter,
+Cosima's thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices,
+the child being then a year old. The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says,
+"is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love,
+paternal and conjugal."
+
+A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the
+Bayreuth dream--the building with hands of a material castle in Spain.
+Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own
+works, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa at
+Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret. For there he had
+been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and
+forethought of the devoted Cosima. His new villa at Bayreuth he called
+"Wahnfried," setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures,
+symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his
+final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first
+inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being
+the portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the role, and the latter
+being the child Siegfried Wagner. Beneath the frescoes he put the
+words: "Hier wo mein Waehnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus von
+mir benannt,"--which may be Englished: "Here, where my illusions
+respite found, 'Illusion-Respite' let this house by me be crowned."
+
+In this home, plain in its exterior, but full of richness within,
+Wagner lived at ease with his wife and her four children. Von Buelow,
+the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his first
+beliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship with
+the man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he had
+regretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though not
+for the same reasons. Once he broke forth in his dilemma: "If he were
+only some one that I could kill, he would have been dead before this."
+But he could not interfere with "the great cause," and even Liszt,
+after some estrangement, was reconciled to Wagner.
+
+Here Wagner's existence went tranquilly and busily on for twelve years,
+till he was at the threshold of his three-score and ten. And now the
+genius, whom we saw but lately juggling with starvation in the slums of
+Paris, we find a figure of world-wide fame, with an annual income of
+$25,000 and the ability to travel to Italy in a private car. But this
+luxury was his last, for his health was on the ebb. And though he took
+a suite of twenty-eight rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, with
+his wife, his own two children, Siegfried and Eva, aged twelve and
+fourteen years, Daniela and Isolde, Cosima's two children by her first
+husband, and two teachers, four servants, and many guests, this was but
+a splendid sarcophagus; for here Wagner had but less than half a year
+to live. Those who would know more of the daily comforts and suffering
+of this time, can read it in Perl's book, "Richard Wagner in Venedig."
+He suffered constantly more and more from heart trouble and other
+torments. One day his servant heard him calling, and, hastening to his
+side, found him on a divan writhing in agony; his last words were:
+"Call my wife and the doctor." Cosima flew to his aid, but could not
+hold back the inevitable. When the doctor came and told her that Wagner
+had finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed and
+fainted. For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to take
+any food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted from
+exhaustion.
+
+And now, the erstwhile exile, living on the pittances he could wheedle
+from his few disciples, died in the fame of the world. Three kings sent
+wreaths to his funeral, and the city of Venice twice asked for the
+privilege of giving him a final pageant. But Cosima strangely would
+have no ceremony at all, and no music. "She feared it would rend her
+heart in twain," says Mr. Finck, "so the procession moved along the
+canal in solemn silence, broken only by the tolling of the distant
+bell."
+
+The railroad station was guarded as for the funeral of a monarch. The
+express-train was not stopped at the border of the three countries
+through which it passed. When the coffin was taken to the grave in
+Bayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as so
+many of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart.
+
+As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unwearied
+in behalf of his glory. In her he had found that ideal of womankind
+which he had so much upheld: instant and dauntless obedience to the
+behest of the one great love. When he died he was even then at work
+upon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowed
+from his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women a
+right to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone.
+
+Once he had written: "Women are the music of life," and of his
+"Bruennhilde" he had said: "Never has woman been so glorified as in this
+poem." For the reward of this trust in womankind, he had also had the
+privilege of saying, "In the hearts of women it has always gone well
+with my art."
+
+And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blonde
+tresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with final
+sacrifice, and as a last tribute, she had sacrificed to bury with him.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+TSCHAIKOVSKI, THE WOMAN-DREADER
+
+
+Had his relations with music been as completely original as his
+relations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius of
+this man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German. He
+was the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believed
+in marriage and made three wives happy--in succession. The young
+Tschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and was
+twenty-three before he took up instrumentation.
+
+He was of a passionate nature, but his temper usually struck inward,
+and his friend Kashkin said that he "never began a quarrel or defended
+himself when attacked." That is not, I believe, a type to fascinate
+women for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered on
+morbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhaps
+fortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them ended
+as they did. And so he drifted--not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yet
+quite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointing
+woman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men. Among his friends was
+Nikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton.
+
+Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marriage, and, after two years of
+quarrels with his wife's relatives and doubtless with her, had forsworn
+the other sex. Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled all
+night; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation.
+Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a menage together for a time.
+Tschaikovski, however, had not learned that womankind was not his kind;
+so he flirted a little with the beautiful niece of one Tarnovski, for
+instance, and with an unknown at a masked ball. But he was chiefly
+music-mad and undermined his health by his overwork.
+
+Then in 1868, his father got after him to marry. As long before as
+1859, when he was nineteen, he had suffered from an unrequited love.
+Now at the age of twenty-eight he cared nothing for petticoats. He had
+written his sister a year ago that he was tired of life, and marriage
+did not tempt him; he was, said he, "too lazy to woo, too lazy to
+support a family, too lazy to endure the responsibility of a wife and
+children." But upon this ennui fell an electric spark--from the old
+storage-batteries, woman's eyes.
+
+There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Desiree Artot, who
+was then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearly
+beautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen of
+dramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and Peter
+Iljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary's
+lamb, followed her about.
+
+One day he wrote: "She is a charmer; we are friends." Then _tempo
+accelerate_; he copied music for her benefit performance; later he
+apologised for not writing his brother--he was all monopolised by the
+singer. So he went swirling into the current. He tried to keep away;
+they met by accident; she reproached him; he promised to call; then his
+inveterate timidity palsied him, till Anton Rubinstein had to drag him
+to her rooms by force.
+
+Eventually they became engaged. Just as in Weber's case, the composer
+demanded that the singer give up her career for his, and she and her
+mother objected. She did not want to be merely the wife of her husband;
+nor he, merely the husband of his wife. He appealed to his father, who
+wrote a nobly generous letter, pleading the woman's right to her own
+career: a very gospel of artistic equality.
+
+"You love her: she loves you: and that should settle it, if--Oh, this
+wretched if! The beloved Desiree must be altogether noble, since my son
+Peter has loved her. He has taste and talent, and would choose a wife
+of his own nature. The few years difference in age are of no moment. If
+your love is real and substantial, all else is nonsense. She would not
+want you to play the servant, and you could compose even if you
+travelled with her.
+
+"I lived with your mother for twenty-one years and all that time loved
+with the passion of youth, and respected and adored her as a saint. If
+your desired one has the character of your mother, whom you so
+resemble, there should be no talk of future coolness and doubt. You
+know well that artists have no home; they belong to the whole world.
+Why worry whether you live at Moscow or St. Petersburg? She should not
+leave the stage, nor should you abandon your career. True, our future
+is known only to God, but why should you foresee that you will be
+robbed of your career? Be her servant, but an independent servant. Do
+you truly love her and for all time? I know your character, my dear
+son, but alas, I do not know you, dear sweetheart; I know your
+beautiful soul and good heart through him. It might be well for you
+both to test your love; not by jealousy--God forbid!--but by time. Wait
+and ask each other, 'Do I really love him? Do I truly love her? Will he
+(or she) share with me the joys and sorrows of life unto the grave?'"
+
+Good father, good sage, gallant old man! But neither of the troubled
+lovers proved worthy of such golden philosophy. Desiree's travels took
+her away. Their parting must have been cold, for in January, 1869,
+Tschaikovski wrote his brother a letter, excitedly referring to the
+acceptance of his opera, and coldly hinting that his love affair would
+probably come to nothing. We remember how calmly Mozart once wrote of
+his operatic triumph and how passionately of his love.
+
+The same month a telegram informed Tschaikovski that his fiancee had
+very suddenly become engaged to a singer in her own troupe, the Spanish
+baritone, Padilla y Ramos, who was two years younger even than
+Tschaikovski. The singers were married at Sevres, September 15, 1869.
+
+Tschaikovski, on receiving the first news, seemed "more surprised than
+pained." He was still flirting desperately with grand opera. A year
+later he heard that Desiree was returning to sing at Moscow. He wrote
+pluckily:
+
+"She is coming here and I cannot avoid meeting her. The woman has cost
+me many a bitter hour, and yet I feel myself drawn toward her with such
+inexplicable sympathy, that I wait her coming with feverish
+impatience."
+
+At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who says
+he was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on her
+always, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears that
+streamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for seven
+years, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's office
+in the Conservatory; he was told to wait in the anteroom. After a time,
+a lady came out. "Tschaikovski leaped to his feet and turned white. The
+woman gave a little cry of alarm, and confusedly fumbled for the door.
+Finding it at last, she fled without speaking."
+
+In 1888 Tschaikovski went to Berlin. There Desiree was the idol of the
+court and public. They met now as friends. He and Edvard Grieg called
+at her house, and he wrote in his diary:
+
+"This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of my
+sojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are as
+irresistibly bewitching as ever."
+
+_Requiescat in pace_! She had taught him the pangs of disprised love,
+but she had escaped misery, and she seems to have lived happily ever
+afterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer. As
+for Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind--in worse
+kind--upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once.
+
+In the year 1875 Tschaikovski's nerves had gone to pieces from overwork
+and his mode of life. For months he was not allowed to write down a
+note. And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a cure
+for his ills. There followed that strange affair which was a riddle as
+late as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solution
+was then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to be
+opened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his own
+diary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed a
+great portion of it before his death in 1893. In 1902, however, his
+brother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and complete
+biography, which partially clears the riddle. This is what we learn
+from that:
+
+In 1875 Tschaikovski was a wreck. In 1876 he suddenly wrote his
+brother: "I have resolved to marry--the resolve is beyond recall;" and
+again: "The result of my thought is the firm resolve to marry with
+whomsoever it may be." His photograph at this time has a worn, hunted
+look, and he has become addicted to cold baths, of which his new plan
+was the coldest of all.
+
+In May, 1877, his friend Kashkin suspected him of being engaged. In
+July, Kashkin was amazed to find him married. Just once Kashkin saw the
+couple together. Then Tschaikovski grew very distant to his friends and
+eccentric in his manner; a little later he fled to Moscow, and in a few
+days came word that he was dangerously ill. Later there were threats of
+suicide, but it was all a mystery.
+
+We know now that late in June, 1877, Tschaikovski announced definitely
+to his brother Anatol, that he was engaged to, and would soon marry,
+Antonina Ivanovna Miljukova. He said little of the girl, except that
+she was not very young and was very poor; she was free from scandal,
+however, and she loved him deeply. He hoped the marriage would be
+happy; and he asked the father's blessing. The father's letter showed
+an enthusiasm the son's lacked.
+
+Before Anatol could reach Moscow, Tschaikovski was Benedick--July 6,
+1877, he being then within three years of forty. The curious details of
+the courtship are told by the composer himself in a letter to Frau von
+Meek, a wealthy idolatress of his genius, with whom he had one of those
+affairs called Platonic, and of whom more later. To her he wrote:
+
+"One day I received a letter from a girl I had known for some time. I
+learned from it that she loved me. The letter was couched in such warm,
+frank terms that I concluded to answer it--something I have always
+avoided doing in previous cases of this sort. Without rehearsing the
+details of this correspondence I must mention that the result of the
+letters was that I followed the wish of my future wife and called to
+see her. Why did I do this? Now it seems to me that some invisible
+power forced me to it. At our meeting I assured her that in return for
+her love I could give her nothing but sympathy and gratitude. But later
+I reproached myself for the carelessness of my action. If I did not
+love her and did not wish to incite her further love for me, why did I
+call on her and how could all this end? By the following letter I saw
+that I had gone too far; that if I now turned from her suddenly it
+would make her unhappy and possibly drive her to a tragic fate.
+
+"So the weighty alternative posed itself: Either I got my liberty at
+the cost of a life, or I married. The latter was my only possible
+choice. So one evening I went to see her, declared openly that I could
+not love her, but that I would always be her grateful friend; I
+described minutely my character, the irritability, the unevenness of my
+temperament, my diffidence--finally my financial condition. Then I
+asked her if she wished to be my wife. Naturally her answer was 'yes.'
+The fearful agonies which I have experienced since that night are not
+to be expressed in words. This is only natural. To live for
+thirty-seven years in congenital antipathy to marriage, and then
+suddenly to be made a bridegroom through the sheer force of
+circumstances, without being in the least charmed by the bride--that is
+something horrible! In order to get back my senses and accustom myself
+to the thought of the future, I decided to go to the country for a
+month. This I did. I console myself with the thought that no one can
+escape his fate, and my meeting with that girl was fatality. My
+conscience is clear. If I marry without loving, it is because
+circumstances have forced this upon me. I cannot do otherwise.
+Carelessly I surrendered at her first confession of love. I should not
+have answered her at all."
+
+Under such auspices, the marriage took place. It is hard to say whom we
+should pity the more, husband or wife; and which we should count the
+more insane. That which is technically called a honeymoon lasted a week
+in this case. In ten days the husband is writing his fellow-Platonist,
+Frau von Meck, that he is uncertain about his happiness, but positive
+that he cannot compose. He and his wife pay a little visit to her
+mother; then they return "home," only to part. The unwilling bridegroom
+must be alone to recuperate. He writes Frau von Meck:
+
+"I leave in an hour. A few days more of this, and I swear I should have
+gone mad."
+
+In ten days he is strong enough to think of his wife again; in his
+solitude he begins work on what he mentions to Frau von Meck as "our
+symphony."
+
+He goes hunting in the woods, while the lonely bride hunts furniture
+for their home. By the middle of September, Tschaikovski is brave
+enough to return; he is pleased to find a home of his own, with all
+clean and neat. For a few days, even a robbery by servants, and the
+necessity his wife is under to go to the police-court, do not disturb
+him, or, at least, so he writes. But hardly more than a week can he
+stand his wife's society. He determines to kill himself, and stands up
+to his chin in the ice-cold river, afraid to drown himself, and yet
+hoping to catch a fatal pneumonia.
+
+His old frenzy seized him; insanity beckoned to him again. Alleging
+that a telegram had called him to St. Petersburg, he fled from his
+home, September 24, 1877.
+
+His brother met him at the St. Petersburg station, and hardly knew him.
+Taken to the nearest hotel, he went into hysterics, and was unconscious
+for forty-eight hours. The doctor said travel was necessary. The wife
+was provided for, and, leaving her forever, Tschaikovski fled to
+foreign countries barely in time to save his sanity. To the last he
+absolved the poor wretched woman of any slightest blame for his
+behaviour. His brother, in a biography, completely frank up to this
+point, now grows reticent, except to release the wife of all blame. So
+you must satisfy your curiosity by imagining some abnormal state of
+mind, which you will regard cynically or pityingly, as your manner of
+mind impels.
+
+The last touch to this tragedy was the sordid tinge of poverty. The
+wretched man alone in Switzerland was without means. Now Frau von Meck,
+with great secrecy, offered him an annual income of 6,000 rubles--about
+$4,500--purely in payment, she said, of the delight his music had given
+her. He accepted a gift so graciously and gracefully made. Tschaikovski
+was thenceforth an institution fully endowed.
+
+Modeste says that without this relief from anxiety Tschaikovski would
+have died. He wrote to the benefactress: "Let every note from my pen
+henceforth be dedicated to you."
+
+This was not the first time she had aided him. A strange, notable
+woman, she; a true phenomenon--or a phenomena, as one would be tempted
+to say who had even less Greek than I or Shakespeare, if such an one
+exist.
+
+Nadeschda Filaretovna, being poor, had married a poor railway engineer;
+they lived carefully, and raised eleven children. A railroad investment
+brought them a sudden wealth, soaring into the millions. In 1876 she
+lost her husband, but all of the children and the riches remained to
+keep her busy. She lived in almost complete seclusion.
+
+Tschaikovski's strenuous music penetrated her solitude and her heart.
+The stories of his small income touched her. She planned schemes to
+fill his purse, ordering arrangements of music and paying for them
+munificently. Yet she would not receive the composer personally, and
+when they met in public they did not speak or exchange a glance.
+
+In Du Maurier's perfect romance, Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess of
+Towers lived their hearts out in a dream-world. So Frau von Meck and
+Peter Iljitsch lived theirs in a letter-world.
+
+In 1877, before his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, she
+had offered to pay him well for a composition. He had said he could not
+conscientiously degrade his art for a price. So she paid his debts to
+the extent of three thousand roubles. This he could accept. These
+theories of art!
+
+It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild scheme of his
+marriage. It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless letters
+not yet publishable entire. Their life apart seems to have been
+continued to the end. During his last years, after a period of travel,
+he lived almost a hermit, dying in 1893, only three years over fifty.
+Whatever posterity may do with his music, he has left a life-story of
+strange perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy and
+hysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall in
+strange contrast with the temper of his music, which at its gentlest is
+masculinely gentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of the
+barbaric.
+
+I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless to
+keep silence in her love, and winning her bridegroom only to find, like
+Elsa, that her Lohengrin could not give her his Heart. And almost more
+harrowing is the vision of the composer, with womanish generosity,
+giving himself to the one that asked, and finding that love cannot
+follow the mere placing of a wedding-ring. So he stands in the icy
+river, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair in
+his own mad heart. It is Abelard and Heloise without the love of
+Abelard or the joy Heloise knew for a while at least.
+
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST
+
+
+  "From this did Paganini comb the fierce
+   Electric sparks, or to tenuity
+   Pull forth the inmost wailing of the wire?--
+   No catgut could swoon out so much of soul!"
+
+   --_Browning, "Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_."
+
+
+Many people have based their idea of the moral status of musicians and
+the moral effects of music upon a certain work by Tolstoi, who is no
+more eminent as a crusader in the fields of real life and real fiction,
+than he is incompetent as a critic of art. His novel, "The Kreutzer
+Sonata," is musically a hopeless fallacy. And Tolstoi's claim, that
+Beethoven must have written it under the inspiration of a too amorous
+mood, is pretty well answered by the fact that Beethoven, who was so
+liberal of his dedications to women, whenever they had inspired him,
+dedicated this work to two different violinists, both men.
+
+It is said that he first inscribed it to George Augustus Polgreen
+Bridgetower, a mulatto violinist, who, being lucky enough to be born in
+Europe, was not ostracised from paleface society. This can be only too
+well proved by the fact that Beethoven--who spelled the man's name
+"Brischdower"--after dedicating the sonata to him, found that the
+Africo-European had been his successful rival in one of those
+numberless flirtations of his, in which Beethoven always came out
+second. Indignant at his dusky rival's success, Beethoven erased his
+name from the title-page and substituted that of Rudolphe Kreutzer. The
+curious thing about this great piece of music, known to fame as the
+"Kreutzer Sonata," is that Beethoven had never seen Kreutzer, and that
+Kreutzer never played the sonata.
+
+I have not discovered whether or no Kreutzer was married; he probably
+was, for he died insane. A German composer, Conradin Kreutzer, with
+whom he might be confused, had a daughter whom he trained as a singer.
+As for Bridgetower, he married and had a daughter.
+
+But speaking of violinists, what would become of them if there never
+had been makers of violins, especially such luthiers as the Amati? Yet
+all I know of the Amati is that they formed a dynasty, and doubtless
+fell in love on occasion, though how, or when, I do not learn.
+
+The great Antonio Stradivari, however, began his love-making like David
+Copperfield, by falling in love with a woman ten years his senior, when
+he was only seventeen. She was Francesca Capra; her husband had been
+assassinated three years before, leaving her a child. The boy
+Stradivari and the widow were married July 4, 1667, and on December
+23d, a daughter named Julia was born. Francesca bore Stradivari six
+children. Her second child was a son named after her, Francesco; but
+Francesco died in infancy, and the name, in spite of the omen, was
+given to the next son, who followed his father's profession, but never
+married. The next child was a daughter, who died a spinster; the next
+was a son, who became a priest, and the next a son, who died a
+bachelor. The failure of all their children to marry does not indicate
+a particularly happy home-life, but this is mere speculation. We only
+know that Stradivari's first wife died, after a marriage lasting
+thirty-four years.
+
+A year and a half later Stradivari married a girl fifteen years his
+junior; Antonia Zambelli was, indeed, born the very year Francesca's
+first husband had been assassinated. Antonia bore Stradivari five
+children: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in
+infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and
+lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child
+of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one
+who handed down the family name. How happy Antonia was with her
+husband, we do not know. "As rich as Stradivari," became a proverb. She
+died at the age of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less than
+one year; this may have been because he was overcome with grief; or
+because he was already nearly ninety years of age.
+
+In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas
+Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named
+Pietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipated
+genius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, "del Gesu." Of him
+there is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, he
+won over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and
+implements with which he made the so-called "prison fiddles," of whose
+curious shape Charles Reade said: "Such is the force of genius that I
+believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they
+are so full of chic." As Giuseppe called himself "Gesu," so there was
+a member of the famous violin-making family of Guadagnini who was
+called "John the Baptist," and of whom I only know that he belonged to
+a large family.
+
+TARTINI
+
+But to turn from these unsatisfactory violin makers to violin players:
+I know nothing of the great Corelli's personal history; his pupil
+Geminiani is said to have led a life full of romance. Philidor spent
+his years chiefly in the intrigues of chess-playing. The great Tartini,
+whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his famous
+Sonata del Diavolo, had a checkerboard career. As a young university
+student he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and married
+her in secret. Like Romeo, his romance brought him separation and
+exile. His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe. He
+fled from Padua, and took up the violin to save him from starvation.
+"And some have greatness thrust upon them."
+
+One day, as he was playing at the monastery where he was in retirement,
+the wind blew aside a curtain just as a fellow townsman was passing. He
+took home the news, and by this time resentment had died out so much,
+that Tartini and his young wife were permitted to resume their romance.
+They went to Venice. Later his ambition for the violin caused them to
+separate, but finally they returned to Padua to live. Burney says that
+his wife was "of the Xantippe sort." His love story somewhat suggests
+that of Desmarets, who also had to flee for his life in consequence of
+a secret marriage, and who was twenty-two years appeasing the wrath of
+the aristocratic family.
+
+A contemporary violinist and composer was Benedetto Marcello, whose
+melodramatic affair has been described by Crowest and may be quoted
+here, with full permission to believe as much of it as you please.
+
+"Marcello was the victim of a hopeless passion for a beautiful lady,
+Leonora Manfrotti, and on the occasion of her marriage to Paolo
+Seranzo, a Venetian of high rank, Marcello was unwise enough to send
+her a rose and a billet-doux containing words more complimentary to the
+lady's beauty than to her taste in the choice of a husband. This
+epistle, coming to Seranzo's notice, caused him so violent a fit of
+jealousy that he tormented his young wife by supervision and suspicion
+to such an extent that she actually sank under his ill-treatment and
+died. Her body was laid out in state in the church 'Dei Frari,' and
+here Marcello seeing it, learned the ill effects of his rash passion.
+He fell into a state of melancholy madness, and at last, having with
+the craft and ingenuity of a madman succeeded in stealing the body of
+his love, he conveyed it to a ruined crypt in one of the neighbouring
+islands, which, bearing the reputation of being haunted, was seldom
+visited by any one. Here, watched only by a faithful old nurse, he sat
+day and night watching the dead form of Leonora, singing and playing to
+it as though by the force of music he would recall her to life.
+
+"Long ere this, Venice, and indeed Italy, was full of excitement at the
+composition of some unknown musician (no other than Marcello). Among
+other admirers of this music was Eliade, twin sister of Leonora, and
+resembling her so closely that even friends could scarcely distinguish
+her. Eliade had even been effected to insensibility by the strain of
+the unknown, and hearing one day a gondola pass, in which a voice was
+singing one of the songs which was an especial favourite, in such a way
+as she had never heard it sung before, she followed and traced the
+gondola to the deserted island. A visit to this island resulted in a
+meeting with the old nurse, and a few explanations. The ingenious woman
+contrived to take advantage of a short absence of Marcello, and,
+substituting the living sister for the dead one, awaited the mad
+musician. This time, however, his usual invocation was not in vain: as
+he called on Leonora to awake, a living image arose from the coffin,
+and Marcello, restored to happiness by the delusion, was quite content
+with the exchange when he found out that, although the lady was not
+Leonora, she was a devoted admirer of his musical skill, and professed
+an 'affinity of soul' for him, in which her sister had been wanting.
+Their happiness was short-lived, for Marcello died a few years after
+their marriage."
+
+This has a faint resemblance to the romance of "The Quick or the Dead,"
+with a certain vice-versation.
+
+LOUIS SPOHR
+
+To come back to earth: The eminent violinist, Spohr, and his pupil,
+Francis Eck, made an extensive concert-tour together, in which they
+rivalled each other almost more in their rapid series of amorous
+adventures, than in their more legitimate concert work. While in St.
+Petersburg, Eck met the daughter of one of the members of the Imperial
+Orchestra, and began a flirtation, which she took so seriously that her
+father gave him the alternative of matrimony or Siberia. After some
+hesitation he chose matrimony. Had he foreseen the sequel, he would
+doubtless have greatly preferred Siberia, for his wife was a virago,
+and collaborated with his ill-health to guide him to the madhouse.
+
+Spohr may have profited by Eck's experience, when some years later he
+met the beautiful and brilliant Dorette Scheidler; she was eighteen
+years old, and played that most becoming instrument, the harp, as well
+as the piano and violin. They appeared together in a court concert, and
+on the way to her home, in the carriage, he made the not particularly
+original proposition: "Shall we thus play together for life?" She, with
+hardly more originality, wept her consent upon his shoulder. They were
+married without delay, and began a series of very successful
+concert-tours. They seem to have been happy together for twenty-six
+years, and they reared a large family. Her death in 1832 broke down his
+health for several months. But two years later, he then being fifty, he
+married the skilful pianist, Marianne Pfeiffer, over twenty years his
+junior. They also made a brilliant concert-tour together.
+
+PAGANINI, THE INFERNAL
+
+Paganini, as everybody knows, sold his soul to the devil for fame. He
+made the best of the gamble, as he usually did when he gambled; for the
+poor, innocent Lucifer got only a fourth-rate soul, while Paganini
+secured a fame that will not be surpassed while fiddlers fiddle.
+
+Gambling was not Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that he
+will always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for his
+skill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was only
+seventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held him
+prisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technical
+fame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical virtue
+in being kidnapped thus? The fair Bolognese kept Paganini captive for
+three years in this retreat, where he fed upon scenery, love, and
+music. For her sake he practised her favourite instrument, the guitar,
+and worked miracles with it as with the violin. At the age of twenty,
+Paganini broke the spell and resumed his gipsying, persuading the
+public, and not without reason, that he was aided by magic. He lived
+for many years with the singer, Antonia Bianchi, who bore him a son,
+Achille, whom he legitimised. Antonia was devotion itself, until she
+was gradually driven to a jealousy that was almost fiendish, and led to
+a separation. Paganini himself tells this story:
+
+"Antonia was constantly tormented by the most fearful jealousy. One
+day, she happened to be behind my chair when I was writing some lines
+in the album of a great pianist, and, when she read the few amiable
+words I had composed in honour of the artist, to whom the book
+belonged, she tore it from my hands, demolished it on the spot. So
+fearful was her rage, she would have assassinated me."
+
+When he died, he left his son a fortune of $400,000. Surely this sum
+alone proves the justice of the popular belief that he had sold himself
+to the devil, and, knowing it, none can doubt the story Liszt quotes in
+one of his essays concerning the G string of Paganini's violin: "It was
+the intestine of his wife, whom he had killed with his own hands."
+There is no record of the secret marriage, but there is record enough
+of the superhuman power of the melodies he drew from that string.
+
+DE BERIOT, SONTAG, AND MALIBRAN
+
+Among the chief contemporaries of Paganini was De Beriot. When he was
+not quite thirty, he found himself in Paris at the time of the deadly
+vocal feud between Sontag and Malibran. The rivalry of the two singers
+was ended by the influence of music. One night, singing together the
+duet from "Semiramide," each was so overcome at the beauty of the
+other's voice and art, that they embraced and became friends.
+
+De Beriot had an equally strange experience with the two women. He fell
+madly in love with Sontag, slight, blue-eyed and blonde as she was, and
+then only twenty-five. But De Beriot paid his court in vain, because at
+this time Sontag was engaged to the young diplomat, Count Rossi; as it
+would have hurt his influence to be engaged to the child of strolling
+players, the engagement was kept secret, until the count could persuade
+the King of Prussia to grant her a patent of nobility. When they were
+married, she gave up the stage, and travelled from court to court with
+her husband, singing only for charity. As her brother said: "Rossi made
+my sister happy, in the best sense of the word. To the day of their
+death they loved each other as on their wedding-day."
+
+But political troubles ruined the count's fortunes, and it seemed
+necessary for the countess to return to the stage. Now again the court
+wished to separate diplomacy from the drama played on the open stage.
+Rossi was told that he might retain his ambassadorship if he would
+formally separate from his wife, at least until she could again leave
+the stage. But Rossi believed that it was his turn to make a sacrifice,
+and could not bear a separation; so he resigned, and travelled with his
+wife. They came to America, and in Mexico the cholera ended her
+beautiful life at the age of forty-nine.
+
+It was into this ideal romance that De Beriot had wandered unwittingly
+in 1830. It was fortunate that he could not prevail against the noble
+Count Rossi, even though his failure caused him pain. It almost cost
+him his health, and he suffered so obviously that his friends were
+alarmed. Among those endeavouring to console him was Madame Malibran,
+whom people, who like exclusive superlatives, have been pleased to
+select as the greatest singer in the history of music. Like Sontag, she
+was the child of stage people, and, indeed, had made her first
+appearance at the age of five.
+
+In 1826 she, and that wonderful assembly, the Garcia family, had found
+themselves in New York, where an old French merchant, supposed to be
+rich, married her. It is certain that Malibran married the old merchant
+for his money--a thing so common that one cannot stop to express
+indignation. The horrible thing is that, as it turned out, the old man
+had also an eye to the weather. He had hoped to stave off bankruptcy by
+marrying the prosperous singer. He succeeded in getting neither her
+money nor her heart, for she left him within a year and returned to
+Paris.
+
+Here, then, we find her again, with her rival Sontag out of the way,
+and Sontag's lover to console. She furnished him with contrast enough,
+for she differed from Sontag in these respects, that she was only
+twenty-two, she was a contralto, dark and Spanish, and was known to be
+married. Her consolation of De Beriot was complete. They lived together
+the rest of her life, touring in concerts occasionally, with enormous
+financial success, she creating an immortal name as an operatic singer,
+and he as a violinist. In 1831 they built a palatial home in the
+suburbs of Brussels, where they spent the time when they were not
+travelling. She bore him a son and a daughter, the latter dying in
+infancy.
+
+Meanwhile, she was trying to divorce her husband, who was now living in
+Paris. The freedom was a long while coming, and it was 1836 before the
+Gordian knot was cut. On March 26th of the same year, she and De Beriot
+were married. The very next month, in London, she was thrown from a
+horse and more severely injured than she realised. As soon as she
+could, she resumed her concerts; brain-fever attacked her. She died at
+the age of twenty-eight.
+
+Two hours after her death, De Beriot hastened away to make sure of the
+possession of the wealth this young woman had already heaped up. He did
+not wait for the funeral, and all Europe was scandalised. But it is
+claimed in his defence that he had been devoted to her, and during her
+illness had never left her side, and that his mercenary haste was due
+to his fear that a moment's delay might give Monsieur Malibran a chance
+to claim her property, and thus rob the child she had borne De Beriot
+of his inheritance. Those who know the peculiar attitude the French law
+takes toward the property of a wife, can understand the difficulty of
+the situation.
+
+In any case, the child was saved from poverty or from the necessity of
+professionalism in later life, though he was a distinguished pianist.
+As for De Beriot, after the success of his mission he returned to the
+country home and remained in seclusion, not playing again in public for
+one year. Two years later he married Fraeulein Huber, the daughter of a
+Vienna magistrate and the adopted ward of a prince. De Beriot travelled
+little after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died in
+blindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years of
+his life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
+
+
+"Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little
+ones."--HENRY T. FINCK, "_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_."
+
+
+There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love
+stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott,
+but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and
+creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such
+other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.
+
+In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little
+or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be
+purely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and the
+chief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom to
+neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of
+immortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose
+_magnum opus_ was some romance that still makes the heart-strings
+tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, there
+are two old crusading troubadours.
+
+CERTAIN TROUBADOURS
+
+You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms
+of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of
+Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty.
+He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those
+days. Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot know
+to-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipation
+was more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at last
+Tripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying. The countess had
+heard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to be
+permitted to clasp his hand and to hear him gasp, with his last breath:
+"Having seen thee, I die satisfied."
+
+There is a distressing ambiguity about the troubadour's last words.
+
+And so there was the other troubadour, the Chatelain Regnault de Coucy.
+His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the Third
+Crusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally wounded
+before those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he begged
+that his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who had
+owned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to the
+husband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husband
+chose a most mediaeval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadour
+cooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her what
+sweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herself
+to death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem de
+Cabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat.
+
+There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancient
+biographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, and
+was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed
+everything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be."
+But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by telling
+how poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husband
+took him, jailed him, and pierced his linnet tongue.
+
+MARTIN LUTHER
+
+If we cannot omit these troubadours, how can we overlook Martin Luther,
+whose musical attainments the skeptics are wont to minimise, as others
+deny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation: "Who loves not wine,
+women, and song remains a fool his whole life long." No one claims that
+Luther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trained
+musicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he played
+upon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as a
+composer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domestic
+romance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married a
+runaway nun."
+
+When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, or
+were abducted, from a convent. One of them, Catherina von Bora, found
+an asylum in Luther's own home. After looking about for a good husband
+for her, at the end of a year he married her himself. She was then
+twenty-six years old. The married life of the jovial reformer was
+happy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged to
+take in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that had
+brought her marriage,--a runaway.
+
+BRITISHERS
+
+The earlier English composers have not been without their heart
+interests. We have already pried into Purcell's romance. Old John Bull,
+at the age of forty-four, could give up his professorship to marry
+"Elizabeth Walker, of the Strand, maiden, being about twenty-four,
+daughter of ---- Walker, citizen of London, deceased, she attending
+upon the Right Honourable Lady Marchioness of Winchester." Four years
+later, he became the chief of the prince's music, with the splendid
+salary of L40 a year.
+
+Sir William Sterndale loved a Mary Wood, and wrote an overture called
+"Marie des Bois," and after this atrocious pun, married the poor girl
+in 1844, and they lived happily ever after, or at least for thirty
+years after.
+
+Those other oldsters, Blow, Byrd, and Playford, were married men; and
+Arne, the composer of "Rule Britannia," married, at the age of
+twenty-six, Cecilia Young, an eminent singer in Haendel's company, and
+the daughter of an organist. She continued to sing, and he to write
+music for her. At the age of sixty-eight he died, singing a hallelujah.
+Whether she echoed his sentiments we are not told, but she lived
+seventeen years longer.
+
+Balfe married a German singer, Rosen, who afterward sang in some of his
+operas.
+
+One of the few other British composers who attained distinction was
+John Field, who, like Balfe, was Dublin-born. He was the inventor of
+Chopin's Nocturne. The story is told that he had a pupil from whom he
+could not collect his bills. Finally in sheer despair he proposed, and,
+when she accepted him, found his only revenge in telling everybody he
+met that he had only married her to escape the necessity of giving her
+further lessons, which she would never pay for. The story seems to be,
+however, neither true nor well-found, for in spite of his awkwardness
+and the hard life he led at the hands of his teacher Clementi, who made
+him serve as a combined salesman of pianos and a concert virtuoso, he
+was said to have married a Russian lady of rank and wealth. She was
+really a Frenchwoman named Charpentier whom he had met in Moscow. She
+was a professional pianist, and bore him a son; then she left him, and
+changed her name, as did even the son. He was one of the many composers
+who should have been kept in a cage.
+
+CLEMENTI, HUMMEL, STEIBELT
+
+As for Clementi, he was chiefly notable for his miserly qualities, by
+which he rendered miserable three successive wives.
+
+The pianist Hummel, whom I always place with Clementi in a sort of
+musical Dunciad, is credited with having won a courtship duel against
+Beethoven, in which Clementi as the winner--or was it the
+loser?--married the woman.
+
+Another rival of Beethoven's in public esteem was Daniel Steibelt,
+forgotten as a virtuoso, but not to be forgotten for his splendid vices
+which range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish. He married a
+young and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since we
+are told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. He
+succeeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, who
+began life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother was
+a milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easy
+divorce law issued by the French Revolutionists.
+
+BOIELDIEU AND GRETRY
+
+The father married again, but with what success, I do not know. But at
+any rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray,
+a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible. It was said that he was
+so wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that his
+departure was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season. None
+the less, though the flight may not have been surreptitious, it may
+well be credited to domestic misery. He buried himself in Russia for
+eight years, which may be placed in music's column of loss. Returning
+to Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success that
+followed. Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman who
+bore him a son in 1816. Her tenderness to the composer is highly
+praised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in
+1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also a
+worthy composer. At the age of fifty-four, consumption and the
+bankruptcy of the Opera Comique, and the expulsion of the king who had
+pensioned him, broke down his health. He lived five years longer.
+
+All I know of the domestic affairs of the great French opera-writer
+Gretry is that he left three daughters, one of whom, Lucille, had a
+one-act opera successfully produced when she was only thirteen years
+old, and who was precocious enough to make an unhappy marriage and end
+it in death by the time she was twenty-three.
+
+HEROLD AND BIZET
+
+The Frenchman Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music
+artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died
+in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pre aux
+Clercs," had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am going
+too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage." He had married
+Adele Elise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three
+children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter,
+married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father's
+disease at twenty.
+
+Bizet, like Herold, died soon after his masterpiece was done. Three
+months after "Carmen's" first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of
+a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease. Six years before
+he had married Genevieve, the daughter of his teacher, the composer
+Halevy. In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in
+May, 1872: "J'attends un _baby_ dans deux ou trois semaines." His wife,
+he said, was "marvellously well," and a happy result was expected--and
+achieved, for in 1874 he sends Lacombe the greetings "des Bizet, pere,
+mere, et enfant." He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of
+"Sainte Genevieve," which his death interrupted. His widow told Gounod
+that Bizet had been so devoted that there was not a moment of their six
+years' life she would not gladly live over again.
+
+Cesar Franck married and left a son. At his funeral Chabrier said, "His
+family, his pupils, his immortal art: viola all his life!" But Auber,
+though too timid to marry or even to conduct his own works, was brave
+enough to earn the name of a "devotee of Venus."
+
+THE PASSIONS OF BERLIOZ
+
+Some of the most eminent musicians were strictly literary men, to whom
+music was an avocation.
+
+Thus Robert Schumann was an editor, who whiled away his leisure writing
+music that almost no one approved or played for many years. Richard
+Wagner was well on in life before his compositions brought him as much
+money as his writing. Hector Berlioz was a prominent critic, whose
+excursions into music brought him unmitigated abuse and ridicule. The
+list might be multiplied.
+
+The tempestuous Berlioz was in love at twelve. The girl was eighteen;
+her name was Estelle, and he called her "the hamadryad of St. Eynard."
+Years later she had grown vague in his memory, and he could only say,
+"I have forgot the colour of her hair; it was black I think. But
+whenever I remember her I see a vision of great brilliant eyes and of
+pink shoes." When he was fifty-seven years old, he found her again and
+his old love revived. But before that time there was much life to live.
+And he lived it at a _tempo presto con fuoco_.
+
+He went to Paris, which was a cyclone of conflict for him. At the age
+of twenty-seven he won the Prix de Rome and went for three years to
+Italy, not without the amorous adventures suitable to that sky.
+
+Returning to Paris, he found the city in a spasm of enthusiasm over
+Shakespeare, especially over the Irish actress Smithson, whom he had
+worshipped from afar, before he had gone to Rome, thinking that he only
+worshipped Shakespeare through the prophetess. The remembrance of her
+had inspired him to write his "Lelio" in Italy. When he was again in
+Paris, he gave a concert, played the kettle-drums for his own symphony,
+and through a friend managed to secure the attendance of Miss Smithson.
+She recognised in him the stranger who had dogged her steps in the
+years before. The poet Heine was at the concert, and his description of
+the scene is as follows:
+
+"It was thus I saw him for the first time, and thus he will always
+remain in my memory. It was at the Conservatoire de Musique when a big
+symphony of his was given, a bizarre nocturne, only here and there
+relieved by the gleam of a woman's dress, sentimentally white,
+fluttering to and fro--or by a flash of irony, sulphur yellow. My
+neighbour in my box pointed out to me the composer, who was sitting at
+the extremity of the hall in the corner of the orchestra playing the
+kettle-drums.
+
+"'Do you see that stout English woman in the proscenium? That is Miss
+Smithson; for nearly three years Berlioz has been madly in love with
+her, and it is this passion that we have to thank for the wild symphony
+we are listening to to-day.'
+
+"Every time that her look met his, he struck his kettle-drum like a
+maniac."
+
+Then he married the plump enchantress and knew a brief happiness. But
+he gradually woke to the fact that the dowry she brought him was mainly
+ill-luck, bad temper, and a monument of debts which she acquired by a
+new series of Shakespeare performances under her own management. By
+this time Paris had forgotten the barbarian Shakespeare and ridiculed
+the former queen of the stage. Then Madame Berlioz fell from a carriage
+and broke her leg. This took her permanently from the stage, where she
+was no longer a success. A few managerial ventures brought her a
+handsome bankruptcy. Berlioz gave benefit concerts and wrote fiendishly
+for the papers to pay her debts, and always provided for her. But there
+was no more happiness for the two, though there was a child. I have
+said that Miss Smithson brought Berlioz a dowry of bad luck and bad
+temper. The worldly goods with which Berlioz had her endowed, were no
+better. He had begun the marriage with "300 francs borrowed from a
+friend and a new quarrel with my parents." He also contributed a temper
+which is one of the most brilliant in history.
+
+A few years after the birth of their child, his wife grew jealous, and
+accused him of loving elsewhere. He reasoned that he might as well have
+the game, if he must have the blame, and thereafter a travelling
+companion attended him when he surreptitiously eloped with his music,
+and his clothes. In his "Memoires," he paints a dismal picture of his
+wife's ill health, her jealous outbreaks, the final separation, and her
+eventual death. Then he married again. "I was compelled to do so," is
+his suggestive explanation. His new experiment was hardly more
+successful; but in eight years his wife was dead.
+
+He found some consolation for his manifold troubles in Liszt's Princess
+Sayn-Wittgenstein, and wrote her many letters which La Mara published
+under the title of "The Apotheosis of Friendship."
+
+Then at Lyons he met again Her of the pink slippers, now Madame
+Fournier, and a widow. He was fifty-seven and she still six years his
+elder. He grew ferociously sentimental over her, and almost fainted
+when he shook her hand. He tried to reconstruct from the victim of
+three-and-sixty years the pink-slippered hamadryad who had haunted him
+all his life. He wrote of the meeting:
+
+"I recognised the divine stateliness of her step; but oh, heavens, how
+changed she was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at the
+sight of her my heart did not feel one moment's indecision; my whole
+soul went out to its idol as though she were still in her dazzling
+loveliness. Balzac, nay, Shakespeare himself, the great painter of the
+passions, never dreamt of such a thing." [For that reason the
+novelty-mad Berlioz tried it. He wrote to her:] "I have loved you. I
+still love you. I shall always love you. I have but one aim left in the
+world, that of obtaining your affection."
+
+But it was not alone her physical self that had grown old; her
+heart-beat, too, was _andante_. She consented to exchange letters; her
+pen could correspond with him, but not her passion. She wrote him: "You
+have a very young heart. I am quite old. Then, sir, I am six years your
+elder, and at my age I must know how to deny myself new friendships."
+So Berlioz went his way. His disapproval of Liszt and Wagner alienated
+the friendship of even the princess, and his stormy career ended at the
+age of sixty-six.
+
+GOUNOD
+
+Charles Gounod wrote as amorous music as ever troubled a human heart.
+Like Liszt he was a religious mystic, and Vernon Blackburn has said
+that the women who used to attend Gounod's concerts of sacred music
+"used to look upon them as a sort of religious orgy."
+
+The details of Gounod's picturesque affairs have been denied us. And
+the translator of his "Memoires" regrets that he not only kept silence
+on these points, but seems to have destroyed all the documents. His
+"Memoires" are disappointing in every way. Even his references to his
+marriage are about as thrilling as a page from a blue book. His account
+of his love and his wedding are on this ground really worth quoting, as
+a curiosity of literature, it being observed how little he has to say
+of romance, how much of his relatives-in-law.
+
+"_Ulysse_ was produced the 18th of June, 1852. I had just married a few
+days before, a daughter of Zimmerman the celebrated professor of the
+piano at the Conservatory, and to whom is due the fine school from
+which have come Prudent, Marmontel, Goria, Lefebure-Wely, Ravina,
+Bizet, and many others. I became by this alliance the brother-in-law of
+the young painter Edouard Dubufe, who was already most ably carrying
+his father's name, the heritage and reputation which his own son
+Guilliaume Dubufe, promises brilliantly to maintain."
+
+Even to his friend, Lefuel he wrote:
+
+"I am going to be married the next month to Mlle. Anna Zimmerman. We
+are all perfectly satisfied with this union which seems to offer the
+most reliable assurances of lasting happiness. The family is excellent
+and I have the good luck to be loved by all its members."
+
+He mentions briefly in later pages that his father-in-law died a year
+after his marriage, and that two years later he lost his sister-in-law,
+to whom he gives several lines of a cordial praise, which he singularly
+denies his wife, though he states that a year after the marriage she
+bore him a girl child, who died at birth, and that four years later she
+bore him a son. On the afternoon of this day he was to conduct a very
+important concert; when he returned, he found himself a father. He is
+here generous enough to say: "On the morning of the day when my son was
+born, my brave wife had the force to conceal from me her sufferings."
+
+When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, Gounod took refuge in London,
+and there wrote his "Gallia." The soprano role was taken by a certain
+Georgina Thomas, who had married Captain Weldon of the 18th Hussars. When
+she met Gounod, she was some thirty-three years old, having been born in
+1837. She took up professional singing for the sake of charity, and
+Gounod and she became romantically attached. She helped him train his
+choir, established an orphanage at her residence for poor children with
+musical inclinations, and published songs by Gounod and others,
+including herself, the proceeds going to the aid of her orphanage. At
+this time she claimed to have acquired the ownership of certain works
+of his. Gounod thought, he said, that he had found in her "an apostle
+of his art and a fanatic for his works," but he also found that her
+charity had an excellent business foundation, for, when their love
+affair came to an end, she claimed her property in his compositions.
+
+He refused to acknowledge her right, and when she clung to his
+"Polyeucte," he rewrote it from memory. She sued him for damages, and
+the English courts ordered him to pay to his former hostess $50,000.
+But he evaded payment by staying in France. Mrs. Weldon was also a
+composer, and she had edited in 1875 Gounod's autobiography and certain
+of his essays with a preface by herself. The lawsuit as usual exposed
+to public curiosity many things both would have preferred to keep
+secret, and was a pitiful finish generally to what promised to be a
+most congenial alliance. The love affair began like a novel and ended
+like a cash-book.
+
+DIVERS ITALIANS
+
+As for the Italians, we know that Paesiello, who was a famous intriguer
+against his musical rivals, was a devoted husband whose wife was an
+invalid and who died soon after her death. Cherubini married
+Mademoiselle Cecile Turette, when he was thirty-five, and the marriage
+was not a success. He left a son and two daughters. Spontini, one of
+whose best operas was based on the life of that much mis-married
+enthusiast for divorce, John Milton, took to wife a member of the Erard
+family. In the outer world Spontini was famous for his despotism, his
+jealousy, his bad temper, and his excessive vanity. None of these
+qualities as a rule add much to home comfort, and yet, it is said that
+he lived happily with his wife. We may feel sure that some of the bad
+light thrown on his character is due purely to the jealousy of rivals,
+when we consider his domestic content, his ardent interest in the
+welfare of Mozart's widow and children, and the great efforts he made
+to secure subscriptions for the widow's biography of Mozart.
+
+Furthermore, Spontini in his later years, when deafness saddened his
+lot, deserted the halls of fame and the palaces of royalty, where he
+had been prominent, and retired with his wife to the little Italian
+village where he had been born of the peasantry. And there he spent
+years founding schools and doing other works for the public good. He
+died there in the arms of his wife, at the age of seventy-five; having
+had no children, he willed his property to the poor of his native
+village.
+
+It is strange how much wrong we do to the geniuses of the second rate,
+when they happen to be rivals of those whom we have voted geniuses of
+the first rate; for the Piccinnis and the Salieris and the Spontinis,
+who chance to fight earnestly against Glucks, Mozarts, and others,
+often show in their lives qualities of the utmost sweetness and
+sincerity, equalling that of their more successful rivals in the
+struggle for existence.
+
+For instance, there is Salieri, who was accused of poisoning Mozart, a
+monstrous slander, which Salieri bitterly regretted and answered by
+befriending Mozart's son and securing him his first appointment. When
+Salieri was young and left an orphan, he was befriended by a man, who
+later died, leaving his children in some distress. Salieri took care of
+the family and educated the two daughters as opera singers. His
+generosity was shown in numberless ways, and if by mishap he did not
+especially approve of Mozart, he was on most cordial terms with Haydn
+and Beethoven. He gave lessons and money to poor musicians; he loved
+nature piously; was exuberant; was devoted to pastry and sugar-plums,
+but cared nothing for wine. All I know of his married life is that when
+he was fifty-five he lost his son, and two years later his wife, and he
+was never the same thereafter. It is a shame to slander him as men do.
+
+THE GRAND ROSSINI
+
+One of the most remarkably successful men of his century was Rossini,
+son of a village inspector of slaughter-houses, and a baker's daughter.
+Once, while the husband was in jail on account of his political
+sympathies, the mother became a burlesque singer, and when the father
+was released, he joined the troupe as a horn-player. Rossini was left
+in the care of a pork-butcher, on whom he used to play practical jokes.
+He always took life easily, this Rossini. At the age of sixteen he was
+already a successful composer, and had begun that dazzling career which
+mingled superhuman laziness with inhuman zeal. Among his first
+acquaintances were the Mombelli family, of whom he said in a letter
+that the girls were "ferociously virtuous."
+
+In 1815, he then being twenty-three, he first met the successful prima
+donna Isabella Colbran, who was then thirty years old and had been
+singing for fourteen years on the stage. She was still beautiful,
+though her voice had begun to show signs of wear. Rossini seems to have
+fallen in love with her art and herself, and he wrote ten roles for
+her. It was she who persuaded him away from comic to tragic opera. The
+political changes of the period soon changed her from public favourite
+to a public dislike, and Rossini, disgusted with his countrymen,
+married her and left Italy. It was said that he married her for her
+money, because she was his elder and was already on the wane in public
+favour, and yet owned a villa and $25,000 a year income. However that
+may be, it was a brilliant match for the son of the slaughter-house
+inspector, and the wedding took place in the palace of a cardinal, the
+Archbishop of Bologna. As one poet wrote, in stilted Latin:
+
+"A remarkable man weds a remarkable woman. Who can doubt that their
+progeny will be remarkable?"
+
+It might have been, for all we know, had there been any progeny, but
+there was not. It is pleasant to note that Rossini's ancient parents
+were at the wedding. Then the couple went to Vienna, where Carpani
+wrote of Colbran's voice: "The Graces seemed to have watered with
+nectar each of her syllables. Her acting is notable and dignified, as
+becomes her important and majestic beauty."
+
+In 1824 they were called to London. Here they were on terms of great
+intimacy with the king. In this one season the two made $35,000.
+Rossini complained that the singer was paid at a far higher rate than
+the composer; besides, she sang excruciatingly off the key and had
+nothing left but her intellectual charms. From England Rossini went to
+equal glory to France. At the early age of forty-three, he took a
+solemn vow to write no more music, a vow he kept almost literally. In
+1845, his wife, then being sixty years of age, died. Two years later he
+married Olympe Pelissier, who had been his mistress in Paris and had
+posed for Vernet's "Judith." Rossini was a great voluptuary, and was
+prouder of his art in cooking macaroni than of anything else he could
+do. But much should be forgiven him in return for his brilliant wit and
+the heroism with which he kept his vow, however regrettable the vow.
+
+BELLINI
+
+Of Bellini, that great treasurer for the hand-organists, a story has
+been told as his first romance. According to this, when he was a
+conservatory student at Naples, he called upon a fellow student and
+took up a pair of opera glasses, proceeding to take that interest in
+the neighbours that one is prone to take with a telescope. On the
+balcony of the opposite house he saw a beautiful girl; the
+opera-glasses seemed to bring her very near, but not near enough to
+reach. So, after much elaborate management he became her teacher of
+singing, and managed to teach her at least to love him. But the family
+growing suspicious that Bellini was instructing her in certain elective
+studies outside the regular musical curriculum, his school was closed.
+
+Then a little opera of his had some success, and he asked for her hand.
+His proposal was received with Neapolitan ice, and the lovers were
+separated, to their deep gloom. When he was twenty-four, another opera
+of his made a great local triumph, and he applied again, only to be
+told that "the daughter of Judge Fumaroli will never be allowed to
+marry a poor cymbal player." Later his success grew beyond the bounds
+of Italy, and now the composer of "La Sonnambula" and "Norma" was
+worthy of the daughter of even a judge; so the parents, it is said,
+reminded him that he could now have the honour of marrying into their
+family. But he was by this time calm enough to reply that he was wedded
+to his art.
+
+This conclusion of the romance reminds one of Handel--a thing which
+Bellini very rarely does. He died when he was only thirty-three years
+of age, and at that age Handel had not written a single one of the
+oratorios by which he is remembered. In fact, he did not begin until he
+was fifty-five with the success which made him immortal. It was the
+irony of fate that Bellini should have died so young, while a brother
+of his who was a fourth-rate church composer lived for eighty-two
+years.
+
+VERDI'S MISERERE
+
+The virtues of senescence are seen in the case of Verdi, who did some
+of his greatest work at the age when most musicians are ready for the
+old ladies' home. His first love affair has been the subject of an
+opera, like Stradella's. In fact it has much of the garish misery of
+the Punchinello story. Verdi was very poor as a child, and was educated
+by a charitable institution. He was greatly befriended by his teacher,
+Barezzi, in whose house he lived, and like Robert Schumann, he showed
+his gratitude by falling in love with the daughter; Margarita was her
+name. But Barezzi interpreted the role of father-in-law in a manner
+unlike that of Wieck, and to the youth to whom he had given not only
+instruction, but funds for his study and board and lodging while in
+Milan, he gave also his daughter, when the time came in 1836, Verdi
+being then twenty-three years old. Two years later, the composer left
+his home town of Busseto with one wife, two children, and three or four
+MSS. He settled in Milan. He was a long time getting his first opera
+produced, and it was not until 1839 that it made its little success,
+and he was engaged to write three more. He chose a comic libretto for
+the first, and then troubles began not to rain but to pour upon him.
+But let Verdi tell his own story:
+
+"I lived at that time in a small and modest apartment in the
+neighbourhood of the Porta Ticinese, and I had my little family with
+me, that is to say my young wife and our two little children. I had
+hardly begun my work when I fell seriously ill of a throat complaint,
+which compelled me to keep my bed for a long time. I was beginning to
+be convalescent, when I remembered that the rent, for which I wanted
+fifty ecus, would become due in a few days. At that time if such a sum
+was of importance to me, it was no very serious matter; but my painful
+illness had not allowed me to provide it in time, and the state of
+communications with Busseto (in those days the post only went twice a
+week) did not leave me the opportunity of writing to my excellent
+father-in-law Barezzi to enable him to send the necessary funds. I
+wished, whatever trouble it might give to me, to pay my lodging on the
+day fixed, and although much annoyed at being obliged to have recourse
+to a third person, I nevertheless decided to beg the engineer Pasetti
+to ask Merelli on my behalf for the fifty ecus which I wanted, either
+in the form of an advance under the conditions of my contract, or by
+way of loan for eight or ten days, that is to say the time necessary
+for writing to Busseto and receiving the said sum.
+
+"It is useless to relate here how it came about that Merelli, without
+any fault on his part, did not advance me the fifty ecus in question.
+Nevertheless, I was much distressed at letting the rent day of the
+lodgings go by. My wife then, seeing my annoyance, took a few articles
+of jewelry which she possessed, and succeeded, I know not how, in
+getting together the sum necessary, and brought it to me. I was deeply
+touched at this proof of affection, and promised myself to return them
+all to her, which, happily, I was able to do with little difficulty,
+thanks to my agreement.
+
+"But now began for me the greatest misfortunes. My 'bambino' fell ill
+at the beginning of April, the doctors were unable to discover the
+cause of his ailment, and the poor little thing, fading away, expired
+in the arms of his mother, who was beside herself with despair. That
+was not all. A few days after my little daughter fell ill in turn, and
+her complaint also terminated fatally. But this even was not all. Early
+in June my young companion herself was attacked by acute brain fever,
+and on the 19th of June, 1840, a third coffin was carried from my
+house.
+
+"I was alone!--alone! In the space of about two months, three loved
+ones had disappeared for ever. I had no longer a family. And, in the
+midst of this terrible anguish, to avoid breaking the engagement I had
+contracted, I was compelled to write and finish a comic opera!
+
+"'Un Giorno di Regno' did not succeed. A share of the want of success
+certainly belongs to the music, but part must also be attributed to the
+performance. My soul, rent by the misfortunes which had overwhelmed me,
+my spirit, soured by the failure of the opera, I persuaded myself that
+I should no longer find consolation in art, and formed the resolution
+to compose no more! I even wrote to the engineer Pasetti (who since the
+fiasco of 'Un Giorno di Regno' had shown no signs of life) to beg him
+to obtain from Merelli the cancelling of my contract."
+
+This story is sad enough, Heaven knows, without the melodramatic frills
+that have been put upon it. You will read in certain sketches, and even
+Mr. Elbert Hubbard has enambered the fable in one of his "Little
+Journeys," that Verdi's wife was ill during the performance of the
+opera, that the first act was a great success, and he ran home to tell
+her. The second act was also successful, and he ran home again, not
+noting that his wife was dying of starvation. The third act, and he was
+hissed off the stage, and flew home, only to find his wife dead. The
+chief objection to the story is the fact that his wife died on the 19th
+of June, 1840, and the opera was not produced until the 5th of
+September that same year. But it is tragic enough that he should have
+been compelled to write a comic opera under the anguish that he felt at
+the loss of his two children and his wife, and that his reward should
+have been even then a dismal fiasco.
+
+He was dissuaded from his vow to write no more, and it was in a driving
+snow-storm that his friend Merelli decoyed him to a field, in which so
+much fame was awaiting him.
+
+This Merelli had first become interested in Verdi from overhearing the
+singer Signora Strepponi praising Verdi's first opera. This was before
+the failure of the comic opera and the annihilation of Verdi's family.
+
+When Merelli had at length decoyed Verdi back to composition, his next
+work, "Nabucco," was a decided success, the principal part being taken
+by this same Strepponi. She had made her debut seven years before, and
+was a singer of dramatic fire and vocal splendour, we are told. Her
+enthusiasm for Verdi's work not only fastened the claim of operatic art
+upon him, but won his interest in her charms also, and Verdi and she
+were soon joined in an alliance, which after some years was legalised
+and churched. She shortly after left the stage without waiting to "lag
+superfluous" there. Thenceforward she shared with Verdi that life of
+quiet retirement from the world in which he played the patriarch and
+the farmer, breeding horses and watching the harmonies of nature with
+almost more enthusiasm than the progress of his art.
+
+So much for the Italian opera composers. How do the Germans compare?
+
+VARIOUS GERMANS
+
+The old composer Hasse, like Rossini, being himself the most popular
+composer of the day, married one of the most popular singers of her
+time, and scored a double triumph with her. This was the famous
+Faustina.
+
+Mendelssohn's friend, Carl Zelter, was a busy lover, as his
+autobiography makes plain. One of his flirtations was with an artistic
+Jewess, with whom he quarrelled and from whom he parted, because they
+could not agree upon the art of suicide as outlined in Goethe's then
+new work, "The Sorrows of Werther."
+
+Albert Lortzing was married before he was twenty, and lived busily as
+singer, composer, and instrumentalist, travelling here and there with a
+family that increased along with his debts. It was not till after his
+death, and then by a public subscription, that his family knew the end
+of worry.
+
+Similarly the public came to the aid of Robert Franz, before his death,
+thanks to Liszt and others. For Franz, who had married the song
+composer, Marie Hinrichs, lost his hearing and drifted to the brink of
+despair before a series of concerts rescued him from starvation.
+
+Heinrich Marschner was married three times, his latter two wives being
+vocalists. Thalberg married a daughter of the great singer Lablache;
+she was the widow of the painter Boucher, whose exquisite confections
+every one knows. They had a daughter, who was a singer of great gifts.
+
+Meyerbeer in 1825 lost his father, whom he loved to the depth of his
+large heart. At the father's death-bed he renewed an old love with his
+cousin, Minna Mosson, and they were betrothed. Niggli says she was "as
+sweet as she was fair." Two years later he married her. She bore him
+five children, of whom three, with the wife, survived him and inherited
+his great fortune.
+
+Josef Strauss, son of a saloon-keeper, married Anna Streim, daughter of
+an innkeeper. After she had borne him five children, they were divorced
+on the ground of incompatibility. How many children did they want for
+compatibility's sake? Their son Johann married Jetty Treffy in 1863;
+she was a favourite public singer, and her ambition raised him out of a
+mere dance-hall existence to the waltz-making for the world. When she
+died he paid her the exquisite compliment of choosing another singer,
+before the year was over, for the next waltz. Her name was Angelica
+Dittrich.
+
+Joachim Raff fell in love with an actress named Doris Genast, and
+followed her to Wiesbaden in 1856; he married her three years later,
+and she bore him a daughter.
+
+The Russian Glinka was sent travelling in search of health. He liked
+Italian women much and many, but it was in Berlin that he made his
+declarations to a Jewish contralto, for whose voice he wrote six
+studies. But he married Maria Petrovna Ivanof, who was young, pretty,
+quarrelsome, and extravagant. She brought along also a dramatic
+mother-in-law, and he set out again for his health. His wife married
+again, and the scandal of the whole affair preyed on him so that he
+went to Paris and sought diversion recklessly along the boulevards.
+
+His countryman, Anton Rubinstein, married Vera Tschekonanof in 1865.
+She accompanied him on his first tour, but after that, not.
+
+The Bohemian composer Smetana married his pupil, Katharine Kolar; he
+was another of those whose happiness deafness ruined. He was
+immortalised in a composition as harrowing as any of Poe's stories, or
+as Huneker's "The Lord's Prayer in B," the torment of one high note
+that rang in his head unceasingly, until it drove him mad.
+
+FRANZ SCHUBERT
+
+Among the beautiful figures, whom the critical historian tries to drive
+back into that limbo, where an imaginary Homer flirts with a fabulous
+Pocahontas, we are asked to place the alleged one love of Schubert's
+life. Few composers have been so overweighted with poverty or so gifted
+with loneliness as Franz Schubert. His joy was spasmodic and short, but
+his sorrow was persistent and deep.
+
+He, who sang so many love songs, could hardly be said to have been in
+any sense a lover. Once he wrote of himself as a man so wrecked in
+health, that he was one "to whom the happiness of proffered love and
+friendship is but anguish; whose enthusiasm for the beautiful threatens
+to vanish altogether." Of his music he wrote, that the world seemed to
+like only that which was the product of his sufferings, and of his
+songs he exclaimed: "For many years I sang my Lieder. If I would fain
+sing of love, it turned to pain; or if I would sing of pain, it turned
+to love. Thus I was torn between love and sorrow."
+
+He had a few flirtations, and one or two strong friendships, but the
+thought of marriage seems to have entered his mind only to be rejected.
+In his diary he wrote:
+
+"Happy is he who finds a true friend; happier still is he who finds in
+his wife a true friend. To the free man at this time, marriage is a
+frightful thought: he confounds it either with melancholy or low
+sensuality." One of his first affairs of the heart was with Theresa
+Grob, who sang in his works, and for whom he wrote various songs and
+other compositions. But he also wrote for her brother, and besides, she
+married a baker. Anna Milder, who had been a lady's maid, but became a
+famous singer and married a rich jeweller and quarrelled with Beethoven
+and with Spontini, was a sort of muse to Schubert, sang his songs in
+public, and gave him much advice.
+
+Mary Pachler was a friend of Beethoven's, and after his death seems to
+have turned her friendship to Schubert, with great happiness to him.
+
+But the legendary romance of Schubert's life occurred when he was
+twenty-one, and a music teacher to Carolina Esterhazy. He first fell in
+love with her maid, it is said, and based his "Divertissement a
+l'Hongroise" on Hungarian melodies he heard her singing at her work.
+There is no disguising the fact that Schubert, prince of musicians, was
+personally a hopeless little pleb. He wrote his friend Schober in 1818
+of the Esterhazy visit: "The cook is a pleasant fellow; the housemaid
+is very pretty and often pays me a visit; the butler is my rival."
+Mozart also ate with the servants in the Archbishop's household, though
+it ground him deep.
+
+But Schubert was too homely even for a housemaid, so in despair he
+turned to the young countess and loved her--they say, till death. Once,
+she jokingly demanded why he had never dedicated anything to her, and
+the legend says he cried: "Why should I, when everything I write is
+yours?"
+
+The purveyors of this legend disagree as to the age of the young
+countess; some say she was seventeen, and some that she was eleven,
+while those who disbelieve the story altogether say that she was only
+seven years old. But now you have heard the story, and you may take it
+or leave it. There is some explanation for the belief that Schubert did
+not dare to love or declare his love, and some reason to believe that
+his reticence was wise and may have saved him worse pangs, in the fact
+that he was only one inch more than five feet high, and yet fat and
+awkward; stoop-shouldered, wild-haired, small-nosed, big-spectacled,
+thick-lipped, and of a complexion which has been called pasty to the
+point of tallowness. Haydn, however, almost as unpromising, was a great
+slayer of women. But Schubert either did not care, or did not dare.
+
+He reminds one of Brahms, a genial giant, who was deeply devoted in a
+filial way to Clara Schumann after the death of Schumann, but who never
+married, and of whom I find no recorded romance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+ROBERT SCHUMANN AND CLARA WIECK
+
+
+"I am not satisfied with any man who despises music. For music is a
+gift of God. It will drive away the devil and makes people cheerful.
+Occupied with it, man forgets all anger, unchastity, pride, and other
+vices. Next to theology, I give music the next place and highest
+praise."--MARTIN LUTHER.
+
+
+By a little violence to chronology, I am putting last of all the story
+of Schumann's love-life, because it marks the highest point of musical
+amour.
+
+If music have any effect at all upon character, especially upon the
+amorous development and activity of character, that effect ought to be
+discoverable--if discoverable it is--with double distinctness where two
+musicians have fallen in love with each other, and with each other's
+music. There are many instances where both the lovers were musically
+inclined, but in practically every case, save in one, there has been a
+great disparity between their abilities.
+
+The whimsical Fates, however, decided to make one trial of the
+experiment of bringing two musicians of the first class into a sphere
+of mutual influence and affection. The result was so beautiful, so
+nearly ideal, that--needless to say--it has not been repeated. But
+while the experiment has not been duplicated, the story well merits a
+repetition, especially in view of the fact that the woman's side of the
+romance has only recently been given to the public in Litzmann's
+biography, only half of which has been published in German and none in
+English.
+
+There can surely be no dispute that Robert Schumann was one of the most
+original and individual of composers, and one of the broadest and
+deepest-minded musicians in the history of the art. Nor can there be
+any doubt that Clara Wieck was one of the richest dowered musicians who
+ever shed glory upon her sex. Henry T. Finck was, perhaps, right, when
+he called her "the most gifted woman that has ever chosen music as a
+profession."
+
+Robert Schumann showed his determined eccentricity before he was born,
+for surely no child ever selected more unconventional parents. Would
+you believe it? It was the mother who opposed the boy's taking up music
+as a career! the father who wished him to follow his natural bent! and
+it was the father who died while Schumann was young, leaving him to
+struggle for years against his mother's will!
+
+Not that Frau Schumann was anything but a lovable and a most beloved
+mother. Robert's letters to her show a remarkable affection even for a
+son. Indeed, as Reissmann says in his biography:
+
+"As in most cases, Robert's youthful years belonged almost wholly to
+his mother, and indeed her influence chiefly developed that pure
+fervour of feeling to which his whole life bore witness; this, however,
+soon estranged him from the busy world and was the prime factor in that
+profound melancholy which often overcame him almost to suicide."
+
+Frau Schumann wished Robert to study law, and sent him to the
+University at Leipzig for that purpose and later to Heidelberg. He was
+not the least interested in his legal studies, but loved to play the
+piano, and write letters, and dream of literature, to idolise Jean Paul
+Richter and to indulge a most commendable passion for good cigars. He
+was not dilatory at love, and went through a varied apprenticeship
+before his heart seemed ready for the fierce test it was put to in his
+grand passion.
+
+In 1827, he being then seventeen years old, we find him writing to a
+schoolfellow a letter of magnificent melancholy; the tone of its
+allusions to a certain young woman reminds one of Chopin's early love
+letters. How sophomoric and seventeen-year-oldish they sound!
+
+"Oh, friend! were I but a smile, how would I flit about her eyes! ...
+were I but joy, how gently would I throb in all her pulses! yea, might
+I be but a tear, I would weep with her, and then, if she smiled again,
+how gladly would I die on her eyelash, and gladly, gladly, be no more."
+
+"My past life lies before me like a vast, vast evening landscape, over
+which faintly quivers a rosy kiss from the setting sun."
+
+He bewails two dissipated ideals. One, named "Liddy," "a narrow-minded
+soul, a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea."
+And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were "petrified," every
+critic would pronounce her perfection. The boy sighs with that
+well-known senility of seventeen:
+
+"I think I loved her, but I knew only the outward form in which the
+roseate tinted fancy of youth often embodies its inmost longings. So I
+have no longer a sweetheart, but am creating for myself other ideals,
+and have in this respect also broken with the world."
+
+Again he looks back upon his absorbing passion for a glorious girl
+called "Nanni," but that blaze is now "only a quietly burning sacred
+flame of pure divine friendship and reverence."
+
+A month after this serene resignation he goes to Dresden, and finds his
+heart full of longing for this very "Nanni." He roves the streets
+looking under every veil that flutters by him in the street, in the
+hope that he might see her features; he remembers again "all the hours
+which I dreamed away so joyfully, so blissfully in her arms and her
+love." He did not see her, but later, to his amazement, he stumbles
+upon the supposedly finished sweetheart "Liddy." She is bristling with
+"explanations upon explanations." She begs him to go up a steep mountain
+alone with her. He goes "from politeness, perhaps also for the sake of
+adventure." But they are both dumb and tremulous and they reach the peak
+just at sunset. Schumann describes that sunset more gaudily than ever
+chromo was painted. But at any rate it moved him to seize Liddy's hand
+and exclaim, somewhat mal-a-propos: "Liddy, such is our life."
+
+He plucked a rose and was about to give it to her when a flash of
+lightning and a cloud of thunder woke him from his dreams; he tore the
+rose to pieces, and they returned home in silence.
+
+In 1828, at Augsburg, he cast his affectionate eyes upon Clara von
+Kurer, the daughter of a chemist; but found her already engaged. It was
+now that he entered the University at Leipzig to study law. The wife of
+Professor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs.
+At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus
+began an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power for
+torment and delight.
+
+Wieck, who was then forty-three, chiefly lived in the career of his
+wonder-child, a pianist, Clara Josephine Wieck. She had been born at
+Leipzig on September 13, 1819, and was only nine years old, and nine
+years younger than Schumann, when they met. She made a sensational
+debut in concert the same year. And, child as she was, she excited at
+once the keenest and most affectionate admiration in Schumann. He did
+not guess then how deeply she was doomed to affect him, but while she
+was growing up his heart seemed merely to loaf about till she was ready
+for it.
+
+For a time he became Wieck's pupil, hoping secretly to be a pianist,
+not a lawyer. He dreamed already of storming America with his
+virtuosity.
+
+In 1829, while travelling, he wrote his mother, "I found it frightfully
+hard to leave Leipzig at the last. A girl's soul, beautiful, happy, and
+pure, had enslaved mine." But this soul was not Clara's. A few months
+later, he made a tour through Italy, and wrote of meeting "a beautiful
+English girl, who seemed to have fallen in love, not so much with
+myself as my piano playing, for all English women love with the head--I
+mean they love Brutuses, or Lord Byrons, or Mozart and Raphaels."
+Surely one of the most remarkable statements ever made, and
+appropriately demolished by the very instances brought to substantiate
+it, for, to the best of my knowledge, Mozart, Brutus, and Raphael had
+affairs with other than English women; and so did, for the matter of
+that, Lord Byron.
+
+A week later Schumann wrote from Venice, whither he had apparently
+followed the English beauty:
+
+"Alas, my heart is heavy ... she gave me a spray of cypress when we
+parted.... She was an English girl, very proud, and kind, and loving,
+and hating ... hard but so soft when I was playing--accursed
+reminiscences!"
+
+The wound was not mortal. A little later, and he was showing almost as
+much enthusiasm in his reference to his cigars. "Oh, those cigars!" We
+find him smoking one at five A.M., on July 30th, at Heidelberg. He had
+risen early to write, "the most important letter I have ever written,"
+pleading ardently with his mother to let him be a musician. She decided
+to leave the decision concerning her son's future to Wieck, who,
+knowing Schumann's attainments and promise, voted for music. Schumann,
+wild with delight and ambition, fled from Heidelberg and the law. He
+went to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and he
+writes his mother, "If ever I marry, it will be an English girl." He
+did not know what was awaiting him in the home of Wieck, whose house he
+entered as pupil and lodger, almost as a son.
+
+Here he worked like a fiend at his theory and practice. He suffered
+from occasional attacks of the most violent melancholy, obsessions of
+inky gloom, which kept returning upon him at long intervals. But when
+he threw off the spell, he was himself again, and could write to his
+mother of still new amours:
+
+"I have filled my cup to the brim by falling in love the day before
+yesterday. The gods grant that my ideal may have a fortune of 50,000."
+
+In 1830 he flirted with the beautiful Anita Abegg; her name suggested
+to him a theme for his Opus I, published in 1831, and based upon the
+notes A-B-E-G-G. He apologised to his family for not dedicating his
+first work to them, but explained that it was not good enough. It is
+published with an inscription to "Pauline, Comtesse d'Abegg," a
+disguise which puzzled his family, until he explained that he himself
+was the "father" of the "Countess" d'Abegg.
+
+It was two years before he confessed another flirtation. In 1833, he
+went to Frankfort to hear Paganini, and there it was a case of "pretty
+girl at the willow-bush--staring match through opera-glasses--champagne."
+The next year he was torn between two admirations. One, the daughter of
+the German-born American consul at Liepzig,--her name was Emily List;
+she was sixteen, and he described her "as a thoroughly English girl, with
+black sparkling eyes, black hair, and firm step; and full of intellect,
+and dignity, and life."
+
+The other was Ernestine von Fricken, daughter--by adoption, though this
+he did not know--of a rich Bohemian baron. Of her he wrote:
+
+"She has a delightfully pure, child-like mind, is delicate and
+thoughtful, deeply attached to me and everything artistic, and
+uncommonly musical--in short just such a one as I might wish to have
+for a wife; and I will whisper it in your ear, my good mother, if the
+Future were to ask me whom I should choose, I would answer
+unhesitatingly, 'This one,' But that is all in the dim distance; and
+even now I renounce the prospect of a more intimate relationship,
+although, I dare say, I should find it easy enough."
+
+Ernestine, like Robert, was a pupil and boarder at the home of the
+Wiecks. She and Robert had acted as godparents to one of Wieck's
+children, possibly Clara's half-sister, Marie, also in later years a
+prominent pianist and teacher.
+
+The affair with Ernestine grew more serious. In 1834 he wrote a letter
+of somewhat formal and timid devotion to her. A little later, with fine
+diplomacy, he also wrote a fatherly letter to her supposed father,
+praising some of the baron's compositions with certain reservations,
+and adding, as a _coup de grace_, the statement that he himself was
+writing some variations on a theme of the baron's own.
+
+The same month Ernestine and Robert became engaged. He was deeply,
+joyously fond of her, and he poured out his soul to her friend, who was
+also a distinguished musician, Henrietta Voigt. To her he wrote of
+Ernestine:
+
+"Ernestine has written to me in great delight. She has sounded her
+father by means of her mother; and he gives her to me! Henrietta, he
+gives her to me! do you understand that? And yet I am so wretched; it
+seems as though I feared to accept this jewel, lest it should be in
+unworthy hands. If you ask me to put a name to my grief I cannot do it.
+I think it is grief itself; but alas, it may be love itself, and mere
+longing for Ernestine. I really cannot stand it any longer, so I have
+written to her to arrange a meeting one of these days. If you should
+ever feel thoroughly happy, then think of two souls who have placed all
+that is most sacred to them in your keeping, and whose future happiness
+is inseparably bound up with your own."
+
+This Madame Voigt, who died at the age of thirty-one, once said that on
+a beautiful summer evening, she and Schumann, after playing various
+music, had rowed out in a boat, and, shipping the oars, had sat side by
+side in complete silence--that deathlike silence which so often
+enveloped Schumann even in the circles of his friends at the taverns.
+When they returned after a mute hour, Schumann pressed her hand and
+exclaimed, "Today we have understood each other perfectly."
+
+It was under Ernestine's inspiration, which Schumann called "a perfect
+godsend," that he fashioned the various jewels that make up the music
+of his "Carneval," using for his theme the name of Ernestine's
+birthplace, "Asch," which he could spell in music in two ways:
+A-ES-C-H, or AS-C-H, for ES is the German name for E flat, while AS is
+our A flat and H our B natural. He was also pleased to note that the
+letters S-C-H-A were in his own name.
+
+While all this flirtation and loving and getting betrothed was going on
+in the home of Wieck, there was another member of the same household,
+another pupil of the same teacher, who was not deriving so much delight
+from the arrangement. Through it all, a great-eyed, great-hearted,
+greatly suffering little girl of fifteen was learning, for the first
+time, sorrow. This was Clara Wieck, who was already electrifying the
+most serious critics and captivating the most cultured audiences by the
+maturity of her art, already winning an encore with a Bach fugue,--an
+unheard-of miracle. As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and his
+daughter kept together, "This marked a new era in piano music." At the
+age of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficult
+music ever written.
+
+But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching at
+home the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved. Can't you
+see her now in her lonely room, reeling off from under her fleet
+fingers the dazzling arpeggios, while the tears gather in her eyes and
+fall upon her hands?
+
+Four years later she could write to Schumann:
+
+"I must tell you what a silly child I was then. When Ernestine came to
+us I said, 'Just wait till you learn to know Schumann, he is my
+favorite of all my acquaintances,' But she did not care to know you,
+since she said she knew a gentleman in Asch, whom she liked much
+better. That made me mad; but it was not long before she began to like
+you better and it soon went so far that every time you came I had to
+call her. I was glad to do this since I was pleased that she liked you.
+But you talked more and more with her and cut me short; that hurt me a
+good deal; but I consoled myself by saying it was only natural since
+you were with me all the time; and, besides, Ernestine was more
+grown-up than I. Still queer feelings filled my heart, so young it was,
+and so warmly it beat even then. When we went walking you talked to
+Ernestine and poked fun at me. Father shipped me off to Dresden on that
+account, where I again grew hopeful, and I said to myself, 'How pretty
+it would be if he were only your husband,'"
+
+From Dresden, Clara wrote to "Lieber Herr Schumann," a quizzical letter
+advising him to drink "less Bavarian beer; not to turn night into day;
+to let your girl friends know that you think of them; to compose
+industriously, and to write more in your paper, since the readers wish
+it."
+
+Schumann, unconsciously to himself, had given Clara reason enough to
+persuade a child of her years that he loved her more than he did, or
+more than he thought he did. He thought he was interested only in the
+marvellous child-artist. He found in the musical newspaper which he
+edited an opportunity to promulgate his high opinion of her. It is
+needless to say that the praises he lavished in print, would be no more
+cordial than those he bestowed on her in the privacy of the home. For
+he and she seemed to be as son and daughter to old Wieck, who was also
+greatly interested in the critical ideals of Schumann, and joined him
+zealously in the organisation and conducting of the _Neue Zeitschrift
+fuer Musik_. This, Schumann made the most wonderfully catholic and
+prophetic critical organ that ever existed for art; and in the editing
+of it he approved himself to posterity as a musical critic never
+approached for discriminating the good from the bad; for daring to
+discover and to acclaim new genius without fear, or without waiting for
+death to close the lifelong catalogue or to serve as a guide for an
+estimate. For some time Wieck joined hands and pen with Schumann in
+this great cause, till gradually his fears for the career of the
+jealously guarded Clara caused a widening rift between the old man and
+the young.
+
+Clara was to Schumann first a brilliant young sister, for whom he
+prophesied such a career as that of Schubert, Paganini, and Chopin, and
+for whom he cherished an affectionate concern. Yet as early as 1832,
+when she was only thirteen, and he twenty-two, he could write to his
+"Dear honoured Clara," "I often think of you, not as a brother of his
+sister, or merely in friendship, but rather as a pilgrim thinking of a
+distant shrine." He began to dedicate compositions to her, and he took
+her opinion seriously. His Opus 5, written in 1833, was based on a
+theme by Clara, and, according to Reissman, showed a feeling of
+"reverence for her genius rather than of love."
+
+He began also to publish most enthusiastic criticisms of her concerts,
+calling her "the wonder-child," and "the first German artist," one who
+"already stands on the topmost peak of our time." He even printed
+verses upon her genius. In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It is
+easy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara." She
+was still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used to
+frighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his
+"Doppelgaenger," a name, Clara afterwards took to herself. Child as she
+was, he watched her with something of fascination, and wrote his
+mother:
+
+"Clara is as fond of me as ever, and is just as she used to be of old,
+wild and enthusiastic, skipping and running about like a child, and
+saying the most intensely thoughtful things. It is a pleasure to see
+how her gifts of mind and heart keep developing faster and faster, and,
+as it were, leaf by leaf. The other day, as we were walking back from
+Cannovitz (we go for a two or three hours' tramp almost every day), I
+heard her say to herself: 'Oh, how happy I am! how happy!' Who would
+not love to hear that? On this same road there are a great many useless
+stones lying about in the middle of the footpath. Now, when I am
+talking, I often look more up than down, so she always walks behind me
+and gently pulls my coat at every stone to prevent my falling; meantime
+she stumbles over them herself."
+
+What an allegory of womanly devotion is here!
+
+Gradually Schumann let himself write to Clara a whit more like a lover
+than a brother, with an occasional "Longingly yours." He begged her to
+keep mental trysts with him, and, acknowledging a composition she had
+dedicated to him, he hinted:
+
+"If you were present, I would press your hand even without your
+father's leave. Then I might express a hope that the union of our names
+on the title-page might foreshadow the union of our ideas in the
+future. A poor fellow like myself cannot offer you more than that....
+Today a year ago we drove to Schleusig, how sorry I am that I spoiled
+your pleasure on that occasion."
+
+Of this last, we can only imagine some too ardent compliment, or
+perhaps some subjection to one of his dense melancholies. In the very
+midst of his short infatuation with Ernestine von Fricken, he is still
+corresponding with Clara. Their tone is very cordial, and, knowing the
+sequel, it is hard not to read into them perhaps more than Schumann
+meant. The letters could hardly have seemed to him to be love letters,
+since he writes to Clara that he has been considering the publication
+of their correspondence in his "Zeitschrift," though he was probably
+not serious at this, seeing that he also plans to fill a balloon with
+his unwritten thoughts and send it to her, "properly addressed with a
+favourable wind."
+
+"I long to catch butterflies to be my messengers to you. I thought of
+getting my letters posted in Paris, so as to arouse your curiosity and
+make you believe that I was there. In short a great many quaint notions
+came to my head and have only just been dispersed by a postilion's
+horn; the fact is, dear Clara, that the postilion has much the same
+effect upon me as the most excellent champagne."
+
+Here is perhaps the secret of much of his correspondence; the pure
+delight of letting his "fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase the
+ink." The aroma of the ink-bottle has run away with how many brains.
+
+He wants to send her "perfect bales of letters," he prefers to write
+her at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and the
+thirteenth. He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letter
+which, he says, is written like a little sonata, "namely, a chattering
+part, a laughing part, and a talking part."
+
+Clara seemed from his first sight of her to exercise over him a curious
+mingling of profound admiration and of teasing amusement. He portrays
+her vividly to herself in such words as these:
+
+"Your letter was yourself all over. You stood before me laughing and
+talking; rushing from fun to earnest as usual, diplomatically playing
+with your veil. In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double."
+
+All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enough
+for the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very same
+letter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara's soul, Ernestine,
+and speak of her as "your old companion in joy and sorrow, that bright
+star which we can never appreciate enough."
+
+A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine. Clara found her
+taciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her,
+Wieck himself wrote in the diary, "We have not missed her; for the last
+six weeks she has been a stranger in our house; she had lost completely
+her lovable and frank disposition." He compares her to a plant, which
+only prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left to
+itself. He concludes, "The sun shone too sharply upon her, _i.e._,
+Herr Schumann."
+
+But the sun seemed to withdraw from the flower it had scorched. During
+her absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chiefly
+remarkable for their poor style and their worse grammar. To a man of
+the exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature so
+earnestly, this must have been a constant torture. It humiliated his
+own love, and greatly undermined the romance, which crumpled absolutely
+when he learned that she was not the baron's own daughter, but only an
+adopted child, and of an illegitimate birth at that. He had not learned
+these facts from her; indeed she had practised elaborate deceptions
+upon him. But the breaking of the engagement--a step almost as serious
+as divorce in the Germany of that day--he seems to have conducted with
+his characteristic gentleness and tact; for Ernestine did not cease to
+be his friend and Clara's. Later, when he was accused of having severed
+the ties with Ernestine, he wrote:
+
+"You say something harsh, when you say that I broke the engagement with
+Ernestine. That is not true; it was ended in proper form with both
+sides agreeing. But concerning this whole black page of my life, I
+might tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that had
+befallen me earlier. It would take a long time, however, and it
+includes the years from the summer of 1833 on. But you shall learn of
+it sometime, and you will have the key to all my actions and my
+peculiar manner."
+
+That explanation, however, does not seem to be extant; all we can know
+is that Ernestine and he parted as friends, and that six years later he
+dedicated to her a volume of songs (Opus 13). Three years after the
+separation she married, to become Frau von Zedtwitz; but her husband
+did not live long, nor did she survive him many years.
+
+Aside from the disillusionment that had taken the glamour from
+Ernestine, Schumann had been slowly coming more and more under the
+spell of Clara Wieck. The affair with Ernestine seemed to have been
+only a transient modulation, and his heart like a sonata returned to
+its home in the original key of "carissima Clara, Clara carissima."
+Clara, who had found small satisfaction in her fame out-of-doors, since
+she was defeated in her love in her home, had the joy of seeing the
+gradual growth in Schumann's heart of a tenderness that kept increasing
+almost to idolatry. Her increasing beauty was partly to blame for it,
+but chiefly it was the nobility yet exuberant joy of her soul, and her
+absolute sympathy with his ideals in music, criticism, literature, and
+life.
+
+To both of them, art was always a religion; there was no philistinism
+or charlatanism in the soul or the career of either. At this time, when
+Schumann found it difficult to get any attention paid to his
+compositions, Clara, from childhood, was able both to conquer their
+difficulties and to express their deep meanings. While Schumann was
+earning his living and a wide reputation by publishing the praises of
+other composers, by burrowing in all the obscure meaning of new
+geniuses, and revealing their messages to the world, his own great
+works were lying ignored and uncomprehended and seemingly forgotten. At
+this time he found a young girl of brilliant fame, honoured by Chopin,
+Liszt, by Goethe, by the king, by the public; and yet devoted to the
+soul and the art of the fellow pupil of her father. Even before he
+broke his engagement with Ernestine, he found Clara's charms
+irresistible.
+
+Chopin came to Leipzig in 1834, and in Schumann's diary after his name
+stands the entry: "Clara's eyes and her love." And later, "The first
+kiss in November."
+
+It was on the 25th. He had been calling on Clara, and when it came time
+to go home, she carried a lamp to light him down the steps. He could
+keep his secret no longer from himself or from her; he declared his
+love then and there. But she reminded him of Ernestine, and, with that
+trivial perjury to which lovers are always apt, he informed her that
+Ernestine was already engaged to some one else. There was no further
+resistance, but nearly a serious accident. The kiss that set their
+hearts afire came near working the same effect upon the house. As Clara
+wrote afterward:
+
+"When you gave me that first kiss, then I felt myself near swooning.
+Before my eyes it grew black!... The lamp I brought to light you, I
+could hardly hold."
+
+Schumann writes a few days later in his diary: "Mit Ernestine
+gebrochen." Schumann consoled himself later by saying that he did
+Ernestine no wrong, for it would have been a greater and more terrible
+misery had they married. "Earlier or later my old love and attachment
+for you would have awakened again, and then what misery!... Ernestine
+knew right well that she had first driven you out of my heart, that I
+loved you before I knew Ernestine."
+
+Ernestine herself wrote him often.
+
+"I always believed that you could love Clara alone, and still believe
+it."
+
+In January, 1836, the engagement with Ernestine was formally broken.
+Shortly after this, Robert's mother died. He was compelled to leave
+Leipzig in dismal gloom. He said to Clara simply, "Bleib mir treu," and
+she nodded her head a little, very sadly. How she kept her word! Two
+nights later he wrote:
+
+"While waiting for the coach at Zwickau,
+
+"10 P.M., Feb. 13, 1836.
+
+"Sleep has been weighing on my eyes. I have been waiting two hours for
+the express coach. The roads are so bad that perhaps we shall not get
+away till two o'clock. How you stand before me, my beloved Clara; ah,
+so near you seem to me that I could almost seize you. Once I could put
+everything daintily in words, telling how strongly I liked any one, but
+now I cannot any more. And if you do not know, I cannot tell you. But
+love me well; do you hear? ... I demand much since I give much. To-day
+I have been excited by various feelings; the opening of mother's will;
+hearing all about her death, etc. But your radiant image gleams through
+all the darkness and helps me to bear everything better.... All I can
+tell you now is, that the future is much more assured. Still I cannot
+fold my hands in my lap. I must accomplish much to obtain that which
+you see when by chance you walk past the mirror. In the meantime you
+also remain an artist and not a Countess Rossi. You will help me; work
+with me; and endure joy and sorrow with me.
+
+"At Leipzig my first care shall be to put my worldly affairs in order.
+I am quite clear about my heart. Perhaps your father will not refuse if
+I ask him for his blessing. Of course there is much to be thought of
+and arranged. But I put great trust in our guardian angel. Fate always
+intended us for one another. I have known that a long time, but my
+hopes were never strong enough to tell you and get your answer before.
+
+"What I write to-day briefly and incompletely, I will later explain to
+you, for probably you cannot read me at all. But simply realise, that I
+love you quite unspeakably. The room is getting dark. Passengers near
+me are going to sleep. It is sleeting and snowing outside. But I will
+squeeze myself right into a corner, bury my face in the cushions, and
+think only of you. Farewell, my Clara.
+
+"Your ROBERT."
+
+Close upon this letter, which must have been answered with no
+hesitation and no inferiority of passion, came the summons to battle
+for the prize. Wieck, who had been a cordial father, declined with
+undue enthusiasm the role of father-in-law. He had viewed with hope
+Robert's entrance into the career of music, had advised the mother to
+let him make it his life; then the youth ruined his chances of earning
+large moneys as a concert performer by practising until his right hand
+was permanently injured and the third finger useless. As early as 1831
+Wieck is quoted as objecting to Schumann's habits, and saying that, if
+he had no money at all, he might turn out well; for Schumann, while
+never rich, never knew poverty. But their friendship continued cordial
+and intimate, and Wieck went into partnership with him in the _Neue
+Zeitschrift fuer Musik_; he was a member of the famous Davids-buendler,
+that mystical brotherhood of art, wherein Clara is alluded to as
+"Chiara," perhaps also as "Zilia." None the less, or perhaps all the
+more, Wieck objected to seeing his famous and all-conquering child
+marry herself away to the dreamer and eccentric.
+
+Wieck's own domestic affairs had not flowed too smoothly; he had
+married the daughter of Cantor Tromlitz, who was the mother of Clara
+and four other children, but the marriage, though begun in love, was
+unhappy, and after six years was ended in divorce. Clara remained with
+her father, while her mother married a music-teacher named Bargiel, and
+bore him a son, Waldemar, well known as a composer and a good friend
+and disciple of Robert Schumann. Wieck had married again, in 1828,
+Clementine Fechner, by whom he had a daughter, Marie, who also attained
+some prominence as pianist and teacher.
+
+On February 13, 1836, we have seen Schumann write his love to Clara.
+The number of the day, the stormy night, and the remembrance of his
+mother's death were all appropriate omens. Wieck stormed about Clara's
+head with rebuke and accusations, and threatened like another Capulet,
+till he scared the seventeen-year-old girl into giving him Schumann's
+letters. Then he threatened to shoot Schumann if she did not promise
+never to speak to him again. She made the promise, and the manner in
+which she did not keep it adds the necessary human touch to this most
+beautiful of true love stories. Schumann was never underhanded by
+choice, or at all, except a little on occasion in this love affair; so
+now he called at once upon his old teacher, friend and colleague.
+
+The interview must have been brief and stormy, for, on the 1st of
+March, 1836, Schumann writes to August Kahlert, a stranger but a fellow
+musical journalist, at Breslau, where Clara had gone:
+
+"I am not going to give you anything musical to spell out today, and,
+without beating about the bush, will come to the point at once. I have
+a particular favour to ask you. It is this: Will you not devote a few
+moments of your life to acting as messenger between two parted souls?
+At any rate, do not betray them. Give me your word that you will not!
+
+"Clara Wieck loves, and is loved in return. You will soon find that out
+from her gentle, almost supernatural ways and doings. For the present
+don't ask me the name of the other one. The happy ones, however, acted,
+met, talked, and exchanged their vows, without the father's knowledge.
+He has found them out, wants to take violent measures, and forbids any
+sort of intercourse on pain of death. Well, it has all happened before,
+thousands of times. But the worst of it is that she has gone away. The
+latest news came from Dresden. But we know nothing for certain, though
+I suspect, indeed I am nearly convinced, that they are at Breslau.
+Wieck is sure to call upon you at once, and will invite you to come and
+hear Clara play. Now, this is my ardent request, that you should let me
+know all about Clara as quickly as possible,--I mean as to the state of
+mind, the life she leads, in fact any news you can obtain. All that I
+have told you is a sacred trust, and don't mention this letter to
+either the old man or anybody else.
+
+"If Wieck speaks of me, it will probably not be in very flattering
+terms. Don't let that put you out. You will learn to know him. He is a
+man of honour, but a rattle-brain (_Er ist ein Ehrenmann, aber ein
+Rappelkopf_). I may further remark that it will be an easy thing for
+you to obtain Clara's confidence and favour, as I (who am more than
+partial to the lovers), have often told her that I correspond with you.
+She will be happy to see you, and to give you a look. Give me your
+hand, unknown one; I believe your disposition to be so noble that it
+will not disappoint me. Write soon. A heart, a life depends upon it--my
+own--. For it is I, myself, for whom I have been pleading."
+
+Kahlert met Clara, but she was embarrassed and mistrustful of the
+stranger's discretion. The next day Schumann wrote to his sister-in-law
+Theresa still with a little hope: "Clara is at Breslau. My stars are
+curiously placed. God grant it may all end happily."
+
+In April, Clara and her father returned to Leipzig, but the lovers, now
+reunited in the same town, were further removed than ever. Clara's
+promise compelled her to treat Schumann as a stranger on the casual
+meetings that happened to the torment rather than the liking of both.
+The nagging uncertainty, the simulating of indifference, a stolen
+glance, or a hasty clasp of the hand, in which one or the other seemed
+not to express warmth enough, caused a certain impatience which Wieck
+and his wife were eager enough to turn into mistrust.
+
+Schumann's compositions no longer frequented Clara's programmes. He was
+driven elsewhere for society, and when the taverns and the boisterous
+humour of his friends wearied him, he turned again to Frau Voigt. In
+March he had written to his sister:
+
+"I am in a critical position; to extricate myself I must be calm and
+clear-sighted; it has come to this, either I can never speak to her
+again, or she must be mine."
+
+By November such an estrangement had come between the lovers that he
+could write his sister-in-law:
+
+"Clara loves me as dearly as ever, but I am resigned. I am often at the
+Voigts."
+
+Since February of the year 1836, they had not spoken or exchanged any
+letters. He never heard her beloved music, except at two concerts, or
+when at night he would stand outside of her house and listen in secret
+loneliness. In May he dedicated to her his Sonata in F Sharp Minor. It
+was, as he expressed it: "One long cry of my heart for you, in which a
+theme of yours appears in all possible forms." His Opus 6, dated the
+same year, was his wonderfully emotional group, "The Davidsbuendlertaenze."
+The opening number is based upon a theme by Clara Wieck, and in certain
+of the chords written in syncopation, I always feel that I hear him
+calling aloud, "Clara! Clara!"
+
+His hope that this musical appeal might bring her to him was in vain,
+and he began to doubt her faith. He passed through one of those
+terrific crises of melancholia which at long intervals threatened his
+reason. On the eve of the New Year, he wrote to his sister-in-law:
+
+"Oh, continue to love me--sometimes I am seized with mortal anguish,
+and then I have no one but you who really seem to hold me in your arms
+and to protect me. Farewell."
+
+To Clara, at a later time, he described this trial of his hope:
+
+"I had given up and then the old anguish broke out anew--then I wrung
+my hands--then I often prayed at night to God: 'Only let me live
+through this one torment without going mad.' I thought once to find
+your engagement announced in the paper--that bowed my neck to the dust
+till I cried aloud. Then I wished to heal myself by forcing myself to
+love a woman who already had me half in her net."
+
+Love by act of Parliament, or by individual resolve, has never been
+accomplished; and Schumann's efforts were foredoomed. In the meanwhile,
+the Wiecks tried the same treatment upon Clara, whose singing-teacher,
+Carl Banck, had been deceived by her friendship into thinking that he
+could persuade her to love him. His ambition suited eminently the
+family politics of Father Wieck. He made his first mistake by
+slandering Schumann, not knowing the A B C of a woman's heart. For a
+lover slandered is twice recommended. As Clara wrote later: "I was
+astounded at his black heart. He wanted to betray you, and he only
+insulted me."
+
+One of the attempts to undermine Schumann was the effort to poison
+Clara's mind against him; because when a piano Concerto of hers was
+played (Opus 7), Schumann did not review it in his paper, but left it
+to a friend of his named Becker. In the next number Schumann wrote an
+enthusiastic criticism upon a Concerto by Sterndale Bennett. The
+attempt failed, however, and Schumann's letter is in existence in which
+he had asked Becker to review the Concerto, because, in view of the
+publicity given to the estrangement with the Wiecks, praise from him
+would be in poor taste.
+
+Soon Clara at a public concert in Leipzig dared to put upon the
+programme the F Sharp Minor Sonata, in which Schumann had given voice
+to his heart's cry ("_Herzensschrei nach der Geliebten_"). Schumann's
+name did not appear on the programme, but it was credited to two of his
+pen-names, Eusebius and Florestan. Now, as Litzman notes, the answer to
+that outcry came back to him over the head of the audience. Clara knew
+he would be there, and that he would understand. Her fingers seemed to
+be giving expression not only to his own yearning, but to her answer
+and her like desire. It was a bold effort to declare her love before
+the world, and, as she wrote him later: "Do you not realise that I
+played it since I knew no other way to express my innermost feelings at
+all. Secretly, I did not dare express them, though I did it openly. Do
+you imagine that my heart did not tremble?"
+
+The musical message renewed in Schumann's heart a hope and
+determination that had been dying slowly for two years. His friend
+Becker came to Leipzig, and took up the cause of the lovers with great
+enthusiasm. He carried letters to and fro with equal diplomacy and
+delight. He appeared in time to play a leading role in a drama Schumann
+was preparing. Wieck's enmity to Schumann had been somewhat mitigated
+after two years of meeting no opposition. Schumann was encouraged to
+hope that, if he wrote a letter to Wieck on Clara's birthday, September
+13, 1837, it might find the old bear in a congenial mood. He had
+written to Clara the very morning after the concert at daybreak,
+saying: "I write this in the very light of Aurora. Would it be that
+only one more daybreak should separate us." He tells her of his plan,
+asking only one word of approval. Clara, overcome with emotion when
+Becker brought her the first letter she had received in so long a time
+from Schumann, was so delighted at the inspiration that she wrote:
+
+"Only a simple 'Ja' do you ask. Such a tiny little word ... so weighty
+though ... could a heart, as full of unspeakable love as mine not speak
+this tiny little word with the whole soul? I do it and my soul whispers
+it for ever. The grief of my heart, the many tears, could I but
+describe them ... oh, no! Your plan seems to me risky, but a loving
+heart fears no obstacles. Therefore once more I say _yes_! Could God
+turn my eighteenth birthday into a day of mourning? Oh, no! that were
+far too gruesome. Ah, I have long felt 'it must be,' and nothing in the
+world shall make me waver, and I will convince my father that a
+youthful heart can also be steadfast. Very hastily,
+
+"Your CLARA."
+
+And now, letters began to fly as thickly as swallows at evening. She
+found a better messenger than Becker, in her faithful maid, "Nanny,"
+whom she recommended to complete confidence: "So Nanny can serve as a
+pen to me." At last the lovers met clandestinely by appointment, as
+Clara returned from a visit to Emily List. Both were so agitated that
+Clara almost fainted, and Schumann was formal and cold. She wrote
+later:
+
+"The moon shone so beautifully on your face when you lifted your hat
+and passed your hand across your forehead; I had the sweetest feeling
+that I ever had; I had found my love again."
+
+It was in this time of frenzied enthusiasm, of alternate hope and
+despondency, that Schumann wrote the seventh of his "Davidsbuendlertaenze."
+The birthday came, and with it the letter went to Wieck:
+
+"It is so simple what I have to say to you--and yet the right words
+fail me constantly. A trembling hand will not let the pen run
+quietly.... To-day is Clara's birthday,--the day when the dearest being
+in the world, for you as for me, first saw the light of the world."
+
+He tells how through all the obstacles that had met their way he had
+deeply loved her and she him.
+
+"Ask her eyes whether I have told the truth. Eighteen months long have
+you tested me. If you have found me worthy, true and manly, then seal
+this union of souls; it lacks nothing of the highest bliss, except the
+parental blessing. An awful moment it is until I learn your decision,
+awful as the pause between lightning and thunder in the tempest, where
+man does not know whether it will give destruction or benediction. Be
+again a friend to one of your oldest friends, and to the best of
+children be the best of fathers."
+
+With this letter he enclosed one to Wieck's wife: "In your hands, dear
+lady, I lay our future happiness, and in your heart--no stepmotherly
+heart, I am sure."
+
+The letter made a sensation in the Wieck home. Clara's father spoke no
+word to her about it. He and his wife locked themselves up in a room to
+answer it. Clara wept alone all the long birthday. Her father asked her
+why she was so unhappy, and when she told him the truth, he showed her
+Schumann's letter, and said: "I did not want you to read it, but, since
+you are so unreasonable, read." Clara was too proud, and would not.
+Schumann wrote to Becker concerning Wieck's answer, saying:
+
+"Wieck's answer was so confused, and he declined and accepted so
+vaguely, that now I really don't know what to do. Not at all. He was
+not able to make any valid objections; but as I said before, one could
+make nothing of his letter. I have not spoken to C. yet; her strength
+is my only hope."
+
+To Clara he wrote that an interview he had with her father was
+frightful. "This iciness, ill-will, such confusion, such
+contradictions. He has a new way to wound; he drives his knife to the
+hilt into my heart. What next then, my dear Clara, what next? Your
+father himself said to me the fearful words: 'Nothing shall shake me.'
+Fear everything from him, he will compel you by force if he cannot by
+trickery. _Fuerchten Sie Alles_!" Wieck consented to permit them to meet
+publicly and with a third person, but not alone, and to correspond only
+when Clara was travelling. His reasons were his ambition for her, her
+youth. But Schumann knew better:
+
+"There is nothing in this, believe me; he will throw you to the first
+comer who has gold and title enough. His highest ambition then is
+concert giving and travelling. Further than that he lets your heart
+bleed, destroys my strength in the midst of my ambition to do beautiful
+things in the world. Besides he laughs at all your tears.... Ah! how my
+head swims. I could laugh at death's own agony!"
+
+His only hope was now her steadfastness. Her message promised him that,
+and warned him also to be true, or else "you will have broken a heart
+that loves but once."
+
+It is only now, strange to say, that they began to use the "Du," that
+second person singular of intimacy which all languages keep except the
+English, which has banished its "thee and thou" to cold and formal
+usages.
+
+It was typical of Clara's attitude throughout this whole long struggle
+that she was always as true to her father's wishes as could humanly be
+expected. She obeyed him always, until he became unreasonable and a
+tyrant beyond even the endurance of a German daughter. So now, though
+Robert begged her to write him secretly, she refused with tears. But,
+fortunately for them both, she did not long remain in the town where
+they were separated like prisoners in neighbouring cells. She could
+soon write him from other cities. As for Schumann, he determined to
+make the most of the new hope, and to establish himself socially and
+financially in a position which Wieck could not assail.
+
+Gradually, with that same justice which made him able to criticise
+appreciatively the music of men who wrote in another style than his, he
+was able to feel an understanding for the position of even his
+tormentor Wieck.
+
+"Now we have only to obtain the affection and confidence of your
+father, to whom I should so love to give that name, to whom I owe so
+many of the joys of my life, so much good advice, and some sorrow as
+well--and whom I should like to make so happy in his old days, that he
+might say: 'What good children!' If he understood me better he would
+have saved me many worries and would never have written me a letter
+which made me two years older. Well, it is all over and forgiven now;
+he is your father, and has brought you up to be everything that is
+noble; he would like to weigh your future happiness as in a pair of
+scales, and wishes to see you just as happy and well-protected as you
+have always been under his fatherly care. I cannot argue with him."
+
+Schumann works with new fury at his compositions, and plans ever larger
+and larger works; but through all his music there reigns the influence
+of Clara in a way unequalled, or at least never equally confessed by
+any other musician. He writes her that the Davidsbuendlertaenze were
+written in happiness and are full of "bridal thoughts, suggested by the
+most delicious excitement that I have ever remembered." Of his "Ende
+vom Lied" he says:
+
+"When I was composing it, I must confess that I thought: 'Well, the end
+of it all will be a jolly wedding,' but towards the end, my sorrow
+about you came over me again, so that wedding and funeral bells are
+ringing together."
+
+He plans how they shall write music together when they are married, and
+says:
+
+"When you are standing by me as I sit at the piano, then we shall both
+cry like children--I know I shall be quite overcome. Then you must not
+watch me too closely when I am composing; that would drive me to
+desperation; and for my part, I promise you, too, only very seldom to
+listen at your door. Well, we shall lead a life of poetry and blossoms,
+and we shall play and compose together like angels, and bring gladness
+to mankind."
+
+He would have "a pretty cottage not far from town--you at my side--to
+work--to live with me blissful and calm" (_selig und still_). And when
+she wishes to tour: "We'll pack our diamonds together and go live in
+Paris."
+
+He writes her, complaining that her father called him phlegmatic, and
+said that he had written nothing in the _Zeitschrift_ for six weeks. He
+insists that he is leading a very serious life:
+
+"I am a young man of twenty-eight with a very active mind, and an
+artist, to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, and
+have been sitting still, saving my money without a thought of spending
+it on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way as usual. And
+do you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that I
+have done are quite lost upon your father?"
+
+Sometimes the strain under which the two lovers lived caused a little
+rift within the lute. Poor Clara, forced to defend Robert against her
+father's contempt, and her father against Robert's indignation,
+preserved her double and contradictory dignity with remarkable skill,
+with a fidelity to both that makes her in the last degree both
+admirable and lovable. When she advised patience or postponement, the
+impatient Robert saw her father's hand moving the pen, and complained;
+but in his next letter he was sure to return to his attitude of
+tenderness for her in her difficulties, and determination to yield
+everything to circumstances except the final possession of the woman of
+his heart.
+
+Musicians seem to be naturally good writers of letters. In the first
+place, those whose fingers grow tired of playing notes or writing them,
+seem to find recreation in the reeling off of letters. They have
+acquired an instinctive sense of form, and an instinct for smoothing
+over its rough edges, and modulating from one mood into another.
+Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good
+letter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, _ex
+officio_, tend to write correspondence that is literary without trying
+to be so, sincere without stupidity. But in the volumes and volumes of
+musicians' letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have never
+found any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbing
+with longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramatic
+with the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of Robert
+Schumann and Clara Wieck.
+
+The woes of the two lovers were as different as possible, though
+equally balanced; and the honourableness of their undertaking was
+equally high.
+
+Clara was torn betwixt filial piety toward a father who could be ursine
+to a miserable degree, and a lover who was not only eating his heart
+out in loneliness, but who needed her personality to complete his
+creative powers in music. While Schumann had no such problem to meet,
+he lacked Clara's elastic and buoyant nature, and it must never be
+forgotten that when he was sad, he was dismal to the point of absolute
+madness. He would sit for hours in the company of hilarious
+tavern-friends, and speak never a word.
+
+Clara at length gave up her attempt to keep from writing to Schumann,
+in the face of her father's actions; for in spite of the promises he
+had given them, he could break out in such speeches as this: "If Clara
+marries Schumann, I will say it even on my death-bed, she is not worthy
+of being my daughter."
+
+Now began that clandestine correspondence which seems to have
+implicated and inculpated half the musicians of Europe. There were
+almost numberless go-betweens who carried letters for the lovers, or
+received them in different towns. There were zealous messengers ranging
+from the Russian Prince Reuss-Koestriz, through all grades of society,
+down to the devoted housemaid "Nanny." Chopin, and Mendelssohn, and
+many another musician, were touched by the fidelity of the lovers, and
+Liszt in one of his letters describes how he had broken off
+acquaintance with his old friend Wieck, because of indignation at his
+treatment of Schumann and Clara.
+
+Schumann's works were now beginning to attract a little attention,
+though not much, and even Clara was impelled to beg him to write her
+something more in the concert style that the public would understand.
+But while the musician Schumann was not arriving at understanding, the
+critic Schumann was already famous for the swiftness of his discoveries
+and the bravery of his proclamations of genius. As for Clara, though
+already in her eighteenth year, she was one of the most famous pianists
+in the world, and favourably compared, in many respects, especially in
+point of poetical interpretation, with Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, and
+Europe's brilliantest virtuosos. But Schumann had delighted her heart
+by writing: "I love you not because you are a great artist; no, I love
+you because you are so good." That praise, she wrote him, had rejoiced
+her infinitely, and that praise any one who knows her life can echo
+with Schumann.
+
+Such fame the love-affair of the Schumanns had gained that to the
+musical world it was like following a serial romance in instalments.
+Doctor Weber in Trieste offered to give Schumann ten thousand
+thalers--an offer which could not of course be accepted. At Easter,
+1838, Schumann received one thousand thalers (about $760) from his
+brothers Eduard and Carl.
+
+But the lovers had agreed to wait two years--until Easter, 1840, before
+they should marry--and the two years were long and wearisome in the
+prospect and in the endurance. As Clara wrote:
+
+"My sole wish is--I wish it every morning--that I could sleep two
+years; could over-sleep all the thousand tears that shall yet flow.
+Foolish wish! I am sometimes such a silly child. Do you remember that
+two years ago on Christmas Eve you gave me white pearls and mother said
+then: 'Pearls mean tears'? She was right, they followed only too soon."
+
+Schumann busied himself in so many ways that again for a little while
+he somewhat melted Wieck's wrath, and Clara hoped that some day he
+could again be received at home as a friend. She was made the court
+pianist at this time, and it was a quaint whimsy of fate that, in
+connection with the award, Schumann was asked to give her father a
+"character." It need hardly be said that he gave him extra measure of
+praise.
+
+Clara's new dignity stirred Schumann to hunt some honour for himself.
+Robert decided, that while he was content "to die an artist, it would
+please a certain girl to see 'Dr.' before his name." He was willing to
+become either a doctor of philosophy or of music. He began at once to
+set both of these schemes to work.
+
+Now old Wieck returned to his congenial state of wrath. He declared
+that Clara was far too extravagant ever to live on Schumann's earnings,
+though she insisted that Schumann was assured of one thousand thalers a
+year, and she could earn an equal sum with one concert a winter in
+Dresden, where prices were so high. But just then the prosperity of
+Schumann's paper began to slough off. It occurred to the lovers that
+they would prefer to live in Vienna, and that the _Zeitschrift_ could
+prosper there. There were endless difficulties, a censorship to pacify,
+and many commercial schemes to arrange, but nothing must be left
+untried. The scheme was put under way. Meanwhile, as usual, the Wiecks
+were trying on their part; to separate the lovers. Schumann was accused
+of infidelity to her, and he admitted that a Mrs. Laidlaw seemed to be
+in love with him, but not he with her. They attacked his character, and
+accused him of being too fond of Bavarian beer. On this charge, he
+answered with dignity:
+
+"Pooh!--I should not be worth being spoken to, if a man trusted by so
+good and noble a girl as you, should not be a respectable man and not
+control himself in everything. Let this simple word put you at ease for
+ever."
+
+Failing here, Wieck presented another candidate for Clara's heart, a
+Doctor D----, who met the same fate as Banck. There were further hopes
+that she would find some one in Paris or London, whither she was bound;
+but she wrote Schumann that if the whole aristocracy of both places
+fell at her feet, she would let them lie there and turn to the simple
+artist, the dear, noble man, and lay her heart at his feet. ("Alle
+Lords von London und alle Cavaliere von Paris, koennten mir zu Fuessen
+liegen," etc.) Clara was also tormented by the persistent suit of Louis
+Rackerman, of Bremen, who could not see how vain was his quest.
+
+One rainy night, Schumann stood a half-hour before her house and heard
+her play. And he wrote her: "Did you not feel that I was there?" He
+could even see his ring glitter on her finger. Another day Clara saw
+him taking his coffee with his sister-in-law, and she repeated his
+query: "Did you not feel that I was there?"
+
+Old Wieck stooped to everything, and even told Clara that he had
+written to Ernestine to demand a statement that she fully released
+Schumann from his former engagement to her--it being remembered that
+among Germans a betrothal always used to be almost as difficult a bond
+to sever as a marriage tie. This drove Clara to resolve a great
+resolve, and she wrote Schumann:
+
+"Twice has my father in his letters underlined the words: 'Never will I
+give my consent.' What I had feared has come true. I must act without
+my father's consent and without my father's blessing."
+
+An elopement was seriously considered. It was planned that Clara was to
+go to Schumann's sister-in-law. At this time also another friend
+offered Schumann one thousand thalers (about $760) and he said: "Ask of
+me what you will, I will do everything for you and Clara." But this
+crisis did not arrive, though the two were kept under espionage. Even
+now in November, 1838, a new and merely nagging attempt was made to
+postpone the marriage till the latter part of 1840, but Clara wrote
+that she would be with Robert on Easter, 1840, without fail. Then he
+went to Vienna to establish his journal there, and from there he sent a
+bundle of thirty short poems written in her praise. While he was in
+Vienna, her father shipped her off to Paris, so sure now of cleaving
+their hearts asunder that he sent her alone without even an elderly
+woman for a companion. He little knew that he was putting her to the
+test she had never yet undergone: that of living far from him and
+depending solely upon herself. It is a curious coincidence that one of
+her best friends in Paris was the same American girl, Emily List, who
+had once been Ernestine's rival for Robert's heart.
+
+The French people did not please Clara and she feared to go on to
+London alone. She dreamed only of hurrying back to Leipzig and Schumann
+and a home with him; in her letters the famous pianist seriously
+discusses learning to cook.
+
+Unhappy as she was in Paris, Robert was unhappier in Vienna, for the
+_Zeitschrift_ made no success, and he was driven to the bitter
+humiliation of taking it back to Leipzig in 1839. His brother died at
+this time also, and their sympathies had been so close that the shock
+was very heavy. Everything seemed to be going wrong. He could not even
+find consolation in his music. At this gloomy moment Clara hoped to win
+over her father by a last concession. She wrote from Paris that it
+would be well to postpone the marriage a few months longer than they
+had first intended, and Emily List wrote a long letter advocating the
+same and explaining how much it grieved Clara to ask this. She advised
+Robert to take up the book business of his brother, who had succeeded
+his father's prosperous trade. Even while Clara's tear-stained appeal
+was going to him, another letter of his crossed hers. It was full of
+joy and told her how well they would get along on their united
+resources. He gave them in detail and it is interesting to pry into the
+personal affairs of so great a musician. He wrote: "Am I not an expert
+accountant? and can't we once in a while drink champagne?"
+
+Clara's letter provoked in Schumann a wild outcry of disappointment,
+that after all these years he should accept as his dole only further
+procrastination. He wrote her that his family were beginning to say
+that if she loved him she would ask no further delay. Clara's letter
+seems to have been only her last tribute to her father, for, at
+Schumann's first protest, she hastened to write that she could endure
+anything, except his doubt; that she would be with him on Easter, 1840,
+come what would. This cheered him mightily, and he wrote that, while he
+was still unable to compose, owing to his loneliness, a beautiful
+future was awaiting him. He described his dreams of the life of art and
+love they should lead, composing and making all manner of beautiful
+music.
+
+"Once I call you mine, you shall hear plenty of new things, for I think
+you will encourage me; and hearing more of my compositions will be
+enough to cheer me up. And we will publish some things under our two
+names, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, and
+may not know which is yours and which is mine. How happy I am! From
+your Romanze I again see plainly that we are to be man and wife. Every
+one of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my music
+to you."
+
+Now he sent for her decision a formidable document, an appeal to the
+court, to compel the father's consent. Clara wrote her father an
+ultimatum on the subject, and received a long letter in reply, in which
+he consented to the marriage under such terms that they were better off
+before. For his consent was to be made on the following six
+stipulations: 1. That Robert and Clara, so long as Wieck lived, should
+not make their residence in Saxony; but that Schumann must none the
+less make as much money in the new home as his _Zeitschrift_ brought
+him in Leipzig. 2. That Wieck should control Clara's property for five
+years, paying her, during that time, five per cent. 3. That Schumann
+should make out a sworn statement of his income which he had given
+Wieck in Leipzig in September, 1837, and turn it over to Wieck's
+lawyer. 4. That Schumann should not communicate with him verbally or by
+letter, until he himself expressed the wish. 5. That Clara should
+renounce all claims as to her inheritance. 6. That the marriage should
+take place September 29, 1839.
+
+This insolent and mercenary protocol drove Clara to bay. She wrote her
+father from the depths of grief, and declared to him finally that she
+would wed Schumann on the 24th of June. Schumann wrote a short note to
+the old man, telling him that if he did not hear in eight days, silence
+would be taken as the last refusal. The answer was simply a letter from
+Frau Wieck, acknowledging Schumann's "impertinent letter," and saying
+that Wieck would not hold any communication with him.
+
+Then the lawsuit began. On the 16th of July he made his appeal and
+wrote to Clara that she must be personally present in six or seven
+weeks. She had written him a letter of great cheer and sent him from
+Paris a portrait she had had painted and a cigar case she had made with
+her own hands.
+
+On her way home Clara stopped at Berlin, where her own mother lived as
+the wife of Bargiel.
+
+Clara's life under her father's guardianship had gradually drifted
+almost out of the ken of her own mother. Her stepmother had done
+everything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her and
+making it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann a
+letter. Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the woman whose flesh
+she was; and she found there an immediate and passionate support.
+
+From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris not
+one penny of money and not a single trinket. They always wrote her:
+"You have your own money." This grieved her deeply, and her father's
+sending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing her
+never a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphaned
+her indeed. Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and Frau
+Bargiel seized the moment. She wrote letters of greatest warmth and
+sweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote an
+invitation to come to Berlin. He accepted and spent several pleasant
+days. Frau Bargiel wrote Clara how she had delighted in the talent and
+person of Schumann, and Robert wrote her how fine a mother she had. On
+the 14th of August, Clara and her friend Henrietta Reissman left Paris.
+
+Meanwhile Schumann had sunk into another awesome abyss of melancholia.
+The humiliation of having to go to law for his wife, and airing the
+family scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friend
+Becker: "I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of the
+court." As soon as Clara left Paris he hastened toward her and met her
+at Altenburg. It was a blissful reunion after a year of separation, and
+they went together to Berlin, where they knew the bliss of sitting once
+more at the piano together, playing Bach fugues. She found his genius
+still what it was,--"_er fantasiert himmlisch_"--but his health was in
+such serious condition that she was greatly frightened.
+
+Now her father proceeded to destroy every claim he may ever have had on
+her sympathy by his ferocity toward a daughter who had been so patient
+and so gentle toward him. He not only neglected her in Paris, except to
+write her merciless letters, but when she returned and he saw himself
+confronted with the lawsuit for her liberty, he offered a revision of
+his terms, which was in itself worse than the original. Clara describes
+the new offer:
+
+"I must surrender the 2,000 thalers (about $1,500) which I have saved
+from seven years' concerts, and give it to my brothers.
+
+"He would give back my effects and instruments, but I must later pay
+1,000 thalers and give this also to my brothers.
+
+"Robert must transfer to me 8,000 thalers of his capital, the interest
+of which shall come to me, also the capital, in case of a
+separation--What a hideous thought! Robert has 12,000 thalers, and
+shall he give his wife two-thirds?"
+
+Robert had already given her four hundred thalers in bonds. The new
+terms being rejected, Wieck put everything possible in the way of a
+speedy termination of the lawsuit. He made it impossible for Clara to
+get back to Paris, as she wished, to earn more money before the
+marriage. He demanded that she should postpone her wedding and take a
+concert tour for three months with him for a consideration of six
+thousand thalers. Clara declined the arrangement.
+
+One day she sent her maid to the house of her father, and asked him for
+her winter cloak. He gave this answer to the maid: "Who then is this
+Mam'selle Wieck? I know two Fraeulein Wieck only; they are my two little
+daughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill a
+dissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig." He compares this exile of
+the daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. But
+it was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving from
+his home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back to
+Berlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clara
+suspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasant
+a notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara had
+always been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieck
+wrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lend
+Clara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, and
+would ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King of
+Prussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in public
+concerts in Berlin. It need hardly be said that Clara was neither
+forbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared in
+person at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously. By a
+curious chance at the end of her _piece de resistance_, a string broke
+on the piano; but as a correspondent of Schumann's paper wrote, it came
+"just at the end, like a cry of victory." After this, Wieck wrote to
+Behrens protesting against his lending a hand to "a demoralised girl
+without shame." Clara learned that such of her letters as had gone
+through the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymous
+letter which she knew must have been dictated by her father. Her
+suspicions were later proved. The worst of the affair was the
+diabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her hand
+just before her chief Berlin concert.
+
+Next, he announced that his reason for not granting his consent was
+that Schumann was a drunkard. Robert found witnesses enough to be
+sponsors for his high respectability, but the accusation was a
+staggering blow in the midst of the deep melancholia into which the
+endless struggle and the recent death of Henrietta Voigt had plunged
+him. Clara had the rare agony of seeing him weep. It was now the turn
+of the strong Clara to break down, and only with the doctor's aid she
+continued her concerts. Her father's effort to undermine her good name
+extended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side of
+the story. But while certain old friends snubbed her, the lies that
+were told against her met their truest answer in the integrity of her
+whole career, and in the purity and honour of her life. This her own
+father was the first and the last ever to slander.
+
+It is noteworthy, in view of the lightness of so many of the love
+affairs of the musicians, such as the case of Liszt, who twice eloped
+with married women and discussed the formality of divorce afterward,
+that through the long and ardent and greatly tormented love story of
+the Schumanns there never appears a line in any of their multitudinous
+letters which shows or hints the faintest dream of any procedure but
+the most upright. Always they encouraged each other with ringing
+beautiful changes on the one theme of their lives: Be true to me as I
+am true to you. Despair not.
+
+The lawsuit dragged on and on. Wieck exhausted all the devices of
+postponement in which the law is so fertile. Schumann found himself the
+victim of a pamphlet of direct assault and downright libel, but all
+these things were only obstacles to exercise fidelity. The lovers felt
+that no power on earth could cut them apart. They began to dream of
+their marriage as more certain than the dawn. Schumann writes to
+Clara--"_Mein Herzensbrautmaedchen_"--that he wishes her to study and
+prepare for his exclusive hearing a whole concert of music, the bride's
+concert. She responds that he too must prepare for her music of his
+own, for a bridegroom's concert. He writes and begs her to compose some
+music and dedicate it to him; he implores her not to ignore her genius.
+She writes that she cannot find inspiration; that he is the family's
+genius for original work. Always they mingled music with love.
+
+The composer Hiller gave a notable dinner to Liszt, who, after toasting
+Mendelssohn, toasted Schumann, "and spoke of me in such beautiful
+French and such tender words, that I turned blood-red." January 31,
+1840, Schumann had taken up his plan to gain himself a doctor's degree
+to match Clara's titles. He had asked a friend to appeal to the
+University of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him an
+examination to pass; for his qualifications he mentioned modestly:
+
+"My sphere of action as editor on a high-class paper, which has now
+existed for seven years; my position as composer and the fact of my
+having really worked hard, both as editor and musician."
+
+He began an essay on Shakespeare's relation to music, but without
+waiting for this the University of Jena granted him his doctorate on
+February 24, 1840, a bit of speed which must have been marvellously
+refreshing to this poor victim of so much delay.
+
+The very day the degree was granted, he had decided to take legal steps
+for libel against the attack of Wieck's, which had been printed in
+pamphlet form and distributed. Toward Wieck he is still pitiful, "The
+wretched man is torturing himself; let it be his punishment." The libel
+suit was not prosecuted and his anger vanished in the rapture of being
+made a doctor of philosophy in flattering terms. As he confesses:
+
+"Of course the first I did was to send a copy to the north for my
+betrothed; who is exactly like a child and will dance at being engaged
+to a doctor."
+
+In May he went to Berlin and visited Clara's mother for a fortnight;
+here he had two weeks' bliss listening to Mendelssohn's singing to
+Clara's accompaniment some of the manifold songs that were suddenly
+beginning to bubble up from Schumann's heart. It was to his happiness
+that he credited this lyric outburst, for he had hitherto written only
+instrumental music.
+
+"While I was composing them I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If I
+were not engaged to such a girl, I could not write such music."
+
+Songs came with a rush from his soul, and he exclaims:
+
+"I have been composing so much that it really seems quite uncanny at
+times. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death like a
+nightingale."
+
+He begged Clara to come to him and drag him away from his music. Yet
+all he wished was to be "where I can have a piano and be near you."
+
+On July 4, 1840, he made her a present of a grand piano as a surprise,
+taking her out for a long walk until the piano could be placed in her
+rooms and hers taken to his.
+
+It will not be possible to tell here in detail the story of the process
+of law, or its many postponements or disappointments. Long ago they had
+set their hearts upon marrying on Easter Day, 1840; they had determined
+not to permit their father to drive them past this date. But they went
+meekly enough under the yoke of the law and passed many a month until
+it seemed to the litigants that the condition of waiting for a decision
+was to be their permanent manner of life. But suddenly, as Litzmann
+says, "there stood Happiness, long besought, on the stoop, and knocked
+with tender fingers on the door."
+
+On the 7th of July, 1840, Clara was told the good news that the father
+had withdrawn the evidence upon which he based his opposition. The case
+was not ended, but the lovers immediately began to hunt for a place to
+live. On the sixteenth of July they found a little, but cosy, lodging
+on the Insel Strasse. Grief had not yet finally done with them,
+however, for Clara must write in her journal:
+
+"I have not for my wedding what the simplest girl in town has, a
+trousseau."
+
+On the 1st of August the case reached a stage where the father had but
+ten days more to make his final appeal. Worn out and lacking in further
+weapons of any kind, he let the occasion pass, and rested on the
+decision of the court. Clara went for one last concert tour as Clara
+Wieck.
+
+On the 12th of August, the super-deliberate court handed down its
+awesome verdict. It was a verdict of reward for the lovers. Since Wieck
+had withdrawn his evidence, the verdict was strongly worded in favour
+of the lovers. Schumann wrote Clara, "On this day, Clara, three years
+ago, I proposed for your hand."
+
+There was no delay in crying the banns, and the lovers went about as in
+a dream of rapture.
+
+On September the 12th, between ten and eleven o'clock of a Saturday, at
+Schoenefeld, a village near Leipzig, they were married by an old school
+friend of Schumann's. On the 13th, a Sunday, and Clara's birthday--her
+twenty-first--she was the wife of the man who had for four years made
+her possession his chief ambition, and who had loved her better than he
+knew, long years before that.
+
+Thus the lovers gained only one day by their lawsuit, for Clara was now
+of age. But who could estimate the value of the struggle in
+strengthening and deepening their love for each other and their
+worthiness for each other? It is the struggle for existence and the
+battle with resistance that bring about the evolution of strength in
+the physical world, and in the mental. Can we not say the same of the
+sentimental?
+
+Would it not be a great pity if there were never such a gymnasium as
+parental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall we
+not, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychical
+culture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has only
+this year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to the
+first volume of Litzmann's new biography.
+
+On Clara's marriage-day she wrote in her diary a little triumph song of
+joy. The wedding had been very simple and--
+
+"There was a little dancing. Though no hilarity reigned, still in every
+face there was an inner content; it was a beautiful day, and the sun
+himself, who had been hidden for many days, poured his mild beams upon
+us in the morning as we went to the wedding, as if he would bless our
+union. There was nothing disturbing on this day, and so let it be
+inscribed in this book as the most beautiful and the most important day
+of my life. A period in my existence has now closed. I have endured
+very many sorrows in my young years, but also many joys which I shall
+never forget. Now begins a new life, a beautiful life, that life which
+one loves more than anything, even than self; but heavy
+responsibilities also rest upon me, and Heaven grant me strength to
+fulfil them truly and as a good wife. Heaven has always stood by me and
+will not cease now. I have always had a great belief in God, and shall
+always keep it."
+
+As for the old Wieck, his bitterness must have been almost suicidal. He
+did not forgive his daughter even after the birth of her first child,
+on September 1, 1841, the year also of Schumann's first symphony. It
+was only after a second child was born, in April, 1843, that Schumann
+could write to a friend:
+
+"There has been a reconciliation between Clara and old Wieck, which I
+am glad of for Clara's sake. He has been trying to make it up with me
+too, but the man can have no feelings or he could not attempt such a
+thing. So you can see the sky is clearing. I am glad for Clara's sake."
+
+But the cherishing of such a grudge even with such foundation was not
+like Schumann, and a year later, from Petersburg, where he had
+accompanied Clara on a triumphal tour and where they had the most
+cordial recognition from the Czar and Czarina, he addressed old Wieck
+as "Dear Father," and described to him with contagious pride the
+immense success of his wife. A little later he reminded him that "It is
+the tenth birthday Of our _Zeitschrift_, I dare say you remember." And
+yet again he writes to him as "Dear Papa," adding "best love to your
+wife and children, till we all meet again happily." And so ended the
+feud between the two men.
+
+The romance of Robert and Clara did not end at the little village
+church, but rather they seemed to issue thence into a very Eden of love
+and art commingled. The gush of song from his heart continued, he
+dedicated to her his "Myrthen" and collaborated with her in the twelve
+songs called "Love's Springtime." As Spitta, his biographer, writes:
+
+"As far as anything human can be imagined, the marriage was perfectly
+happy. Besides their genius both husband and wife had simple domestic
+tastes and were strong enough to bear the admiration of the world,
+without becoming egotistical. They lived for one another and for their
+children. He created and wrote for his wife, and in accordance with
+their temperament; while she looked upon it as her highest privilege to
+give to the world the most perfect interpretation of his works, or at
+least to stand as mediatrix between him and his audience, and to ward
+off all disturbing or injurious impressions from his sensitive soul,
+which day by day became more irritable. Now that he found perfect
+contentment in his domestic relations, he withdrew from his intercourse
+with others and devoted himself exclusively to his family and work. The
+deep joy of his married life, produced the direct result of a mighty
+advance in his artistic progress. Schumann's most beautiful works in
+the larger forms date almost entirely from the years 1841-5."
+
+He went with her on many of her tours. They even planned an American
+trip. Once they were received with a public banquet; these two whom
+Reissman calls "the marvellous couple." In his letters there are
+always loving allusions to "my Clara," and though he could not himself
+play because of his lame finger, she was to him his "right hand." Once
+in referring to a prospective concert he even wrote, "We shall play"
+such and such numbers.
+
+In 1853 he and Clara went to the Netherlands, where he found his music
+well known and himself highly honoured, though they say that the King
+of Holland, after praising Clara's playing, turned to Robert and said:
+"Are you also musical?" But then one does not expect much from a king.
+The musicians knew Schumann's work, and he rejoiced at finding friends
+of his art in a far-away country. "But," says Reissman, "this was
+destined to be his last happiness."
+
+For the dread affliction which throws a spell of horror across his life
+and his wife's devotion, did not long delay in seizing upon him after
+his marriage. As early as 1833, the ferocious onslaughts of melancholia
+had affected him at long intervals. In 1845, on the doctor's advice, he
+moved to Dresden. His trouble seems to have been "an abnormal formation
+of irregular masses of bone in the brain." He was afraid to live above
+the ground floor, or to go high in any building, lest he throw himself
+from the window in a sudden attack. He was subject to moods of long,
+and one might almost say violent, silence. In 1845 he described it as
+"a mysterious complaint which, when the doctor tries to take hold of
+it, disappears. I dare say better times are coming, and when I look
+upon my wife and children, I have joy enough."
+
+Later he wrote to Mendelssohn, that he preferred staying at home, even
+when his wife went out.
+
+"Wherever there is fun and enjoyment, I must still keep out of the way;
+the only thing to be done is hope ... hope ... and I will!"
+
+His wife was still "a gift from above," and his allusions to her were
+affectionate to the utmost. In 1846, and again in the summer of 1847,
+he suffered a violent melancholia. In these periods he experienced an
+inability to remember his own music long enough to write it down. He
+saw but few friends, among them the charming widow of Von Weber,
+Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn, Joachim, and a few others. Wagner wrote
+some articles for Schumann's journal and was highly thought of at
+first, but Schumann soon lost sympathy with him; the final sign of the
+break-up of his wonderful appreciation of other men's music.
+
+His life was more and more his home, and that more and more a voluntary
+prison. In 1853 he presented his wife on her birthday with a grand
+piano, and several new compositions. He took great delight in his
+family, and could even compose amid the hilarity and noise of his
+children. Concerning children he had written in 1845 to Mendelssohn,
+whose wife had presented him with a second child, "We are looking
+forward to a similar event, and I always tell my wife, 'one cannot have
+enough.' It is the greatest blessing we have on earth."
+
+Clara bore him eight children, and at her concerts there was usually a
+nurse with a babe in arms waiting for her in the wings. Schumann wrote
+three sonatas for his three daughters, and other compositions for them.
+His famous "Kinderscenen" were, however, composed before his marriage.
+
+It was in 1853 that his old enthusiasm for new composers broke forth in
+his ardent welcome to Brahms (who was then twenty years old), who
+became a devoted friend and was of much comfort to Frau Schumann after
+Schumann's death. This was not far off, but before life went, he must
+suffer a death in life.
+
+Worst of all in that final disintegration of his great soul was the
+interest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism. He was even
+duped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping. The bliss
+of Robert Browning's home was broken up in this same form, of
+all-encompassing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was the
+spiritualist in this case and resisted Browning's sanity in the matter.
+
+Schumann fancied that he heard spirit voices rebuking and praising him,
+and he rose once in the night to write down a theme given him by the
+ghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn, on which he afterward wrote
+variations which were never finished and were the last pathetic
+exercise of his magnificent mind.
+
+He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in his
+ears--the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he had
+embodied the nightmare in one of his compositions. Clara herself in
+later life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of
+"sequences" in her head, and Bizet's early death was a release from two
+notes that dinned his ears interminably.
+
+Schumann's eccentricities became a proverb. Alice Mangold Diehl tells
+of meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model of
+meekness and patience. Poor Schumann realised his failings and his own
+danger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum. But the idea was
+too ghastly to endure.
+
+On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment and
+helpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away unobserved, and leaped
+from a bridge into the Rhine. He was saved by boatmen and taken home.
+He recovered, but it was now thought best that he should be placed
+under restraint, and he passed his last two years in a private asylum,
+near Bonn. Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends and
+wrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair. Under the
+weight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey's body in the
+Salem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the age
+of forty-six he died. Clara, who had been away on a concert tour to
+earn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to give
+him her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony.
+
+After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live with
+her mother. She found it necessary to travel as a performer and
+to teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer.
+She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even as
+Schumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatest
+ambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had been
+also the perfect helpmeet to his art.
+
+Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and it
+is to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumann
+to write this music, and gave him her support under the long
+discouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to his
+best ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated his
+art, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she had
+coaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and his
+great messages.
+
+She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memory
+personally as well as artistically. She edited his works and published
+his letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to make
+him known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in his
+artistic importance. As she had written in 1871, "the purity of his
+life, his noble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never be
+fully known except through the communication of his family and
+friends."
+
+In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse for
+infidelity or selfishness. It seems actually and beautifully true, as
+Reissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout as
+those of the soul of a pure woman."
+
+Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert and
+Clara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but those
+as well of humanity.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+MUSICIANS AS LOVERS
+
+
+"Et le cortege chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et des
+ah!"--ZOLA, _L'Assommoir_.
+
+
+And now at the end of all this gossip, to see if it has served any
+purpose, and if the multitude of experiences totals up into any
+definite result:
+
+Of course, as you were just going to say, he said, "If music be the
+food of love." But then you must not fail to remember that in another
+play he hedged by saying, "Much virtue in an 'if.'" For music is not
+the food of love, any more than oatmeal or watermelons. And yet in a
+sense, music is a love-food--in the sense I mean, that there is
+love-nourishment in tubes of paint, which can perpetuate your beauty,
+my fair readeress; or in ink-bottles all ebon with Portuguese sonnets
+and erotic rondeaux; or in tubs of plaster of Paris, or in
+bargain-counterfuls of dress goods to add the last word to a woman's
+beauty. In such a sense, indeed, there is _materia amorofica_ in music,
+for with music one can--or at least one did--show forth the very rhythm
+of Tristanic desire, and another portrayed in unexpurgated harmonies
+the garden-mood of Faust and Marguerite.
+
+But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions
+like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as
+there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing
+reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to
+write fugues and five-finger exercises, and yet more settings of
+"Hiawatha," or "_Du bist wie eine Blume_"
+
+Now, there is only one thing easier than a generalisation, and that is
+a generalisation in the opposite direction. You can prove anything by
+statistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when you
+want to. But statistics are like automobiles. Sometimes if you hitch
+yourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who put
+his fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer.
+
+There was a time when I could have written you an essay on the moral
+effect of music, and been convinced, if not convincing. A little later,
+I could have done no worse with a thesis to the effect that music is an
+immoral influence. But that time is gone now, after a time spent in
+gathering material from everywhichway for this book on musicians' love
+affairs. For, to repeat, with a few statistics you can prove anything;
+with a complete array you can usually prove nothing, or its next-door
+neighbour.
+
+The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted to
+it. To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count the
+pulse of one of those "Oh-I'm-passionately-fond-of-music" maidens who
+talk all through even dance-music. Nor would you take for your test one
+of those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it reminds
+them of the first time they heard it--"that night when Sally Perkins
+sang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, now
+Mrs. van Van,--or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two years
+ago next Sunday."
+
+These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to a
+newsboy.
+
+The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls of
+the people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, play
+it,--and what is worse,--work it.
+
+To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned. What could
+have been better for the purpose than to have made them parade before
+us in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or in
+their letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forth
+endlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fetis, Grove, Riemann, and
+from their biographies and memoirs innumerable?
+
+A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to find
+a unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they have
+made, and the music that has made them. Let them pass again, only this
+time as soldiers go by at a review--the second time at the
+double-quick. Here they come--watch them well.
+
+Leading the rout are those stately or capering figures, who, from being
+the great virtuosi of their time, were finally idolised into gods in
+the Golden Age, when musical critics had no columns to perpetuate their
+iconoclasms in.
+
+Mark him with the stately stride--Apollo, smiting his lyre with a
+majesty hardly supported by the seven small notes he could get out of
+it. The gossips said he loved Daphne, and madly withal, but she took to
+a tree.--No, let the gods pass as they will. It is with men we deal,
+not gods.
+
+Note especially the cluster of those wonderful musickers, who, at the
+end of the Middle Age, went from Flanders and thereabouts, into Italy
+and all around Europe, weaving their Flemish counterpoint like a net
+all over the world of music. They seem all to have been marrying men,
+some of them super-romantical, others as stodgily domestic and workaday
+as any village blacksmith. There is Marc Houtermann, called the Prince
+of Musicians. He lived at Brussels, and died there aged forty, and the
+same year he was followed to his grave by his musically named Joanna
+Gavadia, who knew music well, and who, let us still hope, died of a
+broken heart. Cipriano de Rore, De Croes, and Jacques Buus were all
+married men, and begot hostages to fortune. Philippe de Monte may or
+may not have married; we only know that a pupil of his wrote him a
+Latin poem forty-six lines long, and we can only trust that he did not
+marry her.
+
+Orlando di Lasso, "one of the morning stars of modern times," whose
+music was so beautiful that once at Munich a thunder-storm was
+miraculously hushed at the first note of one of his motets, lived a
+love-life much like Schumann's, save that he seems to have had no
+hard-hearted parents to strengthen and purify his resolve. The only
+court he went to, to win her, was the court at Munich, where his Regina
+was a maid of honour. She bore him six children, and they lived
+ideally, it seems. But his health gave way now and then before his hard
+work, and finally, when he had reached his threescore and ten, his wife
+came home to find him gone mad, and unable even to recognise her, who
+had been at his side for thirty years. She guarded him tenderly, and
+strove hard to cheer his last days, but melancholy surrendered him only
+to death.
+
+Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote many
+wills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet,
+yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself a
+composer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet's
+country where her Flemish father took her.
+
+How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wife
+conspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger! When
+he was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a lady
+of the court of Ferrara. Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was a
+poetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry and
+his music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where she
+outlived De Wert some twenty-seven years.
+
+His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects of
+music; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who lived
+ninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater part
+of his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle against
+poverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate his
+family? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music as
+Jacques de Wert?
+
+De Wert had gone to Italy as a boy, and you might be after blaming
+those soft Italian skies for his amorous troubles. But then you'll
+encounter such a life as that of Palestrina spent altogether in Italy.
+He married young. Her name was Lucrezia, and their life seems to have
+been one of ideal devotion. She bore him four sons, and stood by him in
+all his troubles, brightening the twilight of poverty, adorning that
+high noon of his glory, when the Pope himself turned to Palestrina, and
+implored him to reform and rescue the whole music of the Church from
+its corruptions. It was well that Lucrezia could offer him solace, for
+unwittingly she had once brought him his direst distress. When he was
+recovered and well, a better post was offered him, and things ran
+smoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving him
+broken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the last
+fourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressive
+motets seem to have been written under the anguish of Lucrezia's death.
+The finest of them is his setting of the words:
+
+  "By the River of Babylon we have set us down and wept,
+  Remembering Thee, oh, Zion;
+  Upon the willows we have hung our harps,"
+
+which, as E.H. Pember says, "may well have represented to himself, the
+heart-broken composer, mourning by the banks of the Tiber, for the lost
+wife whom he had loved so long."
+
+Close upon so noble a life, artistic and personal, comes the career of
+Georges de la Hele, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative benefice
+to wed the woman he wished.
+
+And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio de
+Cotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and was
+rebuked publicly for howling indecent refrains to the tunes in church.
+Which of these is fairly typical as a musician?
+
+Then comes the most notable man in all English music, Harry Purcell,
+who wrote the best love-songs that ever melted the reserve of his race.
+He must have been a good husband, and his married life a happy one,
+seeing how ardent his wife was for his memory, and how she celebrated
+him in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and how
+eager she was that the two sons that survived out of their six
+children, should be trained to music.
+
+And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses,
+bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach?
+
+There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as
+makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as
+family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking
+in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity. He was notoriously immoral,
+and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had been
+before him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by his
+life and preeminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to any
+theory about the immoral influences of the art. For surely, if he, who
+is generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardly
+equalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has an
+unsettling effect upon society. And yet there are his great rivals,
+Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possible
+contrast.
+
+It is neither here nor there, that "Father" Bach left little money and
+many children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. and
+drifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters to
+live upon the charity of the town. It is unfortunate to have to include
+among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach,
+who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair
+family man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed his
+father's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He had
+family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. So
+much for the Bachs.
+
+A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of
+Cremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began his
+life romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen or
+eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who
+had been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari,
+and they were married on July 4, 1667. In the following December the first
+of their six children was born. Two of his sons took up their father's
+trade. Both of them died bachelors, and the third son became a priest.
+
+At the age of fifty-eight Francesca died. After a year of widowerhood,
+he wedded again; this time, a woman fourteen or fifteen years younger
+than he. She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than a
+year. His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame,
+at Cremona.
+
+The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were the
+Guarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs,
+though he who called himself "Jesus," was addicted to imprisonment, and
+is said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by the
+jailer's daughter. She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries.
+
+But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous
+and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of
+one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg
+Friedrich Haendel, who was born the very same year as the much-married
+Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The first
+snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post
+of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years
+before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had
+left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon
+his successor. Haendel could have got the job, if he would have had the
+girl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another
+musician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain
+under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a
+beautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he was
+in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two
+different women. The mother of the first objected to him as a mere
+fiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, only
+to be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady of
+high degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to be
+declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that
+"rejection implied no lack of merit." Seeing that these things happened
+in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic
+enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully.
+
+Whatever food music may have been to Haendel's greatness, there was
+another food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was the
+symphonic poetry of the cook. For Haendel was almost equally famous both
+as a composer and a digester. In this he was rivalled by the father of
+French opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that he
+spent his early life as a kitchen boy. He led his wife a miserable
+existence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excesses
+in solid and liquid food. After him came Rameau, who, like Stradivari,
+fell in love with a widow while he was still in his teens and she well
+out of hers. He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, and
+then he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very good
+woman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy. But he was
+taciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on them
+almost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time was
+Reinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice,
+rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rather
+sordid and unromantic group.
+
+But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superb
+figure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, with
+Maria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, but
+whose purse-proud father despised him for a musician. The lovers
+accepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like a
+playright, removed the stern parent in the next act. Gluck flew back
+from Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, "with whom to his death he dwelt
+in happiest wedlock." She went with him on his triumphal tours, and
+spent her wealth in charities. They had no children of their own, but
+adopted a niece. The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as he
+sang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that she
+should be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasure
+whether or not his brothers and sisters should have anything at all.
+
+Plainly we should be thinking that music has a purifying, ennobling,
+and substantial effect upon society, if only Gluck's friend and
+partisan, the successful composer and immortal writer, Jean Jacques
+Rousseau, would not intrude upon the picture with his faun-like
+paganisms and magnificently shameless "Confessions."
+
+Jostling elbows with him comes Gluck's chiefest rival, Piccinni, one of
+the most beautiful characters in history, a man who could wage a mortal
+combat in art, without bitterness toward his bitter rivals. He could,
+when Gluck died, strive to organise a memorial festival in his honour,
+and when his other rival, Sacchini, was taken from the arena by death,
+he could deliver the funeral eulogy. This Sacchini, by the bye, was a
+reckless voluptuary, who seems never to have married.
+
+Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband. He and his
+wife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability,
+gave little home concerts, which were events. They and their many
+children went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot of
+many musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, and
+there always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswick
+stumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni's door, and found him
+rocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at his
+coat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment.
+
+Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was the
+romance of Mozart.
+
+This goldenhearted genius was a composer at an age when many children
+have not commenced to learn their ABC's; he was a virtuoso before the
+time when most boys can be trusted with a blunt knife. Kissed and
+fondled by great beauties, from the age of five, it is small wonder
+that Mozart began to improvise upon the oldest theme in the world
+precociously. His first recorded love affair is found in his letters at
+the age of thirteen. He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that he
+gave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmost
+frivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the
+"Baesle," he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turn
+aside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon the
+fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took in
+boarders. For this girl, Aloysia Weber, he wanted to give up his own
+career as a concert pianist; he wanted to give up the conquest he had
+planned of Paris, and devote himself to the training of her voice, to
+writing operas for her exploitation, and to journeying in Italy for the
+production of these operas and the promulgation of her talents. Yet
+after breaking his heart, as he supposed, for the gifted and fickle
+woman who became a successful prima donna,--after losing her, he did
+that most impossible thing which could never happen in real fiction,
+and sought his consolation in the arms and in the heart of Aloysia's
+younger sister, who was not especially pretty, and was only modestly
+musical. But her name was Constanze, and she lived up to it.
+
+Constanze could always read to him, and tell him stories as he liked to
+have her do while he composed, and she could cut up his meat for him
+lest in his absent-mindedness he carve off one of his valuable fingers.
+And when she was ill, as she frequently was, there could be no gentler
+nurse than he. Besides, when winter was upon them, it was no winter of
+discontent, for if the fire gave out and the fuel could not be
+afforded, could they not always waltz together?
+
+Twice Mozart must make concert tours for money, and twice he came home
+poorer than he went, but at least he left the world some of the
+gentlest and most hearty love-letters in its literature. When he was at
+home, Vienna was busy with anecdotes of his devotion. He was indeed so
+good a husband that Constanze could not even withhold forgiveness for
+certain occasions when he strayed from the narrow path of absolute
+fidelity; for she knew that his heart had its home with her. When he
+died, supposedly of malignant typhus, she tried to catch his disease
+and die with him, and her health broke so completely that she could not
+attend his funeral; and when she was recovered enough to visit the
+cemetery, she could not discover, what no man has since found out, in
+just what three-deep pauper's grave Mozart was buried.
+
+All in all, in spite of certain ficklenesses in which this immortal
+musician has been surpassed by lovers of all walks of life, from
+blacksmiths to bishops, music has created one of tenderest, most honest
+of all romances.
+
+But then there was a man whose life encompassed Mozart's, as a long
+brace encompasses a stave of music. For Joseph Haydn was born
+twenty-four years before Mozart, and died eighteen years after him. And
+this man's love affairs were of altogether different fabric.
+
+While Mozart died in his poverty at thirty-five, Haydn, dying at
+seventy-seven, was worried over the endowment he should leave to a
+discarded mistress, whose name, strangely enough, was also Aloysia. And
+Haydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way by
+proposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with results
+how unlike!
+
+Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had been
+kind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interest
+she seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for the
+priests, who clustered around her, eating Haydn out of house and home.
+Frau Haydn was a shrew, and he finally gave up trying to live at home,
+seeking his consolation at court with a young and beautiful Neapolitan
+singer, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli.
+The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both of
+their ill-favoured spouses would pass away. But they both declined to
+"die by request," as Artemus Ward has it.
+
+After a time the lovers drifted apart, until finally Aloysia married
+again, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had made
+years before, to marry no other woman, and to leave her a pension.
+Meanwhile, in London, Haydn was having a quaint alliance, _sub rosa_,
+with a widow. Her letters to him, as doubtless his to her, were full of
+gentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had been
+writing ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn does
+not shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity.
+
+Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with so
+much of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts in
+history.
+
+We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease and
+deafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life so
+largely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through the
+world, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew,
+whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor more
+vain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng his
+letters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing for
+a homelife in a woman's heart.
+
+But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are often
+resolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which he
+claims to be willing, and at times even glad, to pass his life alone.
+We are not justified, then, in taking Beethoven as a man of domestic
+inclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt,
+and Beethoven had every qualification for driving a wife even madder
+than he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswerving
+friends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred and
+maltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have endured
+through the honeymoon.
+
+And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy or
+whim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him as
+a great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried for
+wedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs,--we meet a conflict
+of authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder of
+chastity, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt.
+
+Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he could
+easily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He has
+perpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in the
+furnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But how
+shall we blame or praise music for its effect upon Beethoven's heart,
+in the face of the antipodal life of such a fellow bachelor as Haendel?
+And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor of
+music, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even the
+paltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countess
+is dismissed by the cautious as a fable. Schubert was a pauper to the
+_n_th degree. But he found his joy in the hilarity of the Vienna cafes
+with boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimum
+of food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never to
+have truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them.
+
+There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinction
+between the womanless splendour of Haendel's life at court, and the
+unilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a difference
+also in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicated
+thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who,
+though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have
+loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.
+
+Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had been
+loved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, Leopoldine
+Blahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, Constantia
+Gladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as his
+nocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn under
+her feet. She married elsewhere. The Polish Maria Wodzinska was his
+next flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons of
+Paris at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-old
+girl. Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterious
+sphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as with
+claws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood,
+and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release from
+the embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming with
+her own clammy arms. Every one knows all there is to know about the
+Chopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw from
+it any inference as to the effect of music?
+
+Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art. With her as nurse, his genius
+accomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for a
+time. To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment and
+solace. But that he would have lived his life differently in any way
+had he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or an
+idler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner,
+the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason to
+believe. Is it not the man and the environment rather than the music
+that makes such a life what it is?
+
+There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a member
+of a long line of musicians. At seventeen he had formed "a tender
+connection with a lady of position," whom he lost sight of later and
+forgot in the race with fast young noblemen, whose dissipation he
+rivalled. A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, and
+almost in career. His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishment
+which sobered him with the abruptness of a plunge into a stream of ice.
+But his gaiety was as irrepressible as Chopin's melancholy, and he gave
+Germany some of its most cheerful music. His heart was restless, and
+still at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation for
+a worthless ballet-girl. Then his affection for a singer and soubrette,
+Caroline Brandt, steadied him. After a long period of effort to
+establish a firm position they married, and the soubrette became a
+"Haus-frau." He was thirty-one, however, before this point was reached,
+and the honeymoon consisted of a concert tour.
+
+The glory of his later life fought against the gloom of his disease,
+but the ferocious rake had made, as the proverb has it, an ideal
+husband and father. His letters to his wife are full of ardour. It was
+a tour through England that exhausted Chopin's last strength, and it
+was Weber's fate to die alone in London in the midst of eager
+preparations and vast hunger to reach his home. He was not quite forty
+when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked
+libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in the
+latter half that he wrote his best music.
+
+The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleaded
+even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical home
+than that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one in
+which family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. Like
+Mozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her death
+indeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of the
+utmost cheer and wholesomeness, revelling in dancing, swimming, riding,
+sketching, and billiards; he was idolised in the circle around him,
+though his life was not without its enmities. He had many slight
+flirtations, but seems to have been even engaged but once, to Cecile
+Jeanrenaud, whom he married. His home life was a repetition of that
+ideal circle in his father's house. A busier life or a more pleasantly
+respectable can hardly be found in the history of men, nor yet a more
+truly musical.
+
+A life of similar brilliance and similar musical immersion was that of
+Liszt, whose domestic career was nevertheless as different as possible.
+A soul of greater generosity, and more zealous altruism in many
+respects, it would be hard to find, and yet his relations to women
+were, in the conventional view, a colossal and multifarious scandal.
+Have we any more right to blame his domestic outrages to the music that
+was in him, than to the almost equally intense religious ardour that
+fought for him, leading him again and again to seek to enter a
+monastery, and finally actually to take orders? Abelard was a
+sufficiently tempestuous and irregular lover, yet he was a priest, and
+not a musician. Can we then blame harmony and melody for the
+humming-bird "amours" of the Abbe Liszt,--for the many women he made
+material love to from his early youth,--for the very dubious honesty of
+his bearing toward the Comtesse d'Agoult and the Princess Wittgenstein,
+with whom he debated the formalities of marriage without hesitating
+over the actualities?
+
+There is a strange cluster of domestic infelicities centring about
+Liszt. The Comtesse d'Agoult loved him so ardently that she braved the
+world for him, driving even her complacent husband to divorce her; but
+even then, though they lived together, Liszt did not marry her. He even
+brought George Sand, the ex-mistress of so many men, including Liszt
+himself, to live at the house with the comtesse, who had borne him
+three children out of wedlock. One of these children became the wife of
+Hans von Buelow, who was driven to divorce her that she might marry his
+teacher, Richard Wagner, whose first wife had endured twenty-five years
+of his irregularities in everything, except poverty, and who separated
+from him during the last five years of her life.
+
+Shall we blame all this to music, and if so, shall we say that music
+has atoned sufficiently in the devotion of Wagner and his second wife
+to each other, and their lofty theories of art? And in any case, how
+shall we explain the influence of music in the life of Wagner's rival
+for supremacy, Johannes Brahms, a confirmed bachelor; or his other
+contemporary, Tschaikovski, who, after a normal love affair with a
+singer, Desiree Artot, who jilted him, eventually married a girl by
+whom he seemed to have been deeply loved, without feeling any return?
+He claimed to have explained to the enamoured girl that he would marry
+her if she wished, but that he could not love her. On these terms she
+accepted him, and the bridegroom endured all the agonies of heart
+ordinarily ascribed to bartered brides. A burlesque honeymoon of a week
+was soon followed by a separation. Tschaikovski regarded his wife with
+a horror bordering on insanity, finding what little consolation life
+had for him in the devotion of a widow, who furnished him liberally
+with funds and admiration, with an affection which, for lack of better
+information, we can only call, for lack of a better word, Platonic.
+
+There are other musicians whose private affairs I need not repeat here,
+and yet others' that I have not poked into. There is no lack of curious
+entanglements, especially in the matter of the men and women who have
+played upon the human voice, but we have surely collected enough
+material for forming a judgment, especially when we have turned an
+additional glance upon the life of one other composer.
+
+Now, the influence of music might be modified beyond recognition by the
+fact that one of the lovers might not be musical; but surely, when both
+man and woman are professional musicians, there can be no doubt of the
+governing power of music. In recent musical history there is one
+eminent composer who married a woman also prominent in music. In fact,
+Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took up
+music as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a place
+among the major gods of creative art. Every one knows how he began to
+love Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and she
+entering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Their fidelity through
+the storm and stress of their courtship, their lifelong sympathy and
+collaboration in conserving a humanly perfect home, and in achieving a
+dual immortality, both as lovers and as musicians--these certainly
+indicate music as a solidifying and enriching force in society.
+
+And now, finally, in the procession that has filed past you, you have
+seen almost every imaginable form of love and lover, of husband and
+Lothario, or woman-hater. There have been cool-blooded bachelors like
+Haendel, Schubert, and Brahms; there have been passionate pilgrims like
+Chopin, Beethoven, and Liszt, who loved many women, and married none.
+There have been the home-keeping breeders of children, and contentment,
+such as Willaert, Orlando di Lasso, Palestrina, the Bachs, Gluck,
+Piccinni, Weber, Mendelssohn, and Schumann; and Bizet, whose wife said
+after his death, that there was not a moment of their six years'
+honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live. There have been the
+unhappily wed, who, through the fault of themselves, or their wives,
+found and made misery at home, and sought nepenthe elsewhere, such as
+Haydn, Berlioz, and Tschaikovski. There have been married lives of
+mixed nature, neither failure nor success, such as the careers of
+Lully, Rameau, Stradivari, and Wagner.
+
+If any one lives who could extract from this medley a theory as to the
+effect of music upon the human heart,--a theory that will satisfy
+himself alone, to say nothing of the world in general,--he is welcome
+to his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend to
+trace any thread of unity. I can only fall back upon this agnosticism:
+if any man argue to the effect, that music has a moral influence on
+life, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals in
+domestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has a
+moral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautiful
+lives that have ever bloomed upon earth. It is, after all, a matter of
+time, tide, and temperament. If a man of amorous nature happens to lead
+a life of much leisure, his idle mind will turn one way; and if the
+tide of opportunity concur, he will be dissipated, whether he be
+composer, clergyman, business man, bravo, soldier, sailor, carpenter,
+king, plumber, poet, pope, or peasant.
+
+The long and the short of it is, perhaps, that music, being a universal
+art, like a universal watch-key, will set going the complicated cogs
+and springs of every soul and yet not regulate or assure its rhythm.
+Music stimulates and satisfies the mind in any of its whims, and you
+can tune it to a softly chanted prayer, or to a dance orgy; to a hymn
+of exultation, or a tinkling serenade; a kindergarten song, to the
+bloodthirst of armies; to voluptuous desires that cannot or dare not be
+worded, or to raptures distilled of every human dross; to cynical
+raillery, or the very throb of a young lover's heart; to the hilarity
+of a drinking song, or the midnight elegies of ineffable despair. How
+is such an art as this to compel, or to deny anything or anybody?
+
+Musicians, then, are only ordinary clay, who happened to make music,
+instead of other things of more or less beauty or value. They are
+every-day puppets of circumstance and of inner and outer environment,
+who might have been happier, and might have been unhappier, with the
+women they wed or did not wed, had those women died younger, or lived
+longer--or with other women, or with none at all.
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+_Of Books Consulted and Cited in This Work_
+
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+BAINI (GIUSEPPE).
+
+Memorie storico-critiche della vita e delle opere di G. Pierluigi da
+Palestrina. 2 vols. Rome, 1828.
+
+BEAUFORT (RAPHAEL LEDOS DE).
+
+Franz Lizst. The Story of his Life. Boston, 1887.
+
+BEETHOVEN'S LETTERS. See Nohl.
+
+BELART (HANS).
+
+Richard Wagner in Zuerich (1849-1859). 2 vols. Leipzig. 1901.
+
+BELLAIGNE (CAMILLE).
+
+Portraits and Silhouettes of Musicians. Translated by Ellen Orr. New
+York, 1897.
+
+BELLASIS (Edward).
+
+Cherubini. Memorials illustrative of his life. London. 1874.
+
+BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).
+
+Lettres entre de Vienne en Autriche sur le celebre compositeur Haydn,
+suivees d'une vie de Mozart et de considerations sur Metastasio. Pub.
+1814, first under the pseudonym _L.A. Bombet_, and when exposed as a
+steal from Carpani (_q. v_.) republished under the pseudonym Doctor
+Stendahl in 1817. Published in English by W. Gardiner, 1820.
+
+BEYLE (MARIE HENRI).
+
+Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase. Par de Stendahl (Pseudonym).
+Nouvelle ed. Paris, 1854.
+
+BITTER (CARL II.).
+
+Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brueder. 2
+vols. Berlin, 1868.
+
+BONNET (JACQUES).
+
+Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'a
+present. Paris, 1715.
+
+BOURDELOT (Pierre), ABBE.
+
+Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'a
+present. Et en quoi consiste sa beaute. 4 vols. in 1. Amsterdam, 1725.
+
+BRAY (MRS. ANNA ELIZA).
+
+Handel, his life personal and professional. With thoughts on sacred
+music. A sketch. 2 vols. London, 1857.
+
+BUeLOW (M. VON).
+
+The early correspondence of Hans von Buelow. Edited by his widow.
+Translated by C. Bache. 5 vols. London, 1900.
+
+BUSBY (MRS. THOS. D.).
+
+Concert Room and Orchestra. Anecdotes of Music and Musicians, Ancient
+and Modern. 4 vols. London, 1825.
+
+CARPANI (GIUSEPPE).
+
+Le Haydine. Lettere sur la vita e le opera del celebre Maestro Giuseppe
+Haydn. Milano, 1812. Also in French, translated by Dominique Mondo, and
+in English. Paris, 1837. See also Beyle, _supra_.
+
+CHAMBERLAIN, HOUSTON STEWARD.
+
+Richard Wagner. Translated from the German by G.A. Hight. London, 1900.
+
+CHRYSANDER (FR.).
+
+G.F. Haendel. 3 vols. 1858.
+
+CLARKE (A. MASON).
+
+Dictionary of Fiddlers. London, 1895.
+
+CLAYTON (ELLEN CREATHORNE).
+
+Queens of Song. Being memoirs of some of the most celebrated female
+vocalists, who have appeared on the lyric stage, etc. 2 vols. London,
+1863.
+
+COXE (WILLIAM).
+
+Anecdotes of George Frederick Haendel, and John C. Smith. With select
+pieces of music composed by J.C. Smith, never before published.
+Published anonymously. London, 1799.
+
+CROWEST (FREDERICK).
+
+A Book of Musical Anecdote from every available source. 2 vols. London,
+1878.
+
+CROWEST (FREDERICK).
+
+Verdi; Man and Musician. London.
+
+CUMMINGS (W.H.).
+
+Purcell. London, 1881.
+
+DEITERS (HERMANN).
+
+Johannes Brahms. A biographical sketch. Translated, with additions, by
+Rosa Newmarch. London, 1878.
+
+DELMOTTE (H.).
+
+Notice biographique sur Roland Delattre. Paris, 1836. Translated into
+German by S.W. Dehn. Berlin, 1837.
+
+DIEHL (ALICE MANGOLD).
+
+Musical Memories. London, 1897.
+
+DIETRICH (ALBERT) and J.V. WIDMANN.
+
+Recollections of Johannes Brahms. Translated by Dora E. Hecht. London,
+1893.
+
+EDWARDS (H. SUTHERLAND).
+
+The Life of Rossini. London, 1869.
+
+ELLIS (WILLIAM ASHTON).
+
+Richard Wagner. Letters to Wesendonck _et al_. London, 1899.
+
+ELSON (L.C.)
+
+Great Composers and Their Work. Boston, 1898.
+
+ENGEL (CARL).
+
+Musical Myths and Facts. 2 vols. London, 1876.
+
+FETIS (F.J.)
+
+Biographic universelle des Musiciens et Bibliographic generale de la
+Musique. 8 vols. Paris, 1875, 2d ed.
+
+FERRIS (GEO.T.)
+
+The Great Violinists and Pianists. New York, 1888.
+
+FINCK (HENRY T.).
+
+Romantic Love and Personal Beauty. New York, 1887.
+
+FINCK (HENRY T.).
+
+Wagner and His Works. 2 vols. New York, 1893.
+
+FINCK (HENRY T.).
+
+Chopin and Other Musical Essays. New York, 1899.
+
+GEHRING (FRANZ).
+
+Mozart. London, 1883.
+
+GINGUENE (PIERRE LOUIS).
+
+Notice sur la vie et les oeuvrages de Nicolas Piccinni. Paris, 1800.
+
+GLASENAPP (CARL FR.).
+
+Richard Wagner's Leben und Wirken. 2 vols. Cassel, 1877. English
+version (enlarged) by Wm. Ashton Ellis. 3 vols. London, 1900-1902.
+
+GOUNOD, CHARLES.
+
+Autobiographical Reminiscences. London.
+
+GRIBBLE (FRANCIS).
+
+Rousseau's First Love. _Cosmopolis Magazine_, N.Y., Nov., 1898.
+
+GRIESINGER (GEORG AUGUST).
+
+Biographische Notizen ueber Joseph Haydn. Leipzig, 1870.
+
+GROVE, GEORGE.
+
+A Dictionary of Music and Musicians. 4 vols. London, 1890.
+
+HARDY (E.J.).
+
+The Love Affairs of Some Famous Men. By the author of "How to be Happy,
+though Married." New York, 1897.
+
+HAWEIS (REV. H.R.).
+
+Music and Morals. London, 1871.
+
+HAWEIS (REV. H.R.).
+
+My Musical Life. London, 1884.
+
+HAWKINS (SIR JOHN).
+
+A General History of the Science and Practice of Music. London, 1776.
+
+HEATH (CHARLES).
+
+Beauties of the Opera and Ballet. London.
+
+HENDERSON (W.J.).
+
+Richard Wagner, His Life and His Dramas. New York, 1901.
+
+HENSEL (SEBASTIAN).
+
+The Mendelssohn Family, 1729-1847. Translated by C. Klingmann. 2 vols.
+New York, 1882.
+
+HOESICK (FERDINAND).
+
+Chopin. Sein Leben und sein Schaffen. Warsaw, 1903.
+
+HOLMES (EDWARD).
+
+Life of Mozart, including his correspondence. New York, 1845.
+
+HUBBARD (ELBERT).
+
+Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians. In pamphlets. East
+Aurora, N.Y., serially.
+
+HUEFFER, FRANCIS.
+
+The Troubadours. London, 1878.
+
+HUNEKER (JAMES).
+
+Mezzotints in Modern Music. New York, 1899.
+
+HUNEKER (JAMES).
+
+Chopin: The Man and His Music. New York, 1900.
+
+HUNEKER (JAMES).
+
+The Melomaniacs. New York, 1902.
+
+IMBERT (HUGUES).
+
+Portraits et Etudes. Lettres inedites de Georges Bizet. Paris, 1894.
+JAHN (Otto).
+
+Life of Mozart. Translated by P.D. Townsend. 3 vols. Original edition,
+Leipzig, 1856.
+
+JANSEN (F.G.).
+
+The Life of Robert Schumann, told in his letters. Translated by May
+Herbert. 2 vols. London, 1890.
+
+JULLIEN (ADOLPHE).
+
+Wagner in Paris. 1849. Article in Paris _Journal des Debats._
+Translated in New York _Musical Courier_, 1902.
+
+JULLIEN (ADOLPHE).
+
+Richard Wagner. His Life and Works. Translated by Florence P. Hall. 2
+vols. Boston, 1892.
+
+KARAJAN (TH.G. VON).
+
+J. Haydn in London. Vienna, 1861.
+
+KARASOWSKI (MORITZ).
+
+Frederic Chopin, His Life, Letters, and Works. Translated by Emily
+Hill. 2 vols. London, 1879.
+
+KARLOWICZ. See _Revue Musicale_.
+
+KASHKIN (N.).
+
+Reminiscences of Peter Iljitsch Tschaikovski. Moscow, 1897.
+
+KOBBE (GUSTAVE).
+
+Wagner's Life and Works. New York, 1890.
+
+KREHBIEL (HENRY EDWARD).
+
+Music and Manners in the Classical Period. New York, 1898.
+
+LAHEE (HENRY C.)
+
+Famous Singers of To-day and Yesterday. Boston, 1898.
+
+LA MARA (Pseudonym of MARIE LIPSIUS).
+
+Franz Liszt's Briefe. Baende. Leipzig, 1893-1899.
+
+LA MARA (Pseudonym of MARIE LIPSIUS).
+
+Letters of Franz Liszt. Collected and edited by "La Mara." Translated
+by Constance Bache. 2 vols. London, 1894.
+
+LENZ (W. VON).
+
+The Great Piano Virtuosos of Our Time from Personal Acquaintance.
+Translated by M.R. Baker. New York, 1899.
+
+LERNE (EMMANUEL DE).
+
+Amoureux et grands Hommes. Paris, 1854.
+
+LISZT (FRANZ).
+
+Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. See Wagner.
+
+LISZT (FRANZ).
+
+Life of Chopin. Translated by Martha Walter Cook. Philadelphia, 1863.
+
+LITZMANN, BERTHOLD.
+
+Clara Schumann, Ein Kuenstlerleben nach Tagebuechern und Briefen. 2 vols.
+Vol. I., Leipzig, 1902.
+
+MAINWARING (DOCTOR).
+
+Memoirs of Haendel. Published anonymously. London, 1760.
+
+MATTHEW (JAS. E.)
+
+The Literature of Music. London, 1896.
+
+MATTIEU.
+
+Roland de Lattre. Mons, 1840.
+
+MENDEL (HERMANN).
+
+Giacomo Meyerbeer. Eine Biographie. Berlin, 1868.
+
+MENDELSSOHN-BARTHOLDY (FELIX).
+
+Letters of. Edited by Paul and Carl Mendelssohn. Translated by Lady
+Wallace. New York, 1864.
+
+MILLS (CHARLES).
+
+History of the Crusades. London.
+
+MIROMENIL (M.C. DE).
+
+Le genie de l'amour ou dissertation sur l'amour profane et religieux et
+de son influence sur les sciences et les arts. Paris, 1807.
+
+MOERIKE (EDWARD).
+
+Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag. (A novel.) Stuttgart, 1856.
+
+MOZART'S LETTERS. See Nohl.
+
+NEWMARCH (ROSA).
+
+Tschaikovski. London, 1880.
+
+NIECKS (FREDERICK).
+
+Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician. 2 vols. London, 1888.
+
+NIGGLI (A.).
+
+Robert Schumann. Sein Leben und Seine Werke. For this and other
+biographies see Waldersee.
+
+NISSEN (GEORG NIKOLAUS VON).
+
+Biographie W.A. Mozart's. Nach dessen Tode herausgegeben von Constanze,
+Witwe von Nissen, frueher Witwe Mozart. Leipzig, 1828.
+
+NlEMTSCHEK (FRANZ).
+
+Leben des K.K. Kapellmeister's Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. Prag, 1798.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Beethoven's Letters. Translated by Lady Wallace. 2 vols. London, 1867.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Beethoven Depicted by His Contemporaries. Translated by E. Hill.
+London.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Life of Wagner. Translated by Geo. P. Upton. Chicago, 1892.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Life of Haydn. Translated by Geo. P. Upton. Chicago, 1883.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Musiker-Briefe. Translated by Lady Wallace, 2d ed. London, 1867.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+The Letters of W.A. Mozart. Translated by Lady Wallace. 2 vols. New
+York, 1866.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Neue Briefe Beethovens. Stuttgart, 1867.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Ludwig Beethoven. Reminiscences of the Artistic and Home Life of the
+Artist. Translated by A. Wood. London (undated).
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Life of Liszt. Translated by G.P. Upton. Chicago.
+
+NOHL (LUDWIG).
+
+Life of Mozart. Translated by G.J. Taylor.
+
+NORTH (ROGER).
+
+Memoirs of Musick. Edited by E.F. Rimbault. Extra illustrated. London,
+1846.
+
+NOTTEBOHM (GUSTAV).
+
+Mozartiana. Leipzig, 1880.
+
+PERL (HENRY).
+
+Richard Wagner in Venedig. Augsburg, 1883.
+
+POHL (C.F.).
+
+Mozart und Haydn in London. 2 vols. in 1. Vienna, 1867.
+
+POHL (C.F.).
+
+Joseph Haydn. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1828.
+
+POLKO (ELISE).
+
+Musical Sketches. Translated by Fanny Fuller. Philadelphia, 1864.
+
+POLKO (ELISE).
+
+Reminiscences of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Translated by Lady
+Wallace. New York, 1869.
+
+PRAEGER (FERDINAND).
+
+Wagner as I Knew Him. London.
+
+RAMANN (L.).
+
+Franz Liszt, Artist and Man. 1811-1840. Translated by E. Cowdrey. 2
+vols. London, 1882.
+
+RAU (HERBERT).
+
+Mozart. Ein Kuenstlerleben. (A novel.) Frankfurt, 1858.
+
+REISSMANN (AUGUST).
+
+Joseph Haydn, sein Leben und seine Werke. Berlin, 1879.
+
+REISSMANN (AUGUST).
+
+Christoph Willibald von Gluck, sein Leben und seine Werke. Berlin,
+1882.
+
+REISSMANN (AUGUST).
+
+The Life and Works of Robert Schumann. Translated by A.L. Alger.
+London, 1886.
+
+REVUE MUSICALE, LA.
+
+Paris 1903. (F. Chopin. Souvenirs inedites, publies par M. Karlowicz.)
+
+RIEMANN (HUGO).
+
+Dictionary of Music. New edition. Translated by J.S. Shedlock. London
+(undated).
+
+RODET (EDOUARD).
+
+Lully, homme d'affairs, proprietaire et musicien, Paris, 1891.
+
+ROUSSEAU (JEAN JACQUES).
+
+Les Confessions.
+
+RUBINSTEIN (ANTON).
+
+Autobiography, 1829-1889. Translated by A. Delano. London.
+
+RUNCIMAN (JOHN F).
+
+Old Scores and New Readings. London, 1899.
+
+"SAND, GEORGE" (Pseudonym of AURORE DUDEVANT).
+
+Histoire de ma Vie. Paris.
+
+SATTLER (HEINRICH).
+
+Mozart. Erinnerungen an sein Leben und Wirken nebst Bemerkungen uber
+dessen Bedeutung fuer die Tonkunst. Lagenfalza, 1856.
+
+SCHINDLER (A).
+
+Life of Beethoven. Edited by Moscheles. 1841. Translated by H. Dowing.
+London.
+
+SCHMID (ANTON).
+
+Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck, dessen Leben und
+tonkuenstlerisches Wirken. Leipzig, 1854.
+
+SCHMIDT (LEOPOLD).
+
+Joseph Haydn. Berlin, 1898.
+
+SCHOELCHER (V.).
+
+The Life of Handel. New York, 1875.
+
+SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
+
+Music and Musicians. Essays and Criticisms. Translated by Fanny R.
+Ritter. 1st and 2d series. London, 1877-1880.
+
+SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
+
+Early Letters. Published by his wife in 1885. Translated by May
+Herbert. London, 1888.
+
+SCHUMANN (ROBERT).
+
+The Life of Robt. Schumann, told in his Letters. Translated by May
+Herbert. London.
+
+SCHURE (EDOUARD).
+
+Souvenirs sur Richard Wagner. Paris, 1900.
+
+SPITTA (PHILIPP).
+
+J.S. Bach. Translated by Clara Bell, and J.A. Fuller Maitland. 3 vols.
+London, 1884.
+
+SPOHR (Louis).
+
+Autobiography. Translated from the German. London.
+
+STRATTON (STEPHEN S.)
+
+Mendelssohn. London, 1901.
+
+TAYLOR (SEDLEY). The Life of J.S. Bach. Cambridge,
+
+1897.
+
+TENGER (MARIAM).
+
+Recollections of Countess Theresa Brunswick (Beethoven's "Unsterbliche
+Geliebte"). Translated by G. Russell. London, 1898.
+
+TOWNSEND (PAULINE D.).
+
+Joseph Haydn. New York, 1884.
+
+TSCHAIKOVSKI (MODESTE).
+
+Das Leben Peter Iljitsch Tschaikovski. Translated into German by P.
+Juon. Leipzig, 1902-3.
+
+ULUIBUISHEV, or ULIBISCHEFF (ALEXANDER).
+
+Mozart's Leben und Werke. 4 vols. Stuttgart, 1859.
+
+UPTON (GEORGE P.).
+
+Woman in Music. Chicago, 1849.
+
+VAN DAM.
+
+Great Amours. 2 vols. New York.
+
+VAN DER STRAETEN (EDMOND).
+
+La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant le XIXe siecle. 8 vols. Brussels,
+1867-88.
+
+VAN DER STRAETEN (EDMOND).
+
+Les Menestrels aux Pays-Bas du 13e-18e siecle. Brussels, 1878.
+
+WAGNER.
+
+Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. Translated into English by Francis
+Hueffer. New York, 1889.
+
+WALDERSEE (PAUL GRAF VON).
+
+Sammlung Musikalischer Vortraege. 5 vols. Leipzig, 1879-1884.
+
+WALDERSEE (PAUL GRAF VON).
+
+Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, und die gesammte Ausgabe seiner Werke.
+1884.
+
+WASIELEWSKI (W.J. VON).
+
+Life of Robert Schumann. Translated by A.L. Alger. Boston, 1871.
+
+WEBER (BARON MAX MARIA VON).
+
+Carl Maria von Weber. The Life of an Artist. Translated by J.P.
+Simpson. 2 vols. London, 1865.
+
+WILLEBY (CHARLES FRANCOIS).
+
+Frederick Chopin. London, 1892.
+
+WURZBACH.
+
+Mozart-Buch. Wien, 1869.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Abelard, Pierre
+Adonis
+AEsculapius
+Agoult, Comte d'
+Agoult, Marie Sophie, Comtesse d'
+Amati, family of violin-makers
+Anfossi, Pasquale
+Anhalt-Koethen, Prince of
+Anne, Queen
+Aphrodite
+Apollo
+Arco, Count
+Arion
+Arne, Dr. Thomas
+Arnim, Bettina Brentano von
+Artignon, D'
+Artot, Desiree
+Auber, D.F.E.
+Aurnhammer
+Austen, Jane
+
+Bacchylides
+Bach, Johann Ambrosius
+Bach, Johann Christoph
+Bach, Johann Michael
+Bach, Johann Sebastian
+Bach, Karl Philip Emmanuel
+Bach, Maria Barbara
+Bach, Regina
+Bach, Wilhelm Friedemann
+Baillot, Pierre M.F.
+Baini, Abbate Giuseppe
+Balfe, Michael William
+Banck, Carl
+Baranius, Henrietta
+Barcinska, Isabella
+Barezzi, Margarita
+Bargiel, Madame, mother of Clara Wieck
+Bargiel, Woldemar
+Barisani, Doctor
+Barre, Leonardo
+Bartalozzi, Madame
+Beard, John
+Beatrice (Portinari), Dante's muse
+Becker, Konstantin J.
+Beethoven, Ludwig von
+Behrens, S.
+Belart, Hans
+Belderbusch, Count von
+Bellington, Mrs.
+Bellini, Vincenzo
+Belonda, Fraeulein von
+Bennett, Sterndale
+Berenclow
+Beriot, Charles Auguste de
+Berlioz, Hector
+Berlioz, Madame
+Betz, Franz
+Beyle, Marie Henri
+Bianchi, Antonia
+Bizet, Georges
+Blackburn, Vernon
+Blahetka, Leopoldine
+Blow, John
+Boetius, Anicius
+Boehler, Christine
+Boieldieu, Francois A.
+Boileau-Despreaux, Nicolas
+Bonnet, J.
+Bononcini, Giovanni M.
+Bora, Catherina von
+Boswell, James
+Bourdelot
+Boutmy, Josse _or_ Jodocus
+Boutmy, Laurent
+Brahms, Johannes
+Brandt, Carolina
+Bray, Mrs
+Brebos, Gilles
+Brebos, Jean
+Brenner, Genofeva von
+Breunig, Eleanora von
+Breunig, Stephan von
+Bridgetower, George Augustus Polgreen
+Broschi, Carlo _(see_ Farinelli)
+Browne, Countess von
+Browning, Robert and Elizabeth
+Brunetti, Theresa
+Brunswick, Charlotte, Countess von
+Brunswick, Therese von
+Brutus, Marcus Junius
+Bull, Dr. John
+Buelow, Cosima von _(see also_ Wagner)
+Buelow, Daniela von
+Buelow, Hans von
+Buelow, Isolde von
+Buononcini _(see_ Bononcini)
+Burney, Charles
+Buus, Jacques
+Buxtehude, Dietrich
+Byrd, William
+Byron, Lord
+
+Cabestanh, Guillem de
+Caccini, Francesca
+Calina
+Cannabich, Rosa
+Capra, Francesca
+Carlyle, Thomas
+Carpani, G
+Carus, Professor
+Czetwertynska, Ludvika, Duchess
+Charles X., King
+Charpentier, Madame
+Chaucer, Geoffrey
+Cherubini, M.L.Z.C.S.
+Chopin, Frederick
+Chopin, Louise, his sister
+Chrysander, Fr.
+Cimarosa, Domenico
+Clementi, Muzio
+Cleopatra
+Closset, Doctor
+Colbran, Isabella
+_Copperfield, David_
+_Cordelia_
+Corelli, Marie
+Corey, Giles
+Cornaro, Cardinal
+Cornelius, Peter von
+Coronis, nymph
+Cotes, Ambrosio de
+Coucy, Chatelain Regnault de
+Couwenhoven, Adrien
+Coxe, Dr. William
+Cristofori, B.
+Croes, H.J. de
+Crowest, F.W.
+Cummings, W.H.
+Cupid
+Custine, Countess de
+Cuzzoni, Francesca
+
+Dante
+Daphne
+David
+David, Leah
+Delmotte
+Delorme, Marian
+Desmarets, Henri
+Despres, Josquin
+Devrient, Wilhelmine Schroeder
+Dickens, Charles
+Diderot, Denis
+Diehl, Alice Mangold
+Dies, Albert K.
+Droszdick, Baron von
+Dubufe, Edward
+Dubufe, Guillaume
+"Duchess," The
+Dudevant, Aurore (_see_ Sand, George)
+Du Maurier, George
+_Dunciad_
+
+Eck, Francis
+Egeria, nymph
+"Eliot, George"
+Erard, The family
+Erdoedy, Countess Marie
+Ertmann, Baroness
+Espinosa, Juana de
+Esterhazy, Prince
+Esterhazy, Carolina
+Estrades, Abbe d'
+
+Farinelli (properly Carlo Broschi)
+Faustina (_see_ Hasse)
+Fechner, Clementine
+Ferdinand VII. of Spain
+Ferrabosco, Domenico
+Fetis, Fr. J.
+Field, John
+Filaretovna, Nadeschda
+Finck, Henry T.
+Flavigny, Comte
+Fleury, Duchesse de,
+Flotow, Fr. von
+Fontana
+Fortini
+Fournier, Madame
+Franci, Luigi
+Franck, Cesar
+Franz, Robert
+Fricken, Ernestine von
+Fumaroli, Judge
+Fumetti, Maria Anna
+Fuerstenau, A.B.
+
+Galatea
+Galilei, Galileo
+Gallenberg, Count
+Garella, Lydia
+Gastoldi, Doctor
+Gautier, Theophile
+Gavadia, Joanna
+Geminiani, Francesco
+Genast, Doris
+Genzinger, Maria Anna Sabina von
+Giannatasio
+Giannatasio, Fanny del Rio
+Ginguene, Pierre Louis
+Giorgione, Giorgio
+Gladovska, Constantia
+Glasenapp, Karl Fr.
+Gleichenstein, I.
+Gleichenstein, Mathilde, Baroness
+Glinka, Michail Ivanovitch
+Gluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter von
+Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
+Gounod, Charles
+Grabowski, Joseph
+Gregorius
+Grieg, Edvard
+Griesinger, G.A.
+Gretry, Andre E.M.
+Gretry, Lucille
+Grimm, Baron
+Grob, Theresa
+Grove, Sir George
+Guabaelaraoen, Madalena
+Guadagnini, J.B.
+Guarnieri, Andreas, Pietro, and Giuseppe
+Gublitz
+Guicciardi, Giulietta
+
+Halevy, Genevieve
+Hamilton, Lady Emma
+Haendel, Georg Friedrich
+Hanmann, Fraeulein von
+Haslinger, Tobias
+Hasse, J.A. and Faustina
+Hawkins, Sir John
+Haydn, Joseph
+Heim, Emilie
+Heine, Heinrich
+Helen of Troy
+Heloise, Abbess
+Henderson, W.J.
+Hensel, Fanny
+Herbert, Lady Henrietta
+Herold, L.J.F.
+Herschel, Fr. Wm.
+Hiller, Ferdinand
+Hinrichs, Marie _(see_ Franz)
+Hodges, Mrs.
+Hoesick, Ferdinand
+Hofdaemmel
+Hohenlohe, Cardinal
+Honrath, Jeannette d'
+Hortensia
+Houtermann, Marc
+Howard, Lady Elizabeth
+Hubbard, Elbert
+Huber, Fraeulein
+Hueffer, Francis
+Hugo, Victor and Madame
+Hummel, J.N.
+Humphries, Pelham
+Huneker, James
+Hunter, Mrs. John
+
+_Ibbetson, Peter_
+Irisi
+Ivanof, Maria Petrovna
+Ivanovska, Carolina von
+
+Jahn, Otto
+James, Henry
+Jeanrenaud, Cecile Sophie Charlotte
+Jeanrenaud, Madame
+Jennings, Catherine
+Joachim, Josef
+Jonah
+Julius III., Pope
+
+Kablert, August
+Karajan, T.G., Ritter von
+Karasovski, M.
+Karlovics
+Kashkin, N.
+Kayser, Hofrath von
+Keats, John
+Keglevitch, Babette, Countess von
+Keiser, Reinhard
+Keiserin, Mile
+Keller
+Keller, Anna
+Kind, J.F.
+Kinsky, Countess von
+Klopstock, Fr. G.
+Koch, Barbara
+Koechel, Ludwig
+Koerner, Th.
+Koler, Katharina
+Koschak, Frau Marie L. Pachler
+Krause, Justice Counsellor
+Krehbiel, Henry Edward
+Kreisler, Reinhard
+Kreutzer, Conradin
+Kreutzer, Rudolphe
+Kurer, Clara von
+
+Lablache, Madame (widow of Boucher)
+Lacombe, Paul
+"La Mara," (_see_ Bibliography)
+Laidlaw, Mrs.
+Lambert, Madeline
+Lamennais, Abbe
+Lampi, painter
+Lang, Margarethe
+Lang, Peppi
+Lange,
+Laprunarede, Adele, Countess de
+Lassus, Ferdinand de
+Lassus, Orland di
+Lattre, Roland de (_see_ Lassus)
+_Lear, King_
+Lefebure-Wely, Louis J.A.
+Leitgeb, Madame
+_Lelia_
+_Leoni, Leone_
+_Leporello,_
+Lichnovsky, Prince Carl
+Lichnovsky, Countess
+Lichtenstein, Princess
+Lichtenstein, Karl A. von
+"Liddy"
+Lincoln, Abraham
+List, Emily
+Liszt, Blandine
+Liszt, Daniel
+Liszt, Franz
+Litzmann, Berthold
+_Lorelei_
+Lortzing, Albert
+Lucifer
+Ludvig, King of Bavaria
+Lully, Jean Baptiste de
+Luther, Martin
+
+Mafleuray, Clotilda
+Mainwaring, Doctor
+Malfatti, Therese von
+Malibran, Maria Felicita
+Malibran, New York merchant
+Manfrotti, Eliade
+Manfrotti, Leonora
+Marcello, Benedetto
+Marcellus, Pope
+Marie Antoinette, Queen
+_Mark, King_
+Marlborough, The Duchess of
+Marmontel, Antoine Fr.
+Marschner, Heinrich
+Mattheson, Johann
+Matuszinski
+Maupin, Mile, de
+Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria
+Maximilian, Emperor
+Maximilienne, Princess
+Mary, Queen of Scots
+Meck, Frau von
+Medici family
+Medici, Lorenzo dei
+Mendelssohn, Carl
+Mendelssohn, Felix Bartholdy
+Mendelssohn, Marie
+Mendelssohn, Paul
+Mercury
+Merelli
+Mermann, Doctor
+Meyerbeer, Giacomo
+Meyers
+Michelangelo
+Milder, Anna
+Miljukova, Antonina Ivanovna
+Milton, John
+Moliere
+Molza, Tarquinia
+Mombelli, family
+Monteverde, Claudio
+Montpensier, Mlle. de
+Moretto, Count de
+Moriolles, Countess Alexandra
+Moscheles, Ignaz
+Mosson, Minna
+Mozart, Anna or "Nannerl"
+Mozart, Carl
+Mozart, Leopold
+Mozart, Marianne
+Mozart, Wolfgang
+Mueller, Elise
+Musset, Alfred de
+
+"Nanni"
+"Nanny"
+Negri, Christine
+Neimtschek
+Nelson, Horatio, Admiral
+Newmarch, Rosa
+Newton, Sir Isaac
+Niecks, Frederick
+Nietzsche, Friedrich
+Nissen, George Nicolaus von
+Nohl, Louis (or Ludvig)
+Nossig, Alfred
+
+Odeschalchi, Princess
+Olivier, Emile
+Orpheus
+
+Pachler, Marie
+Paderewski
+Padilla y Ramos
+Paer, Ferdinando
+Paesiello, Giovanni
+Paganini, Achille
+Palestrina, Angelo
+Palestrina, Doralice
+Palestrina, Giovanni Pier Luigi
+Palestrina, Igino
+Palestrina, Lucrezia
+Palestrina, Rodolfo
+Palestrina, Silla
+Pan
+Pasetti
+Paul IV., Pope
+Pecht, painter
+Pelissier, Olympe
+Pember, E.H.
+Pergin, Joseph
+Pergin, Marie Anna
+Pergolesi, G.B.
+Peri, Jacopo
+Perl, Henry
+Pepys, Samuel
+Peyermann, Frau
+Pfeiffer, Marianne
+Philidor, Fr., Andre Danican
+Piccinni, Madame
+Piccinni, Nicola
+Pitoni, G.O.
+Pius IX., Pope
+Planer, Wilhelmine or Minna
+Plater, Countess
+Plato
+Playford, John
+Poe, Edgar Allen
+Pohl, Louis
+Pohl, Richard
+Poliziano, Angelo
+Polko, Elise
+Polovna, Marie, Grand Duchess of Weimar
+Polzelli, Anton
+Polzelli, Luigia
+Potocka, Countess
+Praeger, Fd. C. Wm.
+Prometheus
+Prudent, Emile
+Psyche
+Purcell, Edw.
+Purcell, Frances
+Purcell, Henry
+Purcell, Mary Peters
+Pygmalion
+
+Rackerman, Louis
+Raff, Joachim
+Ramann, Lina
+Rameau, Jean Philippe
+Rameau, Marie Louisa Mangot
+Raphael, painter
+Ravina, Jean Henri
+Reade, Charles
+Reinken, Johann Adam
+Reissman, August
+Reissman, Henrietta
+Reynolds, Sir Joshua
+Ricci or Rizzio, David
+Richard III.
+Richardson, Samuel
+Richter, Hans
+Richter, Jean Paul
+Riemann, Hugo
+Ries, Ferdinand
+Riese, dancing master
+Rinucini, Ottavio
+Ritter, Julie
+Rocheaud, De
+Rochis
+Rockstro, Wm. S.
+Roeckel, Elizabeth, wife of Hummel
+Roeckel, Joseph L.
+Rollet, Adele Elise
+_Romeo_
+Rore, Ciprien de
+Rossi, Count
+Rossi, Countess (_see_ Sontag)
+Rossini, Gioacchino A.
+Roth
+Rousseau, Jean Jacques
+Rubinstein, Anton
+Rubinstein, Nikolai
+Rudel, Geoffrey
+Rue, Pierre de la
+Runciman, John F.
+Ruskin, John
+
+Sacchini, Antonio M.G.
+Salieri, Antonio
+"Sand, George"
+Sarti, Giuseppe
+Saul
+Savoy, Duchess of
+Sayn-Wittgenstein (_see_ Wittgenstein)
+Scarlatti, Alessandro
+Scarlatti, Domenico
+Schanzer, Marie
+Schauroth, Delphine von
+Scheffer, Ary
+Scheidler, Dorette
+Schieferdecker, J.C.
+Schiller, Friedrich
+Schillingfurst-Hohenlohe, Prince Constantin
+Schindler, Anton
+Schmidt, Anton
+Schober, Franz von
+Schoelcher, Victor
+Schopenhauer, Arthur
+Schroeter, Corona
+Schroeter, Johann Samuel
+Schroeter, Mrs. R.
+Schubert, Franz
+Schumann, Clara (_see also_ Wieck)
+Schumann, Robert
+Schure, Edouard
+Scott, Sir Walter
+Sebald, Amalia
+Senesino (rightly Francesco Bernardi)
+Seranzo, Paolo
+Seyfried, Ignaz X. von
+Shakespeare
+Sibilla, Vicenza (_see_ Piccinni)
+Slovaki, Julius
+Smetana, Friedrich
+Smith, J.C.
+Smithson, Miss
+Socrates
+Sontag, Henrietta
+Souvaroff, Prince
+Spaun, Baron
+Spitta, Aug. Ph.
+Spohr, Louis
+Spontini, Gasparo L.P.
+St. Criq, Caroline
+Steibelt, Daniel
+Stendahl, De (pen name of Beyle)
+"Stern, Daniel"
+Sterndale, Sir William
+Stradella, Alessandro
+Stradivari, Antonio
+Stradivari, Francesco
+Stradivari, Paolo
+Stratton, S.S.
+Strauss, D.F.
+Strauss, Johann
+Strauss, Josef
+Streite, postmaster
+Strepponi, Signora
+Stuck, Franz
+Swedenborg, Emanuel
+Swift, Jonathan
+Syrinx, nymph
+
+_Tannhaeuser_
+Tausig, Karl
+Tenger, Miriam
+Tesi, Vittoria
+Thalberg, Sigismund
+Thayer, Alexander W.
+The de
+Thomas, Georgina
+Tolstoi, Leo
+_Towers, Duchess of_
+Townsend, Pauline D.
+Treffy, Jetty
+Tripoli, Countess of
+Tromlitz, Johann G.
+Tschaikovski, Anatol
+Tschaikovski, Modeste
+Tschaikovski, Peter Iljitsch
+Tschekonanof, Vera
+Turette, Cecile
+"Twain, Mark"
+
+Uhlig, Theodor
+Upton, George P.
+
+Vandam
+Van der Straeten, Edmond
+Van Quickelberg
+Venus
+Verdi, Giuseppe
+Verocai
+Vidal, Pierre
+Vigitill, Elise
+Villars, Marquis de
+Villon, Francois
+Vogler, Abbe
+Voigt, Henrietta
+
+Wagner, Eva
+Wagner, Richard
+Wagner, Siegfried
+Waldegrave, Earl of
+Walker, Elizabeth
+Wallace, Lady Grace
+"Ward, Artemus"
+Weber, Aloysia
+Weber, Carl Maria von (_see_ Mozart)
+Weber, Constanze
+Weber, Doctor
+Weber, Franz Anton von
+Weber, Josepha
+Weber, Madame, mother of Constanze W.
+Weber, Max Maria, Baron von
+Weber, Sophia
+Weckinger, Regina
+Wert, Jacques de
+Wegeler, Dr. Franz G.
+Weimar, Grand Duke of
+Weldon, Captain and Mrs
+Wendling, Fraeulein
+Wesendonck, Mathilde
+Wesendonck, Otto
+Westerhold, Fraulein
+Wickerslot, Ana
+Wieck, Carl
+Wieck, Clara (_see also_ Schumann)
+Wieck, Edouard
+Wieck, Friedrich
+Wieck, Marie
+Wildeck, Christian
+Wildeck, Magdalena
+Willaert, Adrien
+Willaert, Catherine
+Willaert, Susanna
+Wille, Frau Elise
+William, Duke of Bavaria
+Winchester, Lady Marchioness
+Wittgenstein, Princess Caroline
+Wittgenstein, Princess Marie
+Wittgenstein, Prince Nicolaus Sayn
+Wittgenstein, Prince Fuerst
+Wodzinska, Maria
+Wodzinski, Count
+Wolf-Metternich, Countess von
+Wood, Mary
+_Wotan_
+Wuelken, Anna Magdalena
+Wuertemberg, Duchess
+
+Xantippe
+
+Young, Cecilia
+
+Zambelli, Antonia
+Zarlino, Gioseffo
+Zelter, Carl
+Zimmerman, Mlle. Anna
+Zingarelli
+Zola
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Affairs of Great Musicians,
+Volume 2, by Rupert Hughes
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE AFFAIRS OF GREAT MUSICIANS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 11419.txt or 11419.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/1/4/1/11419/
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Harry Jones, Sjaani and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Each eBook is in a subdirectory of the same number as the eBook's
+eBook number, often in several formats including plain vanilla ASCII,
+compressed (zipped), HTML and others.
+
+Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks replace the old file and take over
+the old filename and etext number.  The replaced older file is renamed.
+VERSIONS based on separate sources are treated as new eBooks receiving
+new filenames and etext numbers.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+EBooks posted prior to November 2003, with eBook numbers BELOW #10000,
+are filed in directories based on their release date.  If you want to
+download any of these eBooks directly, rather than using the regular
+search system you may utilize the following addresses and just
+download by the etext year.
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org/etext06
+
+    (Or /etext 05, 04, 03, 02, 01, 00, 99,
+     98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90)
+
+EBooks posted since November 2003, with etext numbers OVER #10000, are
+filed in a different way.  The year of a release date is no longer part
+of the directory path.  The path is based on the etext number (which is
+identical to the filename).  The path to the file is made up of single
+digits corresponding to all but the last digit in the filename.  For
+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
+
+