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

DÉSIRÉE ARTÔT

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 ispossible only to float along over the peaks, to touch only the highpoints. Why, his letters to the last of his loves alone make up fourvolumes! And yet, for a life so proverbially given over to flirtationsas his, the beginnings were strangely unprophetic. He had reached themature age of six before he began to study the piano; compared withMozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert--namely, nine years. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of hisfather found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and hewas sent to Vienna to study. When he was eleven years old, after one ofhis concerts, Beethoven kissed him. He survived. Then on to Paris andduchesses and princesses galore. Here he became a proverb of popularityas "Le petit Litz"--the French inevitably gave some twist to a foreignname, then as to-day, when two of their favourite painters are"Wisthler" and "Seargent. "

Liszt's childhood was therefore largely fed upon the embraces andkisses of rapturous women, even as was the young Mozart's, thedifference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Even then heused to throw money among the gamins, as later he scattered it in howmany directions, with what liberality, and with what princeliness, andfrom what a slender purse!

The father and mother had gone to Paris with him; but soon the motherwent back to Austria--she was a German, the father alone beingHungarian. With his father the lad remained, and found him a severe anddomineering master. But in 1827 he died, leaving his sixteen-year-oldson 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, andsent for his mother to come to Paris, where he supported her by givingpiano lessons. Then, as later, he found plenty of pupils, thedifference 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 faceof winsomeness that never lost its spell over womankind. Sixteen-year-older that he was, he was a man of great fame, and thegrind of acquiring technic was all passed. Moscheles had already saidof 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 doyou expect?

It makes small difference what you expect, for the reality was that hisheart was eager for the seclusion of a monastery; his soul pined forreligious excitement only! At fourteen he had begun to rebel againsthis nickname, "Le petit Litz. " It was with the utmost difficulty thathis father had been able to keep him from making religion his career, and giving up his already glittering fame. Never in his life did hecease to thrill with an almost hysterical passion for churchly affairsand ceremonies. 

At fourteen he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. Itwas a set of "exercises, " and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella, a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as hisfirst love. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support hismother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was reallyhis first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior, had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. The youngcomtesse' 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 cangradually 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 leadingthe young teacher to air his views about religion and life, and shewatched with pleasure the gradual development of what was inevitable, amore than musical sympathy between the daughter and the teacher. Butthe romance seemed to win her approval, and when suddenly she saw thatshe was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that heshould not refuse the young lovers their happiness. He allowed his wifeto die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without thefaintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of hisdaughter with an untitled musician. His business affairs, however, kepthim away from home, and from thought upon the subject. After the deathof the mother, the comtesse and the pianist met and wept together; thenresumed their music lessons, reading much between the lines, and farpreferring dreamy duets to difficult solos. 

Liszt had read little but music and religion; the slim, fair comtessehad read much verse and romance. So she was his teacher in thatliterature which would most interest a brace of young lovers. There wasno one at home to note how late he stayed of evenings, and one night hereturned to his own house to find it locked and his mother asleep. Rather than disturb her, he spent the night on the steps. Anotherevening, Franz and Caroline found parting such sweet sorrow, that whenhe reached her outer door, he found it locked for the night. He wascompelled to call the porter from those slumbers which only doorkeepersknow, and this man was doorkeeperishly wrathful at having hisbeauty-sleep broken; he growled his rage. This is the only timerecorded when Franz Liszt failed to respond to a hint for money. Hishead was too high in the clouds, no doubt. The servant, thus suddenlyawakened to the impropriety of affairs, hastened the next morning toinform the comte that his daughter was studying the music of thespheres as well as that of the piano, and that her lessons wereprolonged till midnight. 

The next time Franz came to teach, the ghoulish porter gleefullyinformed him that his master wished to speak to him. The comte was mostpolitely firm, and murdered the young love with most suave apologiesfor the painful amputation. The difference in rank, it went withoutsaying, put marriage out of the question, and, therefore, all thingsconsidered, he could not derange monsieur to the giving of more musiclessons, --for the present, at least. 

The young musician took the _coup de grâce_ bravely; without a word hegave the comte his hand in mute acceptance of his fate, and bowedhimself out. The true bitterness of his loss he sought to hide byfleeing to the Church. His love had been pure and ardent. It had beenfound impossible. His hopes had been put to death; therefore an end tothe world. He bent his burning head low upon the cold steps of SaintVincent de Paul, and resolved to renounce the world. He wrote ten yearslater, and still with suffering: "A female form chaste and pure as thealabaster of holy vessels, was the sacrifice I offered with tears tothe God of Christians. Renunciation of all things earthly was the onlytheme, the only word of that day. "

Caroline, too, sank under the bitterness of the loss. She felldangerously ill, and when she recovered she thought only of theconvent; but her father, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew howto persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madamed'Artigou; they say she gave her husband no affection, and that herheart was still, and always, Liszt's; while in his heart she was forever niched as the young Madonna of his life. 

For the present the shock of sacrifice threatened his whole career, andhis life and mind as well. Again the monastery beckoned him, and now itwas his mother's turn to oppose the Church in its effort to engulf thisbrilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for atime he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out hishealth; until at length he was given up for a dying man, and obituaryeulogies 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 restlessorgy of effort for mental diversion; all manner of theories and foiblesallured him. 

As Heine said of him, his mind was "impelled to concern itself with allthe needs of mankind, impelled to poke its nose into every pot wherethe good God cooks the future. " The theatre offered for a time anotherform of dissipation than his religious hysteria. He hated concerts, andcompared himself to a conjurer or a clever trick poodle; he took upwith the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later hefell under the spell of the Abbé Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Parisand fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world withhis unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back tothe piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. NextBerlioz and romanticism fevered his brain, and then in 1831, thetwenty-year-old Liszt and the twenty-one-year-old Chopin struck uptheir historic friendship, and the two men glittered and flashed in themost artistic salons of Paris. It was about this time that the PolishCountess Plater said, speaking of the genial Ferdinand Hiller and thetwo cronies:

"I would choose Hiller for my friend, Chopin for my husband, Liszt formy 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 gatheredinto the catalogue every woman whom Liszt saw more than once; but weneed not pay this tribute to malice by mentioning the names of all ofLiszt's hostesses. Among those who may be more definitely suspected ofbeing made victims by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse AdèleLaprunarède, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as DeBeaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful. " Her home waslonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was amusician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him tospend the winter months at his château. For a whole winter Liszt waskept there in her castle a prisoner, with fetters of silk. The oldcomte seems never to have suspected. When Liszt eventually, likeTannhäuser, mutineered against the charms of the Venusberg and returnedto Paris, he wrote many letters to the comtesse, in which, as hehimself said, he gained his "first practice in the lofty French style. "

But this intrigue was followed by his appearance in the procession ofGeorge Sand's lovers. Ramann, in his biography, writes of the curiousstate of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women werebeginning to demand freedom and to experiment with the writing ofperfervid romances, which questioned the very foundation principles ofmarriage and made a religion of Affinity. "

George Sand was a chief crusader against the curse of monogamy. Shepracticed this anarchy in the guise of religion, as the old crusadersout-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisation in the name ofthe Cross. George Sand's gospel, summed up briefly by Ramann, is asfollows:

"'Love, ' says the authoress, 'is Christian compassion concentrated on asingle being. It belongs to the sinner, and not to the just; only forthe former it moves restlessly, passionately, and vehemently. Whenthou, O noble and upright man, ' she continues, with deceitfullyfantastic warmth, 'when thou feelest a violent passion for a miserablefallen creature, be reassured that is genuine love; blush nottherefore! so has Christ loved who crucified him. ' According to thisview, the love that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely bealarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the moregenuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steepedin passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty, exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you havenever loved my personal self. ' It also appears to correspond with thiscasuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, ofsky-storming earnestness, but adorned with all unnatural qualities, give themselves up to the latter as to an intoxicating spell, and inthe delirium of self-delusion hold sin for virtue, and the unnaturalfor higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was alogical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressivestubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself, ' said Sand in 'Lelia';'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man shouldtherefore be transitory. '"

If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand wasthe most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large androomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only. It was in1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caughtin the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry. " Alfred deMusset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on toChopin--or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, aslater the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite astrue. Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of GeorgeSand. But soon he was entangled in that "caméraderie" which was thefashionable name for liaison in that time. 

From her the Comtesse de Laprunarède had borrowed him for hersnow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was anotherwoman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off. This was the ComtesseMarie Cathérine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in1834. It was not till six years later that the comtesse took upliterature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an artcritic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine andEnglish pen-name, "Daniel Stern. "

The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement wassigned by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almostequal rank. The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seemsto have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversionin the brilliant society she gathered into her salon. For some time sheseems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him withher own fascinations. 

Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued. This is the morestrange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome. Ramannhas thus pictured her:

"The Countess d'Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified inher movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fairtresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular, classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast withthe modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over hercountenance; these were the general features which rendered itimpossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, orthe opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, theelegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of theFaubourg St. Germain. That fantastic dreams were hidden behind thepurity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the softmelancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time thather connection with the young artist began. "

Her "Souvenirs" justify the accusation of unusual vanity as themainspring in her motives, but if it were only her passion for conquestthat made her seek Liszt, she was punished bitterly. In 1834 shecaptured him, and the preliminary formalities of flirtation werehastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom ofpassion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to eachother. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to hisconstitutionally religious soul, was agony. As for the comtesse, deathentered upon the romance and took away one of her three children. Forawhile she was only a broken-hearted mother, and the intrigue seems tohave 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 thecomtesse that he was going to leave her. She, however, would notconsent. He yielding as gracefully as he could, took a lodging in aquiet part of the city, where his life consisted of music, literature, and the comtesse, who visited him incessantly. Her love had quiteinfatuated her, to take the tone of the time; nowadays we might saythat she found it so serious that she desired to make it honest. Themeans she hit upon were such as might strike a foolish woman as aninspiration. Believing that the long way round was the short way home, she thought to atone for her past foibles by casting them into suddeninsignificance--to clear the sultry air by a thunder crash. 

When Liszt heard that the comtesse planned to leave her husband, andeven her children, and go into foreign exile with him, he felt that thecomtesse was taking the bit into her teeth with a vengeance, but saw ashe would on the lines, and cry "whoa" as he would, the runawaycomtesse still insisted on running away. 

Liszt called on her mother to interfere; she was run over. He appealedto her former confessor; his staying hand was shaken loose. He calledon the venerable family notary; the old man was upset by theroadside--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; Lisztfollowed. 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, howeverthat may be, we find the comtesse and the mother at one hotel, andLiszt at another. A few days later, Liszt returned to his hotel to findhis room choked with the comtesse' trunks, and to learn that the motherhad 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 theestablished codes by which the intriguers bury their heads in the sand, as a form of pretence that nobody knows that they are billing andcooing beneath the sand, though of course everybody knows it, and theyknow that everybody knows it, except possibly the one other person mostinterested. But Paris was dumbfounded that a very prominent andbeautiful comtesse should leave her husband and her children in broaddaylight, and go visiting the most famous pianist in the world. Thepianist was to blame, of course, in the public eye, and the wholeaffair was branded as a flagrant case of abduction. But, as we knownow, 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 uponthe ordinary laws of decency, but when the truth was learned, we find, as the world found--as usual, too late to change its opinion ofhim--that he did everything in his power to undo the evil into whichhis passion had hurried him, and to set himself right with the usualstandards of society. And, as usual, he failed absolutely, because ofthe 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 ofhonour. The comte had obtained a legal separation from his wife, retaining their daughter. Liszt now proposed marriage. Both beingCatholics, it was necessary to experience a change of heart and becomeProtestants. He exclaimed one day: "_Si nous étions Protestants"_ butthe comtesse crushed this hope with a sharp "_La Comtesse d'Agoult nesera jamais Madame Liszt_. "

Liszt bowed to the inevitable, and kept together his many patches ofhonour as well as he was permitted. The comtesse had a personal incomeof four thousand dollars a year, which was as nothing. According toLiszt's secretary, during the time of her stay with Liszt, she spentsixty thousand dollars, the most of which Liszt earned himself by hisconcerts. The pianist and the comtesse soon left Basle for Geneva, where they remained till 1836, with the exception of one journey toParis, which Liszt made for a concert. But he returned rather toliterature than to music, as on another occasion did Wagner. 

For five years Liszt and the comtesse travelled about Switzerland andItaly, he occasionally being convinced that he was seriously in lovewith the woman who had been so imperious and unreasonable. A fewconservatives outlawed him, but there were people enough who forgavehim, or approved him, to give him an abundance of society of thehighest 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 thewanderings in her "Lettres d'un Voyageur, " where _Franz_ representsLiszt, _Arabella_, the comtesse, and where one may read a poeticdescription of the comtesse' beauty even after being drenched withrain. Beauty that is water-proof is beauty indeed!

It is in this book of hers that Sand prints such illuminating epigramsas these:

"There are great errors which are nearer the truth than little truths. "

"The most beautiful creations of genius are those which succeed to theepoch of the passions. The experience of life ought to precede art; artrequires repose, and does not suit with the storms of the heart. Thefinest mountains of our globe are extinguished volcanoes. "

"If you wish to arrive at truth, be reconciled to what is contrary; thewhite light only results from the union of the coloured rays of thespectrum. "

"The oyster boasts and says: 'I have never gone astray, ' Alas, pooroyster! thou hast never walked. "

When Liszt had made his concert trip to Paris, the comtesse had awaitedhim at Sand's home. Then, after his famous duel with Thalberg--theweapons being pianos--he joined the group at Nohant, where Chopin andSand, and Liszt and D'Agoult, and such guests as they gathered there, led a life of elaborate entertainment which made Nohant as famous asanother Trianon. Meanwhile, there was going on a duel, the weapons ofwhich were not pianos, but those invisible stilettos with which twowomen conduct a deadly feud, and politely tear each other's eyes out. George Sand was famous then beyond her present-day esteem, and she wasa woman of vigour almost masculine and of a straightforwardness whichwas almost an affectation. She loved to go about in boots and blouse, and to ride bareback; she smoked cigars, and wrote at night. TheComtesse d'Agoult was eminently feminine. She would rather have spentone thousand francs on a gown than on anything else under heaven, except another gown. She had in her certain literary capabilities, notvery marvellous, to be sure, but strong enough to provoke jealousy ofthe overpraised Sand, who had also, incidentally, been on very intimateterms with the present lover of the comtesse. 

Unhappy is the lover who tries to play peacemaker between two of hismistresses. This is enough to bring lava from any "extinguishedvolcano. " Liszt, after almost vain efforts to avoid downrighthair-pulling, decided to take the comtesse away from Nohant. He seemsto have sided with her against Sand, and said afterward: "I did notcare to expose myself to her insolence" (_sottise_). Chopin, however, took sides with Sand, and it is said that his heart chilled towardLiszt, who spoke bitterly of this estrangement, but on Chopin's deathwrote a biographical sketch full of affection, and of an admirationbetter balanced than the over-flowery style which marks all of Liszt'swritings. 

When the comtesse left Nohant, which Liszt never saw again, they wentto Lyons, where he gave a concert for the benefit of the poor andworking people. For what purposes of benevolence indeed did Liszt notgive concerts! So great and so discriminating and so self-sacrificingwas his charity, that it would almost plead atonement for a millionsuch unconventionalities as his. He was not content to devote theproceeds of a single concert to some object of charity, but even gavemoney, and whole tours. Besides this concert at Lyons, and variousothers, one might mention the concert given for the flood sufferers atPesth, and for the poor of his native town, and the concert tour bywhich he made Beethoven's monument possible at Bonn. Add to this theother sums he scattered to poor artists like Wagner from his meagrepurse, and you will see one reason why women, who are more susceptibleand perceptive of such qualities of character, were almost as helplessto resist Liszt's personality as he theirs. Even when he was "la petitLitz, " he was found holding a street-cleaner's broom while he went tochange a gold piece. And in his later years, his servant always filledtwo of his pockets with coin, one with copper, and one with silver; andthe man used to say that when his master came home at night, the coppermine was usually untouched, but the silver deposit exhausted. 

It was in Lyons that the comtesse began her literary career, by aFrench translation of Schubert's "Erl-König. " She later obtained aconsiderable fame, as I have said, under the name of Daniel Stern. Inthe fall of 1837 Liszt and the comtesse went to Italy, where, especially at Bellaggio, they appear to have been genuinely happy. Heseems to be describing himself when he writes:

"Yes, my friend, when the ideal form of a woman floats before yourdreaming soul, a woman whose heaven-born charms bear no allurement forthe senses, but only wing the soul to devotion, and if you saw at herside a youth of sincere and faithful heart, weave these forms into amoving story of love, and give it the title, 'On the Shores of the Lakeof Como. '"

To us, who think of Liszt always by his last pictures, presenting himin his venerable age, it is hard to remember that at this time he wasonly twenty-seven. It was at this time, too, that he wrote the onlycomposition he ever dedicated to the comtesse. In later years, it wasalmost the only composition of his that she would praise; it was afantasia on the "Huguenots. " The two lovers continued their wanderingsthrough Italy and Austria, he giving concerts for the flood sufferersand the Beethoven monument and she travelling with him. While in Romein 1839, the comtesse had borne him a son, Daniel, having previouslygiven him two daughters, --Blandine, who married the French statesman, Emile Olivier, and died in 1862; and Cosinia, the famous wife ofWagner. All three children had been legitimised immediately upon theirbirth. 

Meanwhile, he and the comtesse were drifting apart, in spite of thesethree hostages to fortune. It is difficult to justify Liszt's desertionof the woman, except by slandering her memory, and it is difficult tosave her memory without slandering his. The cause, as explained byRamann, is, that she cherished an ambition to be Liszt's Muse, and madestrong demands for the acceptance of her opinions upon his works. Wecan easily imagine the situation: A sensitive, fiery composer, who isincidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeouscomposition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to hiscompanion. She, desirous of asserting her importance, listens to itwith that frame of mind which makes it easy to criticise any work ofart ever created--the desire to find fault. Benevolent and sincere asher intentions may have been, the criticisms of this shallow andmusically untrained woman must have driven Liszt to desperation. 

It is a rare musician that can tolerate the faintest disapproval ofeven his poorest work, and frequently a critic lauds to the skies allof the composer's works except one or two, and then, in order to givehis eulogy an appearance of discrimination and remove the taste ofunadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or thesetwo compositions are not the greatest works in existence--that unhappycritic is practically sure to find that his eulogy has been accepted asa mere matter of course, and his criticism bitterly resented as agratuitous and unwarranted assault upon beautiful creations which hissmall skull and hickory-nut heart are unable to grasp. 

Liszt was never especially philosophical under fault-finding, and tohave a fireside critic after him, nagging him day and night, must havesoured all the milk of human kindness in his heart. The comtesse wasstubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Lisztdegenerated into violent brawls. The young French poet, De Rocheaud, "assisted, " as the French say, at one of these combats between anhysterical woman and a thin-skinned musician. The poet believed inMuses and such things, using as an argument that beautiful fable whichDante built on the most slender foundations. 

"Think of Dante and Beatrice, " exclaimed De Rocheaud. "Think how thedivine poet listened to her words as to revelations. Be thou Dante, andshe Beatrice. " "Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!" cried Liszt, "the Dantescreate the Beatrices. The genuine die when they are eighteen yearsold. "

At length the gipsy spirit moved Liszt to make a long continental tourto complete the depletions in his purse. He did not care to take thecomtesse and the children with him. With much difficulty he persuadedher to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad termswith her own family. Later he succeeded in reconciling the comtessewith these, also. After the death of her mother, the comtesse inheriteda fortune, but Liszt continued to support the children. 

The comtesse died of pleurisy in 1876, at the age of seventy-one. Howlong 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 tothe difficult love affair of Robert Schumann. In one of his letters, Liszt tells how fond he had been of Schumann and Wieck and his daughterClara. Then came the famous struggle between father and suitor for thepossession of the girl. Liszt took Schumann's side, because he thoughthe was in the right; he even went so far as to break off allintercourse with Wieck--who took his revenge by publishing ferociouscriticisms 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 toovation, from flirtation to flirtation. But he was drifting unwittinglytoward the grand affair of his life. A woman--the woman--was waitingfor 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 amore than different way, we shall find him--who had slain his hecatombof hearts--helpless in the power of his one great love. Again he isfirst compelling, then compelled. 

February 8, 1819, in Monasterzyka in Kiev, Carolyne von Ivanovska wasborn. She was the only daughter of a rich Polish nobleman. The parentssoon separated, and the child's life was divided between them. Thefather brought her up, as La Mara tells, as if she were a boy. He madeher the companion of his conversations late into the night; and, inorder to make her the more congenial a comrade, he taught her to ridewild horses and smoke strong cigars. Then the other half of the year, she was the ward of her "beautiful, lovely, elegant" mother, who dotedon society, and introduced her daughter to the capitals and the salonsof Europe. 

So, says La Mara, "under constantly changing surroundings, now in themidst of the world, now in the deep solitude, Carolyne von Ivanovskalived her first years. "

When she was seventeen, her father bought her a husband, the son of theField Marshal Fürst Wittgenstein, and on May 7, 1836, she gave her handto 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 thismarriage the Princess Carolyne gained only one happiness: the birth ofa daughter, the Princess Marie, on whom she centred the glowing love ofher heart. "

While the two fathers-in-law lived, the children-in-law were kepttogether; but the old men soon went their way. Then the young wife gaveup attempting to endure the unhappiness of her home, and sought solacefrom her loneliness in the full blaze of literary and artistic society. In February, 1847, Franz Liszt floated in across her horizon, "_aufFlügeln des Gesanges_. " Of course, he gave a concert in Kiev forcharity. Among the contributions, he received a one-hundred-roublenote--about $75. Liszt desired to thank the good-hearted one inperson--Kismet!

Even if the princess had not been beautiful, La Mara thinks she wouldhave overwhelmed Liszt with "her wonderful eloquence and herunbelievable intellectuality. " It was a case of congeniality atfirst sight. There were many meetings. The concert affected theprincess deeply (when she died she bequeathed that programme to herdaughter). The day after the concert, she heard a Pater Noster of hissung in the church. Liszt talked of his plans for compositions. He saidhe wished to express in music his impressions of Dante's "DivinaCommedia, " with a diorama of scenic effects. To fit out the diorama, itneeded about $15, 000. 

The princess, carried away with the idea, offered him the money fromher own purse. The diorama was never built, but it required a greatmany conferences, and it seemed appropriate that Liszt should visit herat her estate, Woronince. He arrived on the tenth birthday of herlittle daughter, Marie. This was in February, the same month of theirfirst meeting. But he could not stay many days, as his concert tourtook him to Constantinople and elsewhere. But in the summer and againin the autumn they met, and they celebrated together his birthday andher saint's day. 

She there and then resolved to give up her life to him, and to marryhim as soon as might be. She believed in the autocracy of genius, andfelt that she recognised her mission in the world--to follow and aidthis maker of music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this wasa horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtessed'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none theless, in April, 1848, she took her daughter and left Russia, after shehad provided herself, by the sale of a portion of her dowry, with asum, as La Mara says, of a million roubles--equal to about $750, 000--atidy little parcel for an eloping couple. 

For her husband and mother-in-law she left letters--it would seem thatthere must have been little else to leave--explaining that she wouldnever return. At the same time she instituted divorce proceedings, andannounced that she was asking the Church to grant her freedom. Being aCatholic, it was necessary for her to persuade the Pope himself topermit her to wed Liszt. In the meanwhile, her husband went to the Czarand loudly bewailed the loss of his daughter and all his money. The oldstory--"My daughter! Oh, my ducats! Oh, my daughter! Oh, my Christianducats! Justice! the law! My ducats and my daughter!"

The princess fled across the Russian border, just at the time of theRevolution of 1848. At the Austrian boundary Liszt's faithful valet mether; in Ratibor she found Liszt's friend, the Prince Lichnovski, whosome months after fell a martyr to the revolution. He conducted her toLiszt. A few days later they visited the prince for two weeks at one ofhis castles. The troubles of the revolution and the barricaded streetsdrove them from the country to Weimar, where Liszt had been given thepost of Kapellmeister. 

It was this third-rate town that became the birthplace of a new schoolof German opera, for years the hub of the musical universe. Here inWeimar the princess lived thirteen years. She placed herself under theprotection of the Grand Duchess of Weimar, Maria Polovna, the sister ofthe Czar and a friend of her childhood. She chose the Altenburg châteaufor her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hoteltoo remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the château. Herehe spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelveSymphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his HungarianRhapsodies, and many other important works, including also literarycompositions, he achieved here. The irritation he had felt at thesuperficial meddling, and domineering criticism of his would-be Muse, the Comtesse d'Agoult, was changed to such a communion as the old Romanking Numa enjoyed with his inspiring nymph, Egeria. 

During the princess' stay in Weimar, constant pressure was brought uponher to return to Russia to arrange a settlement of affairs. She fearedreturning to that great prison-land, which cannot be easily entered orleft, lest they should forbid her return to Liszt. Even threats todeclare her an exile and confiscate her goods, would not move her. Eventually the property she had inherited from her father was put inher daughter's name, by the Czar's order--an arrangement Liszt had longpleaded for in vain. The husband's feelings were mollified by theappropriation to him of the seventh part of her property, and thearrangement of a guardianship for the daughter. 

The prince, being a Protestant, now proceeded to get a divorce, whichhe obtained without difficulty. He speedily married a governess in thehousehold of Prince Souvaroff. None the less, the struggles went on forthe freedom of Princess Carolyne. In 1859 her daughter, Marie, wasmarried to Prince Constantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, aid-de-campand later grand steward of the Austrian emperor. Now that the daughterwas safely disposed of, the princess took active steps for her ownfreedom. She chose, as a pretext for the dissolution of her marriage, the statement that she had entered into it unwillingly at her father'sbehest. Her Polish relatives were shocked at the idea of divorce, andbrought witnesses to prove that the first years of her marriage werepeaceful and content. But in spite of this the divorce was granted inRussia, and the Pope gave it his sanction. 

The princess, however, was not satisfied with a merely technicalsuccess. She would consummate her marriage with Liszt in a blaze ofglory and with all the blessings of religion upon it. In the spring of1860, she had gone to Rome to further her divorce proceedings. Lisztwas to arrive and be married on his fiftieth birthday, the princessthen being forty-two. All went merrily as a marriage bell. It isgenerally believed that Liszt's "Festklänge" was written for thisoccasion 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 altarof the church of San Carlo al Corso decorated. On the very eve of thewedding, when Liszt was with the princess, they were startled toreceive a messenger from the Pope, demanding a postponement of themarriage, and the delivery for review of the documents upon which thedivorce had been granted. The papers were surrendered, and thedisconsolate princess gave way to a superstitious resignation to fate. 

It seems that the amiable relatives of the princess, chancing to be inRome 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 thesatisfactory conclusion of the matter. The Cardinal Hohenlohe offeredhis own chapel for the marriage. But the princess was as immovable inher new determination as she had been in her old. 

She had resisted for thirteen years the efforts of the Russian court todecoy her back to Russia. For the next fifteen years she resistedLiszt's ardent wooing to marriage. Even when, on the 10th of March, 1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Romeconsiders sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in theHoly City had brought her into the whirlpool of Church society andChurch politics. She turned her voracious intellect toward theology;and the interests of the Church, as La Mara says, grew in her eyes farmore important than the petty ambitions of art. 

The woman with a mission had changed her mission. Knowing how powerfulwas her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work athome, and it was on Liszt that she practised her first churchlyseductions. 

In his youth it had taken all the power of his father and mother tokeep him out of the Church; small wonder, then, that when, in theevening fatigue of his life, the woman of his heart beckoned him to thecandle-lighted peace of vespers, he should yield. 

Religion had always been as much an art to him, as art had been areligion. By papal dispensation Liszt was admitted into Holy Orders onthe 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not beengranted the privilege of marrying Liszt, was given the privilege ofshaving his head and turning him into a tonsured abbé. 

There was a great sensation in 1868, when Liszt, who had thirty yearsbefore run away from Paris with a comtesse, returned as a saint, and infull regalia conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The criticand dictionary-maker, Fétis, declared that the whole affair was simplyan advertising scheme of Liszt's. But Liszt was taking himselfseriously. The Pope had called him "My dear Palestrina, " and he desiredto reform church music as Palestrina had done. 

The fact that this ecclesiastical passion was brief, does not provethat it was not sincere; in Liszt's case it would rather prove itssincerity. And by corollary the fact that it was sincere, rather provedthat it would be brief. 

The artistico-ecclesiastical life, or, as the German puts it so muchmore patly, "_das klösterlich-künstlerische Leben_, " began to wear uponhim. For a time Liszt remained in Rome, taking a dwelling in the ViaFelice; later, in June of the year 1863, he moved to the Oratorio ofthe Madonna del Rosario, where the Pope, Pius IX. , visited him to hearhis miraculous music. He saw the princess often, usually dining withher, and letters fluttered thickly between his home and hers in thePiazza di Spagna, and later in the Via del Babuino. 

Liszt was never a man for one of your gray existences. He was homesickfor Weimar, and was a constant truant from Rome. But he had dutiesenough with his ambition as a composer and conductor, and his cloud ofpupils whom he taught without price. To his excursions we owe fourvolumes of letters to the princess. The volumes average over fourhundred pages each of smallish type. They are in French, and have beenall published, the last volume appearing in 1902, under the editorshipof La Mara. Also a publication of the princess' letters has beenannounced by her daughter, who wisely believes that in a matter whichhas become the gossip of the world, the best defence is the fullestpossible presentation. 

In Liszt's letters there is not much of the grand style he had affectedafter his first elopement with De Laprunarède, though there is muchthat is hysterical:

"How it is written above that you should be my Providence and my goodangel 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, letme at least tell you that I will pray with you before I sleep. Ourprayers are united as our souls. " (Nov. 4, 1864)

"Next to my hours in the church the sweetest and dearest are those Ispend with you. " (Feb. 18, 1869. )

"My ancient errors have left me a residue of chagrin that preserves mefrom temptation. Be well assured that I tell you the truth and all thetruth. " (Nov. 10, 1870. )

But to attempt a quotation from these letters would be like profferinga spoonful of brine, and saying, "Here is an idea of the ocean. " Theletters are full of minute details of their busy lives and of othernotable people. There is much, of course, about music and travel, and avast amount of religious ardour. There is also much expression of theutmost devotion and loneliness. Years of this life of reunion andseparation went on. 

Writing to the princess on the 21st of June, 1872, he mentions Wagner, whose marriage to Cosima von Bülow (_nee_ Liszt) scandalised the worldand alienated even Liszt. There are biographers who deny this, but inthis letter to the princess, Liszt encloses Wagner's letter of mostaffectionate appeal for reconciliation, and with it his answer, givinghis long-withheld blessing. Describing this reunion with Wagner, Lisztis moved to say to the princess:

"God will pardon me for leaning to the side of mercy, imploring his andabandoning myself entirely to it. As for the world, I am not uneasy asto its interpretation of that page of what you call 'my biography. ' Theonly chapter that I have ardently desired to add to it, is missing. Maythe good angels keep you, and bring me to you in September. "

Through many others of his letters rings this vain "_leit-motif_" likethe wail of Tristan. But nothing could remove the spell the Church hadcast upon the princess. 

She sank deeper and deeper into seclusion, and during the twenty-sevenyears she lived in Rome she left her home in the Via del Babuino onlyonce for twenty-four hours. She grew more and more immersed in theChurch and its affairs. Gregororius said she fairly "sputteredspirituality. " She began to write, and certain of her essays wererevised by Henri Lasserre, under the name, "Christian Life in Public, "and were widely read, being translated into English and Spanish. Herchief work was a twenty-four-volume study bearing the thrilling title, "Interior Causes of the Exterior Weakness of the Church. " Thisponderous affair she finished a few days before her death, with handalready swollen almost beyond the power of holding the pen. 

Here in Rome, as in Russia and at Weimar, where she was, there was asalon. But she grew wearier and wearier of life, and weaker and weaker, until she spent months and months in bed, and would rarely cross herdoor-sill. To the last she and Liszt were lovers, however remote. Andhis letters are rarely more than a few days apart. He continues to signhimself, even in the final year of his life, "Umilissimo sclavissimo. "His last letter concerned the marriage of his granddaughter Daniela vonBülow to a man with the ominous sounding name of "Thode. " Daniela wasthe daughter of Liszt's daughter, Cosima, by her first husband. Themarriage took place at Wagner's home, "Wahnfried, " in Bayreuth. 

It was appropriate that Liszt should spend his last years in thecompany of this Wagner, for whose success he had been the chiefcrusader, as for the success of how many another famous musician, andfor the charitable comfort of how numberless a throng, and in whatcountless ways! It was doubly appropriate that his last appearance inpublic should be at the performance of "Tristan and Isolde"--thatutmost expression of love that was fiery and lawless and yet worthy ofthe peace it yearned for and never found. 

Liszt died on the 31st of July, 1886. His will declared the princess tobe his sole heir and executrix. She outlived him no long time. On the8th of March, 1887, she died of dropsy of the heart. She was buried inthe German cemetery next to St. Peter's, in Rome. Her grave bore thelegend:

"Yonder is my hope. " At her funeral they played the Requiem, Liszt hadwritten for the death of the Emperor Maximilian. She had wished thatthis 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, itmust interweave the life of this man Wagner; for he gave to every whimand fervour of the passion an expression so nearly absolute that we aredriven 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 untilRichard Wagner created a new orchestra, a new libretto, a new music, anew harmony, and a new fabric of melody. 

"Tristan and Isolde" seems to be so nearly the last word in dramatisedlove that it seems also to be nearly the first word. From theVorspiel's opening measures, gaunt and hungry with despair and longing, to the last measures of the Liebestod, sublime with resignation anddivinely sad with the apotheosis of adoration, this opera sounds everynote of the emotion of man for woman, and woman for man. 

Surely, you would say, the creator of this masterwork must have had aheart thrilled with mighty passion for womankind; surely he must havelived a life of strange devotion. 

But how often, how often we must warn ourselves against judging thecreator from his creations, the artist from his art. In his letter toLiszt, 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 amonument to the most beautiful of my dreams, in which, from beginningto 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 covermyself--to die. "

The truth was that Wagner, as so many another creative genius, spenthis love chiefly upon the beings that he begot within his own heart. Every genius is more or less a Pygmalion, and his own imagination isthe Aphrodite that gives life to the Galateas that he carves. I haveshown by this time that certain musicians have been most excellentlovers, 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 ofideals as Richard Wagner. To his theory of the perfect marriage ofmusic and poetry, he sacrificed everything, --his heart's blood, hissensitiveness 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 apauper, and begged and borrowed every penny he could scrape from everyfriend 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'shistory ever reached. He reached such a pinnacle that critics were notlacking who said that he often threatened to give Art a more importantplace in the State than Religion. 

Nothing but the most complete success, and nothing but the mostbeneficial revolution could justify such a creed or such a life asWagner's. Both were eminently justified. He reaped a superb reward, buthe 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 gonethrough all his struggles with him; had suffered all that he suffered, without any aid from hope, without any belief in his personality or hiscreeds, supported only on the courage and the dog-like fidelity of aGerman _Hausfrau_ to her _Mann_. 

Wagner was as plainly destined for war as any Richard the Third, bornwith hair and teeth. For he was born in the midst of the Napoleonicwars at Leipzig, in 1813, and the dead bodies on the battle-field wereso many that they raised a pestilence, which carried off Wagner'sfather when the child was six months old; and also threatened the lifeof his elder brother and of the babe himself. His life was one longtruceless war. He once said to Edouard Schuré: "The only time I everwent to sea, I barely escaped shipwreck. Should I go to America, I amsure 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 ashis _liebes Mütterchen_. " She must have been a woman of winningmanners, for, though she had seven children, the oldest fourteen, shegot another husband before her first one was a year in his grave; thesecond was an actor. Wagner was so fond of his mother that through hislife he never could see a Christmas tree alight without tears. 

There were other loves that busied his heart. He was remarkably fond ofanimals, particularly of dogs. He suffered keenly when his parrot Papodied; he wrote his friend Uhlig: "Ah, if I could say to you what hasdied for me in this devoted creature! It matters nothing to me whetherI am laughed at for this. " His dog Peps died in his arms, and he wrotePraeger: "I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain andsorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years, who has walkedand worked with me. " One of Wagner's last plans was to write a book tobe called "A History of My Dogs. " Anecdotes galore there are of hishumanity to dogs and cats and other members of our larger family. 

Wagner had also a famous passion for gorgeous colours; his music showsthis. He liked fine stuffs peculiarly, and even in his pauperdom woresilk next to his skin. When fortune found him, he made a veritablerainbow of himself with his dressing-gowns, and even with many-colouredtrousers. His stomach was not so fond of luxury, and he was notaddicted to wine or beer, and for long periods drank neither at all. Heinjured his health by eating too fast, though this was not, as inHändel's case, from gluttony, but from absent-minded interest in hiswork. Yet there is something strangely human and captivating in thestory that, when he was eight years old, he traded off a volume ofSchiller's poems for a cream puff. 

Wagner's career shows a curious growth away from his early ideas. Hewas at first an artistic disciple of Meyerbeer, and not only drewoperatic inspirations from him, but was saved from starving byMeyerbeer's money and by his letters of introduction; later he came toabhor Meyerbeer's operas, and to despise the man himself and his ways. Wagner earned himself numberless powerful enemies by his fierce hatredfor the Jewish race, and by his ferocious attack in an article called"Judaism in Music. " Yet his first flirtation was with a Jewess, and itwas not his fault that he did not marry her. She lived in Leipzig, andwas a friend of his sister. She had the highly racial name of LeahDavid, and was a personification of Jewish beauty, with her eyes andhair of jet and her Oriental features. It has been remarked that all ofWagner's heroes and heroines fall in love at first sight. 

He began it. His first view of Leah plunged him into a frenzy. "Loveme, love my dog, " was an easy task for Wagner, and he was glad of theprivilege of caressing Leah's poodle, and of mauling her piano. Henever could fondle a piano without making it howl. Now Leah had acousin, a Dutchman and a pianist. Wagner criticised his execution, andwas invited to do better. The man hardly lived who played the pianoworse 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 theHebrew maiden, with the headlong impetuosity of an unthinking youth, hereplied in such violent, rude language, that a dead silence fell uponthe guests. Then Wagner rushed out of the room, sought his cap, tookleave of Iago, and vowed vengeance. He waited two days, upon which, having received no communication, he returned to the scene of thequarrel. To his indignation, he was refused admittance. The nextmorning he received a note in the handwriting of the young Jewess. Heopened it feverishly. It was a death-blow. Fraulein Leah was shortlygoing to be married to the hated young Dutchman, Herr Meyers, andhenceforth she and Richard were to be strangers. 'It was my first lovesorrow, and I thought I should never forget it, but after all, ' saidWagner, with his wonted audacity, 'I think I cared more for the dogthan for the Jewess. '"

Wagner entered the university at Leipzig and for a time went the pace ofstudent dissipations; he has described them in his "Lebenserinnerungen. "He took an early disgust, however, for these forms of amusement and wasthereafter a man, whose chief vices were working and dreaming. 

One of his early creeds was free love; and though he gave up thistheory, his works as a whole are by no means an argument fordomesticity. In fact they are so devout a pleading for the superiorityof passion over all other inspirations, that it is astounding to hearWagnerians occasionally complain of modern Italian operas asimmoral--as if any librettos could be immoral in comparison with theNibelungen Cycle. 

Wagner's first libretto, "The Wedding" (Die Hochzeit), horrified hissister so, that he destroyed it at her request. His third, "DasLiebesverbot, " was based on Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure, " withthe slight distinction that where Shakespeare's play is a preachmentfor virtue, Wagner himself said that his libretto was "the boldglorification of unchecked sensuality. " Years afterward, admirers ofhis put the work in rehearsal, but gave it up as too licentious. Thisapostle of unrestrained amours found himself most prosaically marriedand involved in the most commonplace struggle for daily bread, when hewas only twenty-three. 

In 1833, at the age of twenty, Wagner had taken up musicprofessionally, and got a position as chorus-master. In 1834, he becamemusical director at the theatre in Magdeburg. The company, made upprincipally of young enthusiasts, who worked day and night, rehearsedWagner's opera, "Das Liebesverbot. " The first night there was a crowdedhouse, but the troupe went all to pieces. The next night was to beWagner's benefit. Fifteen minutes before the curtain rose, he found theaudience consisted of his landlady, her husband, and one Polish Jew. Afree fight broke out behind the scenes; the prima donna's husband smotethe second tenor, her lover, and every one joined in; even that smallaudience was dismissed. In this company _die erste Liebhaberin_ wasWilhelmine Planer, one of twelve children of a poor spindle-maker. Whenthe Magdeburg company went to pieces, Wagner went to Leipzig andoffered the opera to a manager, whose daughter was the chief singer. The manager said that he could not permit his daughter to appear insuch a work. Eventually, Wagner drifted to Königsberg, where he becamedirector of the theatre, and where Wilhelmine had found a position. Thetwo had become engaged in Magdeburg, and they were married atKönigsberg, on November 24, 1836. 

The theatre soon followed the example of that at Magdeburg and wentinto bankruptcy. During the honeymoon year, Wagner had composed onlyone work, an overture, based on "Rule Britannia. " At that time "The OldOaken Bucket" had not been written. He then drifted to Riga, where hebecame music-director and his wife a singer. Now his relentlessambition seized him and he determined to consecrate the rest of hislife to glory. His wife found herself consecrated to poverty and thefanatic ideals of a husband, to whom starvation was only a detail inthe scheme of his life, --a scheme and a life for which she had neitherinclination nor understanding. 

Wilhelmine, or Minna, as she was called, is described as pretty by someand as of a "pleasing appearance, " by others. The painter Pecht calledher very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul. Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understoodher husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reachingideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career byanything. 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 sorrowand little joy with him. 

The young couple lived at Riga in an expensive suburb, whence it wassaid they could reach the theatre only by means of a cab, thoughGlasenapp denies this story. Minna brought to her husband not a pennyof dowry, and he brought to her a number of debts, and a hopeless lackof economy. The first year he tried to get an advance of salary, andoffered to do anything, "except bootblacking and water-carrying, whichlatter my chest could not endure at present. " Then he decided that fameand fortune awaited him, as they usually do, just over the horizon. Theonly trouble with the horizon, as with to-morrow and thewill-o'-the-wisp, is that it is always just ahead. 

When the Wagners applied for a passport, to leave Riga, they did so inthe face of certain suits for debt. They were told that they could havethe passport as soon as they showed receipts for their bills. That wastoo ridiculous a condition to consider, so Minna disguised as a peasantwoman, and a friendly lumberman took her across the border as his wife. The friends of Wagner took up a purse for him, and by elaboratemanoeuvres got him across the Russian border in disguise. He reachedthe seaport of Pillau, found his wife and his dog there, and set sailin a small boat. 

Thus he embarked for the future, "with a wife, an opera and a half, asmall purse, and a terribly large and terribly voracious Newfoundlanddog. " The composer, his wife, and the dog were all three outrageouslyseasick. They arrived finally after violent storms in London, where thechief event was the loss of the dog. When he came back, the threedecided that Paris offered a better chance, so thither they went. Meyerbeer befriended them with letters of introduction and muchencouragement, on the receipt of which the cautious couple dilutedtheir few remaining pence in champagne. 

Wagner began to write songs, which he offered to sell for pricesranging from $2. 50 to $4. 00; he asked the publisher obligingly to granthim the latter sum, "as life in Paris is enormously expensive"!

Wagner was so poor that about the only thing he could afford to keepwas a diary. Here he wrote down alternate accounts of his abjectpoverty and of his abnormal hopes. In Villon's time, the wolves used tocome into the streets of Paris at night. They were not all dead by1840, it would seem, for one of them made his home on Wagner'sdoor-step. He wrote in his diary that he had invited a sick andstarving German workman to breakfast, and his wife informed him thatthere was to be no breakfast, as the last pennies were gone. 

In one of his moments of desperation, he brought himself to the depthof asking Minna to pawn some of her jewelry. She told him that she hadlong ago pawned it all. She faced their distress like a heroine. Wagnerused to weep when he told of her self-denial, and the cheerfulness withwhich she, the pretty actress of former days, cooked what meals therewere to cook, and scrubbed what clothes there were to scrub. Fordiversion, when they had no money for theatres and the opera, thegenius and his wife and the dog could always take a walk on theboulevard. 

Wagner could not play any instrument, not even a piano, and so he triedfor a position in the chorus of a cheap theatre; but his voice was notfound good enough for even that. His long sea voyage had given him anidea for an opera, "The Flying Dutchman. " He was driven to sell hislibretto 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 togo back to his Fatherland, and to take his wife to the baths atTeplitz, her health having broken under the strain of poverty. It is atthis period that he closed an autobiographic sketch, with these words:"In Paris I had no prospects for years to come, so in the spring of1842 I left there. For the first time, with tears in my eyes, I saw theRhine; poor artist that I was, I swore eternal allegiance to my GermanFatherland. "

But his German Fatherland seems to have sworn everything exceptallegiance at him. From this moment he emerged into fame, or ratherinto notoriety; he thrust his head through the curtain of obscurity, asif he were a negro at a country fair, and with remarkable enthusiasmthe whole critical fraternity proceeded to hurl every conceivablemissile at him. It was well for him that his skull was hard. 

"Rienzi" made an immediate success. But he was in his thirtieth yearbefore even this unwelcome success was achieved. It is typical of theindomitable greatness of the man that even thus late in life, and afterall his trials, he could put away from him success of such a sort, andturn back into the wilderness of exile and ignominy for years, until hecould find the milk and honey land of art, which only his ownmagnificent 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 hisclothes, and darned his socks, this refusal of prosperity was a finalblow of disenchantment. She had understood him little enough before, but now she lost track of him altogether. Her feelings were those ofPsyche, when she found that her lover was a god with wings and a maniafor flight. So far as concerned the further marriage of their minds, henow disappeared for her into the blue empyrean; when she sought toembrace his soul, she clasped thin air. 

As for Wagner's heroism for his art, has there ever been anything likeit? Some of his operas he did not see performed for years and years. Hesaw hardly the hope of winning his crusade this side the grave ofmartyrdom. That he believed in presentiments will be understood in hispowerful feeling throughout the composition of "Tannhãuser, " thatsudden death would prevent his finishing it. The world knows the valueof these presentiments. Mendelssohn, too, in his letters tells ofreceiving on one occasion a letter which he feared to open, so strongwas his feeling that it contained disastrous news. When at length hefound courage to rip the envelope, the news was of the best. If, bychance, either of these presentiments had proved true, who would havebeen satisfied with the explanation of mere coincidence? The value, however, of Wagner's presentiment lies in the fact that, in spite ofhis despairful misgivings, he persevered in his ideals, and, if therehas been never so great a triumph granted a musician, it is perhapslargely because no other musician so relentlessly worshipped hisartistic ideals or sacrificed to them with such Druidic ruthlessness. 

Carl Maria von Weber paid great heed to his wife's artistic advice, andcalled her his "gallery. " But there are wives and wives, and howeverdeeply our humanity may sympathise with poor Minna Planer, our love forevolution can only rejoice that she was not permitted to tie herhusband down to the narrow-souled ideals of the good-hearted, stupidlittle housewife she was. Wagner understood her far better than sheunderstood him. He sympathised with her even in her resistance to hiscareer. To the last it made him indignant to hear her spoken ofslightingly. 

Wagner's appeals for money to his friends, who supported him in hismoneyless art, are constantly mingled with tender allusions to Minna. When he would borrow Liszt's last penny, he usually wanted a large partof it for Minna. I do not find him convicted of ever using roughlanguage to her. She was not so patient. Wagner's friend, Roeckel, wrote to Praeger in reference to the agony Wagner suffered from thegibes of criticism:

"I keep it always from him; Minna is not capable of withholding eitherpraise or blame from him, although I have tried hard to prove to herthat it deeply affects her husband, whose health is none of thestrongest. "

When he was implicated in the revolution of 1849, and was forced toflee for his life, he escaped in the disguise of a coachman, andfinally, with Liszt's ever-ready aid, reached Zurich. As soon as hefound himself there, he borrowed further money from Liszt, to send forMinna, who had remained behind and "suffered a thousand disagreeablethings. "

Wagner had been supporting her parents, and he borrowed sixty-twothalers more to help them. When Minna did not come immediately, Wagnerwrote an anxious letter of inquiry to a friend. 

Surely, there can be nothing tenderer than his allusion to her inanother letter to Liszt:

"As soon as I have my wife I shall go to work again joyfully. Restoreme to my art! You shall see that I am attached to no home, but I clingto this poor, good, faithful woman, for whom I have provided little butgrief, who is serious, solicitous, and without expectation, and whonevertheless 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 everwish 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 heras 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 shorttime. 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 oncewith him, she began again her opposition to his high-flying theories. She wanted him to write a popular French opera for Paris. She washumiliated at his borrowing for his self-support, and could not seemuch 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 thanafraid of her opinion, and wrote to Uhlig:

"She is really somewhat hectoring in this matter, and I shall no doubthave a hard tussle with her practical sense if I tell her bluntly thatI do not wish to write an opera for Paris. True, she would shake herhead and accept that decision, too, were it not so closely related toour means of subsistence; there lies the critical knot, which it willbe painful to cut. Already my wife is ashamed of our presence inZurich, and thinks we ought to make everybody believe that we are inParis. "

At last, she nagged him into her theory, although he fairly loathedwriting a pot-boiler, and considered it the purest dishonesty. He wentto Paris, but returned, having been able to accomplish nothing. On hisreturn, he wrote in his "A Communication to My Friends, " that a newhope sprung up within him. His friend Liszt was then directing theopera at Weimar. 

"At the close of my last Paris sojourn, when I was ill, unhappy, and indespair, my eye fell on the score of my 'Lohengrin, ' which I had almostforgotten. A pitiful feeling overcame me that these tones would neverresound from the deathly pale paper; two words I wrote to Liszt, theanswer to which was nothing else than the information that, as far asthe resources of the Weimar Opera permitted, the most elaboratepreparations were being made for the production of 'Lohengrin. '"

It was in "Lohengrin" that he first put in play his theory of themarriage of poetry and music, his idea being their complete devotion, with poetry as the master of the situation. He believed in independentmelodies no more than in strong-minded wives. He lived this artistictheory in his own domestic relations, and it was not his fault thatMinna, his melody, found it impossible to live in the light upper airof his poetry. He was so discouraged, however, by this time, by findingno encouragement at home, and a frenzy of hostility from thecritics, --a frenzy almost incredible at this late day, in spite of themonumental evidences of it, --that for six years, after the completionof "Lohengrin, " he wrote no music at all. 

He felt that he must first prepare the soil of battle with the criticsin their own element--ink-slinging. On this fact Mr. Finck comments asfollows:

"Five years, --nay, six years, six of the best years of his life, immediately following the completion of 'Lohengrin, '--the greatestdramatic composer the world has ever seen did not write a note! Do yourealise what that means? It means that the world lost two or threeimmortal operas, which he might have, and probably would have, writtenin these six years had not an unsympathetic world forced him into therole of an aggressive reformer and revolutionist. "

He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as aresult of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism. Then hetook up the Nibelungen idea, planning to devote three years to thework; "little dreaming that it would keep him with interruptions forthe next twenty-three years. " For the accomplishment of this vastmonument he asked only a humble place to work. He wrote Uhlig:

"I want a small house, with meadow and a little garden! To work withzest 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 Zürich, where he and his wife rowed about the lake, andaccumulated friends. He found special sympathy in the friendship ofFrau Elise Wille, a novelist. Perhaps she was more than a friend, forone of his letters to her is superscribed "Precious. "

But all the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, andwas occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, forhe was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the worldof music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify. He compared himselfto Beethoven:

"Strange that my fate should be like Beethoven's! he could not hear hismusic because he was deaf. .. . I cannot hear mine because I am more thandeaf, because I do not live in my time at all, because I move among youas one who is dead. .. . Oh, that I should not arise from my bedto-morrow, awake no more to this loathsome life!"

Financial troubles and the discouragement of his wife were still amongthe most faithful torments. His letters to Liszt are abundant withalternations of artistic ecstasy and material misery. It is worthrecording that, "my wife has not scolded me once, although yesterday Ihad the spleen badly enough. " To add to his misery, Minna becameaddicted 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 today. Her health was ruined, especially by the immoderate use of opium, taken nominally as a remedy for sleeplessness. Latterly the cure sheuses has proved highly beneficial; the great weakness and want ofappetite have disappeared, and the recovery of the chief functions (sheused to perspire continually) and a certain abatement of her incessantexcitement, have become noticeable. The great enlargement of her heartwill be bearable to her if only she keeps perfectly calm and avoids allexcitement to her dying day. A thing of this kind can never be got ridof entirely. Thus I have to undertake new duties, over which I must tryto 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 interestingphenomenon. " 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 itis evident that she wears upon him. His temper, peculiarly violent atthe slightest opposition, must have been a serious problem under heropen disbelief in his genius and his creeds; and yet he thought hecould 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 refuseme the thousand francs I had asked for, and offers me thirty louis d'orinstead. This puts me in an awkward position. On the one hand I am, asusual, greatly in want of money, and shall decidedly not be able tosend my wife to Loden for a cure, unless I receive the subvention I hadhoped for. "

These letters to Liszt make a remarkable literature. The two men werebound together by such artistic sympathy, and Liszt was so much asoldier for Wagner's crusade, and so ready with financial help, that hewas more than friend or brother. It was, in Wagner's own phrase, "thegigantic perseverance of his friendship, " that endeared him beyondwords to the struggler. Even Minna seems to have been extremely fond ofLiszt--what woman was not? It was to Liszt that she was indebted forrescue from downright starvation. More than this, Minna's parents weresupported _via_ Liszt, and it somewhat beautifies the otherwiseunbeautiful spectacle of Wagner's splendid mendicancy that, when heborrowed, 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, whosent him money from Dresden for several years. 

This brings us to a time of stress when Minna began to suffer from thefickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune. Wagner began to castmeaning glances over the garden wall. As Mr. Henderson says: "He was asinconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband. His misdoingsamounted to more than peccadilloes. "

It was in Zürich that Wagner gave Minna some other causes foruneasiness than his habit of being late at meals. Hans Bélart, in his"Wagner in Zürich, " refers to Wagner's flirtation with Emilie Heim, thewife of a conductor, who lived so near the Wagners that theirkitchen-gardens adjoined. Emilie was a beautiful blonde with abeautiful 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. Howmuch cause Minna may have had for jealousy, we can hardly know, but itseems certain that she felt she had a sufficiency, and that she made somuch ado about it that Wagner found it advisable to move. In lateryears he and Emilie met again. Wagner gave her the pet name of"Sieglinde, " and told her that she should illumine his Walhalla asFreia, the eternal, blue-eyed, gold-haired goddess of spring. Accordingto Belart, Minna was the inspiration for Wotan's virtuous but naggingwife Fricka!

Frau Wille was another torment to Minna, but Frau Wesendonck was more. Belart even implies that Minna grew so jealous of the Wesendonck thatshe poured out her woes to a dancing-master named Riese, who reveredMeyerbeer. When Minna, who was at least, says Mr. Finck, as welladvanced as the eminent critics of the time, failed to understand themusic of "The Walküre, " when indeed she called it "immoral amorousasininity, "--an opinion for which perhaps the duets with Frau Heim werepartly 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 herdeath Mr. Huneker summed up her affair with Wagner as follows:

"Mathilde Wesendonck is dead. Who was she? Well, she was Isolde whenWagner was Tristan down on the beautiful shores of Zurich in the yearsof 1858 and 1859. When he was in sore straits and had not where to layhis head, he went to Zürich, and Mr. Wesendonck rented to him for nextto nothing a little châlet. There he dreamed out the second and thirdacts of 'Tristan und Isolde, ' and succeeded in deeply interesting Mrs. Wesendonck in them. There had already been trouble between him and hispatient first wife, Minna, because of his attentions to this woman, andin 1856 the Wagners were on the point of a separation. Richard wrote tohis friend Praeger in London: 'The devil is loose. I shall leave Zürichat once and come to you in Paris, ' But this time the trouble wassmoothed over. 

"In the summer of 1859 the attachment of Wagner and Mrs. Wesendonck hadreached such a stage that Wesendonck practically kicked the greatcomposer out of his paradise. In later years, when questioned about it, Wesendonck admitted that he had forced Wagner to go. In 1865 Wagnerwrote to the injured husband:

"'The incident that separated me from you about six years ago should beevaded; it has upset me and my life enough that you recognise me nolonger and that I esteem myself less and less. All this sufferingshould have earned your forgiveness, and it would have been beautifuland noble to have forgiven me; but it is useless to demand theimpossible, and I was in the wrong. '

"It is thoroughly characteristic of Wagner to regard his sufferings asso 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 theorchestra play the 'Liebestod. '"

Judging from external evidences, there is reason enough to accept sucha theory of the relations of Wagner and this sympathetic, beautifulwoman. In fact, it stretches credulity to the bursting point to acceptany other opinion. And yet, it is only fair to say that Wagner put avery different construction upon the friendship, and to confess thatstranger things have happened in real life than the purely artisticwedlock, which Wagner claimed for the intimacy of the two. Mathilde wasa poet, and Wagner set to music some of her verses, notably hisbeautiful "Traume. " Besides, she was the inspiration of his Isolde, andshe gave him the sympathy Minna denied. 

According to a recently published article in a German review, Wagnerwrote a long letter to his sister Clara, explaining why Minna had lefthim, and making himself out to be as thoroughly misunderstooddomestically as he had always been musically. It is a long letter, butquoteworthy, the italics being mine:

"MY DEAR CLARA:--I promised you further information regarding thecauses of the decisive step which you now see me taking. I communicate, therefore, what is necessary to enable you to contradict various piecesof gossip, to which indeed I am indifferent. 

"What for six years has kept and comforted me, and especially hasstrengthened me in remaining by Minna's side, in spite of the enormousdifferences in our characters and natures, is the love of that younglady 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 profoundaffection took the sadly melancholy character which keeps aloof allthat is common and base, and recognises its fount of happiness only inthe welfare of the other. From the period of our first acquaintance shehad displayed the most unwearied and most delicate care for me, and inthe most courageous way had obtained from her husband everything thatcould lighten my life. 

"He could not, in presence of the undisguised frankness of his wife, doanything but soon fall into increasing jealousy. Her nobleness nowconsisted in this, that she kept her husband informed of the state ofher heart and gradually led him to perfect renunciation of her. By whatsacrifices and struggles this was attained can be easily guessed; whatrendered her success possible, could only be the depth and sublimity ofher affection, devoid of every selfish thought, which gave her thepower to show it to her husband in such a light that he, when shefinally threatened him with her death, had to abstain from her and hadto prove his unshakable love for her only by supporting her in hercares for me. Finally, he had to retain the mother of his children, andfor their sake--who invincibly separated us--he assumed his position ofrenunciation. Thus, while he was devoured by jealousy she againinterested him for me so far that--as you know--_he often supportedme_. Lastly, when it came to providing me with what I wanted--a houseand garden--it was she who by the most unheard-of struggles induced himto buy a pretty little property near his own. 

"The most wonderful thing is, that I never had a suspicion of thesestruggles; her husband, out of love for her, had always to show himselffriendly 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 resultof the glorious love of the purest, noblest woman, and _this love, which always remained unspoken between us_, was compelled finally toreveal itself when I composed and gave her 'Tristan, ' Then, for thefirst time her self-control failed, and she declared to me that now shemust die. 

"Think, dear sister, what this love must have been to me after a lifeof toil and suffering, of excitement and sacrifice, such as mine hadbeen. Yet we at once recognised that a union between us must never bethought 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 goingon. She behaved indeed often in a jealous, scornful, contemptuousmanner, yet she tolerated _our mode of life, which otherwise was noinjury to morality_, but looked only to the possibility of knowing eachother at the present moment. Consequently I assumed that Minna would besensible and understand that she had nothing to fear really, that aunion between us could not even be thought of, and that thereforeforbearance 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 sensesthat _she intercepted a letter from me_ and--opened it. This letter, ifshe had been in a position to understand it, would really have soothedher in the most desirable way, for our resignation was its theme. 

"She dwelt only on the confidential expressions and lost the sense. Ina rage she came to me and compelled me therefore to declare quietly anddecisively how matters stood; namely, that she had brought trouble onherself by opening such a letter, and that if she could not restrainherself, 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, youare very sick. Compose yourself and let us once more talk about thematter. ' We concluded with the idea of a Cure for her; she seemed toquiet herself, and the day of her departure for the Cure wasapproaching; previously, however, she would speak to Frau Wesendonck Ifirmly forbade her to do so. All my efforts were to make Minnagradually acquainted with the character of my relations to FrauWesendonck, in order to convince her that she had no need to fear aboutthe continuance of our marriage, and that, therefore, she should behaveherself sensibly, thoughtfully, and generously; reject any foolishrevenge and every kind of spying. Ultimately she promised this. Yet shecould not be quiet. She went behind my back and--without comprehendingit herself--insulted the gentle lady most grossly. She said to her:'Were I like ordinary women, I would go with this letter to yourhusband!' And thus _Frau Wesendonck, who was conscious of never havingany secrets from her husband_--a thing which a woman like Minna couldnot understand--had nothing to do but at once to inform her husband ofthis 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 changewas necessary. I succeeded only after some time in making it clear toFrau Wesendonck that, for a nature like that of my wife, relations ofsuch elevation and unselfishness as those existing between us couldnever be made intelligible, for I was struck by _her serious, deepreproach that I had omitted this, while she had always made her husbandher confidant_. Whoever can comprehend what I have suffered since (itwas then the middle of April) must also comprehend in what state ofmind I am at last, since I must acknowledge that the uninterruptedendeavours to continue our disturbed relations were absolutelyfruitless. I tended Minna at the Cure for three months with the utmostcare, and in order to quiet her, I, during this period, broke off allintercourse with our neighbours; in my anxiety for her health I triedeverything in my power to bring her to reason and to hold viewsbefitting herself and her age. All in vain! She persisted in the mosttrivial remarks, she said she was an injured woman, and she hadscarcely been quieted, before the old rage broke out again. Since Minnareturned a month ago, some conclusion had finally to be reached. Theclose proximity of the two women was for the future impossible, forFrau Wesendonck could not forget that her highest sacrifices andtenderest consideration for me had been met on my side, through mywife, 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 todecide to give up the charming asylum which such tender love hadprepared for me. 

"Now I needed quiet and perfect composure, for what I have to surmountis great. Minna is unable to understand what an unhappy married life wehave led; she imagines the past to have been quite different from whatit was, and if I found consolation, distraction, and forgetfulness inmy art, she verily believes I had no need of them. Enough. I have cometo this resolution with myself: I can no longer bear this everlastingsquabbling and distrustful temper if I have to fulfil my life's taskcourageously. Whoever has observed me sufficiently must wonder at mypatience, kindness, even weakness, and if I am condemned by superficialjudges I am quite indifferent to them. But never had Minna such anopportunity to show herself more worthy of _the dignity (würde) ofbeing my wife_, than now, when it is necessary for me to keep what ishighest and dearest. It lay in her hands to show whether she reallyloved me. But what such genuine love is, she never once conceived, andher temper carried her away beyond everything. 

"Yet I excused her on account of her sickness, although this sicknesswould have taken another and milder character if she herself were otherand milder. The many disagreeable blows of fortune which sheexperienced with me--which my inner genius (which unfortunately I couldnot 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 sorryfor her. Only I feel myself constantly incapable of enduring it by herside; moreover, I can do her no good thereby. I shall become alwaysunintelligible to her and an object of her suspicion. So--separation!But in all kindness and love, I do not desire _her disgrace_. I onlywished that she herself in time would see that it is better if we donot see so much of each other. For the present I hold out to her theprospect of returning to Germany as soon as the amnesty is proclaimed;for this reason she will take with her all the furniture and things. Ipurpose to make no slips of the tongue and to let everything depend onmy future resolutions. Do you therefore stick to it that _it is only atemporary separation_. What ever you can do to make her quiet andreasonable I beg you not to omit. For--as said above--she isunfortunate; _with a smaller man she would have been happier_. Joinwith 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 Ithink of passing the winter, presumably in Venice. Already I feelquickened 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 togo on composing 'Tristan, ' I shall regard myself as saved. In fact, Imust do the best for myself; I ask nothing from the world but that itleave me in quiet for the works which one day will belong to it. So letit judge me gently! The contents of this letter, dear Clara, you canconfidently use to give any explanations where they may be necessary. On the whole, however, naturally I would not like to have much said ofthe matter. Only very few people will understand what this is about, soone must know well the persons introduced here. 

"Now, farewell, dear sister. I thank you again from my heart for thesecret question which, as you can see, I answer confidentially. TreatMinna with forbearance, but make her gradually understand how she nowstands with me. 

"Your brother, "RICHARD WAGNER. "

This is Wagner's side of the affair, only recently made public. Thetranslation is from the _Musical Courier. _ Whatever is discarded, thereremains enough to disprove Bélart's statement that Otto Wesendonck onlylearned of the affair from informants outside, and, finding Wagner andMathilde together, compelled Wagner to leave Zurich immediately. Besides, even Bélart admits that Wesendonck and his wife continued tolive together for the sake of the children, and that years after, whenhe had learned to understand, he renewed his acquaintance with Wagner. 

Amazing as this story is, both with regard to the strange things itasks us to believe of the man and the woman and the husband, it iscertain that there was a pretty how-d'ye-do in Zurich. Minna became sojealous that she drove Wagner, usually so tender in his allusions toher, to use the expression of the ungallant Haydn, saying that, "shewas making a hell out of the home. " Her outbursts of temper were soviolent, and her addiction to opium had become so great, that he beganto fear for her death by heart disease, and finally for her sanity. Hewrote of her to his friend Frau Ritter:

"Her condition of mind became such a torment to herself and hersurroundings, that a radical change of the situation had to be made, unless we were all willing to wear ourselves out unreasonably. .. . Thestate of her education, and her intellectual capacities, make itimpossible for her to find in me and my endowments the consolationwhich she needed so much by way of compensation for thedisagreeableness of our material situation. If this is the source ofgreat anguish to me, it nevertheless makes me pity her with all myheart, and it is my most cordial wish that I may some day be able toafford her lasting consolation in her own way. "

In 1856 she had left him for a time, ostensibly to take a cure. In 1859there had been a short reunion, of which Wagner wrote again to FrauRitter:

"This period I have also chosen for a reunion with my poor wife. MayHeaven grant that I shall always feel able to carry out patiently myfirm and cordial determination of treating her in the most consideratemanner. I confess that my relation to this poor woman, who had so manytrials, and is now suffering so much, has always spurred me on topreserve and develop my moral powers. In all my relations to her I amguided only by the deepest pity with her condition, and I hopeconfidently that it will always arm me with the persistent patiencewith which I feel called upon not only to endure the consequences ofher illness, but personally to allay them. "

Then he had gone to Venice to continue work on "Tristan, " dreamingthere in loneliness of his Isolde, the Wesendonck, whose husband hasbeen well likened to King Mark. But Venice being within the sphere ofSaxon influence, he was afraid to remain long, for fear of arrest. In1860 he was granted a partial amnesty, and went to Frankfort to meethis wife, who had been taking treatment near Wiesbaden. Minna went withhim to Paris, and was there at the time of the violent riots, which putan end to "Tannhäuser, " and doubtless to Minna's hopes of settling inthe Paris she was so fond of. She began again to vent her indignationthat he would not write for the gallery, and the storm grew fiercer andfiercer. Wagner had written Liszt in 1861 with renewed hope and renewedtenderness:

"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 herhoneymoon. My reward is that I see her thrive; her bad illness isvisibly getting better. She is recovering and will, I hope, become alittle 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 willagree with her; in which case, we shall perhaps, after all, enjoy alittle Paradise. "

But the hope was vain, and a friend of the family who wrote under thename of the "Idealistin" describes the--

"almost daily trouble in the intercourse, increased by the fact thatthe absence of children deprived them of the last element ofreconciliation. Nevertheless, Frau Wagner was a good woman, and in theeyes of the world decidedly the better half and the chief sufferer. Ijudged otherwise, and felt the deepest pity for Wagner, for whom loveshould have built the bridge by which he might have reached others, whereas now it was only making the bitter cup of his life bitterer. Iwas on good terms with Frau Wagner, who often poured her complaintsinto my ears, and I tried to console her, but of course in vain. "

And now Minna, whose housewifely meekness had endured the Wesendoncktempest and all the other multitudes of trials Wagner went through, found herself unable to endure his fidelity to his artistic ideals. Thequarrels grew fiercer and fiercer, until finally she left Wagner forever, and went back to her people in Dresden, where she spent the restof her life. 

Wagner's immortal hope was not even yet dead; as late as 1863 he wroteto Praeger from St. Petersburg:

"I would Minna were here with me; we might, in the excitement that nowmoves fast around me, grow again the quiescent pair of yore. The wholething is annoying. I am not in good spirits: I move about freely, andsee a number of people, but my misery is bitter. "

Minna herself seems to have toyed with the idea of reconciliation, forshe wrote to Praeger, who told Wagner, and received the followingbitter complaint:

"And so she has written to you? Whose fault was it? How could she haveexpected I was to be shackled and fettered as any ordinary cold commonmortal? My inspirations carried me into a sphere where she could notfollow, and then the exuberance of my heated enthusiasm was met by acold douche. But still there was no reason for the extreme step;everything might have been arranged between us, and it would have beenbetter had it been so. Now there is a dark void, and my misery isdeep. "

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

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

And again he bewails his loneliness to Praeger:

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

Yet he was destined to know wedded happiness some years later. And heshowed that he could make happy a woman who could understand him. AsMr. 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 ofgenius. 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 theextremely 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, butI think there are instances enough in this book to show that genius hasnothing to do with the case. Wedded happiness is a result of the luckymeeting of two natures, one or both of which may be accidentally soconstituted as to be happy in the other's society without unduerestlessness. It would be just as easy to prove, by a multitude ofinstances, 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 revealedto the public in an intimacy non-historical characters are notsubjected to. But if you will turn from reading the pages of history, biography, or memoirs, and take up any newspaper of the day, you willdoubtless be astounded to find how small a percentage of the divorces, the murders, and other domestic scandals are to be blamed to thepossession of genius, unless, as one might well, you recognise aspecial and separate genius for trouble. 

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

Poor Minna never shared with Wagner his period of luxury. But it was ofsuch magnificence that his envious foes accused him of aiming todethrone 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, hisneglected wife was starving to death in Dresden. Minna was honourableenough to answer this attack with an open letter to those Germannewspapers which, in 1866, outjaundiced that yellow journalism for theinvention of which New America has been blamed. 

Minna wrote as follows:

"The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for sometime published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declarethat I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficientfor my maintenance. I take this opportunity with the more pleasure asit enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnieslaunched against my husband. "

A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heartdisease. She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, withoutever tasting their sweets. To say whether or not she deserved to tastethe sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict uponone of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render. Themarriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man whocould see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades. Neither was more toblame than the other for the fault of eyesight. It was simply a case ofconnubial astigmatism. 

While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the youngking, he was accused of Oriental luxury. The selection of the rainbowfurnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which madeJoseph's coat mere negligée, was not altogether his own, but showed theunmistakable guiding hand of a woman. Frau Cosima von Bülow acted as asort of secretary to Wagner. She was the daughter of Liszt; her motherwas 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 Hansvon Bülow in 1857. 

Von Bülow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt andby Wagner. In 1850, when Von Bülow was about twenty years old, Wagnerand Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced, begging her to let her son take up music. Like Schumann's mother, sheopposed music as a career, but Von Bülow persisted, and became Liszt'spupil. Wagner was to Von Bülow a god. It was a pitiful practical jokethat Fate should have directed the god's favour toward the worshipper'swife. But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense ofgood form. 

As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of VonBülow's misfortunes, and saying: "Add to this a tragic marriage; ayoung woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt'swonderful image, but of superior intellect. " Wagner persuaded the kingto make Von Bülow court pianist, and later court conductor. There arevery pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Bülows andWagner. 

Then Wagner's popularity with the king eventually raised such hostilitythat, at the king's request, he left the country to save his life. Hewas again an exile. Cosima, with her two children, went with him, andlater Von Bülow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his livingas a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne. There exists aletter from Wagner's cook, telling a friend of how the king cameincognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descentof Cosima and her children. They had come to stay. At Triebschen, nearLucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Bülow family, and began to knowcontentment. 

The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough totorment even the idolatrous Von Bülow. Riemann says: "Domesticmisunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Bülow left thecity. " One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birthof Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage wereimperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desireddivorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religiousprofession, " to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who saysthat Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Lisztand Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics ofwhich this is not the place to discuss. "

Von Bülow secured his divorce in the fall of 1869. He remarried, in1882, the actress, Marie Schanzer. Wagner and Cosima were marriedAugust 25, 1870. This was the twenty-fifth birthday of King Ludwig, andGlasenapp 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 tobe the beginning of a new chapter. On Thursday, the 25th of August, 1870, in the Protestant Church of Lucerne, in the presence of twowitnesses, one, the lifelong friend of the Wagner family, Hans Richter, the other, Miss M. V. M. , the wedding of Richard Wagner to Cosima, thedivorced wife of Hans von Bülow, was celebrated. 

"There is no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. Nonehave ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higherimpersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who hadsuffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciativeneglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friendof her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement_(mit theilnahmvollster Sorge_), until she as well as her husbandrealised that she was the one chosen to heal the wounds which theartist had suffered in his restless wanderings and through numberlessdisappointments. The time had arrived when the hand of love preparedthe last and never-to-be-lost home. 

"This knowledge gave the noble-minded woman the courage to sever theties, which in early youth had tied her to one of our most eminentartists, and the best of men; to give up herself to her task, toconsecrate her life to him, to be the helpmeet of the man to whomthrough friendship and the inner voice of her heart, and the knowledgeof noble duty, she had already belonged. The world did not hesitate tomalign this holiest act of fidelity. Only the small and the low areoverlooked, 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 hisfeelings in the matter, which is beautiful enough and sincere enough toquote at some length:

"Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shallpresent ourselves as man and wife. To get into this state, greatpatience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to bebrought about until all manner of suffering. Since last I saw you inMunich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, hasalso become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I couldwell be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I 'couldnot be helped' was false! She knew that I could be helped, and shehelped me: she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herselfevery condemnation. She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful andvigorous boy, whom I boldly call 'Siegfried': he is now growing, together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last hasattained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which wehad retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of thesentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce toyou 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 lifeis an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed withgreat secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll, " that most royal musical welcomethat ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musicalconspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima'sbirthday, 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 theBayreuth dream--the building with hands of a material castle in Spain. Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his ownworks, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa atTriebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret. For there he hadbeen able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection andforethought 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, hisfinal ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his firstinspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former beingthe portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the rôle, and the latterbeing the child Siegfried Wagner. Beneath the frescoes he put thewords: "Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus vonmir benannt, "--which may be Englished: "Here, where my illusionsrespite 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 Bülow, the father of two of them, had found strength to be true to his firstbeliefs in Wagner's art crusade, and to continue his friendship withthe man, though delicacy forbade his entering the home, to which he hadregretfully but gracefully resigned his wife, like Ruskin, though notfor the same reasons. Once he broke forth in his dilemma: "If he wereonly 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 thegenius, whom we saw but lately juggling with starvation in the slums ofParis, 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 thisluxury was his last, for his health was on the ebb. And though he tooka suite of twenty-eight rooms in the Palazzo Vendramin, in Venice, withhis wife, his own two children, Siegfried and Eva, aged twelve andfourteen years, Daniela and Isolde, Cosima's two children by her firsthusband, and two teachers, four servants, and many guests, this was buta splendid sarcophagus; for here Wagner had but less than half a yearto live. Those who would know more of the daily comforts and sufferingof this time, can read it in Perl's book, "Richard Wagner in Venedig. "He suffered constantly more and more from heart trouble and othertorments. One day his servant heard him calling, and, hastening to hisside, 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 nothold back the inevitable. When the doctor came and told her that Wagnerhad finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed andfainted. For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to takeany food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted fromexhaustion. 

And now, the erstwhile exile, living on the pittances he could wheedlefrom his few disciples, died in the fame of the world. Three kings sentwreaths to his funeral, and the city of Venice twice asked for theprivilege of giving him a final pageant. But Cosima strangely wouldhave no ceremony at all, and no music. "She feared it would rend herheart in twain, " says Mr. Finck, "so the procession moved along thecanal in solemn silence, broken only by the tolling of the distantbell. "

The railroad station was guarded as for the funeral of a monarch. Theexpress-train was not stopped at the border of the three countriesthrough which it passed. When the coffin was taken to the grave inBayreuth, it was followed by the two large dogs that had shared, as somany of their fellows, the goodness of his large heart. 

As for the widow, she is still living as I write, and still unweariedin behalf of his glory. In her he had found that ideal of womankindwhich he had so much upheld: instant and dauntless obedience to thebehest of the one great love. When he died he was even then at workupon a glorification of the sex, and the last sentence that ever flowedfrom his pen related to a legend of the Buddhists, granting women aright to the saintliness previously claimed by men alone. 

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

And in his grave, where he lay, his head rested upon the long blondetresses of Cosima, which he had so admired, and which, with finalsacrifice, 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 hisrelations with women, there would be less dispute as to the genius ofthis man whom the Germans call a Russian; the Russians, a German. Hewas the son of a well-to-do mining and military engineer, who believedin marriage and made three wives happy--in succession. The youngTschaikovski was late, like Wagner, in deciding on music, and wastwenty-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 defendedhimself when attacked. " That is not, I believe, a type to fascinatewomen for long, and Tschaikovski's moroseness, which bordered onmorbidness and always hovered on the brink of insanity, made it perhapsfortunate for at least two women that his negotiations with them endedas they did. And so he drifted--not such a bachelor as Beethoven, yetquite as wifeless. Unlike Beethoven, who turned from one disappointingwoman to another, Tschaikovski turned to men. Among his friends wasNikolai Rubinstein, the brother of the more famous pianist, Anton. 

Now, Nikolai, like Anton, had tried marriage, and, after two years ofquarrels with his wife's relatives and doubtless with her, had forswornthe other sex. Incidentally he had taught all day and gambled allnight; so the husband was not the only gainer by the separation. Nikolai and Tschaikovski set up a ménage 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, forinstance, and with an unknown at a masked ball. But he was chieflymusic-mad and undermined his health by his overwork. 

Then in 1868, his father got after him to marry. As long before as1859, when he was nineteen, he had suffered from an unrequited love. Now at the age of twenty-eight he cared nothing for petticoats. He hadwritten his sister a year ago that he was tired of life, and marriagedid not tempt him; he was, said he, "too lazy to woo, too lazy tosupport a family, too lazy to endure the responsibility of a wife andchildren. " But upon this ennui fell an electric spark--from the oldstorage-batteries, woman's eyes. 

There had come to the Moscow opera a Belgian singer, Désirée Artôt, whowas then thirty-three years old, a woman whose pictures make her nearlybeautiful, and who is recorded as a queen of grace and a queen ofdramatic and lyric song. She was witty and magnetic, and PeterIljitsch, five years her junior, like another Chopin and another Mary'slamb, followed her about. 

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

Eventually they became engaged. Just as in Weber's case, the composerdemanded that the singer give up her career for his, and she and hermother 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, whowrote a nobly generous letter, pleading the woman's right to her owncareer: a very gospel of artistic equality. 

"You love her: she loves you: and that should settle it, if--Oh, thiswretched if! The beloved Désirée must be altogether noble, since my sonPeter has loved her. He has taste and talent, and would choose a wifeof his own nature. The few years difference in age are of no moment. Ifyour love is real and substantial, all else is nonsense. She would notwant you to play the servant, and you could compose even if youtravelled with her. 

"I lived with your mother for twenty-one years and all that time lovedwith the passion of youth, and respected and adored her as a saint. Ifyour desired one has the character of your mother, whom you soresemble, there should be no talk of future coolness and doubt. Youknow well that artists have no home; they belong to the whole world. Why worry whether you live at Moscow or St. Petersburg? She should notleave the stage, nor should you abandon your career. True, our futureis known only to God, but why should you foresee that you will berobbed of your career? Be her servant, but an independent servant. Doyou truly love her and for all time? I know your character, my dearson, but alas, I do not know you, dear sweetheart; I know yourbeautiful soul and good heart through him. It might be well for youboth to test your love; not by jealousy--God forbid!--but by time. Waitand 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 troubledlovers proved worthy of such golden philosophy. Désirée's travels tookher away. Their parting must have been cold, for in January, 1869, Tschaikovski wrote his brother a letter, excitedly referring to theacceptance of his opera, and coldly hinting that his love affair wouldprobably come to nothing. We remember how calmly Mozart once wrote ofhis operatic triumph and how passionately of his love. 

The same month a telegram informed Tschaikovski that his fiancée hadvery suddenly become engaged to a singer in her own troupe, the Spanishbaritone, Padilla y Ramos, who was two years younger even thanTschaikovski. The singers were married at Sèvres, September 15, 1869. 

Tschaikovski, on receiving the first news, seemed "more surprised thanpained. " He was still flirting desperately with grand opera. A yearlater he heard that Désirée was returning to sing at Moscow. He wrotepluckily:

"She is coming here and I cannot avoid meeting her. The woman has costme many a bitter hour, and yet I feel myself drawn toward her with suchinexplicable sympathy, that I wait her coming with feverishimpatience. "

At her performance he sat in the pit with his friend Kashkin, who sayshe was terribly excited, and kept his opera-glasses fastened on heralways, though he must have been almost blinded by the tears thatstreamed down his cheeks. The two did not meet, however, for sevenyears, and then unexpectedly. He called at Nikolai Rubinstein's officein 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. Thewoman 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 Désirée was the idol of thecourt and public. They met now as friends. He and Edvard Grieg calledat her house, and he wrote in his diary:

"This evening is counted among the most agreeable recollections of mysojourn in Berlin. The personality and the art of this singer are asirresistibly 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 everafterward with a husband who won eminence equal to hers as a singer. Asfor Tschaikovski, he had already revenged himself in kind--in worsekind--upon the sex, which had really attracted him only once. 

In the year 1875 Tschaikovski's nerves had gone to pieces from overworkand his mode of life. For months he was not allowed to write down anote. And now, I think some one must have prescribed marriage as a curefor his ills. There followed that strange affair which was a riddle aslate as the time Miss Newmarch's biography appeared in 1900; a solutionwas then hoped from a sealed document left by Kashkin, and not to beopened till the year 1927. Tschaikovski himself had looked over his owndiary, and had been so terrified at what he read that he destroyed agreat portion of it before his death in 1893. In 1902, however, hisbrother Modeste began the publication of a very elaborate and completebiography, which partially clears the riddle. This is what we learnfrom that:

In 1875 Tschaikovski was a wreck. In 1876 he suddenly wrote hisbrother: "I have resolved to marry--the resolve is beyond recall;" andagain: "The result of my thought is the firm resolve to marry withwhomsoever it may be. " His photograph at this time has a worn, huntedlook, and he has become addicted to cold baths, of which his new planwas the coldest of all. 

In May, 1877, his friend Kashkin suspected him of being engaged. InJuly, Kashkin was amazed to find him married. Just once Kashkin saw thecouple together. Then Tschaikovski grew very distant to his friends andeccentric in his manner; a little later he fled to Moscow, and in a fewdays came word that he was dangerously ill. Later there were threats ofsuicide, but it was all a mystery. 

We know now that late in June, 1877, Tschaikovski announced definitelyto his brother Anatol, that he was engaged to, and would soon marry, Antonina Ivanovna Miljukova. He said little of the girl, except thatshe was not very young and was very poor; she was free from scandal, however, and she loved him deeply. He hoped the marriage would behappy; and he asked the father's blessing. The father's letter showedan 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 ofthe courtship are told by the composer himself in a letter to Frau vonMeek, a wealthy idolatress of his genius, with whom he had one of thoseaffairs 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. Ilearned from it that she loved me. The letter was couched in such warm, frank terms that I concluded to answer it--something I have alwaysavoided doing in previous cases of this sort. Without rehearsing thedetails of this correspondence I must mention that the result of theletters was that I followed the wish of my future wife and called tosee her. Why did I do this? Now it seems to me that some invisiblepower forced me to it. At our meeting I assured her that in return forher love I could give her nothing but sympathy and gratitude. But laterI reproached myself for the carelessness of my action. If I did notlove her and did not wish to incite her further love for me, why did Icall on her and how could all this end? By the following letter I sawthat I had gone too far; that if I now turned from her suddenly itwould make her unhappy and possibly drive her to a tragic fate. 

"So the weighty alternative posed itself: Either I got my liberty atthe cost of a life, or I married. The latter was my only possiblechoice. So one evening I went to see her, declared openly that I couldnot love her, but that I would always be her grateful friend; Idescribed minutely my character, the irritability, the unevenness of mytemperament, my diffidence--finally my financial condition. Then Iasked her if she wished to be my wife. Naturally her answer was 'yes. 'The fearful agonies which I have experienced since that night are notto be expressed in words. This is only natural. To live forthirty-seven years in congenital antipathy to marriage, and thensuddenly to be made a bridegroom through the sheer force ofcircumstances, without being in the least charmed by the bride--that issomething horrible! In order to get back my senses and accustom myselfto the thought of the future, I decided to go to the country for amonth. This I did. I console myself with the thought that no one canescape his fate, and my meeting with that girl was fatality. Myconscience is clear. If I marry without loving, it is becausecircumstances have forced this upon me. I cannot do otherwise. Carelessly I surrendered at her first confession of love. I should nothave answered her at all. "

Under such auspices, the marriage took place. It is hard to say whom weshould pity the more, husband or wife; and which we should count themore insane. That which is technically called a honeymoon lasted a weekin this case. In ten days the husband is writing his fellow-Platonist, Frau von Meck, that he is uncertain about his happiness, but positivethat he cannot compose. He and his wife pay a little visit to hermother; then they return "home, " only to part. The unwilling bridegroommust 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 havegone mad. "

In ten days he is strong enough to think of his wife again; in hissolitude he begins work on what he mentions to Frau von Meck as "oursymphony. "

He goes hunting in the woods, while the lonely bride hunts furniturefor their home. By the middle of September, Tschaikovski is braveenough to return; he is pleased to find a home of his own, with allclean and neat. For a few days, even a robbery by servants, and thenecessity his wife is under to go to the police-court, do not disturbhim, or, at least, so he writes. But hardly more than a week can hestand his wife's society. He determines to kill himself, and stands upto his chin in the ice-cold river, afraid to drown himself, and yethoping to catch a fatal pneumonia. 

His old frenzy seized him; insanity beckoned to him again. Allegingthat a telegram had called him to St. Petersburg, he fled from hishome, 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 unconsciousfor forty-eight hours. The doctor said travel was necessary. The wifewas provided for, and, leaving her forever, Tschaikovski fled toforeign countries barely in time to save his sanity. To the last heabsolved the poor wretched woman of any slightest blame for hisbehaviour. His brother, in a biography, completely frank up to thispoint, now grows reticent, except to release the wife of all blame. Soyou must satisfy your curiosity by imagining some abnormal state ofmind, which you will regard cynically or pityingly, as your manner ofmind impels. 

The last touch to this tragedy was the sordid tinge of poverty. Thewretched 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 givenher. He accepted a gift so graciously and gracefully made. Tschaikovskiwas thenceforth an institution fully endowed. 

Modeste says that without this relief from anxiety Tschaikovski wouldhave died. He wrote to the benefactress: "Let every note from my penhenceforth be dedicated to you. "

This was not the first time she had aided him. A strange, notablewoman, she; a true phenomenon--or a phenomena, as one would be temptedto say who had even less Greek than I or Shakespeare, if such an oneexist. 

Nadeschda Filaretovna, being poor, had married a poor railway engineer;they lived carefully, and raised eleven children. A railroad investmentbrought them a sudden wealth, soaring into the millions. In 1876 shelost her husband, but all of the children and the riches remained tokeep 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 tofill his purse, ordering arrangements of music and paying for themmunificently. Yet she would not receive the composer personally, andwhen they met in public they did not speak or exchange a glance. 

In Du Maurier's perfect romance, Peter Ibbetson and the Duchess ofTowers lived their hearts out in a dream-world. So Frau von Meck andPeter Iljitsch lived theirs in a letter-world. 

In 1877, before his marriage, learning of his financial troubles, shehad offered to pay him well for a composition. He had said he could notconscientiously degrade his art for a price. So she paid his debts tothe extent of three thousand roubles. This he could accept. Thesetheories of art!

It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild scheme of hismarriage. It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless lettersnot yet publishable entire. Their life apart seems to have beencontinued 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 ofstrange perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy andhysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall instrange contrast with the temper of his music, which at its gentlest ismasculinely gentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of thebarbaric. 

I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless tokeep silence in her love, and winning her bridegroom only to find, likeElsa, that her Lohengrin could not give her his Heart. And almost moreharrowing is the vision of the composer, with womanish generosity, giving himself to the one that asked, and finding that love cannotfollow the mere placing of a wedding-ring. So he stands in the icyriver, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair inhis own mad heart. It is Abélard and Héloise without the love ofAbélard or the joy Héloise 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 andthe moral effects of music upon a certain work by Tolstoi, who is nomore 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 KreutzerSonata, " is musically a hopeless fallacy. And Tolstoi's claim, thatBeethoven must have written it under the inspiration of a too amorousmood, is pretty well answered by the fact that Beethoven, who was soliberal 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 PolgreenBridgetower, a mulatto violinist, who, being lucky enough to be born inEurope, was not ostracised from paleface society. This can be only toowell proved by the fact that Beethoven--who spelled the man's name"Brischdower"--after dedicating the sonata to him, found that theAfrico-European had been his successful rival in one of thosenumberless flirtations of his, in which Beethoven always came outsecond. Indignant at his dusky rival's success, Beethoven erased hisname from the title-page and substituted that of Rudolphe Kreutzer. Thecurious thing about this great piece of music, known to fame as the"Kreutzer Sonata, " is that Beethoven had never seen Kreutzer, and thatKreutzer never played the sonata. 

I have not discovered whether or no Kreutzer was married; he probablywas, for he died insane. A German composer, Conradin Kreutzer, withwhom 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 neverhad been makers of violins, especially such luthiers as the Amati? Yetall I know of the Amati is that they formed a dynasty, and doubtlessfell in love on occasion, though how, or when, I do not learn. 

The great Antonio Stradivari, however, began his love-making like DavidCopperfield, by falling in love with a woman ten years his senior, whenhe was only seventeen. She was Francesca Capra; her husband had beenassassinated three years before, leaving her a child. The boyStradivari and the widow were married July 4, 1667, and on December23d, a daughter named Julia was born. Francesca bore Stradivari sixchildren. Her second child was a son named after her, Francesco; butFrancesco died in infancy, and the name, in spite of the omen, wasgiven to the next son, who followed his father's profession, but nevermarried. The next child was a daughter, who died a spinster; the nextwas a son, who became a priest, and the next a son, who died abachelor. The failure of all their children to marry does not indicatea particularly happy home-life, but this is mere speculation. We onlyknow that Stradivari's first wife died, after a marriage lastingthirty-four years. 

A year and a half later Stradivari married a girl fifteen years hisjunior; Antonia Zambelli was, indeed, born the very year Francesca'sfirst husband had been assassinated. Antonia bore Stradivari fivechildren: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died ininfancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest andlasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only childof Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only onewho handed down the family name. How happy Antonia was with herhusband, we do not know. "As rich as Stradivari, " became a proverb. Shedied at the age of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less thanone year; this may have been because he was overcome with grief; orbecause he was already nearly ninety years of age. 

In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named AndreasGuarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son namedPietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipatedgenius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, "del Gesù. " Of himthere is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, hewon over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood andimplements with which he made the so-called "prison fiddles, " of whosecurious shape Charles Reade said: "Such is the force of genius that Ibelieve in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; theyare so full of chic. " As Giuseppe called himself "Gesù, " so there wasa member of the famous violin-making family of Guadagnini who wascalled "John the Baptist, " and of whom I only know that he belonged toa 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 pupilGeminiani is said to have led a life full of romance. Philidor spenthis years chiefly in the intrigues of chess-playing. The great Tartini, whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his famousSonata del Diavolo, had a checkerboard career. As a young universitystudent he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and marriedher in secret. Like Romeo, his romance brought him separation andexile. His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe. Hefled 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. Hetook 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 toseparate, but finally they returned to Padua to live. Burney says thathis wife was "of the Xantippe sort. " His love story somewhat suggeststhat of Desmarets, who also had to flee for his life in consequence ofa secret marriage, and who was twenty-two years appeasing the wrath ofthe aristocratic family. 

A contemporary violinist and composer was Benedetto Marcello, whosemelodramatic affair has been described by Crowest and may be quotedhere, 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 PaoloSeranzo, a Venetian of high rank, Marcello was unwise enough to sendher a rose and a billet-doux containing words more complimentary to thelady's beauty than to her taste in the choice of a husband. Thisepistle, coming to Seranzo's notice, caused him so violent a fit ofjealousy that he tormented his young wife by supervision and suspicionto such an extent that she actually sank under his ill-treatment anddied. Her body was laid out in state in the church 'Dei Frari, ' andhere Marcello seeing it, learned the ill effects of his rash passion. He fell into a state of melancholy madness, and at last, having withthe craft and ingenuity of a madman succeeded in stealing the body ofhis love, he conveyed it to a ruined crypt in one of the neighbouringislands, which, bearing the reputation of being haunted, was seldomvisited by any one. Here, watched only by a faithful old nurse, he satday and night watching the dead form of Leonora, singing and playing toit 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 thecomposition of some unknown musician (no other than Marcello). Amongother admirers of this music was Eliade, twin sister of Leonora, andresembling her so closely that even friends could scarcely distinguishher. Eliade had even been effected to insensibility by the strain ofthe unknown, and hearing one day a gondola pass, in which a voice wassinging one of the songs which was an especial favourite, in such a wayas she had never heard it sung before, she followed and traced thegondola to the deserted island. A visit to this island resulted in ameeting with the old nurse, and a few explanations. The ingenious womancontrived to take advantage of a short absence of Marcello, and, substituting the living sister for the dead one, awaited the madmusician. This time, however, his usual invocation was not in vain: ashe called on Leonora to awake, a living image arose from the coffin, and Marcello, restored to happiness by the delusion, was quite contentwith the exchange when he found out that, although the lady was notLeonora, she was a devoted admirer of his musical skill, and professedan 'affinity of soul' for him, in which her sister had been wanting. Their happiness was short-lived, for Marcello died a few years aftertheir 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 theyrivalled each other almost more in their rapid series of amorousadventures, than in their more legitimate concert work. While in St. Petersburg, Eck met the daughter of one of the members of the ImperialOrchestra, and began a flirtation, which she took so seriously that herfather gave him the alternative of matrimony or Siberia. After somehesitation he chose matrimony. Had he foreseen the sequel, he woulddoubtless 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 hemet the beautiful and brilliant Dorette Scheidler; she was eighteenyears old, and played that most becoming instrument, the harp, as wellas the piano and violin. They appeared together in a court concert, andon the way to her home, in the carriage, he made the not particularlyoriginal proposition: "Shall we thus play together for life?" She, withhardly more originality, wept her consent upon his shoulder. They weremarried without delay, and began a series of very successfulconcert-tours. They seem to have been happy together for twenty-sixyears, and they reared a large family. Her death in 1832 broke down hishealth for several months. But two years later, he then being fifty, hemarried the skilful pianist, Marianne Pfeiffer, over twenty years hisjunior. They also made a brilliant concert-tour together. 

PAGANINI, THE INFERNAL

Paganini, as everybody knows, sold his soul to the devil for fame. Hemade the best of the gamble, as he usually did when he gambled; for thepoor, innocent Lucifer got only a fourth-rate soul, while Paganinisecured a fame that will not be surpassed while fiddlers fiddle. 

Gambling was not Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that hewill always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for hisskill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was onlyseventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held himprisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technicalfame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical virtuein being kidnapped thus? The fair Bolognese kept Paganini captive forthree years in this retreat, where he fed upon scenery, love, andmusic. 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 thepublic, and not without reason, that he was aided by magic. He livedfor many years with the singer, Antonia Bianchi, who bore him a son, Achille, whom he legitimised. Antonia was devotion itself, until shewas gradually driven to a jealousy that was almost fiendish, and led toa separation. Paganini himself tells this story:

"Antonia was constantly tormented by the most fearful jealousy. Oneday, she happened to be behind my chair when I was writing some linesin the album of a great pianist, and, when she read the few amiablewords I had composed in honour of the artist, to whom the bookbelonged, she tore it from my hands, demolished it on the spot. Sofearful was her rage, she would have assassinated me. "

When he died, he left his son a fortune of $400, 000. Surely this sumalone proves the justice of the popular belief that he had sold himselfto the devil, and, knowing it, none can doubt the story Liszt quotes inone of his essays concerning the G string of Paganini's violin: "It wasthe intestine of his wife, whom he had killed with his own hands. "There is no record of the secret marriage, but there is record enoughof the superhuman power of the melodies he drew from that string. 

DE BÉRIOT, SONTAG, AND MALIBRAN

Among the chief contemporaries of Paganini was De Bériot. When he wasnot quite thirty, he found himself in Paris at the time of the deadlyvocal feud between Sontag and Malibran. The rivalry of the two singerswas ended by the influence of music. One night, singing together theduet from "Semiramide, " each was so overcome at the beauty of theother's voice and art, that they embraced and became friends. 

De Bériot had an equally strange experience with the two women. He fellmadly in love with Sontag, slight, blue-eyed and blonde as she was, andthen only twenty-five. But De Bériot paid his court in vain, because atthis time Sontag was engaged to the young diplomat, Count Rossi; as itwould have hurt his influence to be engaged to the child of strollingplayers, the engagement was kept secret, until the count could persuadethe King of Prussia to grant her a patent of nobility. When they weremarried, she gave up the stage, and travelled from court to court withher husband, singing only for charity. As her brother said: "Rossi mademy sister happy, in the best sense of the word. To the day of theirdeath they loved each other as on their wedding-day. "

But political troubles ruined the count's fortunes, and it seemednecessary for the countess to return to the stage. Now again the courtwished to separate diplomacy from the drama played on the open stage. Rossi was told that he might retain his ambassadorship if he wouldformally separate from his wife, at least until she could again leavethe 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 hiswife. They came to America, and in Mexico the cholera ended herbeautiful life at the age of forty-nine. 

It was into this ideal romance that De Beriot had wandered unwittinglyin 1830. It was fortunate that he could not prevail against the nobleCount Rossi, even though his failure caused him pain. It almost costhim his health, and he suffered so obviously that his friends werealarmed. Among those endeavouring to console him was Madame Malibran, whom people, who like exclusive superlatives, have been pleased toselect as the greatest singer in the history of music. Like Sontag, shewas the child of stage people, and, indeed, had made her firstappearance at the age of five. 

In 1826 she, and that wonderful assembly, the Garcia family, had foundthemselves in New York, where an old French merchant, supposed to berich, married her. It is certain that Malibran married the old merchantfor his money--a thing so common that one cannot stop to expressindignation. The horrible thing is that, as it turned out, the old manhad also an eye to the weather. He had hoped to stave off bankruptcy bymarrying the prosperous singer. He succeeded in getting neither hermoney nor her heart, for she left him within a year and returned toParis. 

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 onlytwenty-two, she was a contralto, dark and Spanish, and was known to bemarried. Her consolation of De Bériot was complete. They lived togetherthe rest of her life, touring in concerts occasionally, with enormousfinancial success, she creating an immortal name as an operatic singer, and he as a violinist. In 1831 they built a palatial home in thesuburbs of Brussels, where they spent the time when they were nottravelling. She bore him a son and a daughter, the latter dying ininfancy. 

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

Two hours after her death, De Bériot hastened away to make sure of thepossession of the wealth this young woman had already heaped up. He didnot wait for the funeral, and all Europe was scandalised. But it isclaimed in his defence that he had been devoted to her, and during herillness had never left her side, and that his mercenary haste was dueto his fear that a moment's delay might give Monsieur Malibran a chanceto claim her property, and thus rob the child she had borne De Bériotof his inheritance. Those who know the peculiar attitude the French lawtakes toward the property of a wife, can understand the difficulty ofthe situation. 

In any case, the child was saved from poverty or from the necessity ofprofessionalism in later life, though he was a distinguished pianist. As for De Bériot, after the success of his mission he returned to thecountry home and remained in seclusion, not playing again in public forone year. Two years later he married Fräulein Huber, the daughter of aVienna magistrate and the adopted ward of a prince. De Bériot travelledlittle after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died inblindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years ofhis life. 

CHAPTER V. 

AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER

"Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the littleones. "--HENRY T. FINCK, "_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_. "

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

In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because littleor nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will bepurely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and thechief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom toneglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair ofimmortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose_magnum opus_ was some romance that still makes the heart-stringstingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, thereare two old crusading troubadours. 

CERTAIN TROUBADOURS

You never heard, perhaps, of Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charmsof an imaginary mistress. " He fell in love with the Countess ofTripoli, 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 thosedays. Whether anticipation was better than realisation, we cannot knowto-day, having no portrait of the countess; but at least anticipationwas more fatal, for it wrought him into such a fever, that when at lastTripoli was reached, he was carried ashore dying. The countess hadheard of his pilgrimage, and had hastened to greet him, only to bepermitted 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 Châtelain Regnault de Coucy. His mistress was a married woman, whom he left to go to the ThirdCrusade. In the inveterate siege of Acre, he was mortally woundedbefore those odious Paynim walls; but, with his dying breath, he beggedthat his heart be taken from his breast and sent home to her who hadowned it. The stupid messenger, arriving at home, betrayed to thehusband what it was he had been charged to deliver, and the husbandchose a most mediæval revenge: he had the heart of the troubadourcooked and placed before his wife. When she had eaten, he told her whatsweetmeat it was she had so relished. Thereafter, she starved herselfto death. The same story is told of the troubadour Guillem deCabestanh; but it is good enough to repeat. 

There was another old troubadour, Pierre Vidal, of whom an ancientbiographer wrote that he "sang better than any man in the world, andwas one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believedeverything to be just as it pleased him and as he would have it be. "But the biographer contradicted his own beautiful portrait by tellinghow poor Pierre sang once too well to a married woman, whose husbandtook 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 othersdeny his claim to that magnificent ejaculation: "Who loves not wine, women, and song remains a fool his whole life long. " No one claims thatLuther wrote his own compositions, but that he dictated them to trainedmusicians who wrote down, and then wrote up such melodies as he playedupon the flute. But whatsoever may be the truth of his position as acomposer, no one can deny him either a passion for music or a domesticromance. The runaway monk told the truth, when he said: "I married arunaway nun. "

When he was forty-one, with his connivance, a number of nuns fled, orwere abducted, from a convent. One of them, Catherina von Bora, foundan asylum in Luther's own home. After looking about for a good husbandfor her, at the end of a year he married her himself. She was thentwenty-six years old. The married life of the jovial reformer washappy; but when he died, he left her so poor that she was obliged totake in boarders, until she met her death by the same means that hadbrought her marriage, --a runaway. 

BRITISHERS

The earlier English composers have not been without their heartinterests. 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 attendingupon the Right Honourable Lady Marchioness of Winchester. " Four yearslater, he became the chief of the prince's music, with the splendidsalary of £40 a year. 

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

Those other oldsters, Blow, Byrd, and Playford, were married men; andArne, the composer of "Rule Britannia, " married, at the age oftwenty-six, Cecilia Young, an eminent singer in Händel's company, andthe daughter of an organist. She continued to sing, and he to writemusic for her. At the age of sixty-eight he died, singing a hallelujah. Whether she echoed his sentiments we are not told, but she livedseventeen years longer. 

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

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

CLEMENTI, HUMMEL, STEIBELT

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

The pianist Hummel, whom I always place with Clementi in a sort ofmusical Dunciad, is credited with having won a courtship duel againstBeethoven, in which Clementi as the winner--or was it theloser?--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 viceswhich range from kleptomania up, or down as you wish. He married ayoung and beautiful woman, who doubtless deserved her fate, since weare told that she was a wonderful performer on the tambourine. Hesucceeded to the post of Boieldieu, the eminent opera composer, whobegan life under poor matrimonial auspices, seeing that his mother wasa milliner, from whom his father managed to escape by means of an easydivorce law issued by the French Revolutionists. 

BOIELDIEU AND GRÉTRY

The father married again, but with what success, I do not know. But atany rate, his son followed his example and married Clotilde Mafleuray, a dancer, who made him as unhappy as possible. It was said that he wasso wretched that he took to flight secretly; but it is known that hisdeparture was mentioned in a theatrical journal in good season. Nonethe less, though the flight may not have been surreptitious, it maywell be credited to domestic misery. He buried himself in Russia foreight years, which may be placed in music's column of loss. Returningto Paris then, he found a clear field for the great success thatfollowed. Soon after, in 1811, he formed an attachment with a woman whobore him a son in 1816. Her tenderness to the composer is highlypraised; she must have given him devotion indeed, for he married her in1827, eleven years after the birth of their son, who became also aworthy composer. At the age of fifty-four, consumption and thebankruptcy of the Opéra Comique, and the expulsion of the king who hadpensioned him, broke down his health. He lived five years longer. 

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

HÉROLD AND BIZET

The Frenchman Hérold, son of a good musician, made ballet-musicartistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and diedin his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pré auxClercs, " had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am goingtoo soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage. " He had marriedAdele Élise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him threechildren, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter, married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father'sdisease at twenty. 

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

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

THE PASSIONS OF BERLIOZ

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

Thus Robert Schumann was an editor, who whiled away his leisure writingmusic that almost no one approved or played for many years. RichardWagner was well on in life before his compositions brought him as muchmoney as his writing. Hector Berlioz was a prominent critic, whoseexcursions into music brought him unmitigated abuse and ridicule. Thelist 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. Butwhenever I remember her I see a vision of great brilliant eyes and ofpink shoes. " When he was fifty-seven years old, he found her again andhis 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 ageof twenty-seven he won the Prix de Rome and went for three years toItaly, not without the amorous adventures suitable to that sky. 

Returning to Paris, he found the city in a spasm of enthusiasm overShakespeare, especially over the Irish actress Smithson, whom he hadworshipped from afar, before he had gone to Rome, thinking that he onlyworshipped Shakespeare through the prophetess. The remembrance of herhad inspired him to write his "Lelio" in Italy. When he was again inParis, 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 theyears before. The poet Heine was at the concert, and his description ofthe scene is as follows:

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

"'Do you see that stout English woman in the proscenium? That is MissSmithson; for nearly three years Berlioz has been madly in love withher, and it is this passion that we have to thank for the wild symphonywe are listening to to-day. '

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

Then he married the plump enchantress and knew a brief happiness. Buthe gradually woke to the fact that the dowry she brought him was mainlyill-luck, bad temper, and a monument of debts which she acquired by anew series of Shakespeare performances under her own management. Bythis time Paris had forgotten the barbarian Shakespeare and ridiculedthe former queen of the stage. Then Madame Berlioz fell from a carriageand broke her leg. This took her permanently from the stage, where shewas no longer a success. A few managerial ventures brought her ahandsome bankruptcy. Berlioz gave benefit concerts and wrote fiendishlyfor the papers to pay her debts, and always provided for her. But therewas no more happiness for the two, though there was a child. I havesaid that Miss Smithson brought Berlioz a dowry of bad luck and badtemper. The worldly goods with which Berlioz had her endowed, were nobetter. He had begun the marriage with "300 francs borrowed from afriend and a new quarrel with my parents. " He also contributed a temperwhich is one of the most brilliant in history. 

A few years after the birth of their child, his wife grew jealous, andaccused him of loving elsewhere. He reasoned that he might as well havethe game, if he must have the blame, and thereafter a travellingcompanion attended him when he surreptitiously eloped with his music, and his clothes. In his "Mémoires, " he paints a dismal picture of hiswife's ill health, her jealous outbreaks, the final separation, and hereventual death. Then he married again. "I was compelled to do so, " ishis suggestive explanation. His new experiment was hardly moresuccessful; but in eight years his wife was dead. 

He found some consolation for his manifold troubles in Liszt's PrincessSayn-Wittgenstein, and wrote her many letters which La Mara publishedunder the title of "The Apotheosis of Friendship. "

Then at Lyons he met again Her of the pink slippers, now MadameFournier, and a widow. He was fifty-seven and she still six years hiselder. He grew ferociously sentimental over her, and almost faintedwhen he shook her hand. He tried to reconstruct from the victim ofthree-and-sixty years the pink-slippered hamadryad who had haunted himall his life. He wrote of the meeting:

"I recognised the divine stateliness of her step; but oh, heavens, howchanged she was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at thesight of her my heart did not feel one moment's indecision; my wholesoul went out to its idol as though she were still in her dazzlingloveliness. Balzac, nay, Shakespeare himself, the great painter of thepassions, never dreamt of such a thing. " [For that reason thenovelty-mad Berlioz tried it. He wrote to her:] "I have loved you. Istill love you. I shall always love you. I have but one aim left in theworld, that of obtaining your affection. "

But it was not alone her physical self that had grown old; herheart-beat, too, was _andante_. She consented to exchange letters; herpen could correspond with him, but not her passion. She wrote him: "Youhave a very young heart. I am quite old. Then, sir, I am six years yourelder, and at my age I must know how to deny myself new friendships. "So Berlioz went his way. His disapproval of Liszt and Wagner alienatedthe friendship of even the princess, and his stormy career ended at theage 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 saidthat 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. Andthe translator of his "Mémoires" regrets that he not only kept silenceon these points, but seems to have destroyed all the documents. His"Mémoires" are disappointing in every way. Even his references to hismarriage are about as thrilling as a page from a blue book. His accountof his love and his wedding are on this ground really worth quoting, asa curiosity of literature, it being observed how little he has to sayof romance, how much of his relatives-in-law. 

"_Ulysse_ was produced the 18th of June, 1852. I had just married a fewdays before, a daughter of Zimmerman the celebrated professor of thepiano at the Conservatory, and to whom is due the fine school fromwhich have come Prudent, Marmontel, Goria, Lefébure-Wély, Ravina, Bizet, and many others. I became by this alliance the brother-in-law ofthe young painter Edouard Dubufe, who was already most ably carryinghis father's name, the heritage and reputation which his own sonGuilliaume 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. Weare all perfectly satisfied with this union which seems to offer themost reliable assurances of lasting happiness. The family is excellentand 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 yearafter 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 singularlydenies his wife, though he states that a year after the marriage shebore him a girl child, who died at birth, and that four years later shebore him a son. On the afternoon of this day he was to conduct a veryimportant concert; when he returned, he found himself a father. He ishere generous enough to say: "On the morning of the day when my son wasborn, 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 rôle was taken by a certainGeorgina Thomas, who had married Captain Weldon of the 18th Hussars. Whenshe met Gounod, she was some thirty-three years old, having been born in1837. She took up professional singing for the sake of charity, andGounod and she became romantically attached. She helped him train hischoir, established an orphanage at her residence for poor children withmusical inclinations, and published songs by Gounod and others, including herself, the proceeds going to the aid of her orphanage. Atthis time she claimed to have acquired the ownership of certain worksof his. Gounod thought, he said, that he had found in her "an apostleof his art and a fanatic for his works, " but he also found that hercharity had an excellent business foundation, for, when their loveaffair 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, andthe English courts ordered him to pay to his former hostess $50, 000. But he evaded payment by staying in France. Mrs. Weldon was also acomposer, and she had edited in 1875 Gounod's autobiography and certainof his essays with a preface by herself. The lawsuit as usual exposedto public curiosity many things both would have preferred to keepsecret, and was a pitiful finish generally to what promised to be amost congenial alliance. The love affair began like a novel and endedlike a cash-book. 

DIVERS ITALIANS

As for the Italians, we know that Paesiello, who was a famous intrigueragainst his musical rivals, was a devoted husband whose wife was aninvalid and who died soon after her death. Cherubini marriedMademoiselle Cécile Turette, when he was thirty-five, and the marriagewas not a success. He left a son and two daughters. Spontini, one ofwhose best operas was based on the life of that much mis-marriedenthusiast for divorce, John Milton, took to wife a member of the Érardfamily. In the outer world Spontini was famous for his despotism, hisjealousy, his bad temper, and his excessive vanity. None of thesequalities as a rule add much to home comfort, and yet, it is said thathe lived happily with his wife. We may feel sure that some of the badlight thrown on his character is due purely to the jealousy of rivals, when we consider his domestic content, his ardent interest in thewelfare of Mozart's widow and children, and the great efforts he madeto secure subscriptions for the widow's biography of Mozart. 

Furthermore, Spontini in his later years, when deafness saddened hislot, deserted the halls of fame and the palaces of royalty, where hehad been prominent, and retired with his wife to the little Italianvillage where he had been born of the peasantry. And there he spentyears founding schools and doing other works for the public good. Hedied there in the arms of his wife, at the age of seventy-five; havinghad no children, he willed his property to the poor of his nativevillage. 

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 ofthe 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 andsincerity, equalling that of their more successful rivals in thestruggle for existence. 

For instance, there is Salieri, who was accused of poisoning Mozart, amonstrous slander, which Salieri bitterly regretted and answered bybefriending Mozart's son and securing him his first appointment. WhenSalieri was young and left an orphan, he was befriended by a man, wholater died, leaving his children in some distress. Salieri took care ofthe family and educated the two daughters as opera singers. Hisgenerosity was shown in numberless ways, and if by mishap he did notespecially approve of Mozart, he was on most cordial terms with Haydnand Beethoven. He gave lessons and money to poor musicians; he lovednature piously; was exuberant; was devoted to pastry and sugar-plums, but cared nothing for wine. All I know of his married life is that whenhe was fifty-five he lost his son, and two years later his wife, and hewas 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 politicalsympathies, the mother became a burlesque singer, and when the fatherwas released, he joined the troupe as a horn-player. Rossini was leftin 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 wasalready a successful composer, and had begun that dazzling career whichmingled superhuman laziness with inhuman zeal. Among his firstacquaintances were the Mombelli family, of whom he said in a letterthat the girls were "ferociously virtuous. "

In 1815, he then being twenty-three, he first met the successful primadonna Isabella Colbran, who was then thirty years old and had beensinging for fourteen years on the stage. She was still beautiful, though her voice had begun to show signs of wear. Rossini seems to havefallen in love with her art and herself, and he wrote ten roles forher. It was she who persuaded him away from comic to tragic opera. Thepolitical changes of the period soon changed her from public favouriteto a public dislike, and Rossini, disgusted with his countrymen, married her and left Italy. It was said that he married her for hermoney, because she was his elder and was already on the wane in publicfavour, and yet owned a villa and $25, 000 a year income. However thatmay be, it was a brilliant match for the son of the slaughter-houseinspector, and the wedding took place in the palace of a cardinal, theArchbishop of Bologna. As one poet wrote, in stilted Latin:

"A remarkable man weds a remarkable woman. Who can doubt that theirprogeny will be remarkable?"

It might have been, for all we know, had there been any progeny, butthere was not. It is pleasant to note that Rossini's ancient parentswere at the wedding. Then the couple went to Vienna, where Carpaniwrote of Colbran's voice: "The Graces seemed to have watered withnectar each of her syllables. Her acting is notable and dignified, asbecomes her important and majestic beauty. "

In 1824 they were called to London. Here they were on terms of greatintimacy with the king. In this one season the two made $35, 000. Rossini complained that the singer was paid at a far higher rate thanthe composer; besides, she sang excruciatingly off the key and hadnothing left but her intellectual charms. From England Rossini went toequal glory to France. At the early age of forty-three, he took asolemn vow to write no more music, a vow he kept almost literally. In1845, his wife, then being sixty years of age, died. Two years later hemarried Olympe Pelissier, who had been his mistress in Paris and hadposed for Vernet's "Judith. " Rossini was a great voluptuary, and wasprouder of his art in cooking macaroni than of anything else he coulddo. But much should be forgiven him in return for his brilliant wit andthe heroism with which he kept his vow, however regrettable the vow. 

BELLINI

Of Bellini, that great treasurer for the hand-organists, a story hasbeen told as his first romance. According to this, when he was aconservatory student at Naples, he called upon a fellow student andtook up a pair of opera glasses, proceeding to take that interest inthe neighbours that one is prone to take with a telescope. On thebalcony of the opposite house he saw a beautiful girl; theopera-glasses seemed to bring her very near, but not near enough toreach. So, after much elaborate management he became her teacher ofsinging, and managed to teach her at least to love him. But the familygrowing suspicious that Bellini was instructing her in certain electivestudies 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 wereseparated, to their deep gloom. When he was twenty-four, another operaof his made a great local triumph, and he applied again, only to betold that "the daughter of Judge Fumaroli will never be allowed tomarry a poor cymbal player. " Later his success grew beyond the boundsof Italy, and now the composer of "La Sonnambula" and "Norma" wasworthy 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 theirfamily. But he was by this time calm enough to reply that he was weddedto his art. 

This conclusion of the romance reminds one of Handel--a thing whichBellini very rarely does. He died when he was only thirty-three yearsof age, and at that age Handel had not written a single one of theoratorios by which he is remembered. In fact, he did not begin until hewas fifty-five with the success which made him immortal. It was theirony of fate that Bellini should have died so young, while a brotherof his who was a fourth-rate church composer lived for eighty-twoyears. 

VERDI'S MISERERE

The virtues of senescence are seen in the case of Verdi, who did someof his greatest work at the age when most musicians are ready for theold ladies' home. His first love affair has been the subject of anopera, like Stradella's. In fact it has much of the garish misery ofthe Punchinello story. Verdi was very poor as a child, and was educatedby a charitable institution. He was greatly befriended by his teacher, Barezzi, in whose house he lived, and like Robert Schumann, he showedhis gratitude by falling in love with the daughter; Margarita was hername. But Barezzi interpreted the rôle of father-in-law in a mannerunlike that of Wieck, and to the youth to whom he had given not onlyinstruction, but funds for his study and board and lodging while inMilan, he gave also his daughter, when the time came in 1836, Verdibeing then twenty-three years old. Two years later, the composer lefthis home town of Busseto with one wife, two children, and three or fourMSS. He settled in Milan. He was a long time getting his first operaproduced, 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 forthe 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 theneighbourhood of the Porta Ticinese, and I had my little family withme, that is to say my young wife and our two little children. I hadhardly 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 tobe convalescent, when I remembered that the rent, for which I wantedfifty ecus, would become due in a few days. At that time if such a sumwas of importance to me, it was no very serious matter; but my painfulillness had not allowed me to provide it in time, and the state ofcommunications with Busseto (in those days the post only went twice aweek) did not leave me the opportunity of writing to my excellentfather-in-law Barezzi to enable him to send the necessary funds. Iwished, whatever trouble it might give to me, to pay my lodging on theday fixed, and although much annoyed at being obliged to have recourseto a third person, I nevertheless decided to beg the engineer Pasettito ask Merelli on my behalf for the fifty ecus which I wanted, eitherin the form of an advance under the conditions of my contract, or byway of loan for eight or ten days, that is to say the time necessaryfor writing to Busseto and receiving the said sum. 

"It is useless to relate here how it came about that Merelli, withoutany fault on his part, did not advance me the fifty ecus in question. Nevertheless, I was much distressed at letting the rent day of thelodgings go by. My wife then, seeing my annoyance, took a few articlesof jewelry which she possessed, and succeeded, I know not how, ingetting together the sum necessary, and brought it to me. I was deeplytouched at this proof of affection, and promised myself to return themall 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 illat the beginning of April, the doctors were unable to discover thecause of his ailment, and the poor little thing, fading away, expiredin the arms of his mother, who was beside herself with despair. Thatwas not all. A few days after my little daughter fell ill in turn, andher complaint also terminated fatally. But this even was not all. Earlyin June my young companion herself was attacked by acute brain fever, and on the 19th of June, 1840, a third coffin was carried from myhouse. 

"I was alone!--alone! In the space of about two months, three lovedones had disappeared for ever. I had no longer a family. And, in themidst of this terrible anguish, to avoid breaking the engagement I hadcontracted, I was compelled to write and finish a comic opera!

"'Un Giorno di Regno' did not succeed. A share of the want of successcertainly belongs to the music, but part must also be attributed to theperformance. My soul, rent by the misfortunes which had overwhelmed me, my spirit, soured by the failure of the opera, I persuaded myself thatI should no longer find consolation in art, and formed the resolutionto compose no more! I even wrote to the engineer Pasetti (who since thefiasco of 'Un Giorno di Regno' had shown no signs of life) to beg himto obtain from Merelli the cancelling of my contract. "

This story is sad enough, Heaven knows, without the melodramatic frillsthat have been put upon it. You will read in certain sketches, and evenMr. Elbert Hubbard has enambered the fable in one of his "LittleJourneys, " that Verdi's wife was ill during the performance of theopera, that the first act was a great success, and he ran home to tellher. The second act was also successful, and he ran home again, notnoting that his wife was dying of starvation. The third act, and he washissed off the stage, and flew home, only to find his wife dead. Thechief objection to the story is the fact that his wife died on the 19thof June, 1840, and the opera was not produced until the 5th ofSeptember that same year. But it is tragic enough that he should havebeen compelled to write a comic opera under the anguish that he felt atthe loss of his two children and his wife, and that his reward shouldhave been even then a dismal fiasco. 

He was dissuaded from his vow to write no more, and it was in a drivingsnow-storm that his friend Merelli decoyed him to a field, in which somuch fame was awaiting him. 

This Merelli had first become interested in Verdi from overhearing thesinger Signora Strepponi praising Verdi's first opera. This was beforethe failure of the comic opera and the annihilation of Verdi's family. 

When Merelli had at length decoyed Verdi back to composition, his nextwork, "Nabucco, " was a decided success, the principal part being takenby this same Strepponi. She had made her début seven years before, andwas a singer of dramatic fire and vocal splendour, we are told. Herenthusiasm for Verdi's work not only fastened the claim of operatic artupon him, but won his interest in her charms also, and Verdi and shewere soon joined in an alliance, which after some years was legalisedand churched. She shortly after left the stage without waiting to "lagsuperfluous" there. Thenceforward she shared with Verdi that life ofquiet retirement from the world in which he played the patriarch andthe farmer, breeding horses and watching the harmonies of nature withalmost 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 popularcomposer of the day, married one of the most popular singers of hertime, and scored a double triumph with her. This was the famousFaustina. 

Mendelssohn's friend, Carl Zelter, was a busy lover, as hisautobiography makes plain. One of his flirtations was with an artisticJewess, with whom he quarrelled and from whom he parted, because theycould not agree upon the art of suicide as outlined in Goethe's thennew work, "The Sorrows of Werther. "

Albert Lortzing was married before he was twenty, and lived busily assinger, composer, and instrumentalist, travelling here and there with afamily that increased along with his debts. It was not till after hisdeath, and then by a public subscription, that his family knew the endof 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 songcomposer, Marie Hinrichs, lost his hearing and drifted to the brink ofdespair before a series of concerts rescued him from starvation. 

Heinrich Marschner was married three times, his latter two wives beingvocalists. Thalberg married a daughter of the great singer Lablache;she was the widow of the painter Boucher, whose exquisite confectionsevery 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 hislarge heart. At the father's death-bed he renewed an old love with hiscousin, Minna Mosson, and they were betrothed. Niggli says she was "assweet as she was fair. " Two years later he married her. She bore himfive children, of whom three, with the wife, survived him and inheritedhis great fortune. 

Josef Strauss, son of a saloon-keeper, married Anna Streim, daughter ofan innkeeper. After she had borne him five children, they were divorcedon the ground of incompatibility. How many children did they want forcompatibility's sake? Their son Johann married Jetty Treffy in 1863;she was a favourite public singer, and her ambition raised him out of amere dance-hall existence to the waltz-making for the world. When shedied he paid her the exquisite compliment of choosing another singer, before the year was over, for the next waltz. Her name was AngelicaDittrich. 

Joachim Raff fell in love with an actress named Doris Genast, andfollowed 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 likedItalian women much and many, but it was in Berlin that he made hisdeclarations to a Jewish contralto, for whose voice he wrote sixstudies. But he married Maria Pétrovna Ivanof, who was young, pretty, quarrelsome, and extravagant. She brought along also a dramaticmother-in-law, and he set out again for his health. His wife marriedagain, and the scandal of the whole affair preyed on him so that hewent 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; hewas another of those whose happiness deafness ruined. He wasimmortalised in a composition as harrowing as any of Poe's stories, oras Huneker's "The Lord's Prayer in B, " the torment of one high notethat rang in his head unceasingly, until it drove him mad. 

FRANZ SCHUBERT

Among the beautiful figures, whom the critical historian tries to driveback into that limbo, where an imaginary Homer flirts with a fabulousPocahontas, we are asked to place the alleged one love of Schubert'slife. Few composers have been so overweighted with poverty or so giftedwith loneliness as Franz Schubert. His joy was spasmodic and short, buthis sorrow was persistent and deep. 

He, who sang so many love songs, could hardly be said to have been inany sense a lover. Once he wrote of himself as a man so wrecked inhealth, that he was one "to whom the happiness of proffered love andfriendship is but anguish; whose enthusiasm for the beautiful threatensto vanish altogether. " Of his music he wrote, that the world seemed tolike only that which was the product of his sufferings, and of hissongs he exclaimed: "For many years I sang my Lieder. If I would fainsing of love, it turned to pain; or if I would sing of pain, it turnedto love. Thus I was torn between love and sorrow. "

He had a few flirtations, and one or two strong friendships, but thethought 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 inhis wife a true friend. To the free man at this time, marriage is afrightful thought: he confounds it either with melancholy or lowsensuality. " One of his first affairs of the heart was with TheresaGrob, who sang in his works, and for whom he wrote various songs andother compositions. But he also wrote for her brother, and besides, shemarried a baker. Anna Milder, who had been a lady's maid, but became afamous singer and married a rich jeweller and quarrelled with Beethovenand with Spontini, was a sort of muse to Schubert, sang his songs inpublic, and gave him much advice. 

Mary Pachler was a friend of Beethoven's, and after his death seems tohave turned her friendship to Schubert, with great happiness to him. 

But the legendary romance of Schubert's life occurred when he wastwenty-one, and a music teacher to Carolina Esterházy. He first fell inlove with her maid, it is said, and based his "Divertissement àl'Hongroise" on Hungarian melodies he heard her singing at her work. There is no disguising the fact that Schubert, prince of musicians, waspersonally a hopeless little pleb. He wrote his friend Schober in 1818of the Esterházy visit: "The cook is a pleasant fellow; the housemaidis very pretty and often pays me a visit; the butler is my rival. "Mozart also ate with the servants in the Archbishop's household, thoughit ground him deep. 

But Schubert was too homely even for a housemaid, so in despair heturned to the young countess and loved her--they say, till death. Once, she jokingly demanded why he had never dedicated anything to her, andthe legend says he cried: "Why should I, when everything I write isyours?"

The purveyors of this legend disagree as to the age of the youngcountess; some say she was seventeen, and some that she was eleven, while those who disbelieve the story altogether say that she was onlyseven years old. But now you have heard the story, and you may take itor leave it. There is some explanation for the belief that Schubert didnot dare to love or declare his love, and some reason to believe thathis reticence was wise and may have saved him worse pangs, in the factthat he was only one inch more than five feet high, and yet fat andawkward; stoop-shouldered, wild-haired, small-nosed, big-spectacled, thick-lipped, and of a complexion which has been called pasty to thepoint of tallowness. Haydn, however, almost as unpromising, was a greatslayer 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 afilial way to Clara Schumann after the death of Schumann, but who nevermarried, 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 agift of God. It will drive away the devil and makes people cheerful. Occupied with it, man forgets all anger, unchastity, pride, and othervices. Next to theology, I give music the next place and highestpraise. "--MARTIN LUTHER. 

By a little violence to chronology, I am putting last of all the storyof Schumann's love-life, because it marks the highest point of musicalamour. 

If music have any effect at all upon character, especially upon theamorous development and activity of character, that effect ought to bediscoverable--if discoverable it is--with double distinctness where twomusicians have fallen in love with each other, and with each other'smusic. There are many instances where both the lovers were musicallyinclined, but in practically every case, save in one, there has been agreat disparity between their abilities. 

The whimsical Fates, however, decided to make one trial of theexperiment of bringing two musicians of the first class into a sphereof mutual influence and affection. The result was so beautiful, sonearly ideal, that--needless to say--it has not been repeated. Butwhile the experiment has not been duplicated, the story well merits arepetition, especially in view of the fact that the woman's side of theromance has only recently been given to the public in Litzmann'sbiography, only half of which has been published in German and none inEnglish. 

There can surely be no dispute that Robert Schumann was one of the mostoriginal and individual of composers, and one of the broadest anddeepest-minded musicians in the history of the art. Nor can there beany doubt that Clara Wieck was one of the richest dowered musicians whoever shed glory upon her sex. Henry T. Finck was, perhaps, right, whenhe called her "the most gifted woman that has ever chosen music as aprofession. "

Robert Schumann showed his determined eccentricity before he was born, for surely no child ever selected more unconventional parents. Wouldyou believe it? It was the mother who opposed the boy's taking up musicas a career! the father who wished him to follow his natural bent! andit was the father who died while Schumann was young, leaving him tostruggle for years against his mother's will!

Not that Frau Schumann was anything but a lovable and a most belovedmother. Robert's letters to her show a remarkable affection even for ason. Indeed, as Reissmann says in his biography:

"As in most cases, Robert's youthful years belonged almost wholly tohis mother, and indeed her influence chiefly developed that purefervour of feeling to which his whole life bore witness; this, however, soon estranged him from the busy world and was the prime factor in thatprofound melancholy which often overcame him almost to suicide. "

Frau Schumann wished Robert to study law, and sent him to theUniversity at Leipzig for that purpose and later to Heidelberg. He wasnot the least interested in his legal studies, but loved to play thepiano, and write letters, and dream of literature, to idolise Jean PaulRichter and to indulge a most commendable passion for good cigars. Hewas not dilatory at love, and went through a varied apprenticeshipbefore his heart seemed ready for the fierce test it was put to in hisgrand passion. 

In 1827, he being then seventeen years old, we find him writing to aschoolfellow a letter of magnificent melancholy; the tone of itsallusions to a certain young woman reminds one of Chopin's early loveletters. 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, mightI 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, overwhich faintly quivers a rosy kiss from the setting sun. "

He bewails two dissipated ideals. One, named "Liddy, " "a narrow-mindedsoul, a simple maiden from innocent Eutopia; she cannot grasp an idea. "And yet she was very beautiful, and if she were "petrified, " everycritic would pronounce her perfection. The boy sighs with thatwell-known senility of seventeen:

"I think I loved her, but I knew only the outward form in which theroseate tinted fancy of youth often embodies its inmost longings. So Ihave 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 girlcalled "Nanni, " but that blaze is now "only a quietly burning sacredflame of pure divine friendship and reverence. "

A month after this serene resignation he goes to Dresden, and finds hisheart full of longing for this very "Nanni. " He roves the streetslooking under every veil that flutters by him in the street, in thehope that he might see her features; he remembers again "all the hourswhich I dreamed away so joyfully, so blissfully in her arms and herlove. " He did not see her, but later, to his amazement, he stumblesupon the supposedly finished sweetheart "Liddy. " She is bristling with"explanations upon explanations. " She begs him to go up a steep mountainalone with her. He goes "from politeness, perhaps also for the sake ofadventure. " But they are both dumb and tremulous and they reach the peakjust at sunset. Schumann describes that sunset more gaudily than everchromo was painted. But at any rate it moved him to seize Liddy's handand exclaim, somewhat mal-à-propos: "Liddy, such is our life. "

He plucked a rose and was about to give it to her when a flash oflightning and a cloud of thunder woke him from his dreams; he tore therose to pieces, and they returned home in silence. 

In 1828, at Augsburg, he cast his affectionate eyes upon Clara vonKurer, the daughter of a chemist; but found her already engaged. It wasnow that he entered the University at Leipzig to study law. The wife ofProfessor Carus charmed him by her singing and inspired various songs. At her house he met the noted piano teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thusbegan an acquaintance of strange vicissitude and strange power fortorment and delight. 

Wieck, who was then forty-three, chiefly lived in the career of hiswonder-child, a pianist, Clara Josephine Wieck. She had been born atLeipzig on September 13, 1819, and was only nine years old, and nineyears younger than Schumann, when they met. She made a sensationaldébut in concert the same year. And, child as she was, she excited atonce the keenest and most affectionate admiration in Schumann. He didnot guess then how deeply she was doomed to affect him, but while shewas growing up his heart seemed merely to loaf about till she was readyfor 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 hisvirtuosity. 

In 1829, while travelling, he wrote his mother, "I found it frightfullyhard to leave Leipzig at the last. A girl's soul, beautiful, happy, andpure, had enslaved mine. " But this soul was not Clara's. A few monthslater, he made a tour through Italy, and wrote of meeting "a beautifulEnglish girl, who seemed to have fallen in love, not so much withmyself as my piano playing, for all English women love with the head--Imean they love Brutuses, or Lord Byrons, or Mozart and Raphaels. "Surely one of the most remarkable statements ever made, andappropriately demolished by the very instances brought to substantiateit, for, to the best of my knowledge, Mozart, Brutus, and Raphael hadaffairs with other than English women; and so did, for the matter ofthat, Lord Byron. 

A week later Schumann wrote from Venice, whither he had apparentlyfollowed the English beauty:

"Alas, my heart is heavy . .. She gave me a spray of cypress when weparted. .. . She was an English girl, very proud, and kind, and loving, and hating . .. Hard but so soft when I was playing--accursedreminiscences!"

The wound was not mortal. A little later, and he was showing almost asmuch enthusiasm in his reference to his cigars. "Oh, those cigars!" Wefind him smoking one at five A. M. , on July 30th, at Heidelberg. He hadrisen early to write, "the most important letter I have ever written, "pleading ardently with his mother to let him be a musician. She decidedto 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. Hewent to Mainz on a steamer with many English men and women, and hewrites his mother, "If ever I marry, it will be an English girl. " Hedid not know what was awaiting him in the home of Wieck, whose house heentered as pupil and lodger, almost as a son. 

Here he worked like a fiend at his theory and practice. He sufferedfrom occasional attacks of the most violent melancholy, obsessions ofinky gloom, which kept returning upon him at long intervals. But whenhe threw off the spell, he was himself again, and could write to hismother of still new amours:

"I have filled my cup to the brim by falling in love the day beforeyesterday. The gods grant that my ideal may have a fortune of 50, 000. "

In 1830 he flirted with the beautiful Anita Abegg; her name suggestedto him a theme for his Opus I, published in 1831, and based upon thenotes A-B-E-G-G. He apologised to his family for not dedicating hisfirst work to them, but explained that it was not good enough. It ispublished with an inscription to "Pauline, Comtesse d'Abegg, " adisguise which puzzled his family, until he explained that he himselfwas the "father" of the "Countess" d'Abegg. 

It was two years before he confessed another flirtation. In 1833, hewent to Frankfort to hear Paganini, and there it was a case of "prettygirl at the willow-bush--staring match through opera-glasses--champagne. "The next year he was torn between two admirations. One, the daughter ofthe German-born American consul at Liepzig, --her name was Emily List;she was sixteen, and he described her "as a thoroughly English girl, withblack 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 thishe did not know--of a rich Bohemian baron. Of her he wrote:

"She has a delightfully pure, child-like mind, is delicate andthoughtful, deeply attached to me and everything artistic, anduncommonly musical--in short just such a one as I might wish to havefor a wife; and I will whisper it in your ear, my good mother, if theFuture were to ask me whom I should choose, I would answerunhesitatingly, 'This one, ' But that is all in the dim distance; andeven 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 theWiecks. She and Robert had acted as godparents to one of Wieck'schildren, possibly Clara's half-sister, Marie, also in later years aprominent pianist and teacher. 

The affair with Ernestine grew more serious. In 1834 he wrote a letterof somewhat formal and timid devotion to her. A little later, with finediplomacy, 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 grâce_, the statement that he himself waswriting 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 wasalso a distinguished musician, Henrietta Voigt. To her he wrote ofErnestine:

"Ernestine has written to me in great delight. She has sounded herfather by means of her mother; and he gives her to me! Henrietta, hegives her to me! do you understand that? And yet I am so wretched; itseems as though I feared to accept this jewel, lest it should be inunworthy 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 merelonging for Ernestine. I really cannot stand it any longer, so I havewritten to her to arrange a meeting one of these days. If you shouldever feel thoroughly happy, then think of two souls who have placed allthat is most sacred to them in your keeping, and whose future happinessis inseparably bound up with your own. "

This Madame Voigt, who died at the age of thirty-one, once said that ona beautiful summer evening, she and Schumann, after playing variousmusic, had rowed out in a boat, and, shipping the oars, had sat side byside in complete silence--that deathlike silence which so oftenenveloped Schumann even in the circles of his friends at the taverns. When they returned after a mute hour, Schumann pressed her hand andexclaimed, "Today we have understood each other perfectly. "

It was under Ernestine's inspiration, which Schumann called "a perfectgodsend, " that he fashioned the various jewels that make up the musicof his "Carnéval, " using for his theme the name of Ernestine'sbirthplace, "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 isour A flat and H our B natural. He was also pleased to note that theletters S-C-H-A were in his own name. 

While all this flirtation and loving and getting betrothed was going onin the home of Wieck, there was another member of the same household, another pupil of the same teacher, who was not deriving so much delightfrom the arrangement. Through it all, a great-eyed, great-hearted, greatly suffering little girl of fifteen was learning, for the firsttime, sorrow. This was Clara Wieck, who was already electrifying themost serious critics and captivating the most cultured audiences by thematurity of her art, already winning an encore with a Bach fugue, --anunheard-of miracle. As Wieck wrote in the diary, which he and hisdaughter kept together, "This marked a new era in piano music. " At theage of twelve, she played with absolute mastery the most difficultmusic ever written. 

But her public triumph made her only half-glad, for she was watching athome the triumph of another girl over the youth she loved. Can't yousee her now in her lonely room, reeling off from under her fleetfingers the dazzling arpeggios, while the tears gather in her eyes andfall 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 tous I said, 'Just wait till you learn to know Schumann, he is myfavorite of all my acquaintances, ' But she did not care to know you, since she said she knew a gentleman in Asch, whom she liked muchbetter. That made me mad; but it was not long before she began to likeyou better and it soon went so far that every time you came I had tocall 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 agood deal; but I consoled myself by saying it was only natural sinceyou were with me all the time; and, besides, Ernestine was moregrown-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 toErnestine and poked fun at me. Father shipped me off to Dresden on thataccount, where I again grew hopeful, and I said to myself, 'How prettyit would be if he were only your husband, '"

From Dresden, Clara wrote to "Lieber Herr Schumann, " a quizzical letteradvising him to drink "less Bavarian beer; not to turn night into day;to let your girl friends know that you think of them; to composeindustriously, and to write more in your paper, since the readers wishit. "

Schumann, unconsciously to himself, had given Clara reason enough topersuade a child of her years that he loved her more than he did, ormore than he thought he did. He thought he was interested only in themarvellous child-artist. He found in the musical newspaper which heedited an opportunity to promulgate his high opinion of her. It isneedless to say that the praises he lavished in print, would be no morecordial than those he bestowed on her in the privacy of the home. Forhe and she seemed to be as son and daughter to old Wieck, who was alsogreatly interested in the critical ideals of Schumann, and joined himzealously in the organisation and conducting of the _Neue Zeitschriftfür Musik_. This, Schumann made the most wonderfully catholic andprophetic critical organ that ever existed for art; and in the editingof it he approved himself to posterity as a musical critic neverapproached for discriminating the good from the bad; for daring todiscover and to acclaim new genius without fear, or without waiting fordeath to close the lifelong catalogue or to serve as a guide for anestimate. For some time Wieck joined hands and pen with Schumann inthis great cause, till gradually his fears for the career of thejealously guarded Clara caused a widening rift between the old man andthe young. 

Clara was to Schumann first a brilliant young sister, for whom heprophesied such a career as that of Schubert, Paganini, and Chopin, andfor 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 hissister, or merely in friendship, but rather as a pilgrim thinking of adistant shrine. " He began to dedicate compositions to her, and he tookher opinion seriously. His Opus 5, written in 1833, was based on atheme 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 printedverses upon her genius. In a letter to Wieck, in 1833, he says, "It iseasy to write to you, but I do not feel equal to write to Clara. " Shewas still, however, the child to him; the child whom he used tofrighten with his gruesome ghost-stories, especially of his"Doppelgänger, " a name, Clara afterwards took to herself. Child as shewas, he watched her with something of fascination, and wrote hismother:

"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, andsaying the most intensely thoughtful things. It is a pleasure to seehow 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 fromCannovitz (we go for a two or three hours' tramp almost every day), Iheard her say to herself: 'Oh, how happy I am! how happy!' Who wouldnot love to hear that? On this same road there are a great many uselessstones lying about in the middle of the footpath. Now, when I amtalking, I often look more up than down, so she always walks behind meand gently pulls my coat at every stone to prevent my falling; meantimeshe stumbles over them herself. "

What an allegory of womanly devotion is here!

Gradually Schumann let himself write to Clara a whit more like a loverthan a brother, with an occasional "Longingly yours. " He begged her tokeep mental trysts with him, and, acknowledging a composition she haddedicated to him, he hinted:

"If you were present, I would press your hand even without yourfather's leave. Then I might express a hope that the union of our nameson the title-page might foreshadow the union of our ideas in thefuture. 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 spoiledyour pleasure on that occasion. "

Of this last, we can only imagine some too ardent compliment, orperhaps some subjection to one of his dense melancholies. In the verymidst of his short infatuation with Ernestine von Fricken, he is stillcorresponding with Clara. Their tone is very cordial, and, knowing thesequel, it is hard not to read into them perhaps more than Schumannmeant. The letters could hardly have seemed to him to be love letters, since he writes to Clara that he has been considering the publicationof their correspondence in his "Zeitschrift, " though he was probablynot serious at this, seeing that he also plans to fill a balloon withhis unwritten thoughts and send it to her, "properly addressed with afavourable wind. "

"I long to catch butterflies to be my messengers to you. I thought ofgetting my letters posted in Paris, so as to arouse your curiosity andmake you believe that I was there. In short a great many quaint notionscame to my head and have only just been dispersed by a postilion'shorn; the fact is, dear Clara, that the postilion has much the sameeffect upon me as the most excellent champagne. "

Here is perhaps the secret of much of his correspondence; the puredelight of letting his "fingers chase the pen, and the pen chase theink. " 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 writeher at the piano, especially in the chords of the ninth and thethirteenth. He paints her a pleasant portrait of herself in a letterwhich, he says, is written like a little sonata, "namely, a chatteringpart, a laughing part, and a talking part. "

Clara seemed from his first sight of her to exercise over him a curiousmingling of profound admiration and of teasing amusement. He portraysher vividly to herself in such words as these:

"Your letter was yourself all over. You stood before me laughing andtalking; rushing from fun to earnest as usual, diplomatically playingwith your veil. In short, the letter was Clara herself, her double. "

All these expressions of tenderness and fascinations were ground enoughfor the child Clara to build Spanish hopes upon, but in the very sameletter Schumann could refer to that torment of Clara's soul, Ernestine, and speak of her as "your old companion in joy and sorrow, that brightstar which we can never appreciate enough. "

A change, however, seems to have come over Ernestine. Clara found hertaciturn and mistrustful, and when the Baron von Fricken came for her, Wieck himself wrote in the diary, "We have not missed her; for the lastsix weeks she has been a stranger in our house; she had lost completelyher lovable and frank disposition. " He compares her to a plant, whichonly prospers under attention, but withers and dies when left toitself. 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. Duringher absence, Ernestine wrote to Schumann many letters, chieflyremarkable for their poor style and their worse grammar. To a man ofthe exquisite sensibility of Schumann, and one who took literature soearnestly, this must have been a constant torture. It humiliated hisown love, and greatly undermined the romance, which crumpled absolutelywhen he learned that she was not the baron's own daughter, but only anadopted child, and of an illegitimate birth at that. He had not learnedthese facts from her; indeed she had practised elaborate deceptionsupon him. But the breaking of the engagement--a step almost as seriousas divorce in the Germany of that day--he seems to have conducted withhis characteristic gentleness and tact; for Ernestine did not cease tobe his friend and Clara's. Later, when he was accused of having severedthe ties with Ernestine, he wrote:

"You say something harsh, when you say that I broke the engagement withErnestine. That is not true; it was ended in proper form with bothsides agreeing. But concerning this whole black page of my life, Imight tell you a deep secret of a heavy psychic disturbance that hadbefallen me earlier. It would take a long time, however, and itincludes the years from the summer of 1833 on. But you shall learn ofit sometime, and you will have the key to all my actions and mypeculiar manner. "

That explanation, however, does not seem to be extant; all we can knowis that Ernestine and he parted as friends, and that six years later hededicated to her a volume of songs (Opus 13). Three years after theseparation she married, to become Frau von Zedtwitz; but her husbanddid not live long, nor did she survive him many years. 

Aside from the disillusionment that had taken the glamour fromErnestine, Schumann had been slowly coming more and more under thespell of Clara Wieck. The affair with Ernestine seemed to have beenonly a transient modulation, and his heart like a sonata returned toits home in the original key of "carissima Clara, Clara carissima. "Clara, who had found small satisfaction in her fame out-of-doors, sinceshe was defeated in her love in her home, had the joy of seeing thegradual growth in Schumann's heart of a tenderness that kept increasingalmost to idolatry. Her increasing beauty was partly to blame for it, but chiefly it was the nobility yet exuberant joy of her soul, and herabsolute sympathy with his ideals in music, criticism, literature, andlife. 

To both of them, art was always a religion; there was no philistinismor charlatanism in the soul or the career of either. At this time, whenSchumann found it difficult to get any attention paid to hiscompositions, Clara, from childhood, was able both to conquer theirdifficulties and to express their deep meanings. While Schumann wasearning his living and a wide reputation by publishing the praises ofother composers, by burrowing in all the obscure meaning of newgeniuses, and revealing their messages to the world, his own greatworks were lying ignored and uncomprehended and seemingly forgotten. Atthis 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 thesoul and the art of the fellow pupil of her father. Even before hebroke his engagement with Ernestine, he found Clara's charmsirresistible. 

Chopin came to Leipzig in 1834, and in Schumann's diary after his namestands the entry: "Clara's eyes and her love. " And later, "The firstkiss in November. "

It was on the 25th. He had been calling on Clara, and when it came timeto go home, she carried a lamp to light him down the steps. He couldkeep his secret no longer from himself or from her; he declared hislove then and there. But she reminded him of Ernestine, and, with thattrivial perjury to which lovers are always apt, he informed her thatErnestine was already engaged to some one else. There was no furtherresistance, but nearly a serious accident. The kiss that set theirhearts afire came near working the same effect upon the house. As Clarawrote 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, Icould hardly hold. "

Schumann writes a few days later in his diary: "Mit Ernestinegebrochen. " Schumann consoled himself later by saying that he didErnestine no wrong, for it would have been a greater and more terriblemisery had they married. "Earlier or later my old love and attachmentfor you would have awakened again, and then what misery!. .. Ernestineknew right well that she had first driven you out of my heart, that Iloved you before I knew Ernestine. "

Ernestine herself wrote him often. 

"I always believed that you could love Clara alone, and still believeit. "

In January, 1836, the engagement with Ernestine was formally broken. Shortly after this, Robert's mother died. He was compelled to leaveLeipzig in dismal gloom. He said to Clara simply, "Bleib mir treu, " andshe nodded her head a little, very sadly. How she kept her word! Twonights 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 forthe express coach. The roads are so bad that perhaps we shall not getaway 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 puteverything daintily in words, telling how strongly I liked any one, butnow I cannot any more. And if you do not know, I cannot tell you. Butlove me well; do you hear? . .. I demand much since I give much. To-dayI have been excited by various feelings; the opening of mother's will;hearing all about her death, etc. But your radiant image gleams throughall the darkness and helps me to bear everything better. .. . All I cantell you now is, that the future is much more assured. Still I cannotfold my hands in my lap. I must accomplish much to obtain that whichyou see when by chance you walk past the mirror. In the meantime youalso remain an artist and not a Countess Rossi. You will help me; workwith 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 ifI ask him for his blessing. Of course there is much to be thought ofand arranged. But I put great trust in our guardian angel. Fate alwaysintended us for one another. I have known that a long time, but myhopes were never strong enough to tell you and get your answer before. 

"What I write to-day briefly and incompletely, I will later explain toyou, for probably you cannot read me at all. But simply realise, that Ilove you quite unspeakably. The room is getting dark. Passengers nearme are going to sleep. It is sleeting and snowing outside. But I willsqueeze myself right into a corner, bury my face in the cushions, andthink only of you. Farewell, my Clara. 

"Your ROBERT. "

Close upon this letter, which must have been answered with nohesitation and no inferiority of passion, came the summons to battlefor the prize. Wieck, who had been a cordial father, declined withundue enthusiasm the rôle of father-in-law. He had viewed with hopeRobert's entrance into the career of music, had advised the mother tolet him make it his life; then the youth ruined his chances of earninglarge moneys as a concert performer by practising until his right handwas permanently injured and the third finger useless. As early as 1831Wieck is quoted as objecting to Schumann's habits, and saying that, ifhe had no money at all, he might turn out well; for Schumann, whilenever rich, never knew poverty. But their friendship continued cordialand intimate, and Wieck went into partnership with him in the _NeueZeitschrift für Musik_; he was a member of the famous Davids-bündler, that mystical brotherhood of art, wherein Clara is alluded to as"Chiara, " perhaps also as "Zilia. " None the less, or perhaps all themore, Wieck objected to seeing his famous and all-conquering childmarry herself away to the dreamer and eccentric. 

Wieck's own domestic affairs had not flowed too smoothly; he hadmarried the daughter of Cantor Tromlitz, who was the mother of Claraand four other children, but the marriage, though begun in love, wasunhappy, and after six years was ended in divorce. Clara remained withher father, while her mother married a music-teacher named Bargiel, andbore him a son, Waldemar, well known as a composer and a good friendand disciple of Robert Schumann. Wieck had married again, in 1828, Clementine Fechner, by whom he had a daughter, Marie, who also attainedsome 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 hismother's death were all appropriate omens. Wieck stormed about Clara'shead with rebuke and accusations, and threatened like another Capulet, till he scared the seventeen-year-old girl into giving him Schumann'sletters. Then he threatened to shoot Schumann if she did not promisenever to speak to him again. She made the promise, and the manner inwhich she did not keep it adds the necessary human touch to this mostbeautiful of true love stories. Schumann was never underhanded bychoice, or at all, except a little on occasion in this love affair; sonow he called at once upon his old teacher, friend and colleague. 

The interview must have been brief and stormy, for, on the 1st ofMarch, 1836, Schumann writes to August Kahlert, a stranger but a fellowmusical 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 havea particular favour to ask you. It is this: Will you not devote a fewmoments 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 outfrom her gentle, almost supernatural ways and doings. For the presentdon'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 anysort 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. Thelatest news came from Dresden. But we know nothing for certain, thoughI 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 andhear Clara play. Now, this is my ardent request, that you should let meknow all about Clara as quickly as possible, --I mean as to the state ofmind, the life she leads, in fact any news you can obtain. All that Ihave told you is a sacred trust, and don't mention this letter toeither the old man or anybody else. 

"If Wieck speaks of me, it will probably not be in very flatteringterms. Don't let that put you out. You will learn to know him. He is aman of honour, but a rattle-brain (_Er ist ein Ehrenmann, aber einRappelkopf_). I may further remark that it will be an easy thing foryou to obtain Clara's confidence and favour, as I (who am more thanpartial 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 yourhand, unknown one; I believe your disposition to be so noble that itwill not disappoint me. Write soon. A heart, a life depends upon it--myown--. For it is I, myself, for whom I have been pleading. "

Kahlert met Clara, but she was embarrassed and mistrustful of thestranger's discretion. The next day Schumann wrote to his sister-in-lawTheresa still with a little hope: "Clara is at Breslau. My stars arecuriously placed. God grant it may all end happily. "

In April, Clara and her father returned to Leipzig, but the lovers, nowreunited in the same town, were further removed than ever. Clara'spromise compelled her to treat Schumann as a stranger on the casualmeetings that happened to the torment rather than the liking of both. The nagging uncertainty, the simulating of indifference, a stolenglance, or a hasty clasp of the hand, in which one or the other seemednot to express warmth enough, caused a certain impatience which Wieckand his wife were eager enough to turn into mistrust. 

Schumann's compositions no longer frequented Clara's programmes. He wasdriven elsewhere for society, and when the taverns and the boisteroushumour of his friends wearied him, he turned again to Frau Voigt. InMarch he had written to his sister:

"I am in a critical position; to extricate myself I must be calm andclear-sighted; it has come to this, either I can never speak to heragain, or she must be mine. "

By November such an estrangement had come between the lovers that hecould write his sister-in-law:

"Clara loves me as dearly as ever, but I am resigned. I am often at theVoigts. "

Since February of the year 1836, they had not spoken or exchanged anyletters. He never heard her beloved music, except at two concerts, orwhen at night he would stand outside of her house and listen in secretloneliness. In May he dedicated to her his Sonata in F Sharp Minor. Itwas, as he expressed it: "One long cry of my heart for you, in which atheme of yours appears in all possible forms. " His Opus 6, dated thesame year, was his wonderfully emotional group, "The Davidsbündlertänze. "The opening number is based upon a theme by Clara Wieck, and in certainof the chords written in syncopation, I always feel that I hear himcalling 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 thoseterrific crises of melancholia which at long intervals threatened hisreason. 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 armsand 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 wrungmy hands--then I often prayed at night to God: 'Only let me livethrough this one torment without going mad. ' I thought once to findyour engagement announced in the paper--that bowed my neck to the dusttill I cried aloud. Then I wished to heal myself by forcing myself tolove a woman who already had me half in her net. "

Love by act of Parliament, or by individual resolve, has never beenaccomplished; 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 hecould persuade her to love him. His ambition suited eminently thefamily politics of Father Wieck. He made his first mistake byslandering Schumann, not knowing the A B C of a woman's heart. For alover slandered is twice recommended. As Clara wrote later: "I wasastounded at his black heart. He wanted to betray you, and he onlyinsulted me. "

One of the attempts to undermine Schumann was the effort to poisonClara's mind against him; because when a piano Concerto of hers wasplayed (Opus 7), Schumann did not review it in his paper, but left itto a friend of his named Becker. In the next number Schumann wrote anenthusiastic criticism upon a Concerto by Sterndale Bennett. Theattempt failed, however, and Schumann's letter is in existence in whichhe had asked Becker to review the Concerto, because, in view of thepublicity given to the estrangement with the Wiecks, praise from himwould be in poor taste. 

Soon Clara at a public concert in Leipzig dared to put upon theprogramme the F Sharp Minor Sonata, in which Schumann had given voiceto his heart's cry ("_Herzensschrei nach der Geliebten_"). Schumann'sname did not appear on the programme, but it was credited to two of hispen-names, Eusebius and Florestan. Now, as Litzman notes, the answer tothat outcry came back to him over the head of the audience. Clara knewhe would be there, and that he would understand. Her fingers seemed tobe giving expression not only to his own yearning, but to her answerand her like desire. It was a bold effort to declare her love beforethe world, and, as she wrote him later: "Do you not realise that Iplayed it since I knew no other way to express my innermost feelings atall. Secretly, I did not dare express them, though I did it openly. Doyou imagine that my heart did not tremble?"

The musical message renewed in Schumann's heart a hope anddetermination that had been dying slowly for two years. His friendBecker came to Leipzig, and took up the cause of the lovers with greatenthusiasm. He carried letters to and fro with equal diplomacy anddelight. He appeared in time to play a leading role in a drama Schumannwas preparing. Wieck's enmity to Schumann had been somewhat mitigatedafter two years of meeting no opposition. Schumann was encouraged tohope that, if he wrote a letter to Wieck on Clara's birthday, September13, 1837, it might find the old bear in a congenial mood. He hadwritten to Clara the very morning after the concert at daybreak, saying: "I write this in the very light of Aurora. Would it be thatonly one more daybreak should separate us. " He tells her of his plan, asking only one word of approval. Clara, overcome with emotion whenBecker brought her the first letter she had received in so long a timefrom Schumann, was so delighted at the inspiration that she wrote:

"Only a simple 'Ja' do you ask. Such a tiny little word . .. So weightythough . .. Could a heart, as full of unspeakable love as mine not speakthis tiny little word with the whole soul? I do it and my soul whispersit for ever. The grief of my heart, the many tears, could I butdescribe them . .. Oh, no! Your plan seems to me risky, but a lovingheart fears no obstacles. Therefore once more I say _yes_! Could Godturn my eighteenth birthday into a day of mourning? Oh, no! that werefar too gruesome. Ah, I have long felt 'it must be, ' and nothing in theworld shall make me waver, and I will convince my father that ayouthful heart can also be steadfast. Very hastily, "Your CLARA. "

And now, letters began to fly as thickly as swallows at evening. Shefound a better messenger than Becker, in her faithful maid, "Nanny, "whom she recommended to complete confidence: "So Nanny can serve as apen to me. " At last the lovers met clandestinely by appointment, asClara returned from a visit to Emily List. Both were so agitated thatClara almost fainted, and Schumann was formal and cold. She wrotelater:

"The moon shone so beautifully on your face when you lifted your hatand passed your hand across your forehead; I had the sweetest feelingthat I ever had; I had found my love again. "

It was in this time of frenzied enthusiasm, of alternate hope anddespondency, that Schumann wrote the seventh of his "Davidsbündlertänze. "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 wordsfail me constantly. A trembling hand will not let the pen runquietly. .. . To-day is Clara's birthday, --the day when the dearest beingin 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 haddeeply loved her and she him. 

"Ask her eyes whether I have told the truth. Eighteen months long haveyou tested me. If you have found me worthy, true and manly, then sealthis union of souls; it lacks nothing of the highest bliss, except theparental blessing. An awful moment it is until I learn your decision, awful as the pause between lightning and thunder in the tempest, whereman does not know whether it will give destruction or benediction. Beagain a friend to one of your oldest friends, and to the best ofchildren be the best of fathers. "

With this letter he enclosed one to Wieck's wife: "In your hands, dearlady, I lay our future happiness, and in your heart--no stepmotherlyheart, I am sure. "

The letter made a sensation in the Wieck home. Clara's father spoke noword to her about it. He and his wife locked themselves up in a room toanswer it. Clara wept alone all the long birthday. Her father asked herwhy she was so unhappy, and when she told him the truth, he showed herSchumann's letter, and said: "I did not want you to read it, but, sinceyou 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 sovaguely, that now I really don't know what to do. Not at all. He wasnot able to make any valid objections; but as I said before, one couldmake nothing of his letter. I have not spoken to C. Yet; her strengthis my only hope. "

To Clara he wrote that an interview he had with her father wasfrightful. "This iciness, ill-will, such confusion, suchcontradictions. He has a new way to wound; he drives his knife to thehilt into my heart. What next then, my dear Clara, what next? Yourfather himself said to me the fearful words: 'Nothing shall shake me. 'Fear everything from him, he will compel you by force if he cannot bytrickery. _Fürchten Sie Alles_!" Wieck consented to permit them to meetpublicly and with a third person, but not alone, and to correspond onlywhen Clara was travelling. His reasons were his ambition for her, heryouth. But Schumann knew better:

"There is nothing in this, believe me; he will throw you to the firstcomer who has gold and title enough. His highest ambition then isconcert giving and travelling. Further than that he lets your heartbleed, destroys my strength in the midst of my ambition to do beautifulthings in the world. Besides he laughs at all your tears. .. . Ah! how myhead 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 heartthat loves but once. "

It is only now, strange to say, that they began to use the "Du, " thatsecond person singular of intimacy which all languages keep except theEnglish, which has banished its "thee and thou" to cold and formalusages. 

It was typical of Clara's attitude throughout this whole long strugglethat she was always as true to her father's wishes as could humanly beexpected. She obeyed him always, until he became unreasonable and atyrant beyond even the endurance of a German daughter. So now, thoughRobert begged her to write him secretly, she refused with tears. But, fortunately for them both, she did not long remain in the town wherethey were separated like prisoners in neighbouring cells. She couldsoon write him from other cities. As for Schumann, he determined tomake the most of the new hope, and to establish himself socially andfinancially in a position which Wieck could not assail. 

Gradually, with that same justice which made him able to criticiseappreciatively the music of men who wrote in another style than his, hewas able to feel an understanding for the position of even histormentor Wieck. 

"Now we have only to obtain the affection and confidence of yourfather, to whom I should so love to give that name, to whom I owe somany of the joys of my life, so much good advice, and some sorrow aswell--and whom I should like to make so happy in his old days, that hemight say: 'What good children!' If he understood me better he wouldhave saved me many worries and would never have written me a letterwhich 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 isnoble; he would like to weigh your future happiness as in a pair ofscales, and wishes to see you just as happy and well-protected as youhave always been under his fatherly care. I cannot argue with him. "

Schumann works with new fury at his compositions, and plans ever largerand larger works; but through all his music there reigns the influenceof Clara in a way unequalled, or at least never equally confessed byany other musician. He writes her that the Davidsbündlertänze werewritten in happiness and are full of "bridal thoughts, suggested by themost delicious excitement that I have ever remembered. " Of his "Endevom Lied" he says:

"When I was composing it, I must confess that I thought: 'Well, the endof it all will be a jolly wedding, ' but towards the end, my sorrowabout you came over me again, so that wedding and funeral bells areringing together. "

He plans how they shall write music together when they are married, andsays:

"When you are standing by me as I sit at the piano, then we shall bothcry like children--I know I shall be quite overcome. Then you must notwatch me too closely when I am composing; that would drive me todesperation; and for my part, I promise you, too, only very seldom tolisten at your door. Well, we shall lead a life of poetry and blossoms, and we shall play and compose together like angels, and bring gladnessto mankind. "

He would have "a pretty cottage not far from town--you at my side--towork--to live with me blissful and calm" (_selig und still_). And whenshe wishes to tour: "We'll pack our diamonds together and go live inParis. "

He writes her, complaining that her father called him phlegmatic, andsaid that he had written nothing in the _Zeitschrift_ for six weeks. Heinsists that he is leading a very serious life:

"I am a young man of twenty-eight with a very active mind, and anartist, to boot; yet for eight years I have not been out of Saxony, andhave been sitting still, saving my money without a thought of spendingit on amusement or horses, and quietly going my own way as usual. Anddo you mean to say that all my industry and simplicity, and all that Ihave done are quite lost upon your father?"

Sometimes the strain under which the two lovers lived caused a littlerift within the lute. Poor Clara, forced to defend Robert against herfather'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 bothadmirable and lovable. When she advised patience or postponement, theimpatient Robert saw her father's hand moving the pen, and complained;but in his next letter he was sure to return to his attitude oftenderness for her in her difficulties, and determination to yieldeverything to circumstances except the final possession of the woman ofhis heart. 

Musicians seem to be naturally good writers of letters. In the firstplace, those whose fingers grow tired of playing notes or writing them, seem to find recreation in the reeling off of letters. They haveacquired an instinctive sense of form, and an instinct for smoothingover its rough edges, and modulating from one mood into another. Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a goodletter has so necessarily a unity of mood, that musicians, _exofficio_, tend to write correspondence that is literary without tryingto be so, sincere without stupidity. But in the volumes and volumes ofmusicians' letters, which it has been my fortune to read, I have neverfound any others which were so ardent and yet so earnest, so throbbingwith longing and yet so full of honesty, so eloquent and so dramaticwith the very highest forms of eloquence and romance as those of RobertSchumann and Clara Wieck. 

The woes of the two lovers were as different as possible, thoughequally balanced; and the honourableness of their undertaking wasequally high. 

Clara was torn betwixt filial piety toward a father who could be ursineto a miserable degree, and a lover who was not only eating his heartout in loneliness, but who needed her personality to complete hiscreative powers in music. While Schumann had no such problem to meet, he lacked Clara's elastic and buoyant nature, and it must never beforgotten that when he was sad, he was dismal to the point of absolutemadness. He would sit for hours in the company of hilarioustavern-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 hehad given them, he could break out in such speeches as this: "If Claramarries Schumann, I will say it even on my death-bed, she is not worthyof being my daughter. "

Now began that clandestine correspondence which seems to haveimplicated and inculpated half the musicians of Europe. There werealmost numberless go-betweens who carried letters for the lovers, orreceived them in different towns. There were zealous messengers rangingfrom the Russian Prince Reuss-Köstriz, through all grades of society, down to the devoted housemaid "Nanny. " Chopin, and Mendelssohn, andmany another musician, were touched by the fidelity of the lovers, andLiszt in one of his letters describes how he had broken offacquaintance with his old friend Wieck, because of indignation at histreatment 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 hersomething more in the concert style that the public would understand. But while the musician Schumann was not arriving at understanding, thecritic Schumann was already famous for the swiftness of his discoveriesand the bravery of his proclamations of genius. As for Clara, thoughalready in her eighteenth year, she was one of the most famous pianistsin the world, and favourably compared, in many respects, especially inpoint of poetical interpretation, with Liszt, Thalberg, Chopin, andEurope's brilliantest virtuosos. But Schumann had delighted her heartby writing: "I love you not because you are a great artist; no, I loveyou because you are so good. " That praise, she wrote him, had rejoicedher infinitely, and that praise any one who knows her life can echowith Schumann. 

Such fame the love-affair of the Schumanns had gained that to themusical world it was like following a serial romance in instalments. Doctor Weber in Trieste offered to give Schumann ten thousandthalers--an offer which could not of course be accepted. At Easter, 1838, Schumann received one thousand thalers (about $760) from hisbrothers Eduard and Carl. 

But the lovers had agreed to wait two years--until Easter, 1840, beforethey should marry--and the two years were long and wearisome in theprospect and in the endurance. As Clara wrote:

"My sole wish is--I wish it every morning--that I could sleep twoyears; could over-sleep all the thousand tears that shall yet flow. Foolish wish! I am sometimes such a silly child. Do you remember thattwo years ago on Christmas Eve you gave me white pearls and mother saidthen: 'Pearls mean tears'? She was right, they followed only too soon. "

Schumann busied himself in so many ways that again for a little whilehe somewhat melted Wieck's wrath, and Clara hoped that some day hecould again be received at home as a friend. She was made the courtpianist at this time, and it was a quaint whimsy of fate that, inconnection with the award, Schumann was asked to give her father a"character. " It need hardly be said that he gave him extra measure ofpraise. 

Clara's new dignity stirred Schumann to hunt some honour for himself. Robert decided, that while he was content "to die an artist, it wouldplease a certain girl to see 'Dr. ' before his name. " He was willing tobecome either a doctor of philosophy or of music. He began at once toset both of these schemes to work. 

Now old Wieck returned to his congenial state of wrath. He declaredthat Clara was far too extravagant ever to live on Schumann's earnings, though she insisted that Schumann was assured of one thousand thalers ayear, and she could earn an equal sum with one concert a winter inDresden, where prices were so high. But just then the prosperity ofSchumann's paper began to slough off. It occurred to the lovers thatthey would prefer to live in Vienna, and that the _Zeitschrift_ couldprosper there. There were endless difficulties, a censorship to pacify, and many commercial schemes to arrange, but nothing must be leftuntried. The scheme was put under way. Meanwhile, as usual, the Wieckswere trying on their part; to separate the lovers. Schumann was accusedof infidelity to her, and he admitted that a Mrs. Laidlaw seemed to bein love with him, but not he with her. They attacked his character, andaccused him of being too fond of Bavarian beer. On this charge, heanswered with dignity:

"Pooh!--I should not be worth being spoken to, if a man trusted by sogood and noble a girl as you, should not be a respectable man and notcontrol himself in everything. Let this simple word put you at ease forever. "

Failing here, Wieck presented another candidate for Clara's heart, aDoctor D----, who met the same fate as Banck. There were further hopesthat she would find some one in Paris or London, whither she was bound;but she wrote Schumann that if the whole aristocracy of both placesfell at her feet, she would let them lie there and turn to the simpleartist, the dear, noble man, and lay her heart at his feet. ("AlleLords von London und alle Cavaliere von Paris, könnten mir zu Füssenliegen, " etc. ) Clara was also tormented by the persistent suit of LouisRackerman, of Bremen, who could not see how vain was his quest. 

One rainy night, Schumann stood a half-hour before her house and heardher play. And he wrote her: "Did you not feel that I was there?" Hecould even see his ring glitter on her finger. Another day Clara sawhim taking his coffee with his sister-in-law, and she repeated hisquery: "Did you not feel that I was there?"

Old Wieck stooped to everything, and even told Clara that he hadwritten to Ernestine to demand a statement that she fully releasedSchumann from his former engagement to her--it being remembered thatamong Germans a betrothal always used to be almost as difficult a bondto sever as a marriage tie. This drove Clara to resolve a greatresolve, and she wrote Schumann:

"Twice has my father in his letters underlined the words: 'Never will Igive my consent. ' What I had feared has come true. I must act withoutmy father's consent and without my father's blessing. "

An elopement was seriously considered. It was planned that Clara was togo to Schumann's sister-in-law. At this time also another friendoffered Schumann one thousand thalers (about $760) and he said: "Ask ofme what you will, I will do everything for you and Clara. " But thiscrisis did not arrive, though the two were kept under espionage. Evennow in November, 1838, a new and merely nagging attempt was made topostpone the marriage till the latter part of 1840, but Clara wrotethat she would be with Robert on Easter, 1840, without fail. Then hewent to Vienna to establish his journal there, and from there he sent abundle of thirty short poems written in her praise. While he was inVienna, her father shipped her off to Paris, so sure now of cleavingtheir hearts asunder that he sent her alone without even an elderlywoman for a companion. He little knew that he was putting her to thetest she had never yet undergone: that of living far from him anddepending solely upon herself. It is a curious coincidence that one ofher best friends in Paris was the same American girl, Emily List, whohad once been Ernestine's rival for Robert's heart. 

The French people did not please Clara and she feared to go on toLondon alone. She dreamed only of hurrying back to Leipzig and Schumannand a home with him; in her letters the famous pianist seriouslydiscusses 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 bitterhumiliation of taking it back to Leipzig in 1839. His brother died atthis time also, and their sympathies had been so close that the shockwas very heavy. Everything seemed to be going wrong. He could not evenfind consolation in his music. At this gloomy moment Clara hoped to winover her father by a last concession. She wrote from Paris that itwould be well to postpone the marriage a few months longer than theyhad first intended, and Emily List wrote a long letter advocating thesame and explaining how much it grieved Clara to ask this. She advisedRobert to take up the book business of his brother, who had succeededhis father's prosperous trade. Even while Clara's tear-stained appealwas going to him, another letter of his crossed hers. It was full ofjoy and told her how well they would get along on their unitedresources. He gave them in detail and it is interesting to pry into thepersonal affairs of so great a musician. He wrote: "Am I not an expertaccountant? 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 furtherprocrastination. He wrote her that his family were beginning to saythat if she loved him she would ask no further delay. Clara's letterseems to have been only her last tribute to her father, for, atSchumann's first protest, she hastened to write that she could endureanything, except his doubt; that she would be with him on Easter, 1840, come what would. This cheered him mightily, and he wrote that, while hewas still unable to compose, owing to his loneliness, a beautifulfuture was awaiting him. He described his dreams of the life of art andlove they should lead, composing and making all manner of beautifulmusic. 

"Once I call you mine, you shall hear plenty of new things, for I thinkyou will encourage me; and hearing more of my compositions will beenough to cheer me up. And we will publish some things under our twonames, so that posterity may regard us as one heart and one soul, andmay not know which is yours and which is mine. How happy I am! Fromyour Romanze I again see plainly that we are to be man and wife. Everyone of your thoughts comes out of my soul, just as I owe all my musicto you. "

Now he sent for her decision a formidable document, an appeal to thecourt, to compel the father's consent. Clara wrote her father anultimatum on the subject, and received a long letter in reply, in whichhe consented to the marriage under such terms that they were better offbefore. For his consent was to be made on the following sixstipulations: 1. That Robert and Clara, so long as Wieck lived, shouldnot make their residence in Saxony; but that Schumann must none theless make as much money in the new home as his _Zeitschrift_ broughthim in Leipzig. 2. That Wieck should control Clara's property for fiveyears, paying her, during that time, five per cent. 3. That Schumannshould make out a sworn statement of his income which he had givenWieck in Leipzig in September, 1837, and turn it over to Wieck'slawyer. 4. That Schumann should not communicate with him verbally or byletter, until he himself expressed the wish. 5. That Clara shouldrenounce all claims as to her inheritance. 6. That the marriage shouldtake place September 29, 1839. 

This insolent and mercenary protocol drove Clara to bay. She wrote herfather from the depths of grief, and declared to him finally that shewould wed Schumann on the 24th of June. Schumann wrote a short note tothe old man, telling him that if he did not hear in eight days, silencewould be taken as the last refusal. The answer was simply a letter fromFrau Wieck, acknowledging Schumann's "impertinent letter, " and sayingthat Wieck would not hold any communication with him. 

Then the lawsuit began. On the 16th of July he made his appeal andwrote to Clara that she must be personally present in six or sevenweeks. She had written him a letter of great cheer and sent him fromParis a portrait she had had painted and a cigar case she had made withher own hands. 

On her way home Clara stopped at Berlin, where her own mother lived asthe wife of Bargiel. 

Clara's life under her father's guardianship had gradually driftedalmost out of the ken of her own mother. Her stepmother had doneeverything possible to make her life miserable, spying upon her andmaking it impossible to be alone long enough to write Schumann aletter. Now, in her loneliness, Clara turned to the woman whose fleshshe was; and she found there an immediate and passionate support. 

From Wieck and the Wieck family, Clara had received while in Paris notone penny of money and not a single trinket. They always wrote her:"You have your own money. " This grieved her deeply, and her father'ssending her to Paris without a chaperon of any kind and writing hernever a word of tenderness but only and always reproaches, had orphanedher indeed. Her heart was doubly ripe for a little mothering, and FrauBargiel seized the moment. She wrote letters of greatest warmth andsweetness to her child in Paris, and to Schumann she wrote aninvitation to come to Berlin. He accepted and spent several pleasantdays. Frau Bargiel wrote Clara how she had delighted in the talent andperson of Schumann, and Robert wrote her how fine a mother she had. Onthe 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 thefamily scandal in public, crushed him to the dust. He wrote his friendBecker: "I hardly think I shall live to hear the decision of thecourt. " As soon as Clara left Paris he hastened toward her and met herat Altenburg. It was a blissful reunion after a year of separation, andthey went together to Berlin, where they knew the bliss of sitting oncemore at the piano together, playing Bach fugues. She found his geniusstill what it was, --"_er fantasiert himmlisch_"--but his health was insuch serious condition that she was greatly frightened. 

Now her father proceeded to destroy every claim he may ever have had onher sympathy by his ferocity toward a daughter who had been so patientand so gentle toward him. He not only neglected her in Paris, except towrite her merciless letters, but when she returned and he saw himselfconfronted with the lawsuit for her liberty, he offered a revision ofhis terms, which was in itself worse than the original. Clara describesthe new offer:

"I must surrender the 2, 000 thalers (about $1, 500) which I have savedfrom seven years' concerts, and give it to my brothers. 

"He would give back my effects and instruments, but I must later pay1, 000 thalers and give this also to my brothers. 

"Robert must transfer to me 8, 000 thalers of his capital, the interestof which shall come to me, also the capital, in case of aseparation--What a hideous thought! Robert has 12, 000 thalers, andshall he give his wife two-thirds?"

Robert had already given her four hundred thalers in bonds. The newterms being rejected, Wieck put everything possible in the way of aspeedy termination of the lawsuit. He made it impossible for Clara toget back to Paris, as she wished, to earn more money before themarriage. He demanded that she should postpone her wedding and take aconcert tour for three months with him for a consideration of sixthousand thalers. Clara declined the arrangement. 

One day she sent her maid to the house of her father, and asked him forher winter cloak. He gave this answer to the maid: "Who then is thisMam'selle Wieck? I know two Fräulein Wieck only; they are my two littledaughters here. I know no other!" As Litzmann says: "With so shrill adissonance ended Clara's stay at Leipzig. " He compares this exile ofthe daughter by the father to the story of King Lear and Cordelia. Butit was the blind and tyrannical old Lear of the first act, driving fromhis home his most loving child. On October 3d, Clara went back toBerlin to her mother. Her father moved heaven and earth to make Clarasuspect Schumann's fidelity, and he gave the love affair as unpleasanta notoriety as possible. For an instance of senile spite: Clara hadalways been given a Behrens piano for her concerts in Berlin. Wieckwrote to a friend to go to Behrens, and warn him that he must not lendClara his pianos, because she was used to the hard English action, andwould ruin any others! He wrote that he hoped the honour of the King ofPrussia would prevent his disobedient daughter from appearing in publicconcerts in Berlin. It need hardly be said that Clara was neitherforbidden her piano nor her concerts; indeed, the king appeared inperson at her concert and applauded the runaway vigorously. By acurious chance at the end of her _pièce de résistance_, a string brokeon 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 toBehrens protesting against his lending a hand to "a demoralised girlwithout shame. " Clara learned that such of her letters as had gonethrough the Wieck home were opened, and she received an anonymousletter which she knew must have been dictated by her father. Hersuspicions were later proved. The worst of the affair was thediabolical malice that led Wieck to have the letter put into her handjust before her chief Berlin concert. 

Next, he announced that his reason for not granting his consent wasthat Schumann was a drunkard. Robert found witnesses enough to besponsors for his high respectability, but the accusation was astaggering blow in the midst of the deep melancholia into which theendless struggle and the recent death of Henrietta Voigt had plungedhim. Clara had the rare agony of seeing him weep. It was now the turnof the strong Clara to break down, and only with the doctor's aid shecontinued her concerts. Her father's effort to undermine her good nameextended to the publication of a lithographed account of his side ofthe story. But while certain old friends snubbed her, the lies thatwere told against her met their truest answer in the integrity of herwhole career, and in the purity and honour of her life. This her ownfather was the first and the last ever to slander. 

It is noteworthy, in view of the lightness of so many of the loveaffairs of the musicians, such as the case of Liszt, who twice elopedwith married women and discussed the formality of divorce afterward, that through the long and ardent and greatly tormented love story ofthe Schumanns there never appears a line in any of their multitudinousletters which shows or hints the faintest dream of any procedure butthe most upright. Always they encouraged each other with ringingbeautiful changes on the one theme of their lives: Be true to me as Iam true to you. Despair not. 

The lawsuit dragged on and on. Wieck exhausted all the devices ofpostponement in which the law is so fertile. Schumann found himself thevictim of a pamphlet of direct assault and downright libel, but allthese things were only obstacles to exercise fidelity. The lovers feltthat no power on earth could cut them apart. They began to dream oftheir marriage as more certain than the dawn. Schumann writes toClara--"_Mein Herzensbrautmädchen_"--that he wishes her to study andprepare for his exclusive hearing a whole concert of music, the bride'sconcert. She responds that he too must prepare for her music of hisown, for a bridegroom's concert. He writes and begs her to compose somemusic 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'sgenius for original work. Always they mingled music with love. 

The composer Hiller gave a notable dinner to Liszt, who, after toastingMendelssohn, toasted Schumann, "and spoke of me in such beautifulFrench and such tender words, that I turned blood-red. " January 31, 1840, Schumann had taken up his plan to gain himself a doctor's degreeto match Clara's titles. He had asked a friend to appeal to theUniversity of Jena to give him an honorary degree, or set him anexamination to pass; for his qualifications he mentioned modestly:

"My sphere of action as editor on a high-class paper, which has nowexisted for seven years; my position as composer and the fact of myhaving really worked hard, both as editor and musician. "

He began an essay on Shakespeare's relation to music, but withoutwaiting for this the University of Jena granted him his doctorate onFebruary 24, 1840, a bit of speed which must have been marvellouslyrefreshing to this poor victim of so much delay. 

The very day the degree was granted, he had decided to take legal stepsfor libel against the attack of Wieck's, which had been printed inpamphlet form and distributed. Toward Wieck he is still pitiful, "Thewretched man is torturing himself; let it be his punishment. " The libelsuit was not prosecuted and his anger vanished in the rapture of beingmade 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 mybetrothed; who is exactly like a child and will dance at being engagedto 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 toClara's accompaniment some of the manifold songs that were suddenlybeginning to bubble up from Schumann's heart. It was to his happinessthat he credited this lyric outburst, for he had hitherto written onlyinstrumental music. 

"While I was composing them I was quite lost in thoughts of you. If Iwere 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 attimes. I cannot help it, and should like to sing myself to death like anightingale. "

He begged Clara to come to him and drag him away from his music. Yetall 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 herrooms and hers taken to his. 

It will not be possible to tell here in detail the story of the processof law, or its many postponements or disappointments. Long ago they hadset their hearts upon marrying on Easter Day, 1840; they had determinednot to permit their father to drive them past this date. But they wentmeekly enough under the yoke of the law and passed many a month untilit seemed to the litigants that the condition of waiting for a decisionwas to be their permanent manner of life. But suddenly, as Litzmannsays, "there stood Happiness, long besought, on the stoop, and knockedwith tender fingers on the door. "

On the 7th of July, 1840, Clara was told the good news that the fatherhad withdrawn the evidence upon which he based his opposition. The casewas not ended, but the lovers immediately began to hunt for a place tolive. On the sixteenth of July they found a little, but cosy, lodgingon 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, atrousseau. "

On the 1st of August the case reached a stage where the father had butten days more to make his final appeal. Worn out and lacking in furtherweapons of any kind, he let the occasion pass, and rested on thedecision of the court. Clara went for one last concert tour as ClaraWieck. 

On the 12th of August, the super-deliberate court handed down itsawesome verdict. It was a verdict of reward for the lovers. Since Wieckhad withdrawn his evidence, the verdict was strongly worded in favourof the lovers. Schumann wrote Clara, "On this day, Clara, three yearsago, I proposed for your hand. "

There was no delay in crying the banns, and the lovers went about as ina dream of rapture. 

On September the 12th, between ten and eleven o'clock of a Saturday, atSchoenefeld, a village near Leipzig, they were married by an old schoolfriend of Schumann's. On the 13th, a Sunday, and Clara's birthday--hertwenty-first--she was the wife of the man who had for four years madeher possession his chief ambition, and who had loved her better than heknew, long years before that. 

Thus the lovers gained only one day by their lawsuit, for Clara was nowof age. But who could estimate the value of the struggle instrengthening and deepening their love for each other and theirworthiness for each other? It is the struggle for existence and thebattle with resistance that bring about the evolution of strength inthe physical world, and in the mental. Can we not say the same of thesentimental?

Would it not be a great pity if there were never such a gymnasium asparental resistance for lovers to exercise their hearts in? Shall wenot, then, thank old Wieck for his fine lessons in psychicalculture? His daughter Marie, by the way, Clara's half-sister, has onlythis year (1903) published a defence of the old man in answer to thefirst volume of Litzmann's new biography. 

On Clara's marriage-day she wrote in her diary a little triumph song ofjoy. The wedding had been very simple and--

"There was a little dancing. Though no hilarity reigned, still in everyface there was an inner content; it was a beautiful day, and the sunhimself, who had been hidden for many days, poured his mild beams uponus in the morning as we went to the wedding, as if he would bless ourunion. There was nothing disturbing on this day, and so let it beinscribed in this book as the most beautiful and the most important dayof my life. A period in my existence has now closed. I have enduredvery many sorrows in my young years, but also many joys which I shallnever forget. Now begins a new life, a beautiful life, that life whichone loves more than anything, even than self; but heavyresponsibilities also rest upon me, and Heaven grant me strength tofulfil them truly and as a good wife. Heaven has always stood by me andwill not cease now. I have always had a great belief in God, and shallalways keep it. "

As for the old Wieck, his bitterness must have been almost suicidal. Hedid not forgive his daughter even after the birth of her first child, on September 1, 1841, the year also of Schumann's first symphony. Itwas only after a second child was born, in April, 1843, that Schumanncould write to a friend:

"There has been a reconciliation between Clara and old Wieck, which Iam glad of for Clara's sake. He has been trying to make it up with metoo, but the man can have no feelings or he could not attempt such athing. 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 notlike Schumann, and a year later, from Petersburg, where he hadaccompanied Clara on a triumphal tour and where they had the mostcordial recognition from the Czar and Czarina, he addressed old Wieckas "Dear Father, " and described to him with contagious pride theimmense success of his wife. A little later he reminded him that "It isthe tenth birthday Of our _Zeitschrift_, I dare say you remember. " Andyet again he writes to him as "Dear Papa, " adding "best love to yourwife and children, till we all meet again happily. " And so ended thefeud between the two men. 

The romance of Robert and Clara did not end at the little villagechurch, but rather they seemed to issue thence into a very Eden of loveand art commingled. The gush of song from his heart continued, hededicated to her his "Myrthen" and collaborated with her in the twelvesongs called "Love's Springtime. " As Spitta, his biographer, writes:

"As far as anything human can be imagined, the marriage was perfectlyhappy. Besides their genius both husband and wife had simple domestictastes and were strong enough to bear the admiration of the world, without becoming egotistical. They lived for one another and for theirchildren. He created and wrote for his wife, and in accordance withtheir temperament; while she looked upon it as her highest privilege togive to the world the most perfect interpretation of his works, or atleast to stand as mediatrix between him and his audience, and to wardoff all disturbing or injurious impressions from his sensitive soul, which day by day became more irritable. Now that he found perfectcontentment in his domestic relations, he withdrew from his intercoursewith others and devoted himself exclusively to his family and work. Thedeep joy of his married life, produced the direct result of a mightyadvance in his artistic progress. Schumann's most beautiful works inthe larger forms date almost entirely from the years 1841-5. "

He went with her on many of her tours. They even planned an Americantrip. Once they were received with a public banquet; these two whomReissman calls "the marvellous couple. " In his letters there arealways loving allusions to "my Clara, " and though he could not himselfplay because of his lame finger, she was to him his "right hand. " Oncein 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 musicwell known and himself highly honoured, though they say that the Kingof 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 friendsof his art in a far-away country. "But, " says Reissman, "this wasdestined to be his last happiness. "

For the dread affliction which throws a spell of horror across his lifeand his wife's devotion, did not long delay in seizing upon him afterhis marriage. As early as 1833, the ferocious onslaughts of melancholiahad affected him at long intervals. In 1845, on the doctor's advice, hemoved to Dresden. His trouble seems to have been "an abnormal formationof irregular masses of bone in the brain. " He was afraid to live abovethe ground floor, or to go high in any building, lest he throw himselffrom 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 ofit, disappears. I dare say better times are coming, and when I lookupon my wife and children, I have joy enough. "

Later he wrote to Mendelssohn, that he preferred staying at home, evenwhen 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 wereaffectionate to the utmost. In 1846, and again in the summer of 1847, he suffered a violent melancholia. In these periods he experienced aninability to remember his own music long enough to write it down. Hesaw but few friends, among them the charming widow of Von Weber, Ferdinand Hiller, Mendelssohn, Joachim, and a few others. Wagner wrotesome articles for Schumann's journal and was highly thought of atfirst, but Schumann soon lost sympathy with him; the final sign of thebreak-up of his wonderful appreciation of other men's music. 

His life was more and more his home, and that more and more a voluntaryprison. In 1853 he presented his wife on her birthday with a grandpiano, and several new compositions. He took great delight in hisfamily, and could even compose amid the hilarity and noise of hischildren. Concerning children he had written in 1845 to Mendelssohn, whose wife had presented him with a second child, "We are lookingforward to a similar event, and I always tell my wife, 'one cannot haveenough. ' It is the greatest blessing we have on earth. "

Clara bore him eight children, and at her concerts there was usually anurse with a babe in arms waiting for her in the wings. Schumann wrotethree 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 inhis ardent welcome to Brahms (who was then twenty years old), whobecame a devoted friend and was of much comfort to Frau Schumann afterSchumann's death. This was not far off, but before life went, he mustsuffer a death in life. 

Worst of all in that final disintegration of his great soul was theinterest he took in the atrocious frauds of spiritualism. He was evenduped into believing in the cheap swindle of table-tipping. The blissof Robert Browning's home was broken up in this same form, ofall-encompassing credulity, only it was Mrs. Browning who was thespiritualist 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 theghosts of Schubert and Mendelssohn, on which he afterward wrotevariations which were never finished and were the last patheticexercise of his magnificent mind. 

He was also distracted by hearing one eternal note ringing in hisears--the same horror that drove the composer Smetana mad, after he hadembodied the nightmare in one of his compositions. Clara herself inlater life was long distressed by hearing a continual pattern of"sequences" in her head, and Bizet's early death was a release from twonotes that dinned his ears interminably. 

Schumann's eccentricities became a proverb. Alice Mangold Diehl tellsof meeting Robert and Clara, and finding him peevish and her a model ofmeekness and patience. Poor Schumann realised his failings and his owndanger, and often suggested retirement to an asylum. But the idea wastoo ghastly to endure. 

On February 27, 1854, after an especial attack of the bewilderment andhelpless terror that thrilled him, he stole away unobserved, and leapedfrom 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 placedunder restraint, and he passed his last two years in a private asylum, near Bonn. Periods of complete sanity, when he received his friends andwrote to them, alternated with periods of absolute despair. Under theweight of his affliction, his soul, like Giles Corey's body in theSalem witchcraft times, was gradually crushed to death, and at the ageof forty-six he died. Clara, who had been away on a concert tour toearn much-needed funds, hastened back from London just in time to givehim her own arms as his resting-place in his last agony. 

After his funeral she and her children went to Berlin to live withher mother. She found it necessary to travel as a performer andto teach until 1882, when her health forbade her touring longer. She had shown herself a woman worth fighting for, even asSchumann fought for her, and she had given him not only the greatestambition and the greatest solace his life had known, but she had beenalso the perfect helpmeet to his art. 

Schumann's music was not an easy music for the world to learn, and itis to Clara Wieck's eternal honour, that she not only inspired Schumannto write this music, and gave him her support under the longdiscouragement of its neglect and the temptations to be untrue to hisbest ideals; but that she travelled through Europe and promulgated hisart, until with her own power of intellect and persuasion she hadcoaxed and compelled the world to understand its right value, and hisgreat messages. 

She never married again, but devoted her long widowhood to his memorypersonally as well as artistically. She edited his works and publishedhis letters in 1885, with a preface, saying that her desire was to makehim known for himself as well as he was loved and honoured in hisartistic importance. As she had written in 1871, "the purity of hislife, his noble aspirations, the excellence of his heart, can never befully known except through the communication of his family andfriends. "

In return for her devotion he never made genius an excuse forinfidelity or selfishness. It seems actually and beautifully true, asReissman says, that "Schumann's devotions were as chaste and devout asthose of the soul of a pure woman. "

Such a love, such a courtship, and such a wedlock as that of Robert andClara Schumann ennoble not only the art and history of music, but thoseas well of humanity. 

CHAPTER VII. 

MUSICIANS AS LOVERS

"Et le cortège chantait quelque chose de triste des oh! et desah!"--ZOLA, _L'Assommoir_. 

And now at the end of all this gossip, to see if it has served anypurpose, and if the multitude of experiences totals up into anydefinite result:

Of course, as you were just going to say, he said, "If music be thefood of love. " But then you must not fail to remember that in anotherplay he hedged by saying, "Much virtue in an 'if. '" For music is notthe food of love, any more than oatmeal or watermelons. And yet in asense, music is a love-food--in the sense I mean, that there islove-nourishment in tubes of paint, which can perpetuate your beauty, my fair readeress; or in ink-bottles all ebon with Portuguese sonnetsand erotic rondeaux; or in tubs of plaster of Paris, or inbargain-counterfuls of dress goods to add the last word to a woman'sbeauty. 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 rhythmof Tristanic desire, and another portrayed in unexpurgated harmoniesthe garden-mood of Faust and Marguerite. 

But as there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visionslike Franz Stuck's "War, " or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and asthere are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathingreviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music towrite 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 isa generalisation in the opposite direction. You can prove anything bystatistics, if you can only choose your statistics and stop when youwant to. But statistics are like automobiles. Sometimes if you hitchyourself up with a statistic, you meet the fate of the farmer who puthis fool head in the yoke with a skittish steer. 

There was a time when I could have written you an essay on the moraleffect 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 animmoral influence. But that time is gone now, after a time spent ingathering material from everywhichway for this book on musicians' loveaffairs. For, to repeat, with a few statistics you can prove anything;with a complete array you can usually prove nothing, or its next-doorneighbour. 

The way to test any food is to observe its effects on those addicted toit. To study the true workings of music, then, you would not count thepulse of one of those "Oh-I'm-passionately-fond-of-music" maidens whotalk all through even dance-music. Nor would you take for your test oneof those laymen who are fond of this tune or that, because it remindsthem of the first time they heard it--"that night when Sally Perkinssang it while I was out in the moonlit piazza hugging Kitty Gray, nowMrs. Van Van, --or was it Bessie Brown? who buried her husband two yearsago next Sunday. "

These are people to whom music is as much a rarity as Nesselrode to anewsboy. 

The true place, surely, to test the effect of music is in the souls ofthe people who live in it, breathe it, steep themselves in it, playit, --and what is worse, --work it. 

To the great musicians themselves, then, we have turned. What couldhave been better for the purpose than to have made them parade beforeus in historic mardi-gras? wearing their hearts on their sleeves, or intheir letters, their music, their lives, as they trooped forthendlessly from the tomes of Burney, Hawkins, Fétis, Grove, Riemann, andfrom their biographies and memoirs innumerable?

A motley crew they have formed, and you perhaps have been able to finda unity, if not of purpose, at least of result, in the music they havemade, and the music that has made them. Let them pass again, only thistime as soldiers go by at a review--the second time at thedouble-quick. Here they come--watch them well. 

Leading the rout are those stately or capering figures, who, from beingthe great virtuosi of their time, were finally idolised into gods inthe Golden Age, when musical critics had no columns to perpetuate theiriconoclasms in. 

Mark him with the stately stride--Apollo, smiting his lyre with amajesty hardly supported by the seven small notes he could get out ofit. The gossips said he loved Daphne, and madly withal, but she took toa 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 theend of the Middle Age, went from Flanders and thereabouts, into Italyand all around Europe, weaving their Flemish counterpoint like a netall over the world of music. They seem all to have been marrying men, some of them super-romantical, others as stodgily domestic and workadayas any village blacksmith. There is Marc Houtermann, called the Princeof Musicians. He lived at Brussels, and died there aged forty, and thesame year he was followed to his grave by his musically named JoannaGavadia, who knew music well, and who, let us still hope, died of abroken heart. Cipriano de Rore, De Croes, and Jacques Buus were allmarried men, and begot hostages to fortune. Philippe de Monte may ormay not have married; we only know that a pupil of his wrote him aLatin poem forty-six lines long, and we can only trust that he did notmarry her. 

Orlando di Lasso, "one of the morning stars of modern times, " whosemusic was so beautiful that once at Munich a thunder-storm wasmiraculously hushed at the first note of one of his motets, lived alove-life much like Schumann's, save that he seems to have had nohard-hearted parents to strengthen and purify his resolve. The onlycourt he went to, to win her, was the court at Munich, where his Reginawas a maid of honour. She bore him six children, and they livedideally, it seems. But his health gave way now and then before his hardwork, and finally, when he had reached his threescore and ten, his wifecame home to find him gone mad, and unable even to recognise her, whohad been at his side for thirty years. She guarded him tenderly, andstrove hard to cheer his last days, but melancholy surrendered him onlyto death. 

Adrien Willaert had a wife, and loved her long and well, and wrote manywills, in which he grew more and more affectionate toward his helpmeet, yet strangely he never mentioned his daughter, who was herself acomposer, and had perhaps a romance of her own, down there in Juliet'scountry where her Flemish father took her. 

How otherwise is the domestic life of Jacques de Wert, whose wifeconspired against him heinously, and put his very life in danger! Whenhe was well rid of this baggage, he fell into an intrigue with a ladyof the court of Ferrara. Her name was Tarquinia Molza, and she was apoetess, but her relatives frowned upon the alliance of her poetry andhis music, and forced her to go back to her mother at Mantua, where sheoutlived De Wert some twenty-seven years. 

His is such a life as one would take to prove the unsettling effects ofmusic; yet what shall we say then of Josse Boutmy, who livedninety-nine years and raised twelve children, spending the greater partof his life with his faithful spouse in one long struggle againstpoverty, one eternal drudgery for the pence necessary to educate hisfamily? Shall we not say that he was as truly influenced by music asJacques de Wert?

De Wert had gone to Italy as a boy, and you might be after blamingthose soft Italian skies for his amorous troubles. But then you'llencounter such a life as that of Palestrina spent altogether in Italy. He married young. Her name was Lucrezia, and their life seems to havebeen one of ideal devotion. She bore him four sons, and stood by him inall his troubles, brightening the twilight of poverty, adorning thathigh noon of his glory, when the Pope himself turned to Palestrina, andimplored him to reform and rescue the whole music of the Church fromits corruptions. It was well that Lucrezia could offer him solace, forunwittingly she had once brought him his direst distress. When he wasrecovered and well, a better post was offered him, and things ransmoothly till, twenty-five years later, Lucrezia died, leaving himbroken-hearted with only one worthless son to embitter the lastfourteen years of his widowed life. His most poignantly impressivemotets 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, theheart-broken composer, mourning by the banks of the Tiber, for the lostwife whom he had loved so long. "

Close upon so noble a life, artistic and personal, comes the career ofGeorges de la Hèle, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative beneficeto wed the woman he wished. 

And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio deCotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and wasrebuked 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 celebratedhim in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and howeager she was that the two sons that survived out of their sixchildren, 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 asmakers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names asfamily makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lackingin virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity. He was notoriously immoral, and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had beenbefore him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by hislife and preëminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to anytheory about the immoral influences of the art. For surely, if he, whois generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardlyequalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has anunsettling effect upon society. And yet there are his great rivals, Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possiblecontrast. 

It is neither here nor there, that "Father" Bach left little money andmany children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. Anddrifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters tolive upon the charity of the town. It is unfortunate to have to includeamong the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fairfamily man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed hisfather's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He hadfamily troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. Somuch for the Bachs. 

A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers ofCremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began hislife romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen oreighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man whohad been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari, and they were married on July 4, 1667. In the following December the firstof their six children was born. Two of his sons took up their father'strade. 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 youngerthan he. She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than ayear. His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame, at Cremona. 

The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were theGuarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs, though he who called himself "Jesus, " was addicted to imprisonment, andis said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by thejailer's daughter. She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries. 

But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorousand domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty ofone of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, GeorgFriedrich Händel, who was born the very same year as the much-marriedBach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The firstsnub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the postof organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married yearsbefore the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and hadleft behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance uponhis successor. Händel could have got the job, if he would have had thegirl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for anothermusician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vainunder those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by abeautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he wasin England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with twodifferent women. The mother of the first objected to him as a merefiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, onlyto be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady ofhigh degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to bedeclined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that"rejection implied no lack of merit. " Seeing that these things happenedin the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romanticenough to go into a decline, and die beautifully. 

Whatever food music may have been to Händel's greatness, there wasanother food that rivalled it in his esteem; and that food was thesymphonic poetry of the cook. For Händel was almost equally famous bothas a composer and a digester. In this he was rivalled by the father ofFrench opera, Lully, who was a gourmand, in spite of the fact that hespent his early life as a kitchen boy. He led his wife a miserableexistence on account of his hot temper, his brutality, and his excessesin 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 wellout of hers. He did not wed, however, until he was forty-three, andthen he wed an eighteen-year-old girl, who was, they say, a very goodwoman, and who did her best to make her husband very happy. But he wastaciturn, and rarely spoke even to his own family, and spent on themalmost less money than words. Another opera composer of the time wasReinhard Keiser. He married a woman who, with her wealth and her voice, rescued his operatic ventures from bankruptcy. These make a rathersordid and unromantic group. 

But again there stalks forth, to confound all our theories, the superbfigure of Gluck, who fell in love but once, and then for all time, withMaria Anna Pergin, who loved him, and whose mother approved of him, butwhose purse-proud father despised him for a musician. The loversaccepted the rebuff as a temporary sorrow only, and Providence, like aplayright, removed the stern parent in the next act. Gluck flew backfrom Italy to Vienna to his betrothed, "with whom to his death he dweltin happiest wedlock. " She went with him on his triumphal tours, andspent her wealth in charities. They had no children of their own, butadopted a niece. The devoted wife used to play his accompaniment as hesang his own music, and when he died he took especial pains that sheshould be his sole and exclusive heir, even leaving it to her pleasurewhether 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 andpartisan, the successful composer and immortal writer, Jean JacquesRousseau, would not intrude upon the picture with his faun-likepaganisms and magnificently shameless "Confessions. "

Jostling elbows with him comes Gluck's chiefest rival, Piccinni, one ofthe most beautiful characters in history, a man who could wage a mortalcombat 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 areckless voluptuary, who seems never to have married. 

Piccinni was the very beau ideal of a father and a husband. He and hiswife, who was a singer of exquisite skill and a teacher of ability, gave little home concerts, which were events. They and their manychildren went through more vicissitudes than have fallen to the lot ofmany musicians; but always they loved one another and their art, andthere always remains that picture which the Prince of Brunswickstumbled upon, when he knocked at Piccinni's door, and found himrocking the cradle of one of his children, while another tugged at hiscoat in boisterous fun, and the mother beamed her enjoyment. 

Hardly less ideal, though far more picturesque and dramatic, was theromance of Mozart. 

This goldenhearted genius was a composer at an age when many childrenhave not commenced to learn their ABC's; he was a virtuoso before thetime when most boys can be trusted with a blunt knife. Kissed andfondled by great beauties, from the age of five, it is small wonderthat Mozart began to improvise upon the oldest theme in the worldprecociously. His first recorded love affair is found in his letters atthe age of thirteen. He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that hegave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmostfrivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the"Bäsle, " he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turnaside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon thefifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took inboarders. For this girl, Aloysia Weber, he wanted to give up his owncareer as a concert pianist; he wanted to give up the conquest he hadplanned of Paris, and devote himself to the training of her voice, towriting operas for her exploitation, and to journeying in Italy for theproduction of these operas and the promulgation of her talents. Yetafter breaking his heart, as he supposed, for the gifted and ficklewoman who became a successful prima donna, --after losing her, he didthat most impossible thing which could never happen in real fiction, and sought his consolation in the arms and in the heart of Aloysia'syounger sister, who was not especially pretty, and was only modestlymusical. But her name was Constanze, and she lived up to it. 

Constanze could always read to him, and tell him stories as he liked tohave her do while he composed, and she could cut up his meat for himlest 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 gentlernurse than he. Besides, when winter was upon them, it was no winter ofdiscontent, for if the fire gave out and the fuel could not beafforded, could they not always waltz together?

Twice Mozart must make concert tours for money, and twice he came homepoorer than he went, but at least he left the world some of thegentlest and most hearty love-letters in its literature. When he was athome, Vienna was busy with anecdotes of his devotion. He was indeed sogood a husband that Constanze could not even withhold forgiveness forcertain occasions when he strayed from the narrow path of absolutefidelity; for she knew that his heart had its home with her. When hedied, supposedly of malignant typhus, she tried to catch his diseaseand die with him, and her health broke so completely that she could notattend his funeral; and when she was recovered enough to visit thecemetery, she could not discover, what no man has since found out, injust what three-deep pauper's grave Mozart was buried. 

All in all, in spite of certain ficklenesses in which this immortalmusician has been surpassed by lovers of all walks of life, fromblacksmiths to bishops, music has created one of tenderest, most honestof all romances. 

But then there was a man whose life encompassed Mozart's, as a longbrace encompasses a stave of music. For Joseph Haydn was borntwenty-four years before Mozart, and died eighteen years after him. Andthis man's love affairs were of altogether different fabric. 

While Mozart died in his poverty at thirty-five, Haydn, dying atseventy-seven, was worried over the endowment he should leave to adiscarded mistress, whose name, strangely enough, was also Aloysia. AndHaydn, more than strangely enough, had begun his life the same way byproposing to an older sister, and marrying a younger; but with resultshow unlike!

Haydn also found his inamorata in the home of a poor man who had beenkind to him. His wife, however, led him a dog's life. The only interestshe seemed to have in his music was to keep him writing numbers for thepriests, 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 Neapolitansinger, who was unhappily married to a poor fiddler, named Polzelli. The two lovers made little secret of their hope that one or both oftheir 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 marriedagain, though to the last she held Haydn to an agreement he had madeyears 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 ofgentle idolatry. She had been writing these to him while he had beenwriting ardent letters of yearning to Polzelli. Altogether Haydn doesnot shine as the beau ideal of single-hearted fidelity. 

Was it from him that Beethoven caught his own fickleness along with somuch of his musical manner? Beethoven had one of the busiest hearts inhistory. 

We cannot say that he might not have been a marrying man if disease anddeafness had not harrowed his volcanic soul, and made his life solargely one of tempestuous tragedy, in which he wandered through theworld, and found it as homeless and as bleak as did the Wandering Jew, whose quarrels with Fate were no more fierce, more majestic, nor morevain than Beethoven's. Among the multitudinous agonies that throng hisletters and rave through his music, are many cries of wild longing fora homelife in a woman's heart. 

But these "diminished sevenths" of unrest and yearning are oftenresolved in a cold minor of resignation or of cynicism in which heclaims 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 domesticinclinations. The most confirmed bachelors have their moments of doubt, and Beethoven had every qualification for driving a wife even madderthan he himself could be on occasions. His most intimate and unswervingfriends were the victims of spasms of suspicious hatred andmaltreatment that surely no wife worth having could ever have enduredthrough the honeymoon. 

And yet in his love-letters there is a notable absence of jealousy orwhim, and we can only accept his life as we find it, and regard him asa great genius who rushed from love to love, and never tarried forwedlock. As to the quality of those love affairs, --we meet a conflictof authority; some of his friends recording him as a wonder ofchastity, and others treating him as a never-tiring flirt. 

Among the thirty or more women who accepted his attentions, he couldeasily have found a wife, had he been at heart a marrying man. He hasperpetuated in his dedications all these flames, and it was in thefurnace of these flames that much of his music was forged. But howshall 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 Händel?And to these two bachelors there belongs a third great bachelor ofmusic, Schubert, who is said never to have loved a woman. Even thepaltry anecdote or two of his hopeless love for a very young countessis 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 caféswith boisterous friends, working up a maximum enthusiasm on a minimumof food, living a life of much art and equal beer. He seems never tohave truly cared for women, nor to have been cared for by them. 

There are all sorts of bachelorhoods, and there is a wide distinctionbetween the womanless splendour of Händel's life at court, and theunilluminated garret of Schubert's obscurity. There is a differencealso in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicatedthirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who, though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to haveloved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once. 

Chopin, only half-Polish, and finding his true home in Paris, had beenloved by the tiny musicienne, hardly so big as her name, LeopoldineBlahetka, but his first true love was for the raving beauty, ConstantiaGladkovska, whom he mourned for in prose as highly coloured as hisnocturnes, wishing that after his death his ashes might be strewn underher feet. She married elsewhere. The Polish Maria Wodzinska was hisnext flame, and he wished to marry her, but he, who had the salons ofParis at his princely behest, could not hold this nineteen-year-oldgirl. Then he fell into the embrace of George Sand, that mysterioussphinx who clasped him to her commodious heart, and held him as withclaws, though little he cared to escape; and yet, her claws drew blood, and at length it was the sphinx herself who struggled for release fromthe embrace of the fretful genius, whom consumption was claiming withher own clammy arms. Every one knows all there is to know about theChopin-Sand affair, all and a great deal more, but who could draw fromit any inference as to the effect of music?

Sand was attracted to Chopin by his art. With her as nurse, his geniusaccomplished much of its greatest, and it held her enthralled for atime. To Chopin, music was both a medicine and a disease, torment andsolace. But that he would have lived his life differently in any wayhad he been a painter, a poet, an architect, a man of affairs, or anidler, with the same effeminate nature, the same elegance of manner, the same disease, the same women about him, I can find no reason tobelieve. Is it not the man and the environment rather than the musicthat makes such a life what it is?

There is another brilliant consumptive, Carl Maria von Weber, a memberof a long line of musicians. At seventeen he had formed "a tenderconnection with a lady of position, " whom he lost sight of later andforgot in the race with fast young noblemen, whose dissipation herivalled. A mad entanglement with a singer ruined him in purse, andalmost in career. His frivolities ended in an arrest and punishmentwhich 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 gaveGermany some of its most cheerful music. His heart was restless, andstill at the age of twenty-seven he was writhing in an infatuation fora worthless ballet-girl. Then his affection for a singer and soubrette, Caroline Brandt, steadied him. After a long period of effort toestablish 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 idealhusband and father. His letters to his wife are full of ardour. It wasa tour through England that exhausted Chopin's last strength, and itwas Weber's fate to die alone in London in the midst of eagerpreparations and vast hunger to reach his home. He was not quite fortywhen he died, and his life had been two lives, one of uncheckedlibertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in thelatter half that he wrote his best music. 

The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleadedeven more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn. A more musical homethan that in which Mendelssohn grew up, could hardly exist, nor one inwhich family life reached a higher level of comfort and delight. LikeMozart, Mendelssohn was especially devoted to his sister. Her deathindeed grieved him so deeply, that he died shortly after. A man of theutmost 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 slightflirtations, but seems to have been even engaged but once, to CécileJeanrenaud, whom he married. His home life was a repetition of thatideal circle in his father's house. A busier life or a more pleasantlyrespectable can hardly be found in the history of men, nor yet a moretruly musical. 

A life of similar brilliance and similar musical immersion was that ofLiszt, whose domestic career was nevertheless as different as possible. A soul of greater generosity, and more zealous altruism in manyrespects, it would be hard to find, and yet his relations to womenwere, in the conventional view, a colossal and multifarious scandal. Have we any more right to blame his domestic outrages to the music thatwas in him, than to the almost equally intense religious ardour thatfought for him, leading him again and again to seek to enter amonastery, and finally actually to take orders? Abélard was asufficiently tempestuous and irregular lover, yet he was a priest, andnot a musician. Can we then blame harmony and melody for thehumming-bird "amours" of the Abbe Liszt, --for the many women he madematerial love to from his early youth, --for the very dubious honesty ofhis bearing toward the Comtesse d'Agoult and the Princess Wittgenstein, with whom he debated the formalities of marriage without hesitatingover the actualities?

There is a strange cluster of domestic infelicities centring aboutLiszt. The Comtesse d'Agoult loved him so ardently that she braved theworld for him, driving even her complacent husband to divorce her; buteven then, though they lived together, Liszt did not marry her. He evenbrought George Sand, the ex-mistress of so many men, including Liszthimself, to live at the house with the comtesse, who had borne himthree children out of wedlock. One of these children became the wife ofHans von Bülow, who was driven to divorce her that she might marry histeacher, Richard Wagner, whose first wife had endured twenty-five yearsof his irregularities in everything, except poverty, and who separatedfrom him during the last five years of her life. 

Shall we blame all this to music, and if so, shall we say that musichas atoned sufficiently in the devotion of Wagner and his second wifeto each other, and their lofty theories of art? And in any case, howshall we explain the influence of music in the life of Wagner's rivalfor supremacy, Johannes Brahms, a confirmed bachelor; or his othercontemporary, Tschaikovski, who, after a normal love affair with asinger, Desirée Artôt, who jilted him, eventually married a girl bywhom he seemed to have been deeply loved, without feeling any return?He claimed to have explained to the enamoured girl that he would marryher if she wished, but that he could not love her. On these terms sheaccepted him, and the bridegroom endured all the agonies of heartordinarily ascribed to bartered brides. A burlesque honeymoon of a weekwas soon followed by a separation. Tschaikovski regarded his wife witha horror bordering on insanity, finding what little consolation lifehad for him in the devotion of a widow, who furnished him liberallywith funds and admiration, with an affection which, for lack of betterinformation, 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 curiousentanglements, especially in the matter of the men and women who haveplayed upon the human voice, but we have surely collected enoughmaterial for forming a judgment, especially when we have turned anadditional glance upon the life of one other composer. 

Now, the influence of music might be modified beyond recognition by thefact that one of the lovers might not be musical; but surely, when bothman and woman are professional musicians, there can be no doubt of thegoverning power of music. In recent musical history there is oneeminent composer who married a woman also prominent in music. In fact, Clara Wieck has been called the most eminent woman who ever took upmusic as a profession. It would be hard to deny Robert Schumann a placeamong the major gods of creative art. Every one knows how he began tolove Clara, and she him, when he was first leaving his teens and sheentering her fame as an eleven-year-old prodigy. Their fidelity throughthe storm and stress of their courtship, their lifelong sympathy andcollaboration in conserving a humanly perfect home, and in achieving adual immortality, both as lovers and as musicians--these certainlyindicate music as a solidifying and enriching force in society. 

And now, finally, in the procession that has filed past you, you haveseen almost every imaginable form of love and lover, of husband andLothario, or woman-hater. There have been cool-blooded bachelors likeHändel, Schubert, and Brahms; there have been passionate pilgrims likeChopin, 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 saidafter his death, that there was not a moment of their six years'honeymoon she could regret or would not re-live. There have been theunhappily wed, who, through the fault of themselves, or their wives, found and made misery at home, and sought nepenthe elsewhere, such asHaydn, Berlioz, and Tschaikovski. There have been married lives ofmixed nature, neither failure nor success, such as the careers ofLully, Rameau, Stradivari, and Wagner. 

If any one lives who could extract from this medley a theory as to theeffect of music upon the human heart, --a theory that will satisfyhimself alone, to say nothing of the world in general, --he is welcometo his conclusion. To me it is a chaos wherethrough I cannot pretend totrace 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 onlife, I will hurl at his head some of the most brilliant rascals indomestic chronicle; and equally, if any man will deny that music has amoral effect, I will barricade his path with some of the most beautifullives that have ever bloomed upon earth. It is, after all, a matter oftime, tide, and temperament. If a man of amorous nature happens to leada life of much leisure, his idle mind will turn one way; and if thetide of opportunity concur, he will be dissipated, whether he becomposer, 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 universalart, like a universal watch-key, will set going the complicated cogsand springs of every soul and yet not regulate or assure its rhythm. Music stimulates and satisfies the mind in any of its whims, and youcan tune it to a softly chanted prayer, or to a dance orgy; to a hymnof exultation, or a tinkling serenade; a kindergarten song, to thebloodthirst of armies; to voluptuous desires that cannot or dare not beworded, or to raptures distilled of every human dross; to cynicalraillery, or the very throb of a young lover's heart; to the hilarityof a drinking song, or the midnight elegies of ineffable despair. Howis 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 areevery-day puppets of circumstance and of inner and outer environment, who might have been happier, and might have been unhappier, with thewomen they wed or did not wed, had those women died younger, or livedlonger--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 daPalestrina. 2 vols. Rome, 1828. 

BEAUFORT (RAPHAEL LEDOS DE). 

Franz Lizst. The Story of his Life. Boston, 1887. 

BEETHOVEN'S LETTERS. See Nohl. 

BÉLART (HANS). 

Richard Wagner in Zürich (1849-1859). 2 vols. Leipzig. 1901. 

BELLAIGNE (CAMILLE). 

Portraits and Silhouettes of Musicians. Translated by Ellen Orr. NewYork, 1897. 

BELLASIS (Edward). 

Cherubini. Memorials illustrative of his life. London. 1874. 

BEYLE (MARIE HENRI). 

Lettres entre de Vienne en Autriche sur le célèbre compositeur Haydn, suivées d'une vie de Mozart et de considérations sur Metastasio. Pub. 1814, first under the pseudonym _L. A. Bombet_, and when exposed as asteal from Carpani (_q. V_. ) republished under the pseudonym DoctorStendahl in 1817. Published in English by W. Gardiner, 1820. 

BEYLE (MARIE HENRI). 

Vies de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Métastase. Par de Stendahl (Pseudonym). Nouvelle éd. Paris, 1854. 

BITTER (CARL II. ). 

Carl Philipp Emanuel und Wilhelm Friedemann Bach und deren Brüder. 2vols. Berlin, 1868. 

BONNET (JACQUES). 

Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'àprésent. Paris, 1715. 

BOURDELOT (Pierre), ABBÉ. 

Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, depuis son origine jusqu'apresent. Et en quoi consiste sa beauté. 4 vols. In 1. Amsterdam, 1725. 

BRAY (MRS. ANNA ELIZA). 

Handel, his life personal and professional. With thoughts on sacredmusic. A sketch. 2 vols. London, 1857. 

BÜLOW (M. VON). 

The early correspondence of Hans von Bülow. 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, Ancientand Modern. 4 vols. London, 1825. 

CARPANI (GIUSEPPE). 

Le Haydine. Lettere sur la vita e le opera del celebre Maestro GiuseppeHaydn. Milano, 1812. Also in French, translated by Dominique Mondo, andin 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. Händel. 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 femalevocalists, who have appeared on the lyric stage, etc. 2 vols. London, 1863. 

COXE (WILLIAM). 

Anecdotes of George Frederick Händel, and John C. Smith. With selectpieces 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, byRosa Newmarch. London, 1878. 

DELMOTTE (H. ). 

Notice biographique sur Roland Delattre. Paris, 1836. Translated intoGerman 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. 

FÉTIS (F. J. )

Biographic universelle des Musiciens et Bibliographic générale de laMusique. 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. 

GINGUENÉ (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. Englishversion (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 über 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. EastAurora, 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 Études. Lettres inédites 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 MayHerbert. 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. 2vols. Boston, 1892. 

KARAJAN (TH. G. VON). 

J. Haydn in London. Vienna, 1861. 

KARASOWSKI (MORITZ). 

Frederic Chopin, His Life, Letters, and Works. Translated by EmilyHill. 2 vols. London, 1879. 

KARLOWICZ. See _Revue Musicale_. 

KASHKIN (N. ). 

Reminiscences of Peter Iljitsch Tschaikovski. Moscow, 1897. 

KOBBÉ (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. Bände. Leipzig, 1893-1899. 

LA MARA (Pseudonym of MARIE LIPSIUS). 

Letters of Franz Liszt. Collected and edited by "La Mara. " Translatedby 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 Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen. 2 vols. Vol. I. , Leipzig, 1902. 

MAINWARING (DOCTOR). 

Memoirs of Händel. 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 LadyWallace. New York, 1864. 

MILLS (CHARLES). 

History of the Crusades. London. 

MIROMÉNIL (M. C. DE). 

Le génie de l'amour ou dissertation sur l'amour profane et réligieux etde 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 otherbiographies see Waldersee. 

NISSEN (GEORG NIKOLAUS VON). 

Biographie W. A. Mozart's. Nach dessen Tode herausgegeben von Constanze, Witwe von Nissen, früher 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. NewYork, 1866. 

NOHL (LUDWIG). 

Neue Briefe Beethovens. Stuttgart, 1867. 

NOHL (LUDWIG). 

Ludwig Beethoven. Reminiscences of the Artistic and Home Life of theArtist. 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 LadyWallace. New York, 1869. 

PRAEGER (FERDINAND). 

Wagner as I Knew Him. London. 

RAMANN (L. ). 

Franz Liszt, Artist and Man. 1811-1840. Translated by E. Cowdrey. 2vols. London, 1882. 

RAU (HERBERT). 

Mozart. Ein Künstlerleben. (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 inédites, publiés par M. Karlowicz. )

RIEMANN (HUGO). 

Dictionary of Music. New edition. Translated by J. S. Shedlock. London(undated). 

RODET (EDOUARD). 

Lully, homme d'affairs, propriétaire 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 uberdessen Bedeutung für 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 undtonkünstlerisches 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 MayHerbert. London, 1888. 

SCHUMANN (ROBERT). 

The Life of Robt. Schumann, told in his Letters. Translated by MayHerbert. London. 

SCHURÉ (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 "UnsterblicheGeliebte"). 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 siècle. 8 vols. Brussels, 1867-88. 

VAN DER STRAETEN (EDMOND). 

Les Ménéstrels aux Pays-Bas du 13e-18e siècle. Brussels, 1878. 

WAGNER. 

Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt. Translated into English by FrancisHueffer. New York, 1889. 

WALDERSEE (PAUL GRAF VON). 

Sammlung Musikalischer Vorträge. 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

Abélard, PierreAdonisÆsculapiusAgoult, Comte d'Agoult, Marie Sophie, Comtesse d'Amati, family of violin-makersAnfossi, PasqualeAnhalt-Köthen, Prince ofAnne, QueenAphroditeApolloArco, CountArionArne, Dr. ThomasArnim, Bettina Brentano vonArtignon, D'Artot, DesiréeAuber, D. F. E. AurnhammerAusten, Jane

BacchylidesBach, Johann AmbrosiusBach, Johann ChristophBach, Johann MichaelBach, Johann SebastianBach, Karl Philip EmmanuelBach, Maria BarbaraBach, ReginaBach, Wilhelm FriedemannBaillot, Pierre M. F. Baini, Abbate GiuseppeBalfe, Michael WilliamBanck, CarlBaranius, HenriettaBarcinska, IsabellaBarezzi, MargaritaBargiel, Madame, mother of Clara WieckBargiel, WoldemarBarisani, DoctorBarré, LeonardoBartalozzi, MadameBeard, JohnBeatrice (Portinari), Dante's museBecker, Konstantin J. Beethoven, Ludwig vonBehrens, S. Belart, HansBelderbusch, Count vonBellington, Mrs. Bellini, VincenzoBelonda, Fräulein vonBennett, SterndaleBerenclowBériot, Charles Auguste deBerlioz, HectorBerlioz, MadameBetz, FranzBeyle, Marie HenriBianchi, AntoniaBizet, GeorgesBlackburn, VernonBlahetka, LeopoldineBlow, JohnBoëtius, AniciusBöhler, ChristineBoieldieu, Francois A. Boileau-Despréaux, NicolasBonnet, J. Bononcini, Giovanni M. Bora, Catherina vonBoswell, JamesBourdelotBoutmy, Josse _or_ JodocusBoutmy, LaurentBrahms, JohannesBrandt, CarolinaBray, MrsBrebos, GillesBrebos, JeanBrenner, Genofeva vonBreunig, Eleanora vonBreunig, Stephan vonBridgetower, George Augustus PolgreenBroschi, Carlo _(see_ Farinelli)Browne, Countess vonBrowning, Robert and ElizabethBrunetti, TheresaBrunswick, Charlotte, Countess vonBrunswick, Therese vonBrutus, Marcus JuniusBull, Dr. JohnBülow, Cosima von _(see also_ Wagner)Bülow, Daniela vonBülow, Hans vonBülow, Isolde vonBuononcini _(see_ Bononcini)Burney, CharlesBuus, JacquesBuxtehude, DietrichByrd, WilliamByron, Lord

Cabestanh, Guillem deCaccini, FrancescaCalinaCannabich, RosaCapra, FrancescaCarlyle, ThomasCarpani, GCarus, ProfessorCzetwertynska, Ludvika, DuchessCharles X. , KingCharpentier, MadameChaucer, GeoffreyCherubini, M. L. Z. C. S. Chopin, FrederickChopin, Louise, his sisterChrysander, Fr. Cimarosa, DomenicoClementi, MuzioCleopatraClosset, DoctorColbran, Isabella_Copperfield, David__Cordelia_Corelli, MarieCorey, GilesCornaro, CardinalCornelius, Peter vonCoronis, nymphCotes, Ambrosio deCouçy, Chatelain Regnault deCouwenhoven, AdrienCoxe, Dr. WilliamCristofori, B. Croes, H. J. DeCrowest, F. W. Cummings, W. H. CupidCustine, Countess deCuzzoni, Francesca

DanteDaphneDavidDavid, LeahDelmotteDelorme, MarianDesmarets, HenriDesprès, JosquinDevrient, Wilhelmine SchroederDickens, CharlesDiderot, DenisDiehl, Alice MangoldDies, Albert K. Droszdick, Baron vonDubufe, EdwardDubufe, Guillaume"Duchess, " TheDudevant, Aurore (_see_ Sand, George)Du Maurier, George_Dunciad_

Eck, FrancisEgeria, nymph"Eliot, George"Érard, The familyErdödy, Countess MarieErtmann, BaronessEspinosa, Juana deEsterhazy, PrinceEsterhazy, CarolinaEstrades, Abbé d'

Farinelli (properly Carlo Broschi)Faustina (_see_ Hasse)Fechner, ClementineFerdinand VII. Of SpainFerrabosco, DomenicoFétis, Fr. J. Field, JohnFilaretovna, NadeschdaFinck, Henry T. Flavigny, ComteFleury, Duchesse de, Flotow, Fr. VonFontanaFortiniFournier, MadameFranci, LuigiFranck, CésarFranz, RobertFricken, Ernestine vonFumaroli, JudgeFumetti, Maria AnnaFürstenau, A. B. 

GalateaGalilei, GalileoGallenberg, CountGarella, LydiaGastoldi, DoctorGautier, TheophileGavadia, JoannaGeminiani, FrancescoGenast, DorisGenzinger, Maria Anna Sabina vonGiannatasioGiannatasio, Fanny del RioGinguené, Pierre LouisGiorgione, GiorgioGladovska, ConstantiaGlasenapp, Karl Fr. Gleichenstein, I. Gleichenstein, Mathilde, BaronessGlinka, Michail IvanovitchGluck, Christoph Willibald, Ritter vonGoethe, Johann WolfgangGounod, CharlesGrabowski, JosephGregoriusGrieg, EdvardGriesinger, G. A. Grétry, André E. M. Grétry, LucilleGrimm, BaronGrob, TheresaGrove, Sir GeorgeGuabaelaraoen, MadalenaGuadagnini, J. B. Guarnieri, Andreas, Pietro, and GiuseppeGublitzGuicciardi, Giulietta

Halévy, GenevièveHamilton, Lady EmmaHändel, Georg FriedrichHanmann, Fräulein vonHaslinger, TobiasHasse, J. A. And FaustinaHawkins, Sir JohnHaydn, JosephHeim, EmilieHeine, HeinrichHelen of TroyHéloise, AbbessHenderson, W. J. Hensel, FannyHerbert, Lady HenriettaHérold, L. J. F. Herschel, Fr. Wm. Hiller, FerdinandHinrichs, Marie _(see_ Franz)Hodges, Mrs. Hoesick, FerdinandHofdämmelHohenlohe, CardinalHonrath, Jeannette d'HortensiaHoutermann, MarcHoward, Lady ElizabethHubbard, ElbertHuber, FräuleinHueffer, FrancisHugo, Victor and MadameHummel, J. N. Humphries, PelhamHuneker, JamesHunter, Mrs. John

_Ibbetson, Peter_IrisiIvanof, Maria PetrovnaIvanovska, Carolina von

Jahn, OttoJames, HenryJeanrenaud, Cécile Sophie CharlotteJeanrenaud, MadameJennings, CatherineJoachim, JosefJonahJulius III. , Pope

Kablert, AugustKarajan, T. G. , Ritter vonKarasovski, M. KarlovicsKashkin, N. Kayser, Hofrath vonKeats, JohnKeglevitch, Babette, Countess vonKeiser, ReinhardKeiserin, MileKellerKeller, AnnaKind, J. F. Kinsky, Countess vonKlopstock, Fr. G. Koch, BarbaraKöchel, LudwigKoerner, Th. Koler, KatharinaKoschak, Frau Marie L. PachlerKrause, Justice CounsellorKrehbiel, Henry EdwardKreisler, ReinhardKreutzer, ConradinKreutzer, RudolpheKurer, Clara von

Lablache, Madame (widow of Boucher)Lacombe, Paul"La Mara, " (_see_ Bibliography)Laidlaw, Mrs. Lambert, MadelineLamennais, AbbéLampi, painterLang, MargaretheLang, PeppiLange, Laprunarède, Adele, Countess deLassus, Ferdinand deLassus, Orland diLattre, Roland de (_see_ Lassus)_Lear, King_Lefébure-Wély, Louis J. A. Leitgeb, Madame_Lelia__Leoni, Leone__Leporello, _Lichnovsky, Prince CarlLichnovsky, CountessLichtenstein, PrincessLichtenstein, Karl A. Von"Liddy"Lincoln, AbrahamList, EmilyLiszt, BlandineLiszt, DanielLiszt, FranzLitzmann, Berthold_Lorelei_Lortzing, AlbertLuciferLudvig, King of BavariaLully, Jean Baptiste deLuther, Martin

Mafleuray, ClotildaMainwaring, DoctorMalfatti, Thérèse vonMalibran, Maria FelicitaMalibran, New York merchantManfrotti, EliadeManfrotti, LeonoraMarcello, BenedettoMarcellus, PopeMarie Antoinette, Queen_Mark, King_Marlborough, The Duchess ofMarmontel, Antoine Fr. Marschner, HeinrichMattheson, JohannMatuszinskiMaupin, Mile, deMaximilian, Duke of BavariaMaximilian, EmperorMaximilienne, PrincessMary, Queen of ScotsMeck, Frau vonMedici familyMedici, Lorenzo deiMendelssohn, CarlMendelssohn, Felix BartholdyMendelssohn, MarieMendelssohn, PaulMercuryMerelliMermann, DoctorMeyerbeer, GiacomoMeyersMichelangeloMilder, AnnaMiljukova, Antonina IvanovnaMilton, JohnMolièreMolza, TarquiniaMombelli, familyMonteverde, ClaudioMontpensier, Mlle. DeMoretto, Count deMoriolles, Countess AlexandraMoscheles, IgnazMosson, MinnaMozart, Anna or "Nannerl"Mozart, CarlMozart, LeopoldMozart, MarianneMozart, WolfgangMüller, EliseMusset, Alfred de

"Nanni""Nanny"Negri, ChristineNeimtschekNelson, Horatio, AdmiralNewmarch, RosaNewton, Sir IsaacNiecks, FrederickNietzsche, FriedrichNissen, George Nicolaus vonNohl, Louis (or Ludvig)Nossig, Alfred

Odeschalchi, PrincessOlivier, EmileOrpheus

Pachler, MariePaderewskiPadilla y RamosPaër, FerdinandoPaesiello, GiovanniPaganini, AchillePalestrina, AngeloPalestrina, DoralicePalestrina, Giovanni Pier LuigiPalestrina, IginoPalestrina, LucreziaPalestrina, RodolfoPalestrina, SillaPanPasettiPaul IV. , PopePecht, painterPelissier, OlympePember, E. H. Pergin, JosephPergin, Marie AnnaPergolesi, G. B. Peri, JacopoPerl, HenryPepys, SamuelPeyermann, FrauPfeiffer, MariannePhilidor, Fr. , Andre DanicanPiccinni, MadamePiccinni, NicolaPitoni, G. O. Pius IX. , PopePlaner, Wilhelmine or MinnaPlater, CountessPlatoPlayford, JohnPoe, Edgar AllenPohl, LouisPohl, RichardPoliziano, AngeloPolko, ElisePolovna, Marie, Grand Duchess of WeimarPolzelli, AntonPolzelli, LuigiaPotocka, CountessPraeger, Fd. C. Wm. PrometheusPrudent, EmilePsychePurcell, Edw. Purcell, FrancesPurcell, HenryPurcell, Mary PetersPygmalion

Rackerman, LouisRaff, JoachimRamann, LinaRameau, Jean PhilippeRameau, Marie Louisa MangotRaphael, painterRavina, Jean HenriReade, CharlesReinken, Johann AdamReissman, AugustReissman, HenriettaReynolds, Sir JoshuaRicci or Rizzio, DavidRichard III. Richardson, SamuelRichter, HansRichter, Jean PaulRiemann, HugoRies, FerdinandRiese, dancing masterRinucini, OttavioRitter, JulieRocheaud, DeRochisRockstro, Wm. S. Roeckel, Elizabeth, wife of HummelRoeckel, Joseph L. Rollet, Adèle Elise_Romeo_Rore, Ciprien deRossi, CountRossi, Countess (_see_ Sontag)Rossini, Gioacchino A. RothRousseau, Jean JacquesRubinstein, AntonRubinstein, NikolaiRudel, GeoffreyRue, Pierre de laRunciman, John F. Ruskin, John

Sacchini, Antonio M. G. Salieri, Antonio"Sand, George"Sarti, GiuseppeSaulSavoy, Duchess ofSayn-Wittgenstein (_see_ Wittgenstein)Scarlatti, AlessandroScarlatti, DomenicoSchanzer, MarieSchauroth, Delphine vonScheffer, AryScheidler, DoretteSchieferdecker, J. C. Schiller, FriedrichSchillingfurst-Hohenlohe, Prince ConstantinSchindler, AntonSchmidt, AntonSchober, Franz vonSchoelcher, VictorSchopenhauer, ArthurSchroeter, CoronaSchroeter, Johann SamuelSchroeter, Mrs. R. Schubert, FranzSchumann, Clara (_see also_ Wieck)Schumann, RobertSchuré, EdouardScott, Sir WalterSebald, AmaliaSenesino (rightly Francesco Bernardi)Seranzo, PaoloSeyfried, Ignaz X. VonShakespeareSibilla, Vicenza (_see_ Piccinni)Slovaki, JuliusSmetana, FriedrichSmith, J. C. Smithson, MissSocratesSontag, HenriettaSouvaroff, PrinceSpaun, BaronSpitta, Aug. Ph. Spohr, LouisSpontini, Gasparo L. P. St. Criq, CarolineSteibelt, DanielStendahl, De (pen name of Beyle)"Stern, Daniel"Sterndale, Sir WilliamStradella, AlessandroStradivari, AntonioStradivari, FrancescoStradivari, PaoloStratton, S. S. Strauss, D. F. Strauss, JohannStrauss, JosefStreite, postmasterStrepponi, SignoraStuck, FranzSwedenborg, EmanuelSwift, JonathanSyrinx, nymph

_Tannhäuser_Tausig, KarlTenger, MiriamTesi, VittoriaThalberg, SigismundThayer, Alexander W. The deThomas, GeorginaTolstoi, Leo_Towers, Duchess of_Townsend, Pauline D. Treffy, JettyTripoli, Countess ofTromlitz, Johann G. Tschaikovski, AnatolTschaikovski, ModesteTschaikovski, Peter IljitschTschekonanof, VeraTurette, Cécile"Twain, Mark"

Uhlig, TheodorUpton, George P. 

VandamVan der Straeten, EdmondVan QuickelbergVenusVerdi, GiuseppeVerocaiVidal, PierreVigitill, EliseVillars, Marquis deVillon, FrançoisVogler, AbbéVoigt, Henrietta

Wagner, EvaWagner, RichardWagner, SiegfriedWaldegrave, Earl ofWalker, ElizabethWallace, Lady Grace"Ward, Artemus"Weber, AloysiaWeber, Carl Maria von (_see_ Mozart)Weber, ConstanzeWeber, DoctorWeber, Franz Anton vonWeber, JosephaWeber, Madame, mother of Constanze W. Weber, Max Maria, Baron vonWeber, SophiaWeckinger, ReginaWert, Jacques deWegeler, Dr. Franz G. Weimar, Grand Duke ofWeldon, Captain and MrsWendling, FräuleinWesendonck, MathildeWesendonck, OttoWesterhold, FrauleinWickerslot, AnaWieck, CarlWieck, Clara (_see also_ Schumann)Wieck, EdouardWieck, FriedrichWieck, MarieWildeck, ChristianWildeck, MagdalenaWillaert, AdrienWillaert, CatherineWillaert, SusannaWille, Frau EliseWilliam, Duke of BavariaWinchester, Lady MarchionessWittgenstein, Princess CarolineWittgenstein, Princess MarieWittgenstein, Prince Nicolaus SaynWittgenstein, Prince FürstWodzinska, MariaWodzinski, CountWolf-Metternich, Countess vonWood, Mary_Wotan_Wülken, Anna MagdalenaWürtemberg, Duchess

Xantippe

Young, Cecilia

Zambelli, AntoniaZarlino, GioseffoZelter, CarlZimmerman, Mlle. AnnaZingarelliZola