The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 16

"Here rest thee, then! ... Wherever thy genius bore thee, to whatsoever distant lands, it stayed for ever linked by a thousand tendrils to the German people's heart; that heart with which it wept and laughed, a child believing in the tales and legends of his country. And though the Briton may yield thee justice; the Frenchman, admiration; yet, the German alone can love thee. His thou art; a beautiful day in his life, a warm drop of his own blood, a morsel of his heart--and who shall blame us that we wished thy ashes, too, to mingle with this earth, to form a part of our dear German soil."

CHAPTER XVI.

THE FELICITIES OF MENDELSSOHN

Happy, they say, is the country that hath no history. Happy, too, the man whose love affairs make tame reading.

It is not often that people live up to their names so thoroughly as Mendelssohn lived up to his. His parents were prophets when they called him Felix, for his life was happy, though he enjoyed it only thirty-eight years, and though it was not without its disappointments and rebuffs,--being a Christianised Jew, he was acceptable to neither the Jews nor the Gentiles. None the less, Mendelssohn's life was, as human lives go, one of complete felicity.

Well begun is half done, and half the struggle for happiness is achieved if one's childhood years are made pleasant. Mendelssohn's home life was so brilliantly joyous, and so busy with artistic and domestic comforts, that it has almost pa.s.sed into proverb as ideal. Mendelssohn is described as having been "enthusiastically, almost fanatically, fond of his father," who, without possessing musical technic, possessed a remarkable spiritual grasp of it. His mother was something of a pianist, and a woman of great sweetness and firmness of character, to whom the children were devoted and with whom they were confidential to the utmost degree. In this atmosphere the flower of Mendelssohn's genius bore early fruit, and we find him in 1826, at the age of seventeen, writing his Overture to "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," a wonderful fabric of harmony and instrumentation, which sounds like Wagner at his best, though it was written when Wagner was only thirteen years old, and had never dreamed of writing music, nor had even turned out that old-fangled and empty sonata which is beautiful only because it was his first and last offence of the sort.

Mendelssohn, like Mozart, gave his heart first to his sister; who was like him a prodigy at the piano, and so thoroughly congenial, that when she died suddenly the shock shortened his own life. Some of her compositions were published with his, and he took her advice in many things. At the age of twenty-four she married the painter Hensel, and at the age of forty-two she died.

Mendelssohn was a man of many friends among men; he was small and excitable, but was counted handsome. He was versatile to an unusual degree, being an adept at painting, as well as billiards, chess, riding, swimming, and general athletics. He was also something of a scholar in Greek and Latin, and his correspondence was so enthusiastically kept up that his published letters take a high place in such literature, overflowing as they are with comment of all kinds on the people and things he saw in his wide travels. As an aunt of his once wrote his mother: "If G.o.d spare him, his letters will in long, long years to come create the deepest interest. Take care of them as of a holy relic; indeed, they are sacred already as the effusion of so pure and childlike a mind."

His heart was indeed remarkably clean. Stratton says of him: "He was always falling in love, as his letters show, but no breath of scandal bedimmed the s.h.i.+ning brightness of his character." "He wore his heart upon his sleeve," says Stratton. He also wore it on the tip of his pen, and one who wishes to know how possible it is to be both a good and joyous man and a great, busy musician can find such an one in Mendelssohn's published letters, though the most personal family matters have been omitted from them as printed, and his wife before her death burned all the letters he had written her.

We, however, are concerned only in his amours. When he was twenty years old, he went to England and thence to Scotland and Wales, where he spent a time composing, sketching, and exercising his fascinations; he wrote home: "Yes, children, I do nothing but flirt, and that in English." Wherever he went, he saw something beautiful in nature or in womankind, and at Munich, in 1830, he was, as his sister wrote, "the darling in every house, the centre of every circle." The fifteen-year-old Josephine or "Peppi" Lang and Delphine von Schauroth seem to have touched his heart most deeply; to the latter he dedicated a piano composition; to the former he taught double counterpoint, a forbidding subject which the two doubtlessly found gay enough. In Italy, in 1831, he found his heart captured easily, and, as once in Schumann's case, it was an English girl who entangled him. She was a beauty whom he first met at a ball at Torlonia's; he danced with her again at the Palazzo Albani. But music held him fast through all, though he could on occasion impatiently vow that he would be more serious and no longer alter his compositions to suit the whims of pretty girls.

Mendelssohn's life flowed on in smoothness, in thorough contrast with the violent ups and downs of Beethoven's mind and music, for he was, as Stratton says, "on the most excellent terms with himself," as with the world in general. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and to false friends.h.i.+p, but he was never stung into those virulent humours which poisoned Beethoven's career. So placid a life his was, indeed, that some of his admirers have wished that he had met with more tragedy, in order that he might have written more poignant music. Against this view, Grove wisely protested, comparing Schubert's words: "My music is the product of my genius and my misery; and that which I have written in my greatest distress is that which the world seems to like best." Grove moralises thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:

"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure, aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony?

It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But let us take the man as we have him. Surely there is enough of conflict and violence in life and in art. When we want to be made unhappy we can turn to others. It is well in these agitated modern days to be able to point to one perfectly balanced nature, in whose life, whose letters, and whose music alike, all is at once manly and refined, clever and pure, brilliant and solid. For the enjoyment of such s.h.i.+ning heights of goodness we may well forego for once the depths of misery and sorrow."

In November, 1835, Mendelssohn's father died, among his last wishes being the wish that his son should marry, as the two sisters already had. The blow to Mendelssohn was exceedingly severe, and his condition alarmed his sister, who urged upon him his father's advice. Mendelssohn told her that he would look about him on the Rhine next summer.

In 1836 he visited Frankfort, and made the acquaintance of the widow of a French clergyman who had preached at the French Reformed Church. The widow was Madame Jeanrenaud (_nee_ Souchay); she was so well preserved and handsome that she was credited with having won Mendelssohn's love.

But it was her second daughter, Cecile Charlotte Sophie, who had stuck the first pin of permanence through his b.u.t.terfly heart. She was seventeen and he twenty-seven; he loved beauty, and she was beautiful.

The hyper-romantic Elise Polko often saw Cecile, and described her:

"To the present hour she has always remained my beau ideal of womanly fascination and loveliness. Her figure was slight, of middle height, and rather drooping, like a flower heavy with dew; her luxuriant gold-brown hair fell in rich curls on her shoulders, her complexion was of transparent delicacy, her smile charming, and she had the most bewitching deep blue eyes I ever beheld, with dark eyelashes and eyebrows.... Her whole aspect had a Madonna air, what Berthold Auerbach so beautifully calls _Marienhaft_. Her manner was generally thought too reserved; indeed she was considered cold, and called 'the fair Mimosa,'

In music we have an expressive term, 'calm but impa.s.sioned,' and this I deem an appropriate conception for the portrait of Cecile."

Mendelssohn was so surprised at the depth of the impression the young girl had made upon him that he was worried. To make sure that he was really at last in love, he went away for a month to take sea-baths at Scheveningen, near The Hague. But salt water would not wash away his emotion, and after a month's absence he returned, proposed, and on the 9th of September, 1836, was betrothed. He wrote his mother at once:

"My head is quite giddy from the events of the day; it is already late at night and I have nothing else to say; but I must write to you, I feel so rich and happy."

It is a proof of the fondness the people cherished for Mendelssohn that, when the engagement became noised abroad, the directors of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig put on the programme the second finale in "Fidelio," "He who has gained a charming wife" ("_Wer ein holdes Weib errungen_"). The audience saw the meaning at once and shouted in its enthusiasm, until Mendelssohn was forced to seat himself at the piano and extemporise upon the theme.

Felix and Cecile were married March 28, 1837, at the Walloon French Reformed Church in Frankfort, and his friend Hiller surprised them with a new bridal chorus. The wedding tour lasted nearly a month, and the honeymooners kept a journal, in which they both sketched and wrote humourous nothings. The home they chose was in Leipzig, where f.a.n.n.y Hensel visited them, and found Cecile possessed not only of "the beautiful eyes" Felix had raved over so much, "but possessed also of a wonderfully soothing temperament, that calmed her husband's whims and promised to cure him of his irritability."

The married life of the two was interrupted by the journeys the husband had to make for his important engagements, till he growled vigorously, and regretted being a conductor at all.

In February, 1838, the first child was born, and Cecile was dangerously ill. On other tours of his, even to England, she accompanied him. She bore him five children, three boys and two girls. Their life together was almost perfect. He writes, in 1841, to a friend who is to be married:

"If I have still a wish to form it is that your blissful betrothal-mood may be continued in marriage, that is, may you be like me, who feel every day of my life that I cannot be sufficiently thankful to G.o.d for my happiness."

In another letter he thus pictures his private paradise: "Eating and sleeping, without dress coat, without piano, without visiting-cards, without carriage and horses, but with donkeys, with wild flowers, with music-paper and sketch-book, with Cecile and the children." Again, in 1844, he writes of a return home:

"I found all my family well, and we had a joyful meeting. Cecile looks so well again,--tanned by the sun, but without the least trace of her former indisposition; my first glance told this when I came into the room, but to this day I cannot cease rejoicing afresh every time I look at her. The children are as brown as Moors, and play all day long in the garden. And so I am myself again now, and I take one of the sheets of paper that Cecile painted for me, to write to you.

"I am sitting here at the open window, looking into the garden at the children, who are playing with their 'dear Johann.' The omnibus to Koenigstein pa.s.ses here twice every day. We have early strawberries for breakfast, at two we dine, have supper at half-past eight in the evening, and by ten we are all asleep. The country is covered with pear-trees and apple-trees, so heavy with fruit that they are all propped up; then the blue hills, and the windings of the Main and the Rhine; the confectioner, from whom you can buy thread and s.h.i.+rt-b.u.t.tons; the list of visitors, which comes out every Sat.u.r.day, as _Punch_ does with you; the walking-post, who, before going to Frankfort, calls as he pa.s.ses to ask what we want, and next day brings me my linen back; the women who sell cherries, with whom my little four-year-old Paul makes a bargain, or sends them away, just as he pleases; above all, the pure Rhenish air,--this is familiar to all, and I call it Germany!"

Grove makes this sketch of the blissful circle:

"The pleasure in his simple home life, which crops out now and then in these Frankfort letters, is very genuine and delightful. Now, Marie is learning the scale of C; he has actually forgotten how to play it, and has taught her to pa.s.s her thumb under the wrong finger! Now, Paul tumbles the others about so as to crack their skulls as well as his own. Another time he is dragged off from his letter to see a great tower which the children have built, and on which they have ranged all their slices of bread and jam--'A good idea for an architect,' At ten Carl comes to him for reading and sums, and at five for spelling and geography--and so on. 'And,' to sum up, 'the best part of every pleasure is gone if Cecile is not there,' His wife is always somewhere in the picture."

Even when Mendelssohn went to England and was cordially received by the young Queen Victoria, and when she asked him what she could grant him for his pleasure, he asked to see the royal nursery. Stratton describes the strange reward of his art as follows:

"Delighted beyond everything, the Queen led the way, and the two were soon deep in the mysteries of children's clothing, dietary, ailments, and all that appertains to the duties of the heads of a family.

Perchance he inspected the juvenile wardrobe of the future Empress of his own Germany."

On one of the home festivals, Cecile and her sister gave and acted a comic dialogue between two ladies' maids, in Frankfort dialect.

Gradually, however, Mendelssohn's overbusy musical enthusiasm wore down his health, and at thirty-seven he was nearing the end of his marvellous vitality and vivacity. In May, 1847, his sister f.a.n.n.y was conducting a rehearsal of her choir; she sat at the piano till suddenly her hands dropped from the keys, and she was dead. The news was told to Mendelssohn without any preparation; with a scream he dropped senseless; it was said that a blood-vessel had broken in his brain. From this time on he was a changed man, weary of everything. He sank gradually until, the evening of November 4, 1847, he died, painlessly, in the presence of his wife, his brother, and three friends.

His funeral was a fitting close to his splendid life; six years later Cecile died at Frankfort of consumption.

Of Mendelssohn's character there is no need to speak further here; it was strangely summed up in his own words, in a letter he wrote to a man who had told him that he was spoken of as a veritable saint. How few saints are canonised in their own time, and how few deserve it ever! But let us take Mendelssohn's own words for his own epitaph:

"So I am said to be a saint! If this is intended to convey what I conceive to be the meaning of the word, and what your expressions lead me to think you also understand by it, then I can only say that, alas! I am not so, though every day of my life I strive with greater earnestness, according to my ability, more and more to resemble this character. I know indeed that I can never hope to be altogether a saint, but if I ever approach to one, it will be well. If people, however, understand by the word 'saint' a Pietist, one of those who lay their hands on their laps and expect that Providence will do their work for them, and who, instead of striving in their vocation to press on towards perfection, talk of a heavenly calling being incompatible with an earthly one, and are incapable of loving with their whole hearts any human being, or anything on earth,--then G.o.d be praised! such a one I am not, and hope never to become, so long as I live; and though I am sincerely desirous to live piously, and really to be so, I hope this does not necessarily entail the other character. It is singular that people should select precisely _this_ time to say such a thing, when I am in the enjoyment of so much happiness, both through my inner and outer life, and my new domestic ties, as well as my busy work, that I really know not how sufficiently to show my thankfulness. And, as you wish me to follow the path which leads to rest and peace, believe me, I never expected to live in the rest and peace which have now fallen to my lot."

CHAPTER XVII.

THE NOCTURNES OF CHOPIN

He wrote to his parents:

"I have made the acquaintance of an important celebrity, Mme. Dudevant, well known as George Sand; but I do not like her face; there is something in it that repels me."

And then, of course, he fell in love with her, for she leaned on his piano and improvised flatteries across the strings to him and turned full on him the luminous midnight of her ox-eyed beauty. A punster would say that he was oxidised, at once. The two lovers were strangely unlike--of course. She was masculine, self-poised, and self-satisfied; she had taken excellent care of herself at a time when the independent woman had less encouragement than now. So more than masculinely coa.r.s.e she was in some ways, indeed, that Henry James once insinuated that, while she may have been to all intents and purposes a man, she was certainly no gentleman. Heine raved over her beauty, but, judging from her portrait, she later had a face as homely as that of George Eliot, who, as Carlyle said, looked like a horse. The poet De Musset, one of Sand's later lovers, said her dark complexion gave reflections like bronze; therefore De Musset found her very beautiful. Chopin was--well, some say he was not effeminate; and he could break chairs when he was angry at a pupil. But they also speak of his frail, fairylike, ethereal manner, and those qualities I, for one, have never known in any non-effeminate man--outside of books.

The first meeting of Chopin and Sand was a curious proof of the value of presentiments, and should interest those who have such things and believe them. Chopin, according to Karasovski, went to the salon of the Countess de Custine. As he climbed the stairs he fancied that he was followed by a shadow odorous of violets; he wanted to turn back, but resisted the superst.i.tious thrill. Those violets were the perfumery of George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter surrounded him with her mult.i.tudinous wreaths of tobacco--though he neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars--as did Liszt's princess.

Other accounts are given of the first meeting, and Liszt claims the credit for arranging it all at her request, in spite of Chopin's desire not to meet her. But, be that as it may, he came, he saw, and she conquered. The two were alike chiefly in their versatility as lovers.

Chopin's first loves were his family, on whom he doted with Polish fervour. George Sand once exclaimed that his mother was his only love.

She was a Polish woman whose name was Krzyzanovska--a good name to change for the shorter tinkle of "Chopin." It was from her that Chopin took that deep-burning patriotism which characterised him and gave his music a national tinge. And at that time Polish patriotism was bound to be all one elegy. But Chopin's father was a Frenchman, and when finally the composer reached Paris, he found himself instantly at home, and the darling of the salons. How different this feeling was from the loneliness and disgust that Paris filled Mozart's soul withal!

As we found Mozart's first serious wound in the heart coming from a public singer, so Chopin (unless we except his pupil, the Princess Elisa Radziwill) seems to have been caught very young by Constantia Gladkovska. She made a great success at Warsaw in the year which was Chopin's twentieth. He had previously indulged in a mild flirtation with a pretty little pianist and composer, Leopoldine Blahetka, but in her case he seems less to have loved than to have graciously permitted himself to be loved. When he fell under the witchery of Gladkovska, however, he was genuinely pierced to the heart, and his letters are as full of vague morose yearning as his Preludes. He left Warsaw for Vienna, but the memory of her pursued him. She had sung at his farewell concert in Warsaw, and made a ravis.h.i.+ng success as a picture and as a singer. In Vienna he longed for her so deeply that he went about wearing the black velvet mantle of gloom which was so effective on the musicians and poets of that day.