Mr. Upton, who accepts the friendship as "honourable," finds in Frau von Genzinger the only true feminine inspiration Haydn ever had for composition. "We owe much of his music to his wife; but the savage and truculent manner in which she inspired him was not conducive to the best work of his genius. There is no record that the Polzelli was of any benefit to him musically; certainly she was not morally."

But there was another woman who idolised Haydn the musician, and with Haydn the man conducted a quaint and curious love duet embalmed in many a billet-doux fragrant with charm.

It was not, then, Frau von Genzinger that threatened Polzelli's supremacy. Nor was it Madame Bartolozzi, for whom Haydn wrote a sonata and three trios; nor Mrs. John Hunter, who wrote words for many of his canzonets. Nor yet Mrs. Hodges, for whom he composed, and whom he called "the loveliest woman I ever saw." Nor yet again the fascinating actress, Mrs. Billington, of whom the pleasant story is told, that Haydn, when he went to London, called on Sir Joshua Reynolds at his studio, found him painting Mrs. Billington as "Saint Cecilia listening to the angels," and protested gallantly that Reynolds ought to have painted the angels listening to her. For which sprightliness he received immediately a fervent hug and a kiss from those so sweet and promiscuous lips. The skeptics object, that Reynolds exhibited the picture in London in 1790, a year before Haydn reached London, but it is a shame to spoil a good and famous story.

The true woman in the case makes her entree in this innocent style:

"Mrs. Schroeter presents her complements to Mr. Haydn, and informs him that she is just returned to town, and will be very happy to see him whenever it is convenient to him to give her a lesson.

"James-st., Buckingham gate, Wednesday, June the 29th, 1791."

This little note was the first of a series of genuine love letters preserved for many years by Haydn. His answers to them seem to have been lost, though the whimsical spade of time that has recently brought to light the works of Bacchylides, after two thousand years and more of oblivion, may with equal speed unsod Haydn's letters to this interesting personage. May we be there to see!

Just nineteen years before this little preludising note, Mrs. Schroeter was an Englishwoman of wealth and aristocracy. In that year there came to London a German musician, Johann Samuel Schroeter, a brother of Corona Schroeter, one of that Amazonian army of beauties to whom Goethe made love and wrote poetry. He became music-master to the English queen as successor to that son of Sebastian Bach who is known as "the English Bach." He speedily won pupils and esteem among the higher circles of London society. But being welcomed as a musician was one thing and as a son-in-law quite another. When, therefore, he made one of his most aristocratic pupils his wife by a clandestine marriage, there was, according to Fetis, such scandal and such a threat of legal proceedings that he consented to the annulment of the marriage in consideration of a pension of five hundred pounds, and retired from the city to escape notoriety. Sixteen years after his entry into London Schroeter died of consumption.

Three years later another German musician, Joseph Haydn, appears in London, and is taken up by society. Mrs. Schroeter, apparently not sated by her first experience, proceeds to repeat it pat. Just as before, she becomes a pupil in music, and later a pupil in love of the newcomer. But whereas her husband had died at the age of thirty-eight, her new lover Haydn was fifty-nine when she met him.

Dies quoted Haydn's own words as saying, "In London, I fell in love with a widow, though she was sixty years old at the time." But Mr. Krehbiel shows good reason for believing that Dies must have misunderstood Haydn. To me it occurs as a possibility that Haydn said to Dies, not "though she was sixty years old," but "though I was sixty years old." I think we are safe in assuming with Mr. Krehbiel that she was not more than thirty-five or forty, an age not yet so great, according to statistics, as that of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, and Marian Delorme, at the times of their most potent beauty.

Let us also dismiss as unauthorised and gratuitous the words of Pauline D. Townsend, in her biography of Haydn, when she says of Mrs. Schroeter that she was "an attractive, although, according to modern taste, a somewhat vulgar woman, of over sixty years of age, and there is no disguising the fact that she made violent love to Haydn. Her letters to Haydn are full of tenderness and in questionable taste; his to her have not been preserved, but we can have little doubt that they were warmer in tone than they would have been had not the Channel rolled between him and Frau Haydn in Vienna." We know how little Frau Haydn had had to do with Haydn's life in his own town. You may judge for yourself as to the charge of "vulgarity."

The existence of Mrs. Schroeter's veritable Love Letters of an Englishwoman was known for many years, and Pohl in his book on "Mozart und Haydn in London" quoted from them. But for their complete publication in the original English, we are indebted to Mr. Krehbiel's "Music and Manners in the Classical Period." This captivating work contains also a note-book which Haydn kept in London; it is filled with amusing blunders in English and vivid pictures of London life of the time, pictures as delectable in their way as the immortal garrulity of Pepys.

I cannot do better than let these letters speak for themselves through such quotations as I have room to make. There are twenty-two of them in all, in Mr. Krehbiel's book. The abbreviations are curious and explain themselves. M.L. is "my love," D.L. is "dear love," M.D. is "my dear," and M. Dst. is its superlative. The abbreviations were possibly due to the fact that the letters exist only in Haydn's own handwriting, copied into his note-book without attention to their proper order. Or they may have been simply the amorous shorthand of that day.

Two of them are signed R.S. and this leads me to believe that Mrs. Schroeter's first name began with R., though we know neither that nor her maiden name. In the first letter Mrs. Schroeter says that she encloses him "the words of the song you desire." This letter is dated February 8th. In his note-book there is an entry on February 13, 1792, and just preceding it a little Italian poem in which I have been pleased to see what was possibly this very song, its first lines being suggestively like the first line of Mrs. Schroeter's letter.

"Io vi mando questo foglio Dalle lagrime rigato, Sotto scritto dal cordoglio Dai pensieri sigillato Testimento del mio amore (Io) vi mando questo core."

Among the letters there are many anxious allusions, which may indicate that Haydn was suffering from insomnia, unless you are inclined to give them a more subtle significance. But to the quotations, with regrets that they must be incomplete.

"Wednesday, Febr. 8th, 1792.

"M.D. Inclos'd I have sent you the words of the song you desire. I wish much to know how you do to day. I am very sorry to lose the pleasure of seeing you this morning, but I hope you will have time to come tomorrow. I beg my D you will take great care of your health and do not fatigue yourself with too much application to business. My thoughts and best wishes are always with you, and I ever am with the utmost sincerity M.D. your &c."

"March the 7th 92.

"My D. I was extremely sorry to part with you so suddenly last night, our conversation was particularly interesting and I had a thousand affectionate things to Say to you. my heart was and is full of tenderness for you but no language can express half the Love and Affection I feel for you. you are dearer to me every Day of my life. I am very Sorry I was so dull and Stupid yesterday, indeed my Dearest it was nothing but my being indisposed with a cold occasioned my Stupidity. I thank you a thousand times for your Concern for me. I am truly Sensible of your goodness and I assure you my D. if anything had happened to trouble me, I wou'd have open'd my heart and told you with the greatest confidence, oh, how earnestly I wish to See you. I hope you will come to me tomorrow. I shall be happy to See you both in the Morning and the Evening. God Bless you my love. my thoughts and best wishes ever accompany you and I always am with the most Sincere and invariable Regard my D,

"Your truly affectionate—

"my Dearest I cannot be happy till I see you if you Know do tell me when you will come."

"April 4th 92.

"My D: With this you will receive the Soap. I beg you a thousand pardons for not sending it sooner. I know you will have the goodness to excuse me. I hope to hear you are quite well and have Slept well. I shall be happy to See you my D: as soon as possible. I shall be much obliged to you if you will do me the favor to send me Twelve Tikets for your Concert. may all success attend you my ever D H that Night and always is the sincere and hearty wish of your "Invariable and Truly affectionate—"

"James St. Thursday, April 12th

"M.D. I am so truly anxious about you. I must write to beg to know how you do? I was very sorry I had not the pleasure of Seeing you this Evening, my thoughts have been constantly with you and my D.L. no words can express half the tenderness and affection I feel for you. I thought you seemed out of Spirits this morning. I wish I could always remove every trouble from your mind, be assured my D: I partake with the most perfect sympathy in all your sensations and my regard is Stronger every day. my best wishes always attend you and I am ever my D.H. most sincerely your Faithful etc."

"M.D. I was extremely Sorry to hear this morning that you were indisposed. I am told you were five hours at your Studys yesterday, indeed my D.L. I am afraid it will hurt you. why shou'd you who have already produced So many wonderful and Charming compositions Still fatigue yourself with Such close application. I almost tremble for your health let me prevail on you my much-loved H. not to keep to your Studys so long at one time, my D. love if you could know how very precious your welfare is to me I flatter myself you wou'd endeaver to preserve it for my sake as well as your own. pray inform me how you do and how you have Slept. I hope to see you to Morrow at the concert and on Saturday I shall be happy to See you here to dinner, in the mean time my D: my Sincerest good wishes constantly attend you and I ever am with the tenderest regard your most &c.

"J.S. April the 19th 92"

"April 24th 1792.

"My D. I cannot leave London without Sending you a line to assure you my thoughts, my best wishes and tenderest affections will inseparably attend you till we meet again. the Bearer will also deliver you the March. I am very Sorry I could not write it Sooner, nor better, but I hope my D. you will excuse it, and if it is not passable I will send you the Dear original directly. If my H. would employ me oftener to write Music I hope I should improve and I know I should delight in the occupation, now my D.L. let me intreat you to take the greatest care of your health. I hope to see you Friday at the concert and on Saturday to dinner, till when and ever I most sincerely am and Shall be yours etc."

"M.D. If you will do me the favor to take your dinner with me tomorrow I shall be very happy to see you and particularly wish for the pleasure of your company my Dst Love before our other friends come. I hope to hear you are in good Health. My best wishes and tenderest Regards are your constant attendants and I ever am with the firmest Attachment my Dst H most sincerely and Affectionately yours,

"R.S."

"James S. Tuesday Ev. May 22d."

"M.D. I can not close my eyes to sleep till I have return'd you ten thousand thanks for the inexpressible delight I have received from your ever Enchanting compositions and your incomparably Charming performance of them, be assured my D.H. that among all your numerous admirers no one has listened with more profound attention and no one can have Such high veneration for your most brilliant Talents as I have, indeed my D.L. no tongue can express the gratitude I feel for the infinite pleasure your Musick has given me. accept then my repeeted thanks for it and let me also assure you with heart felt affection that I Shall ever consider the happiness of your acquaintance as one of the Chief Blessings of my life, and it is the Sincer wish of my heart to preserve to cultivate and to merit it more and more. I hope to hear you are quite well. Shall be happy to see you to dinner and if you can come at three o'Clock it would give me a great pleasure as I shou'd be particularly glad to see you my D. befor the rest of our friends come. God Bless you my h: I ever am with the firmest and most perfect attachment your &c.

"Wednesday night, June the 6th 1792."

"My Dst, Inclosed I send you the verses you was so Kind as to lend me and am very much obliged to you for permitting me to take a copy of them, pray inform me how you do, and let me know my Dst L when you will dine with me; I shall be happy to See you to dinner either tomorrow or tuesday whichever is most Convenient to you. I am truly anxious and impatient to See you and I wish to have as much of your company as possible; indeed my Dst H. I feel for you the fondest and tenderest affection the human Heart is capable of and I ever am with the firmest attachment my Dst Love

"most Sincerely, Faithfully

"and most affectionately yours

"Sunday Evening, June 10, 1792"

"M.D.

"I was extremely sorry I had not the pleasure of seeing you to-day, indeed my Dst Love it was a very great disappointment to me as every moment of your company is more and more precious to me now your departure is so near. I hope to hear you are quite well and I shall be very happy to see you my Dst Hn. any time to-morrow after one o'clock, if you can come; but if not I shall hope for the pleasure of Seeing you on Monday. You will receive this letter to-morrow morning. I would not send it to-day for fear you should not be at home and I wish to have your answer. God bless you my Dst. Love, once more I repeat let me See you as Soon as possible. I ever am with the most inviolable attachment my Dst and most beloved H.

"most faithfully and most

"affectionately yours

"R.S."

"I am just returned from the concert where I was very much Charmed with your delightful and enchanting Compositions and your Spirited and interesting performance of them, accept ten thousand thanks for the great pleasure I always receive from your incomparable Music. My D: I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any Sleep to Night. I am extremely anxious about your health. I hope to hear a good account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate

"Friday Night, 12 o'clock."

This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the barbarous word "yearnful," once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.

This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St. James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady," probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was asked what the letters were. "They are letters from an English widow in London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have married had I then been single."

Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?

When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to—even the fable that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl, who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in Haydn's will.

Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson—and that points to us as a by-path, which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art, that pet of artists.

As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of now as a musician.

"On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned, however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with him, married him, and gave him a dowry of L100,000. Besides this he has L500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold."



CHAPTER X.

THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR

Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and the other eighteen, strike the town of Luebeck in 1703. They are drawn thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition is to be friendly.

Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Luebeck as soon as can be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see, and her years were thirty-four—just six years less than the total years of the two young candidates.

Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing "Cleopatra," an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.

But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years, and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor; he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove fatal,—but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves its wearer for a better fate.

By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of versatility—which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a writer than aught else.

The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter, and "got the pretty job" ("erhielt den schoenen Dienst").

The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681—1764), a sort of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings, daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral. That is all of his story that belongs here.

The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler and Handel—the later form being preferred by the English, who, as somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glueck." It is not needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon of deafness. Haendel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's bachelorhood.

Haendel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.

The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window, threatened to throw her out, thundering, "I always knew you were a devil, but I'll show you that I am Beelzebub, the prince of devils."

Haendel's greatest love seems to have been for things to eat. In the memoirs of him, published anonymously [by Doctor Mainwaring] in 1760, the author says that Haendel was "always habituated to an uncommon portion of food and nourishment," and accuses him of "excessive indulgence in this lowest of gratifications."

"He certainly paid more attention to it than is becoming in any man; but it is some excuse that Nature had given him so vigorous a constitution, so exquisite a palate, so craving an appetite, that fortune enabled him to obey these calls, and to satisfy these demands of nature.... Had he hurt his health or fortune by indulgences of this kind, they would have been vicious; as he did not, they were at the most indecorous."

A story is told of him that he once ordered up enough dinner for three. Noting that the servant dawdled about, Haendel demanded why; the servant answered that he was waiting for the company to come, whereupon Haendel stormed, in his famous broken English, "Den pring up der tinner prestissimo. I am de gombany."

In his later years Haendel was not so beautiful as he might have been, and Queen Anne, alluding to his bulk, said that his hands were feet and his fingers toes. Mrs. Bray, however, says that "in his youth he was the most handsome man of his time."

Handel resembles Lully somewhat in his reputation for being a lover of the table and a neglecter of womankind. Schoelcher in his biography states "that not one woman occupies the smallest place in the long career of his life." And yet contradicts himself in his very next sentence, for he adds:

"When he was in Italy a certain lady named Vittoria fell in love with him and even followed him from Florence to Venice. Burney describes Vittoria as 'a songstress of talent.' Fetis calls her the Archduchess Vittoria, but both agree that she was beautiful and that she filled the part of the prima donna in 'Roderigo,' his first Italian score. At that period, and even later, it was not uncommon to find princes and princesses singing in the pieces which were produced at their courts. Artist or archduchess, either title was enough to turn the head of a young man twenty-four years old; but Haendel disdained her love. All the English biographers say that he was too prudent to accept an attachment which would have been ruin to both. This is calumny, for he was never prudent."

This Vittoria is an interesting problem in romance. Doctor Mainwaring says that Haendel was Apollo and she Daphne. Chrysander in his great biography properly notes that the legend has been twisted, and represents here the god as fleeing from the nymph. Coxe says that Vittoria was "an excellent singer, the favourite mistress of the Grand Duke of Tuscany"—which gives a decidedly different look to Haendel's "prudence."

Chrysander tries to prove that this Vittoria was no other than the famous singer, Vittoria Tesi, "a contralto of masculine strength," as one listener describes her voice. She was very dramatic, and made her chief success in men's roles, singing bass songs transposed an octave higher. She was born at Florence in 1690, and would have been seventeen years old when Haendel's "Roderigo" was produced there in 1707. That she should be capable of so ardent a love at that age need hardly be mentioned when we remember that Romeo's Juliet was only twelve at the time of her immortal amour. Love a l'Italienne is precocious.

Wild stories are told of the escapades of this brilliant singer, whom Haendel never brought to London among all his importations—and with good reason, if she had once pursued him as legend tells. No stranger account is given than that of Doctor Burney, who describes her peculiar method of escaping the proposals of a certain nobleman who implored her to marry him. She had no prejudices against the nobleman, but strong prejudices against marriage. Finally, to quiet her lover's conscientious appeals, she went out into the street and bribed the first labouring man she met with fifty ducats to marry her. Her new husband sped from dumbfounded delight to amazed regret, for he found that with her money she bought only his name and a marriage document, as a final answer to the count when next he came whimpering of conventional marriage.

In London Haendel reigned as never musician reigned before or since. He is still reigning to the lasting detriment of English musical independence.

He was a lordly man in his day was Haendel; and dared to cut that terrible Dean Swift, whose love affairs are perhaps the chief riddle of all amorous chronicle. Dean Swift is said to have said: "I admire Haendel principally because he conceals his petticoat peccadillos with such perfection." This statement may be taken as only a proof either that the dean had so tangled a career of his own that he could not see any other man's straight; or that Haendel was really more of a flirt than tradition makes him out.

Rockstro said that Haendel was engaged more than once; once to the aforementioned Vittoria Tesi—this in spite of the tradition that woman proposed and man disposed; and later to two other women. Rockstro bases this last doubtless on the account given in that strangely named book, "Anecdotes of Haendel and J.C. Smith, with compositions by J.C. Smith." This was published anonymously in London, in 1799, but it is known to have been written by Dr. William Coxe. Smith (ne Schmidt) was Haendel's secretary and assistant. He was something of a composer himself, and on his death-bed advised his widow to consult Doctor Coxe in every emergency; whereupon, to simplify matters and have the counsellor handy, in due time she married him.

Doctor Coxe indignantly denies Hawkins' statement that Haendel lacked social affection; he says that two rich pupils loved him. The first would have married him, but her mother said she should never marry a fiddler. After the mother's death, the father implied that all obstacles were now removed, but too late. He never saw the girl again, and she fell into a decline, which soon terminated her existence. The second woman was a personage of high estate, and offered to marry Haendel if he would give up his career. But when he declined, she also declined, and died after the fashion of the eighteenth century.

In his will Haendel left money to two cousins, also to two widows, and one other woman.

He brought many singers to London for his operas, and their romances would fill ten volumes. There is the famous tenor, Beard, for instance, the creator of "Samson." He created Samsonian scandal by marrying Lady Henrietta Herbert, the only daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave; she died fourteen years later, and he built her a fine monument. Six years later he married the daughter of a harlequin.

Then there was the singer Senesino, and Farinelli, whose heart and brain were real though his voice was artificial. He became finally a sort of vocal prime minister to Spain. To start one of these romances of singers would be like throwing a match in a fireworks factory.



CHAPTER XI.

GLUCK THE DOMESTIC, ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR, AND THE AMIABLE PICCINNI

While Haendel was in London at the height of his autocracy, he was visited by a composer named Gluck, whom we think of to-day as a revolutionist in music, and a man of the utmost historical importance. To the lordly Haendel, however, he was more or less contemptible, and people who know nothing else of either genius, know that Haendel said, "Gluck understood about as much counterpoint as my cook."

Gluck did not make a success on his London visit, and began to criticise both his own work and contemporary schools of opera, with a thoroughness that resulted in a determination to "reform it altogether." From London he went to Vienna in 1748, and there he was soon a figure of importance, moving in the best families, and entertained at the best homes. Among the homes in which he was most cordially received, was that of the rich banker and wholesale merchant, Joseph Pergin, who had a large business with Holland. Both daughters of the house were, according to Reissman's not particularly novel expression, "passionately fond of music." Gluck was soon made thoroughly at home there.

"Soon also he was bound in most intimate affection to the elder daughter, Maria Anne. She reciprocated the feelings, and the mother gave her consent to the betrothal. Gluck dared to deem the year 1749, in which this change took place, the happiest of his life; but it also turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve unbroken fidelity."

Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna—as Schmid puts it—"auf dem Fluegeln der Liebe nach Wien zurueck" On the 15th of September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protege of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.

No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.

"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von Gluck, nee Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my previous bequests,'"

None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his operatic warfare.

Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played, con amore, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself; his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose. Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand Fine. But now he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.

On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could have procured,—indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for eleven thousand florins,—outlived him less than three years, dying March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:

"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."

ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR

During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way, wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal "Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who kiss and tell."

THE AMIABLE PICCINNI

In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.

The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was not a genius of the first order.

But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His biographer Ginguene says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni. He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art, so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."

In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protege, Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of Piccinni's home life.

"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter" [one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"

The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his eldest daughter, aged eighteen. "Devoted to his art, foreign to all intrigue, to all ambition, to the morals, tastes, customs, and language of the country, Piccinni lived in his family circle, and devoted himself quietly to his work, in oblivion of the efforts that the Gluckists made to thwart the success, and even to prevent the representation, of his work. It must be said that Gluck himself stooped to be the instigator of these intrigues."

In spite of all, the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera, "Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre. He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife, and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than so good a man merited.

Piccinni was large-hearted enough to cherish no malice against either of his rivals, Sacchini or Gluck. When Sacchini died, Piccinni delivered the funeral oration, and when, a year later, Gluck died in Vienna, Piccinni made a vain effort to organise a fitting memorial festival.

He remained upon the field of battle, and the victory for the time must be granted him, in spite of certain defeats. Then the French Revolution broke out, and he lost his favour with the public, and the friendship of the aristocracy became a danger to his very life. He went to Naples, where he found some success, and was well received by the court. But everything seemed now to conspire against him. The Republicans of Paris had driven him to Italy, into the arms of the aristocracy there; whereupon, in 1792, his daughter married a French Republican. This brought him into such disgrace with the Italian court that he did not dare leave his house, and fell into neglect and poverty.

In 1798 he made his way back to Paris, and there his reunited family gave little operas, sung by his wife and daughters. Here "one heard with pleasure always new airs taken from his Italian operas, sung by Mme. Piccinni, with a voice that age had rendered more grave and less light, without making it less beautiful or touching, and with a method as wise as it was learned, and well opposed to these pretentious displays, these eternal embroideries which disfigure Italian song to-day, and which Piccinni never admitted into his school, but which he always detested." So says Ginguene of the theories of Piccinni, which are not, as we see, so opposed to the theories of Gluck as we are sometimes urged to believe. In the course of time Napoleon took up Piccinni, but he was too old to revive under this new favour, and Ginguene has this last picture of him:

"It was in this state that he had the courage to give a concert at his home. The small number of amateurs who gathered there will long remember the impression of that which one may call the last song of the swan. They were profoundly moved to hear Mme. Piccinni sing with due expression the beautiful air from 'Zendia,' Lasciami, o ciel pietoso! composed in all the vigour of youth, by this illustrious man, now old and unfortunate. He accompanied it now with a languishing hand, but with eyes relighted by this beautiful production of his genius. They will not forget the admirable 'Sommeil d'Atys,' nor the trio from 'Iphigenia in Aulis' executed, as it had been in Naples, by the mother and the two daughters, grouped behind a husband and father who seemed, in accompanying them, to be reborn in the touching accord of those voices, so tender and so dear, and to feel again some spark of that fire which had animated him when he produced those sublime works."

Poor old Piccinni died in 1800 at the age of seventy-two, and his tomb said that he was "Cher aux Arts et a l'Amitie." He left to his widow and six children no property but the memory of his genius. Madame Piccinni was given a pension, but she proudly declined to accept it purely as a charity, and asked that four pupils of the Conservatoire be assigned to her for instruction, which was done. Piccinni left two sons; the younger had some success as an opera writer, and the elder had a natural son, who was quite successful as a composer of operas.

Of the other participants in the Gluck-Piccinni feud there is not much to say. Sacchini was a man of notoriously luxurious and voluptuous life, but I do not find that he married. Salieri—whom Gluck assisted in the most generous manner, even to the extent of having one of Salieri's operas produced under his own name, and declaring the true author when it was a success—was married, and had many daughters, who lavished upon him much affection. Mehul was befriended by a Doctor Gastoldi, and married a daughter of his benefactor. They had no children, but adopted a nephew.

It may be well here, while we are in the midst of opera composers, to take a glance at some of the predecessors of these men, beginning with the first of all opera composers, who, in his declaration of what opera should be and do, very curiously foreshadowed almost the exact words of Gluck and Wagner, revolutionists, who were really reactionists.



CHAPTER XII.

A FEW TUNESTERS OF FRANCE AND ITALY—PERI, MONTEVERDE, ET AL.

Though it sounds strange to speak of the "invention" of opera, that is the word which may be applied to the work of Jacopo Peri and his friends. They, however, thought of it rather as a revival of the manner of the ancient Greek tragedy, which was, in a sense, a crude form of Wagnerian recitation, with musical accompaniment.

As the English novel owes its origin to the commission given to Mr. Samuel Richardson to prepare a Ready Letter Writer, which he decided to put in the form of a story told in letters, so grand opera, which has almost rivalled the novel in the world's favour, found its origin in a conference among certain aristocratic gentlemen, of the city of Florence, concerning the possibility of reviving part of Greek tragedy. As an experiment, they prepared a small work called "Dafne" for private presentation at the palace of the Corsi. Rinuccini was the first of a long and usually incompetent lineage of librettists. The music was written by Peri and Caccini. It was appropriate that they should have chosen the love affairs of the first musician Orpheus and the coy Daphne, seeing what a vast amount of love-making, pretended and real, the school of opera has handed down upon the world. Reissman has reckoned it out that twenty thousand lovers are joined or are parted every night in the world's theatres.

Peri played the part of Apollo, and he was fitted to play the sun-god by his aureole of notoriously ardent hair. According to Fetis, Peri was very avaricious. Of noble birth himself, he grew rich on the favour of the Medicis, and added to his wealth by marrying a daughter of the house of Fortini, who incidentally brought with her a very handsome dot. She bore him a son, who won an early fame by his mathematics, his temper, and his dissipations, which led his tutor, the famous Galileo, to call him his demon. And this is all I know of the love affairs of the father of modern opera.

His collaborator, Caccini, who was more famous among his contemporaries than Peri, states in the preface to a book of his, that he was married twice, both times to pupils. His former wife was a well-known singer, and his daughters were musicians, the elder, Francesca, being also a composer.

The name of Monteverde is immortal in the history of music, because, although no one sings his songs now, or hears his operas, even the strictest composers make constant use of certain musical procedures, which were in his time forbidden, and which he fought for tooth and nail. Irisi says that he entered the Church after the death of his wife, and as he entered the priesthood in 1633, it would seem that she died when he was about sixty-five years of age. He had two sons, the elder of whom became a priest, and a tenor in his father's church; the younger son became a physician—a good division of labour, for those patients whom the doctor lost could send for the priest.

Monteverde's successor at St. Mark's was Heinrich Schuetz, a great revolutionist in German music, whose chief work, and the first German opera, was "Dafne," written to a libretto by Rinuccini, possibly the same one used by Peri. When he was thirty-four, he married on June 1, 1619, a girl named Magdalena, who is described as "Christian Wildeck of Saxony's land steward's bookkeeper's daughter," which description Hawkins compares to that of "Pontius Pilate's wife's chambermaid's sister's hat." She died six years later, having borne him two daughters. He lived the rest of his eighty-seven years as a widower, and joined the pathetic line of musicians who have gone deaf.

LULLY THE IMP

French opera, which was reformed by the Austrian Gluck, had been created by the Italian Signor Lulli, who later, as Monsieur Lully, became most French of the French. Though he was the son of a gentleman of Florence, he was not gifted with wealth, and was taken to France to serve in the kitchen of Mlle. de Montpensier, the chief princess of the French court. The impishness which characterised his whole career inspired him to turn a highly improper couplet on an accident that happened in public to Mademoiselle,—and worst of all, he set it to music. She did not see the fun of the joke, and dismissed him, but the king laughed so much at his wit, that he had him presented, and interested himself in his musical career.

The kitchen lad was a born courtier and revelled in the "atmosphere of passion, love, and pleasure, that radiant aurora." He was always a very dissipated man, but in July, 1662, "regularised" his life by marrying Madeleine Lambert, daughter of the music-master of the court. "The honour of the new family, and the dot of twenty thousand francs which he received, made Lully a personage, and the second phase of his life commenced." His wife bore him three sons and three daughters, who are said to have shared his stinginess, though they built him a magnificent monument.

It was a brilliant circle Lully moved in. He had the honour of being hated by Boileau and La Fontaine, and of being first the friend and collaborator, and later the enemy, of Moliere. His contract of marriage was signed by the king, queen, and the queen-mother. Of his marriage, Fetis says: "Never was a union better arranged, for if Lully was quick to procure riches, his wife knew how to fructify them by the order and the economy that reigned in her house. Lully reserved for his menus plaisirs only the price of the sale of his works, which amounted annually to seven or eight thousand francs."

His dissipations, like those of Haendel, were chiefly confined to excesses in eating and drinking, but for all his doubtful fidelity to his wife, he cannot have been an ideal husband, for he was of a miserly disposition, and his temper was enforced by a ruthless brutality. On one occasion the singer Rochis, being in a condition that compelled a postponement of "Armide," he demanded, angrily, "Qui t'a fait cela?" and gave her a kick qui lui fit faire une fausse couche. This poor woman was revenged upon him by his own temper, for at the age of fifty-four, while conducting his orchestra, he grew indignant, and in wildly brandishing his baton struck his own foot so fierce a blow that gangrene set in and he died of the wound. While he was on his death-bed, he was called upon by one of his old friends, whom his wife reproached with having been the last to get him drunk. Whereupon the dying man spoke up with the gaiety for which he was famous, "That's true, my dear, and when I get well he shall be the first to get me drunk again."

In his will he named his wife as executrix, and took great care that she and the children should preserve the royal monopoly in the Academy of Music. Lully had been reconciled only eight days before his death, with his son, whom he had previously disinherited. His wife outlived him twenty-three years, and died May 3, 1720, at the age of seventy-seven.

When the superb mausoleum was built for Lully by his widow, some unknown poet, who hated him for his moeurs infames, scrawled on his tomb these terrific lines:

"Pourquoi, par un faste nouveau, Nous rappeler la scandaleuse histoire D'un libertin, indigne de memoire, Peut-etre meme indigne du tombeau."

It was in some of his operas, I believe, that certain roles were sung by Mlle. de Maupin, whose incredibly wild, scandalous, and ambiguous love affairs, and duels in male costume, made the material for Gautier's famous romance.

THE TACITURN RAMEAU

The next great master in French opera was Rameau (1683—1764), who resembled Lully in his stinginess, but not in his brilliant social qualities. As a boy he neglected his lessons in language for his music-books. His parents' efforts were in vain, and his teachers gave him up as hopeless; but at the age of sixteen or seventeen he fell in love with a young widow, who was a neighbour of his. His letters to her, brought from her the crushing statement:

"You spell like a scullion."

This rebuke woke him to his senses as far as orthography was concerned, but his father did not approve of the widow as a teacher, and sent him to Italy to break off the relation. Some years later he returned to the town, but as he remained only a short time, he evidently did not reillumine his first flame.

He did not wed until he was forty-three years old, and then on February 25, 1726, he married the eighteen-year-old Marie Louise Mangot. Of her Maret says: "Madame Rameau is a virtuous woman, sweet and amiable, and she has made her husband very happy. She has much talent for music, a very pretty voice, and good taste in song." They had three children, one a son, who became equerry to the king, a daughter who became a nun, and another who married a musketeer.

Baron Grimm accuses Rameau of being "a savage, a stranger to every sentiment of humanity." The great Diderot, in a book called "The Nephew of Rameau," referred caustically to Rameau's experiments and theories in acoustics, and added:

"He is a philosopher in his way; he thinks only of himself, and the rest of the universe is as the puff of a bellows. His daughter and his wife have only to die when they please; provided the bells of the parish which toll for them continue to sound the 12th and the 17th overtones, all will be well."

Fetis credits these feelings to men who loved neither Rameau nor French music. He paid a pension to his invalid sister. "Sombre and unsociable he fled the world, and kept, even amid his family, a silence almost absolute." I do not know whether or not Rameau's wife survived him.

PERGOLESI

In his old age Rameau said that if he were twenty years younger, he would go to Italy and take Pergolesi for his master in harmony. This brilliant genius, Pergolesi, died in 1736, at the age of twenty-six. It was consumption that carried him off, and I find no record of any love of his. The saccharine romance-monger, Elise Polko, has a rather mawkish story which she connects with his name, though on what authority, I am ignorant. As Lincoln said, "For those that like that sort of thing, it is about the sort of thing they'll like."

KEISER

A contemporary of his was Reinhard Keiser, who died three years later at the age of sixty-six, and who wrote one hundred and sixteen operas for the German stage. Like his contemporary, Haendel, he attempted management, and like Haendel went into a magnificent bankruptcy, but quite unlike the woman-hater Haendel, he married his way out of poverty. In 1709 he entered into a matrimonial and financial partnership with the daughter of an aristocratic town musician of Oldenburg, Hamburg. She was a distinguished singer, and her talent brought new charm to the production of his works, and restored prosperity. She seems to have died before him, for twenty years after his marriage he went to Moscow with his daughter, who was a prominent singer, and had an engagement there. She married a Russian violinist, Verocai, and her father spent his last years at her home.

BONONCINI AND THE SCARLATTIS

Of that exquisite and elegant scamp Bononcini, who was the great rival of Haendel in the London operatic war, I find no amorous gossip, though Hawkins says he was the favourite of the Duchess of Marlborough, who gave him a pension of L500 per year, and had him live in her home until he was compelled to leave London, by various scandals attached to his repute as an honest gentleman. He had been in his youth a great admirer of the style of Alessandro Scarlatti, an eminent composer, both in opera and sacred music, of whom little is known, except his work; he left a son, Domenico, who was hardly less famous. But he was a confirmed gambler, and left his family in great destitution, from which the famous artificial soprano, Farinelli, rescued them.



CHAPTER XIII.

MOZART

As we come nearer to our own day, the documents concerning the personal lives of composers begin to multiply. Of the love of Bach we have only that tantalising allusion to the "stranger maiden." Of Haydn we have amorous documents enough to make a brochure. When we reach Mozart, his letters alone fill two comfortable volumes. Of Beethoven there are still more numerous possessions. By Wagner and Liszt we are fairly overwhelmed.

Search not for the artist's self in his works of art. This is good cautious advice. But there are occasional exceptions, and of these Mozart is the most radiant. The qualities of eternal youth and of juventine gaiety; of intimate tenderness; of swagger that winks while it swaggers; of love that is ever deep but sunlit to the depth; and of tragedy with a touch of fatalistic horror,—all those qualities that are found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various operas—all the qualities that are combined in "Don Giovanni," are the qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and the fanatic libertinism of his Don Juan.

Schopenhauer says that the genius is he who never quite outgrows the childhood of his attitude toward the world. Mozart was always the sublime child.

All the qualities of youth give life and personality to his letters, and place them consequently among the most delightful letters in existence. Ludwig Nohl collected most of them into two volumes, and Lady Wallace has translated them into English, with a certain amount of inaccuracy, but a surprising amount of spirit withal. They may be picked up without much difficulty, though they are out of print; and any one interested in musicians or in lovers or in letters, should make haste to add these two golden volumes to his library.

As the first letter was written in his thirteenth year and the last in the thirty-fifth and final year of his life, and as they constitute two volumes of the size of this one, it is manifest that I am here empowered only to make a skimming summary of his heart-history—woe's me!

The human affections grow by exercise. Mozart was so devoted and so enthusiastic in his fondness for his father and mother and his sister that his heart was graduated early for any demand. The most unmusical people know that Mozart stands unrivalled among infant prodigies, that he was a pocket-Paderewski, at a period when most children cannot even trundle a hoop, and that he was deep in composition before the usual child is out of kilts. Everybody has seen the pictures of the littler Mozart and his little sister perched like robins on a piano stool and giving a concert before crowned heads, with the assistance of the father and the mother, themselves musicians.

The elder Mozart made a life-work out of the career of his children, though he was a gifted musician and a shrewd and intelligent man on his own account. He was in no sense one of your child-beating brutes who make an easy livelihood by turning their children into slaves. He believed that his son was capable of being one of the world's greatest musicians, and he gave a splendid and permanent demonstration of his theory. Through all his vicarious ambition he kept his son's love and kept it almost to the point of idolatry. Indeed the boy once wrote, "Next to God comes papa."

The domestic relations of the family were indeed as happy as they well could be. Mozart's letters to his sister, Maria Anna, who was nicknamed "Nannerl," are brimful of cheerful affection and of sprightly interest in her own love affairs. His relations with his mother and father were full, not only of filial piety, but of that far better proof of real affection, a playful humour.

Mozart's mother died in Paris when her son and she were there alone together. He wrote the news of her death to a friend of his father's and bade him tell the father only that she was seriously ill but would probably recover, and gradually to prepare him for the worst. This letter he wrote at two o'clock in the morning; the same night he wrote his father a long letter full of news, incidentally saying that his mother was very ill, but that he hoped for the best, and that, in any case, resignation to the will of God was imperative. A few days later he wrote another letter telling the bitter truth, and telling it with most devout concern for his father's health and reconciliation with the divine dispensation. In this letter he seems rather the father to his own father than the young gallant of twenty-two. It was a good heart the boy had.

Mozart had been so much caressed and flattered by court beauties as a child that he was precocious in flirtation. His sister was the confidante and messenger of all sorts of boyish amours. There is a fine mysteriousness in the letters he wrote his mother while he was making a musical conquest of Milan like a veteran musician, and betraying his fourteen-year-old boyishness only in such phrases as this: "I kiss your hand a thousand times, and have a great deal to say to my sister; but what? That is known only to God and myself. Please God I hope soon to be able to confide it to her verbally."

This does not sound like the writing of a composer who was adding in a letter a few days later, "Pray to God that my opera may be successful." The opera was successful, and the Pope gave him a knighthood; and he was only fourteen years old!

Perhaps this mysterious sweetheart is the same one he alludes to later as Annamindl, and concerning whom he sends his sister such solemn messages as these:

"Don't, I entreat, forget about the one other, where no other can ever be."

"Say to Fraulein W. von Moelk that I rejoice at the thought of Salzburg, in the hope that I may again receive the same kind of present, for the minuets which was bestowed on me at a similar concert. She knows all about it."

"Carissima Sorella,—Spero che voi sarete stata dalla Signora, che voi gia sapete."

"My dearest Sister,—I entreat you not to forget before your journey, to perform your promise, that is, to make a certain visit. I have my reasons for this. Pray present my kind regards in that quarter, but in the most impressive and tender manner,—the most tender; and, oh,—but I need not be in such anxiety. I beg my compliments to Roxalana, who is to drink tea this evening with the Sultan. All sorts of pretty speeches to Madlle Mizerl; she must not doubt my love. I have her constantly before my eyes in her fascinating neglige. I have seen many pretty girls here, but not one whose beauty can be compared with hers." The daughter of Doctor Barisani, the family physician, was for a time his heart's queen. Later Rosa Cannabich was "the magnet." And Wendling's daughter paid her visit to his heart's best room.

These instances of puppy-love can have given little anxiety to the father and mother; but soon old Leopold began to fear that this amorous activity might interfere with his son's wedlock to his art. When, therefore, he was sixteen years old and began to take a solemn interest in an opera singer at Munich, to weep over the beauty of her singing, and to seek her acquaintance, the father began to protest. This was Mlle. Keiserin, the daughter of a cook, and Mozart was later a little ashamed of his easy enthusiasm.

There seems to be an implied affair, perhaps more serious, in this letter to his father, dated 1777—he was born in 1756:

"As to the baker's daughter, I have no objection to make; I foresaw all this long ago. This was the cause of my reluctance to leave home, and finding it so difficult to go. I hope the affair is not by this time known all over Salzburg. I beg you, dear papa, most urgently to keep the matter quiet as long as possible, and in the meantime to pay her father on my account any expense he may have incurred by her entrance into the convent, which I will repay gladly when I return to Salzburg."

Meanwhile he was well immersed in his dalliance with his Baesle, or cousin. In 1777, when Mozart was twenty-one and travelling on a concert-tour with his mother, he met, at Augsburg, Marianne Mozart, the daughter of his uncle, a book-binder. His experience at Augsburg with certain impertinent snobs disgusted him with the place, and he wrote his father that the meeting with his fair cousin was the only compensation of visiting the town. He found her "pretty, intelligent, lovable, clever, and gay," and, like him, "rather inclined to be satirical."

They struck up a correspondence which shows him in most hilarious moods. His letters are full of that possenhaften Jargon with which he sprinkled his letters to his sister. He calls his cousin by the pet name of Baesle, with which he rhymes "Haesle," a colloquial word for "rabbit." His first letter to her overflows with nonsense and meaningless rhymes, puns, and quibbles, such as:

"Ich hoffe, Sie werden auch meinen Brief—trief, welchen ich Ihnen aus Mannheim geschrieben erhalten haben—schaben. Desto besser, besser desto!"

Lady Wallace has made a translation which reproduces well the nonsense if not literally the sense. This is a sample:

"My dear Coz-Buzz:—I have safely received your precious epistle—thistle, and from it I perceive—achieve, that my aunt—gaunt, and you—shoe, are quite well—bell. I have to-day a letter—setter, from my papa—ah-ha, safe in my hands—sands."

A week later he writes her a letter beginning:

"My dear niece, cousin, daughter! mother, sister, and wife!—Potz Himmel! Croatians, demons, witches, hags, and cross batteries! Potz Element! air, earth, fire and water! Europe, Asia, Africa, and America! Jesuits, Augustines, Benedictines, Capucins, Minorites, Franciscans, Dominicans, Carthusians, and Knights of the Cross! privateers, canons regular and irregular, sluggards, rascals, scoundrels, imps, and villains all! donkeys, buffaloes, oxen, fools, blockheads, numskulls, and foxes! What means this? Four soldiers and three shoulder-belts! Such a packet and no portrait!"

It seems that she had promised him her picture! She sends it later, and it is still in the Mozart Museum, showing her, as Jahn declares, to have a good-natured and cheerful face, and rather a stocky figure; he adds, "Without being beautiful she seems right pleasing." It is certain that in whatever butterfly humour Mozart regarded her, she took him and his kisses and his flowery declarations seriously. Had he not said in this very letter, "love me as I love you, and then we shall never cease loving each other?" Had he not thence broken into French?

"Je vous baise vos mains,—votre visage—afin, tout ce que vous me permettez de baiser. Je suis de tout mon coeur," etc.

His sister later had a target painted for a club of Salzburg friends who met for crossbow practice, and the target represented "the melancholy farewell of two persons dissolved in tears, Wolfgang and the Baesle."

His flirtations with his cousin seemed to have angered his father, who was eager for him to go to France and conquer Paris. The father was the more indignant as Mozart was at the same time becoming entangled with Aloysia Weber—of whom more later. Mozart loved his father and treated him with the utmost respect, but he could rise to a sense of his own dignity when the occasion demanded, and he wrote him:

"The bitter way in which you write about my merry and innocent intercourse with your brother's daughter, makes me justly indignant; but it is not as you think. I require to give you no answer on the subject."

A few days later he writes to his cousin with all the old hilarity, his letter being mostly in doggerel rhyme beginning:

"You may think or believe that I have croaked (crepirt) or kicked the bucket (verreckt). But I beg you not to think so, for how could I write so beautifully if I were dead?"

Nearly a year later he writes to her regretting that he could not have her visit him at Kaisersheim, and begging her to meet him in Munich.

In Munich it was Mozart's fate to find a tragedy awaiting him, for Aloysia (whom he had loved as solemnly as he had loved his cousin frivolously, and to whom he looked forward longingly after his long absence) showed herself indifferent. He had planned that his cousin should "have a great part to play in this meeting with Aloysia." This I would rather interpret as evidence that Mozart was quite ignorant of any deep affection in his cousin. There is nothing in his life that shows him as anything other than the most tender-hearted of men, and it is inconceivable that he should have brought his cousin to Munich simply to drag her at the chariot of his triumph with Aloysia.

And yet his flirtation with the Baesle certainly went past mere bantering and repartee. She stayed several weeks in Munich and must have furnished Mozart grateful diversion from his humiliation. She went with him to Salzburg and later, when she returned to her own home, we find him writing with the same exuberance, addressing her as—

"Dearest, best, lovingest, fairest, enticingest, by-an-unworthy-cousin-to-harness-broken."

With her name he puns on Baesle and Bass, thence, "Baeschen oder Violoncellchen"—a little bass-viol or violoncelline. He writes, as he says, to appease her "alluring beauty (visibilia et invisibilia) heightened by wrath to the height of your slipper-heel." Then he writes her a passionate parody on a poem of Klopstock's, and writes it in circular form around his own sketch of her portrait, which implies neither beauty on her part nor art on his.

This is the last letter he seems ever to have written her excepting a business letter two years later. And this marks the end of a flirtation which he seems to have regarded as sheer frivolity. But this was not her mood. Biographer Jahn says:

"The Baesle seems to have taken her cousin's courtship seriously; at least all the neighbours thought from the way she spoke of him that there was something of deluded expectation in her tone. She spoke neither gladly nor often of this time. She was not musical and could not have had a proper appreciation of Mozart's artistic value. His vivacity and velocity of musical performance seemed comical to her. Of her later life nothing is known to me; she lived later with the Postmaster Streite in Bayreuth and died there Jan. 25, 1841, at the great age of eighty-three."

So much for the Baesle. Poor girl! But while the hollyhock was taking the bee's fickleness so solemnly, a rose was revenging her upon him. A more serious—for Mozart a very serious—affair, was his infatuation with Aloysia Weber, a fifteen-year-old girl with much beauty and little heart.

When Mozart was in Manheim in 1778, writing flowery letters to the Baesle, he had occasion to have certain music copied, to be sung before the Princess of Orange, who had become interested in his work. The copyist was also a prompter in the theatre and a very poor, but hospitable man. His name was Weber, and his brother became the father of Carl Maria von Weber, the composer.

The fact that Weber was poor was the first recommendation to Mozart. Another magnet was, that Weber had a daughter fifteen years old who was gifted with a voice and seemed capable of a great artistic career. It was this vicarious ambition that had interested him in the young singer Keiserin some years before. And now we find him writing to his father on Jan. 17, 1778, the following description of the Weber family:

"He has a daughter who sings admirably, and has a lovely pure voice; she is only fifteen. She fails in nothing but in stage action; were it not for that, she might be the prima donna of any theatre. Her father is a downright honest German who brings up his children well, for which very reason the girl is persecuted here. He has six children,—five girls and a son. He and his wife and children have been obliged to live for the last fourteen years on an income of 200 florins, but as he has already done his duty well, and has lately provided a very accomplished singer for the Elector, he has now actually 400 florins. My aria for De' Amicis she sings to perfection with all its tremendous passages."

He and his mother had been living with the Wendlings. Frl. Wendling, who had engaged Mozart's interest for a time, turned out to be a disreputable character and the father to be devoid of all religion. The deeply pious Mozart writes in the same letter to his father, "Friends who have no religion cannot long be our friends." Then, with man's usual consistency, he outlines the white lie by which he is going to break off the association with the Wendlings; and goes on to say that he wishes to form a similar connection with the Weber family. The daughter Aloysia is improving vastly in her singing under his tuition; he has written an aria especially for her, and he plans a trip to Italy principally for her benefit. They could live very comfortably, he says, because Aloysia's eldest sister could cook. The father Weber reminds him greatly of his own father, and Aloysia will be, he is sure, a congenial friend for Nannerl.

Mozart is so much in love with Aloysia that in this long letter to his father he declares:

"I am so deeply touched with this oppressed family that my greatest wish is to make them happy, and perhaps I may be able to do so.... I will be answerable with my life for her singing, and her doing credit to my recommendation.... I will gladly write an opera for Verona for thirty zeccini, solely that Madlle. Weber may acquire fame by it; for if I don't, I fear she may be sacrificed.... I have now written you of what is in my heart; my mother is satisfied with my plans."

How well the mother was satisfied with the plans is evident from the postscript in her own hand, added secretly to the letter and displaying a slight touch of motherly jealousy:

"No doubt you perceive by the accompanying letter that when Wolfgang makes new friends he would give his life for them. It is true that she does sing incomparably; still, we ought not to lose sight of our own interests. I write this quite secretly while he is at dinner, for I don't wish him to know it."

Five days afterwards Mozart recurs to the subject, referring to a friend who married for money and commenting:

"I hope never to marry in this way; I wish to make my wife happy, but not to become rich by her means.... The nobility must not marry from love or inclination, but from interest, and all kinds of other considerations. It would not at all suit a grandee to love his wife after she had done her duty, and brought in to the world an heir to his property. But we poor humble people are privileged not only to choose a wife who loves us, and whom we love, but we may, can, and do take such a one, because we are neither noble, nor high-born, nor rich, but, on the contrary, lowly, humble, and poor; we therefore need no wealthy wife, for our wealth, being in our heads, dies with us, and these no man can deprive us of, unless he cut them off, in which case we need nothing more."

Next week he writes again asking his father to concern himself for the Webers. The poor father had been imploring Wolfgang to go to Paris for fame and fortune's sake. Now he finds him so far from being willing to pursue his own promising career, that he wishes to give up all thought of Paris and subordinate his genius to the task of boosting into fame the daughter of a poverty-stricken music-copyist!

Leopold answers in the violent tone he could adopt on occasions, and tries to distract his son's attention by appealing to his ambition. He asks him to decide whether he wishes to become "a commonplace artist whom the world will forget, or a celebrated capellmeister of whom posterity will read years after in books,—whether, infatuated with a pretty face you one day breathe your last on a straw sack, your wife and children in a state of starvation, or, after a well-spent Christian life, you die in honour and independence and your family well provided for.... Get to Paris without delay, take your place by the side of really great people. Aut Caesar ant nihil."

Little the father could have realised how much truth there was to be in the dark side of his prophecy; and that, too, in spite of the fact that his son took his advice. Leaving Aloysia behind, the son and his mother went to Paris.

He landed there in the very midst of the tempest raging around Gluck. Paris did not at all please Mozart, and the French people disgusted him. For this Paris was not entirely to blame, seeing that Mozart had gone there unwillingly and was parted from his beloved Aloysia. It was in Paris, too, that his mother died. And now, while he was so deeply concerned for Aloysia's career and was trying so desperately to secure her an engagement in Paris, she was blandly forgetting him. Of this, however, he had no suspicion until he reached Munich, where she, the star of his heart and of his ambition, was waiting for him.

What the change was that had come over Aloysia it is impossible to tell. The first thought is that, having risen to prominence by Mozart's tuition and assistance, she spurned the ladder that had uplifted her. But Nohl's theory that her head was turned by her admission to the favour that quickly surrounds the successful prima donna is hardly to be held, in view of the fact that in rejecting a man of Mozart's prominence she took the actor Lange, who had little, if any, more prominence. It was doubtless simply the old story of the one who loves and the other who lets herself be loved, just to keep up practice, until she learns to love elsewhere.

When Mozart reached Munich, he was still in mourning for his mother, and dressed according to the French custom of the time, in red coat with black buttons. He hurried to meet Aloysia and felt at once the chill of her jilt. The lips once so warm under his gave him merely the formal German kiss. She seemed scarcely to recognise the one for whose sake once she shed so many tears. Whereupon Mozart immediately flung himself upon the piano stool and sang, in a loud voice, with forced gaiety, "Ich lass das Maedel gern das mich nicht will,"—which you might translate, "Gladly I give up the girl that gives up me." It was on Christmas Day that Mozart had hastened to the presence of his beloved. For the Christmas gift she gave him back his heart! and right gallantly he took it. But his gaiety was hollow, and when he went to the house of a friend he locked himself in a room and wept for days.

Still he continued to live with the Webers and to brave out his despair before them all. He feared to turn to his father for full sympathy, and his fears were apparently justified, for his father seemed only to have answered with rebuking him for his foolish "dreams of pleasure." To this ill-timed reproof Mozart answered:

"What do you mean by dreams of pleasure? I do not wish to give up dreaming, for what mortal on the whole compass of the earth does not often dream? above all, dreams of pleasure—peaceful dreams, sweet, cheering dreams, if you will—dreams which, if realised, would have rendered my life (now far rather sad than happy) more endurable."

In a few weeks, however, he returned home to Salzburg, and there his cousin the Baesle, who had brightened a part of his trial in Munich, followed him. And this was in the month of January of the year 1779.

As for Aloysia, she had cause enough to regret jilting one of the greatest, as well as one of the most gentle, souls in the world. She married the actor Lange and lived unhappily with him. According to Jahn, each both gave and received cause for jealousy. Years after, Mozart drifted back into her vicinity under curious circumstances. The lovers became good friends, and such friends, that for him, at least, Lange could not feel jealousy, according to Jahn, who adds, "Otherwise he would hardly have taken the role of Pierrot in the pantomime in which his wife played Columbine and Mozart the Harlequin."

Nohl thus sums up the whole affair: "Neither happiness nor riches brightened Aloysia's path in life, nor the peace of mind arising from the consciousness of purity of heart. Not till she was an aged woman, and Mozart long dead, did she recognise what he had really been; she liked to talk about him and his friendship, and in thus recalling the brightest memories of her youth, some of that lovable charm seemed to revive that Mozart had imparted to her and to all with whom he had any intercourse. Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. Meanwhile, he parted from her with much pain, though the esteem with which he had hitherto regarded her was no longer the same."

* * * * *

Of all strange things in the strange history of lives upon this earth, there cannot be many more strange than this, that Mozart, after being so sadly treated by this woman, should have his next love affair with her youngest sister. A novelist would not dare tax the credulity of his readers with such a plot. But such impossibilities and implausibilities belong exclusively to the historian.

The Webers moved to Vienna where Aloysia was highly successful as a prima donna. In March, 1781, the Archbishop, to whom Mozart played the part of musical lackey, summoned him to the same city. The Archbishop was one whose petty malicious and grinding temper almost drove the pious Mozart to contempt of all churchmen. At least he drove him finally to a declaration of independence which, in our modern eyes, he was very long in reaching. The Archbishop's brother, Count Arco, was so infuriated at the impertinence of a mere musical flunkey, like Mozart, daring to present a formal resignation, that he heaped abuse upon him and finally kicked him out of the room. Everybody knows about this kick, but seemingly ignores the fact that Mozart was restrained from retaliation only by the fact that he was in the apartment of the prince, and that it was the dream of his life and his very definite plan to meet Count Arco and return the kick with interest. But the Archbishop and the count went back to Salzburg and the opportunity did not occur.

The portrait usually presented of Mozart meekly accepting the humiliation is of a piece with the legend that Keats died of a broken heart because of a bitter review of his poetry. The fact being, of course, that Keats' death was due to constitutional weakness, and that the emotion inspired by the attack upon his art was a burning desire to punch the critic's head.

Strange to say, Mozart could not convince his pusillanimous father that he did not owe an apology to the Archbishop for being kicked. But he was so deeply offended that he never returned to Salzburg. So much for those who cherish the pathetic belief that the days of patrons were of benefit to the artist and his art.

Mozart did not starve upon being left positionless in Vienna. The emperor desired to establish a national opera, and Mozart took up the composition of his "Die Entfuehrung aus dem Serail." In the first moment of his quarrel with the Archbishop Mozart had left the retinue and sought rooms outside. Where could he go for a home but back to the household of the Webers?—now more than ever in poverty since the good father had died and Aloysia had married soon after obtaining her new engagement.

The very name of Weber was a red rag to Leopold Mozart, and he began a series of bitter rebukes, which the son answered with ample dignity and gentleness.

"What you write about the Webers, I do assure, is not the fact. I was a fool about Madame Lange, I own; but what is a man not when he is in love? But I did love her truly, and even now I feel that she is not indifferent to me; it is perhaps, therefore, fortunate that her husband is a jealous booby and never leaves her, so that I seldom have an opportunity of seeing her. Believe me when I say that old Madame Weber is a very obliging person, and I cannot serve her in proportion to her kindness to me, for indeed I have not time to do so."

A little later one of Mozart's letters is interrupted and is finished in a strange hand as follows:

"Your good son has just been summoned by Countess Thun, and he has not time to finish the letter to his dear father, which he much regrets, and requests me to let you know this, for, being post-day, he does not wish you to be without a letter from him. Next post he will write again. I hope you will excuse my P.S., which cannot be so agreeable to you as what your son would have written. I beg my compliments to your amiable daughter. I am your obedient friend,