Table Of Contentcover next page >
title: Love Lives of the Great Composers : From Gesualdo to
Wagner
author: Howitt, Basil.
publisher: Sound And Vision
isbn10 | asin: 0920151183
print isbn13: 9780920151181
ebook isbn13: 9780585141633
language: English
subject Composers--Biography, Composers--Relations with
women.
publication date: 1995
lcc: ML390.H82 1995eb
ddc: 780/.92/2
subject: Composers--Biography, Composers--Relations with
women.
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Page III
Love Lives of the Great Composers
From Gesualdo to Wagner
Basil Howitt
Sound And Vision
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Page V
Contents
Dedication VII
Overture IX
Chapter 1
Don Carlo Gesualdo 1
Chapter 2
Jean-Baptiste Lully 13
Chapter 3
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi Georg Philipp Telemann George Frideric Handel Johann
Sebastian Bach 23
Chapter 4
Franz Joseph Haydn 41
Chapter 5
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 57
Chapter 6
Ludwig van Beethoven 83
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Page VI
Chapter 7
Gioachino Rossini 105
Chapter 8
Franz Peter Schubert 121
Chapter 9
Gaetano Donizetti 135
Chapter 10
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy 147
Chapter 11
Robert Alexander Schumann 165
Chapter 12
Franz Liszt 195
Chapter 13
Richard Wagner 231
Acknowledgements 267
Copyright notice 269
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Page VII
Dedication
To my wife Sue,
and to all musicians past and present who make life so
enjoyable.
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Page IX
Overture
In the only real pub left in the centre of Manchester UK, a poky, spartan, gem of a boozer without a juke box,
gaming machine, piewarmer, or even condoms in the gents, I was sitting alone with my fifth and final pint after my
clarinettist friend Phil had left to catch his last bus home. Some friendly cyber-yuppies up from the south of
England drew me into their conversation. They were in Manchester for a crash update course on something to do
with bytes, bits and bugs, but right then they needed a good cheap nosh. Where could they go? And would I like
another pint? Accepting with weak will, I pointed out that the world behind the pub was quite literally their soft,
succulent oyster; they were already on the edge of China Town, with its £5 Special Chow Meins, whiffs of star-
anise and garlic, clattering plates, and rhythmic cleaver chops muffled by swishing works.
In response to their inevitable next question, what did I do for a living, I began my off-pat monologue about this
bookwhich is certainly not yet a living, but has usually been good fun, which is some compensation. In no time,
one of the young men broke in. The only time in his life he had ever been creative was when he had been apart
from his fiancée for six months. The pain of separation, and the craving to be re-united with his beloved drew from
him a flood of love letters to her which astonished no-one more than himself. Till then, poems and novels and all
that stuff had been outside his orbit; and since he had married the lady, of course, he had written nothing.
Many composers have themselves written about how their love lives affected their creativity. Chopin in his early
20s was by far the most explicit on the theme in his soft-to-hard-porn correspondence with his beautiful and very
liberated mistress, Countess Delphina Potocka, to whom he dedicated his F Minor Concerto and his "Minute"
Waltz.
When they began their affair in 1832, Delphina, mother of five and separated from her rake of a husband,
undoubtedly nursed Chopin, three years younger than herself, through his sexual noviceship
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Page X
into full priesthood. In the words of the romantic biographer G. F. Pourtalès (quoted in Ruth Jordan's Nocturne: A
Life of Chopin) Delphina "offered him what he wanted long before he thought of asking for it". He was very soon
addicted to the experience, like so many of the Countess's far more socially exalted previous and concurrent lovers.
She had almost lost count of them; and no wonder, with her "dazzling white shoulders and generous breasts, dark
blue eyes and golden hair worn in ringlets or piled into a bun". What's more, she was no bimbo, being well read, a
pianist, composer and beautiful singer.
For the newly initiated Chopin, regular, rampant sex with Delphina was, he wrote to her in a letter of around 1833,
disastrous for his creative urges:
. . . I have been thinking a great deal about inspiration and creativity and I have very slowly made an
important discovery. Inspiration and ideas only come to me when I have not had a woman for a long time .
. .
. . . A creative person must keep women out of his life, the energy collecting in his system will not go from
his cock and balls into the woman's womb but into his brain in the form of inspiration and will perhaps give
birth to a great work of art. Think of it, the temptation which drives us men into a woman's arms can be
transformed into inspiration! . . .
. . . Think of it, my sweetest Phindela, how much of that precious fluid and energy I have wasted on you,
ramming you to no purpose
. . . Ballads, polonaises, even a whole concerto may have been lost forever up your des durka , I can't tell
how many. I have been so deeply engulfed in my love for you I have hardly created anything, everything
creative went straight from my cock into your des durka , you are now carrying my music in your womb . . .
. . . When the diligence [public stage coach] will at long last bring you back I'll cling so hard that for a
whole week you won't be able to get me out of you. Bother all inspiration, ideas and works of art . . .
. . . I kiss you all over your dear little body and inside.
Your faithful Frycek, your most talented pupil who has mastered the art of love. [from Ruth Jordan's
Nocturne]
The des durka reference would take time to explain, but its meaning is clear enough. The authenticity of some of
Chopin's steamy letters to the Countess is very dubious, but the above one definitely
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Page XI
seems to be part of what the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians describes as "an authentic nucleus" of
such correspondence.
Schumann was also very explicit, though without a trace of lewdness, on how privations in love stimulated
creativity. He and Clara Wieck endured long and agonising separations imposed by Clara's tyrant of a father
Friedrich Wieck, whose intransigence towards their marriage forced them to seek permission for it through the
courts. In 1837 Schumann wrote to Clara of his discovery that "nothing sharpens the imagination as much as
expecting and longing for something" with the result on this occasion being the 18 Characteristic Pieces entitled
Davidsbündlertänze (Davidsbündler Dances). Again in 1838 he wrote: "I have been waiting for your letter and as a
result have written books-ful of piecesamazing, crazy, sober stuff. You'll stretch your eyes when you open it up . . .
You appear in the Novelletten [one of his longest and most demanding piano works in eight movements] in every
possible circumstance, in every irresistible form . . . They could only be written by one who knows such eyes as
yours and has touched such lips as yours." And so it went on, with Schumann bursting forth in floods of heavenly
song during the harrowing months of their legal battles with Wieck before they finally received permission from
the court to marry in August 1840. "So utterly at the mercy of the ebb and flow of melody am I," he wrote to
Clara, "that I feel almost swamped, oblivious to all the disgraceful goings on around me. I fear I shall not be able
to bear this exhilaration for long."
The flow of great music from suffering in love has been endless. Aloisia Weber's rejection of Mozart in 1778 was
clear-cut and very painful, yet drew from him a stunning and intensely moving series of seven concert arias for her
between 1778 and 1788 (some six years after he had married her sister). The passionate heartache which
Beethoven suffered on account of the great love of his life around the years 1804 to 1806, Josephine Deym, may
well, suggests Ates Orga, be bound up with the lyrical ecstasy of the Fourth Symphony, the Fourth Piano Concerto,
and the Violin concerto. (This was also the period of the Eroica, Fidelio , and the Appassionata piano sonata.)
Josephine Deym certainly loved and revered Beethoven, but refused to satisfy the "sensual love" he craved from
her.
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Janácek at the age of 63 provides perhaps one of the most extreme cases of the creative fruitfulness of agonised,
unrequited, fantasising love. "All my works, all my operas contain one painful love," he said, referring to his
fixation with the young 26-year-old Kamilá Stösslová. The wife of an antiques dealer who was often away, Kamilá
was uninterested in Janácek's works and only replied spasmodically to his hundreds of letters to her over a period
of 11 years. In spite of its onesidedness, this affair was the creative force behind his late woman-orientated operas
and directly inspired his string quartet of 1928 subtitled "Love Letters".
Happiness in love has also inspired wonderful music, of course. The supreme example is surely the most wonderful
birthday present in the history of music from husband to wife, Wagner's Siegfried Idyll to Cosima on Christmas
Day 1870, four months after she had at long, long last become his wife. No wonder Wagner and his 15 musicians
played it three times on the staircase and the entire household at Tribschen was crying with happiness. Cosima also
inspired the final love music in his opera Siegfried first produced at Bayreuth some six years later. "Everything is
yours before I write it," he told her.
It's always very dangerous to read too much of a life into a work of art, of course, but many other works seemingly
fired by happiness in love spring to mind. These include Haydn's joyful String Quartet in C major (No. 3 op. 33),
written perhaps at the height of his rejuvenation, in his 50th-year, by the luscious young Italian singer Luigia
Polzelli who had become his mistress at Esterháza under the nose of her aging, consumptive husband! "She
(Polzelli) was quite clearly always in his mind in his music in the 1780s, and especially in Op. 33," suggests no less
a scholarly figure than H.C. Robbins Landon in his mammoth and marvellous tome Haydn at Esterháza. Then
there is Mendelssohn's glorious String Quartet in E minor (No. 2 op. 44), with its radiant slow movement, and his
Second Piano Concerto in D minor (op. 40), both written between bouts of rumpy pumpy during his honeymoon
with Cécile in 1837. His first Piano Concerto in G minor (op. 25), with its roller coaster outer movements and
gorgeously romantic, cello dominated middle movement was also probably inspired by lovefor the beautiful and
very talented 16-year-old pianist Delphine von Schauroth on whom he had a crush and to whom he dedicated the
work. After meeting her in Munich in 1830 at the start
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Page XIII
of his Grand Tour, he wrote to his sister Fanny that he was following Delphine around "like a pet lamb". "We
flirted dreadfully," he added, "but there isn't any danger because I'm already in love with a Scotch girl whose name
I don't know."
One could go on and on, but my cumulative impressionit's definitely no more than that at the momentis that
suffering and angst in love have produced more great art than has happiness. "They say in Vienna that Haydn's
rather unhappy and childless marriage is the reason he composed so much," wrote Johan Frederik Berwald in his
account of when, as a young touring wunderkind , he visited Haydn in 1799. That proves nothing, of course, but it
fits in with my hunch.
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The importance of muse figures in composers' lives cannot be exaggerated. As with Robert Graves and his
succession of goddesses (who often lived en famille with the poet and his wife in Majorca), sexual activity has
often been non-existent, or else a relatively insignificant aspect in the inspirational relationship. Haydn deeply
valued the close and sympathetic interest of Maria von Genzinger, wife of the Esterházy physician, in all aspects of
his creative life. So did Elgar in his relationship with Lady Alice Stuart-Wortley, his "Windflower" who was
undoubtedly the "soul" of his Violin Concerto. "All stands still until you come and approve!", Elgar wrote to her in
April 1910. He was indeed lucky that his dearly loved wife Caroline Alice could tolerate the deep mutual affection
between Lady Alice and himself without feeling threatened by it.
Wagner's relationship with each of his two main muses Mathilde Wesendonck and Judith Gautier was certainly
rather more tactileplenty of kisses and embracesbut the likelihood is that he never got either of them into bed. Both
women were essentially indulging and adoring groupies who became very caught up in serving his shortterm
creative and egocentric purposeswhile he was composing Tristan and Parsifal respectivelybefore fading away, or,
rather, being shown the door by the current irate Mrs Wagner.
Even Puccini, whose compositional style is said to "mimic sexuality" and consist of "endless foreplay leading up to
intensely orgasmic but brief melodic climaxes" (Tom Sutcliffe, The Guardian 16th
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