III
The story of Le Pardon de Ploërmel is interesting. It was first called Dinorah, a name which Meyerbeer picked up abroad. But Meyerbeer liked to change the titles of his operas several times in the course of the rehearsals in order to keep public curiosity at fever heat. He had the notion of writing an opéra-comique in one act, and he asked his favorite collaborators, Jules Barbier and Michael Carré, for a libretto. They produced Dinorah in three scenes and with but three characters. The music was written promptly and was given to Perrin, the famous director, whose unfortunate influence soon made itself felt. A director’s first idea at that time was to demand changes in the piece given him. “A single act by you, Master? Is that permissible? What can we put on after that? A new work by Meyerbeer should take up the entire evening.” That was the way the insidious director talked, and there was all the more chance of his being listened to as the author was possessed by a mania for retouching and making changes. So Meyerbeer took the score to the Mediterranean where he spent the winter. The next spring he brought back the work developed into three acts with choruses and minor characters. Besides these additions he had written the words which Barbier and Carré should have done.
The rehearsals were tedious. Meyerbeer wanted Faure and Madame Carvalho in the leading rôles but one was at the Opéra-Comique and the other at her own house, the Théâtre-Lyrique. The work went back and forth from the Place Favart to the Place du Châtelet. But the author’s hesitancy was at bottom only a pretext. What he wanted was to secure a postponement of Limnander’s opera Les Blancs et les Bleus. The action of this work and of Dinorah, as well, took place in Brittany. In the hope of being Meyerbeer’s choice, both theatres turned poor Limnander away. Finally, Dinorah fell to the Opéra-Comique. After long hard work, which the author demanded, Madame Cabel and MM. Faure and Sainte-Foix gave a perfect performance.
There was a good deal of criticism of having the hunter, the reaper, and the shepherd sing a prayer together at the beginning of the third act. This was not considered theatrical; to-day that is a virtue.
There was a good deal of talk about L’Africanne, which had been looked for for a long time and which seemed to be almost legendary and mysterious; it still is for that matter. The subject of the opera was unknown. All that was known was that the author was trying to find an interpreter and could get none to his liking.
Then Marie Cruvelli, a German singer with an Italian training, appeared. With her beauty and prodigious voice she shone like a meteor in the theatrical firmament. Meyerbeer found his Africanne realized in her and at his request she was engaged at the Opéra. Her engagement was made the occasion for a brilliant revival of Les Huguenots and Meyerbeer wrote new ballet music for it. To-day we have no idea of what Les Huguenots was then. Then the author went back to his Africanne and went to work again. He used to go to see the brilliant singer about it nearly every day, when she suddenly announced that she was going to leave the stage to become the Comtesse Vigier! Meyerbeer was discouraged and he threw his unfinished manuscript into a drawer where it stayed until Marie Sass had so developed her voice and talent that he made up his mind to entrust the rôle of Sélika to her. He wanted Faure for the rôle of Nelusko and he was already at the Opéra, so he had the management engage Naudin, the Italian tenor, as well.
But Scribe had died during the long period which had elapsed since the marriage of the Comtesse Vigier. Meyerbeer was now left to himself, and too much inclined to revisions of every kind as he was, re-made the piece to his fancy. When it was completed—it didn’t resemble anything and the author planned to finish it at the rehearsals.
As we know, Meyerbeer died suddenly. He realized that he was dying and as he knew how necessary his presence was for a performance of L’Africanne he forbade its appearance. But his prohibition was only verbal as he could no longer write. The public was impatiently awaiting L’Africanne, so they went ahead with it.
When Perrin and his nephew du Locle opened the package of manuscripts Meyerbeer had left, they were stupefied at finding no L’Africanne.
“Never mind,” said Perrin, “the public wants an Africanne and it shall have one.”
He summoned Fétis, Meyerbeer’s enthusiastic admirer, and the three, Fétis, Perrin and du Locle, managed to evolve the opera we know from the scraps the author had left in disorder. They did not accomplish this, however, without considerable difficulty, without some incoherences, numerous suppressions and even additions. Perrin was the inventor of the wonderful map on which Sélika recognized Madagascar. They took the characters there in order to justify the term Africanne applied to the heroine. They also introduced the Brahmin religion to Madagascar in order to avoid moving the characters to India where the fourth act should take place. The first performance was imminent when they found that the work was too long. So they cut out an original ballet where a savage beat a tom-tom, and they cut and fitted together mercilessly. In the last act Sélika, alone and dying, should see the paradise of the Brahmins appear as in a vision. But Faure wanted to appear again at the finale, so they had to adapt a bit taken from the third act and suppress the vision. This is the reason why Nelusko succumbs so quickly to the deadly perfume of the poisonous flowers, while Sélika resists so long. The riturnello of Sélika’s aria, which should be performed with lowered curtain as the queen gazes over the sea and at the departing vessel far away on the horizon, became a vehicle for encores—the last thing that was ever in Meyerbeer’s mind. But the worst was the liberty Fétis took in retouching the orchestration. As a compliment to Adolph Sax he substituted a saxaphone for the bass clarinet which the author indicated. This resulted in the suppression of that part of the aria beginning O Paradis sorti de l’onde as the saxophone did not produce a good effect. Fétis also allowed Perrin to make over a bass solo into a chorus, the Bishop’s Chorus. The great vocal range in this is poorly adapted for a chorus. Some barbarous modulations are certainly apocryphal....
We are unable to imagine what L’Africanne would have been if Scribe had lived and the authors had put it into shape. The work we have is illogical and incomplete. The words are simply monstrous and Scribe certainly would not have kept them. This is the case in the passage in the great duet:
O ma Sélika, vous régnez sur mon âme!
—Ah! ne dis pas ces mots brûlante!
Ils m’égarent moi-même....
The music stitched to this impossible piece, however, had its admirers—even fanatical admirers—so great was the prestige of the author’s name at the time of its appearance. We must not forget that there are, indeed, some beautiful pages in this chaos. The religious ceremony in the fourth act and the Brahmin recitative accompanied by the pizzicati of the bass may be mentioned as an indication of this. The latter passage is not in favor, however; they play it down without conviction and so deprive it of all its strength and majesty.
I said, at the beginning of this study, that we were ungrateful to Meyerbeer, and this ingratitude is double on the part of France, for he loved her. He only had to say the word to have any theatre in Europe opened to him, yet he preferred to them all the Opéra at Paris and even the Opéra-Comique where the choruses and orchestra left much to be desired. When he did work for Paris after he had given Margherita d’Anjou and Le Crociato in Italy, he was forced to accommodate himself to French taste just as Rossini and Donizetti were. The latter wrote for the Opéra-Comique La Fille du Régiment, a military and patriotic work, and its dashing and glorious Salut à la France has resounded through the whole world. Foreigners do not take so much pains in our day, and France applauds Die Meistersinger which ends with a hymn to German art. Such is progress!
Something must be said of a little known score, Struensée, which was written for a drama which was so weak that it prevented the music gaining the success it deserved. The composer showed himself in this more artistic than in anything else he did. It should have been heard at the Odéon with another piece written by Jules Barbier on the same subject. The overture used to appear in the concerts as did the polonnaise, but like the overture to Guillaume Tell, they have disappeared. These overtures are not negligible. The overture to Guillaume Tell is notable for the unusual invention of the five violoncellos and its storm with its original beginning, to say nothing of its pretty pastoral. The fine depth of tone in the exordium of Struensée and the fugue development in the main theme are also not to be despised. But all that, we are told, is lacking in elevation and depth. Possibly; but it is not always necessary to descend to Hell and go up to Heaven. There is certainly more music in these overtures than in Grieg’s Peer Gynt which has been dinned into our ears so much.
But enough of this. I must stop with the operas, for to consider the rest of his music would necessitate a study of its own and that would take us too far afield. My hope is that these lines may repair an unnecessary injustice and redirect the fastidious who may read them to a great musician whom the general public has never ceased to listen to and applaud.
Chapter XXI
Jacques Offenbach
It is dangerous to prophesy. Not long ago I was speaking of Offenbach, trying to do justice to his marvellous natural gifts and deploring his squandering them. And I was imprudent enough to say that posterity would never know him. Now posterity is proving that I was wrong, for Offenbach is coming back into fashion. Our contemporaneous composers forget that Mozart, Beethoven and Sebastian Bach knew how to laugh at times. They distrust all gaiety and declare it unesthetic. As the good public cannot resign itself to getting along without gaiety, it goes to operetta and turns naturally to Offenbach who created it and furnished an inexhaustible supply. My phrase is not exaggerated, for Offenbach hardly dreamed of creating an art. He was endowed with a genius for the comic and an abundance of melody, but he had no thought of doing anything beyond providing material for the theatre he managed at the time. As a matter of fact he was almost its only author.
He was unable to rid himself of his Germanic influences and so corrupted the taste of an entire generation by his false prosody, which has been incorrectly considered originality. In addition he was lacking in taste. At the time they affected a dreadful mannerism of always stopping on the next to the last note of a passage, whether or not it was associated with a mute syllable. This mannerism had no purpose beyond indicating to the audience the end of a passage and giving the claque the signal to applaud. Offenbach did not belong to that heroic strain to which success is the least of its cares. So he adopted this mannerism, and often his ingeniously turned and charming couplets are ruined by this silly absurdity now gone out of fashion.
Furthermore, he wrote badly, for his early education was neglected. If the Tales of Hoffman shows traces of a practised pen, it is because Guiraud finished the score and went out of his way to remedy some of the author’s mistakes. Leaving aside the bad prosody and the minor defects in taste, we have left a work which shows a wealth of invention, melody, and sparkling fancy comparable to Grétry’s.
Grétry was no more a great musician than Offenbach, for he also wrote badly. The essential difference between the two was the care, not only in his prosody but also in his declamation, which Grétry tried to reproduce musically with all possible exactness. He overshot the mark in this for he did not see that in singing the expression of a note is modified by the harmonic scheme which accompanies it. It must be recognized, in addition, that many times Grétry was carried away by his melodic inventiveness and forgot his own principles so that he relegated his care for declamation to second place.
What hurt Grétry was his unbounded conceit, with which Offenbach, to his credit, was never afflicted. As an indication of this, he dared to write in his advice to young musicians:
“Those who have genius will make opéra-comique like mine; those who have talent will write opera like Gluck’s; while those who have neither genius nor talent, will write symphonies like Haydn’s.”
However, he tried to make an opera like Gluck’s and in spite of his great efforts and his interesting inventions, he could not equal the work of his formidable rival.
Although he was not a great musician, Offenbach had a surprising natural instinct and made here and there curious discoveries in harmony. In speaking of these discoveries I must go slightly into the theory of harmony and resign myself to being understood only by those of my readers who are more or less musicians. In a slight work, Daphnis et Chloé, Offenbach risked a dominant eleventh without either introduction or conclusion—an extraordinary audacity at the time. A short course in harmony is necessary for the understanding of this. We must start with the fact that, theoretically, all dissonances must be introduced and concluded, which we cannot explain here, but this leading up to and away from have for their purpose softening the harshness of the dissonance which was greatly feared in bygone times. Take if you please, the simple key of C natural. Do is the keynote, sol is the dominant. Place on this dominant two-thirds—si-re—and you have the perfect dominant chord. Add a third fa and you have the famous dominant seventh, a dissonance which to-day seems actually agreeable. Not so long ago they thought that they ought to prepare for the dissonance. In the Sixteenth Century it was not regarded as admissible at all, for one hears the two notes si and fa simultaneously and this seems intolerable to the ear. They used to call it the Diabolus in musica.
Palestrina was the first to employ it in an anthem. Opinions differ on this, and certain students of harmony pretend that the chord which Palestrina used only has the appearance of the dominant seventh. I do not concur in this view. But however the case may be, the glory of unchaining the devil in music belongs to Montreverde. That was the beginning of modern music.
Later, a new third was superimposed and they dared the chord sol-si-re-fa-la. The inventor is unknown, but Beethoven seems to have been the first to make any considerable use of it. He used the chord in such a way that, in spite of its current use to-day, in his works it appears like something new and strange. This chord imposes its characteristics on the second motif of the first part of the Symphony in C minor. This is what gives such amazing charm to the long colloquy between the flute, the oboe and the clarinets, which always surprises and arouses the listener, in the andante of the same symphony. Fétis in his Traité d’Harmonie inveighed against this delightful passage. He admits that people like it, but, according to him, the author had no right to write it and the listener has no right to admire it. Scholars often have strange ideas.
Then Richard Wagner came along and the reign of the ninth dominant took the place of the seventh. That is what gives Tannhauser, and Lohengrin their exciting character, which is dear to those who demand in music above everything else the pleasure due to shocks to the nervous system. Imitators have fallen foul of this easy procedure, and with a laughable naïveté imagine that in this way they can easily equal Wagner. And they have succeeded in making this valuable chord absolutely banal.
Jacques Offenbach
By adding still another third we have the dominant eleventh. Offenbach used this, but it has played but a small part since then. Beyond that we cannot go, for a third more and we are back to the basic note, two octaves away.
But innovations in harmony are rare in Offenbach’s work. What makes him interesting is his fertility in invention of melodies and few have equaled him in this. He improvised constantly and with incredible rapidity. His manuscripts give the impression of having been done with the point of a needle. There is nothing useless anywhere in them. He used abbreviations as much as he could and the simplicity of his harmony helped him here. As a result he was able to produce his light works in an exceedingly short time.
He had the luck to attach Madame Ugalde to his company. Her powers had already begun to decline but she was still brilliant. While she was giving a spectacular revival of Orphée aux Enfers, he wrote Les Bavards for her. He was inspired by the hope of an unusual interpretation and he so surpassed himself that he produced a small masterpiece. A revival of this work would certainly be successful if that were possible, but the peculiar merits of the creatrix of the rôle would be necessary and I do not see her like anywhere.
It is strange but true that Offenbach lost all his good qualities as soon as he took himself seriously. But he was not the only case of this in the history of music. Cramer and Clementi wrote studies and exercises which are marvels of style, but their sonatas and concertos are tiresome in their mediocrity. Offenbach’s works which were given at the Opéra-Comique—Robinson Crusoé, Vert-Vert, and Fantasio are much inferior to La Chanson de Fortunio, La Belle Hélène and many other justly famous operettas. There have been several unprofitable revivals of La Belle Hélène. This is due to the fact that the rôle of Hélène was designed for Mlle. Schneider. She was beautiful and talented and had an admirable mezzo-soprano voice. The slight voice of the ordinary singer of operetta is insufficient for the part. Furthermore, traditions have sprung up. The comic element has been suppressed and the piece has been denatured by this change. In Germany they conceived the idea of playing this farce seriously with an archaic stage setting!
Jacques Offenbach will become a classic. While this may be unexpected, what doesn’t happen? Everything is possible—even the impossible.
Chapter XXII
Their Majesties
Queen Victoria did me the honor to receive me twice at Windsor Castle, and Queen Alexandra paid me the same honor at Buckingham Palace in London. The first time I saw Queen Victoria I was presented to her by the Baroness de Caters. She was the daughter of Lablache and had one of the most beautiful voices and the greatest talent that I have ever known. This charming woman had been left a widow and so she became an artist, appearing in concerts and giving singing lessons. At the time of which I speak she was teaching Princess Beatrice, now the mother-in-law of the King of Spain. In all the glory of the freshness of youth, the Princess was endowed with a charming voice which the Baroness guided perfectly. The Princess received Madame de Caters and myself with a gracefulness which was increased by her unusual bashfulness. Her Majesty, in the meantime, was finishing her luncheon. I was somewhat apprehensive through having heard of the coldness which the Queen affected at this sort of audience, so I was more than surprised when she came in with both hands extended to take mine and when she addressed me with real cordiality. She was very fond of Baroness de Caters and that was the secret of the reception which put me at my ease at once.
Her Majesty wanted to hear me play the organ (there is an excellent one in the chapel at Windsor), and then the piano. Finally, I had the honor of accompanying the Princess as she sang the aria from Etienne Marcel. Her Royal Highness sang with great clearness and distinctness, but it was the first time she had sung before her august mother and she was frightened almost to death. The Queen was so delighted that some days later, without my being told of it, she summoned to Windsor, Madame Gye, wife of the manager of Covent Garden,—the famous singer Albani—to ask to have Etienne Marcel staged at her own theatre. The Queen’s wish was not granted.
I returned to Windsor seventeen years later, in company with Johann Wolf, who was for many years Queen Victoria’s chosen violinist. We dined at the palace, and, if we did not enjoy the distinction of sitting at the royal table, we were nevertheless in good company with the young princesses, daughters of the Duke of Connaught. We were lodged at a hotel for the honor of sleeping at the Castle was reserved for very important personages—an honor which need not be envied, for the sleeping apartments are really servants’ rooms. But etiquette decrees it.
Dinner was over, and princes in full uniform and princesses in elaborate evening dress stood about, waiting for her Majesty’s appearance. I was heartbroken when I saw her enter, for she was almost carried by her Indian servant and obviously could not walk alone. But once seated at a small table, she was just as she had been before, with her wonderful charm, her simple manner and her musical voice. Only her white hair bore witness to the years that had passed. She asked me about Henri VIII, which was being given for the second time at Covent Garden, and I explained to her that in my desire to give the piece the local color of its times I had been ferreting about in the royal library at Buckingham Palace, to which my friend, the librarian, had given me access. And I also told how I had found in a great collection of manuscripts of the Sixteenth Century an exquisitely fine theme arranged for the harpsichord, which served as the framework for the opera—I used it later for the march I wrote for the coronation of King Edward. The Queen was much interested in music in general and she appeared to be especially pleased in this discussion. His Highness the Duke of Connaught wrote me that she had spoken of it several times.
The musical library at Buckingham Palace is most remarkable and it is a pity that access to it is not easier. Among other things, there are the manuscripts of Handel’s oratorios, written for the most part with disconcerting rapidity. His Messiah was composed in fifteen days! The rudimentary instrumentation of the time made such speed possible, yet who is there to-day who could write all those fugue choruses with such speed? The fugue manner, which seems laborious to us, was current at the time and they were practised in it. The library also contains works of Handel’s contemporaries, which are executed with the same mastery. We cannot say whether they were written with the same rapidity as Handel’s, but it is easy to see that there was a general ability to do so, just as now it is a matter of common attainment to produce complicated orchestral effects, the possibility of which the old masters had no conception. What made Handel superior to his rivals was the romantic and picturesque side of his works; probably also, his prodigious and unvarying fertility.
The last word has been said about Queen Victoria, yet the peculiar charm which radiated from her personality cannot be too highly praised. She seemed the personification of England. When she passed on, it seemed as though a great void were left. All King Edward’s splendid qualities were necessary to take her place, combined with the effect of the world’s surprise at discovering a great king where they had expected to see only a brilliant prince who had been a constant lover of pomp and pleasure.
I was later admitted to Buckingham Palace to play with Josef Hollman, the violinist, before Queen Alexandra. We both were eager for this opportunity which we were told was impossible. The Queen was very busy, and, in addition, she was in mourning for the successive deaths of her father and mother, the King and Queen of Denmark. Suddenly, however, we learned that she would receive us. She was pale and appeared to be feeble, but she received us with the utmost cordiality. She spoke to me about her mother, whom I had seen at Copenhagen with her sisters the Empress Dowager of Russia, and the Princess of Hanover whom politics deprived of a crown which was hers by right. I have a very pleasant recollection of this visit. I do not know how it happened but I remained speechless at this lead from the Queen. She brought the subject up a second time and my timidity still prevented my responding. I ought to have had many things to say to one so obviously eager to listen. This Queen of Denmark, with her eighty years, was the most delightful old lady imaginable. Erect, slight, alert of mind and unfaltering of speech, she reminded me vividly of my maternal great-aunt, that extraordinary woman, who gave me my first notions of things and directed my hand on the keys so well.
A singer whom I had never seen or heard of, but of whom I had heard poor reports, had written Queen Louise that I wanted to accompany her to court. The Queen asked me if I knew her and if what she had written was true. My surprise was so great that I could not repress a start, which I followed by an exclamation of denial, which appeared to amuse her greatly. “I did not doubt it,” she said, “but I’m not sorry to be sure.”
Queen Alexandra was accompanied by Lady Gray, her great friend, and the hereditary princess of Greece. After M. Hollman and I had played a duet, she expressed a desire to hear me play alone. As I attempted to lift the lid of the piano, she stepped forward to help me raise it before the maids of honor could intervene. After this slight concert she delivered to each of us, in her own name and in that of the absent king, a gold medal commemorative of artistic merit, and she offered us a cup of tea which she poured with her royal and imperial hands.
Other queens have also received me—Queen Christine of Spain and Queen Amelie of Portugal. After Queen Christine had heard me play on the piano, she expressed a desire to hear me play the organ, and they chose for this an excellent instrument made by Cavaillé-Coll in a church whose name I have forgotten. The day was fixed for this ceremony, which would naturally have been of a private character, when some great ladies lectured the indiscreet queen for daring to resort to a sacred place for any purpose besides taking part in divine services. The queen was displeased by this remonstrance and she responded by coming to the church not only not incognito, but in great state, with the king (he was very young), the ministers and the court, while horsemen stationed at intervals blew their trumpets. I had written a religious march especially for this event, and the Queen kindly accepted its dedication to her. I was a little flustered when she asked me to play the too familiar melody from Samson et Dalila which begins Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix. I had to improvise a transposition suited for the organ, something I had never dreamt of doing. During the performance the Queen leaned her elbow on the keyboard of the organ, her chin resting on one hand and her eyes upturned. She seemed rapt in exstasy which, as may be imagined, was not precisely displeasing to the author.
The press of the day printed delightful articles about the scene, but with no pretense to accuracy. I had nothing to do with that in any way.
Her Majesty Queen Amelie of Portugal once honored me in a distinctive manner. She received me alone without any of her ladies of honor, which allowed her to dispense with all etiquette and to have me sit in a chair near her. In this intimate way she entertained me for three-quarters of an hour asking questions on all sorts of subjects. I had the chance to tell her how the oriental theme of the ballet in Samson had been given to me years before by General Yusuf, and to give her many details of that interesting personage of whom she had heard her uncles speak.
“I am going to leave you,” she said at last, “but not because I want to. If one conscientiously practices the metier of being a queen, one doesn’t always find it amusing.”
What would that unhappy woman have said, could she have foreseen the calamities that were to befall her!
In Rome I had the honor to be invited to a musicale at Queen Margharita’s. The great drawing-rooms were filled with great ladies laden down with family jewels of fabulous value. All the music was terribly serious. Now this kind of music does not make for personal acquaintance, especially as all these great people were victims of a boredom they did their best to conceal. Afterwards the two queens wanted to talk to me. Queen Hélène, who is a violinist, told me that her children were learning the violin and the cello, an arrangement I praised highly, for the exclusive devotion to the piano in these later days has been the death of chamber music and almost of music itself.
In my gallery of sovereigns I cannot forget the gracious Queen of Belgium. I have always seen her, however, in company with her august husband, and this story would become interminable if I were to include “Their Majesties” of the sterner sex—the Emperor of Germany, the Kings of Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Portugal....
As I have had more to do with princes than with sovereigns, my tongue sometimes slips in talking to the latter. As I excused myself one day for addressing the Queen of Belgium as “Highness,” she replied, with a smile, “Don’t apologize; that recalls good times.”
She told me of the time when she and the king, then only heirs apparent, used to go up and down the Mediterranean coast in a little two-seated car. It was during this period that I had the honor of meeting them at the palace of his Serene Highness the Prince of Monaco, and of having charming and interesting personal conversation with them, for the king is a savant and the queen an artist.
Chapter XXIII
Musical Painters
Ingres was famous for his violin. A single wall separated the apartment where I lived during my childhood and youth from the one where the painter Granger, one of Ingres’s pupils, with his wife and daughter, lived. Granger painted the Adoration of the Wise Men in the church of Notre Dame de Lorette. I have played with the gilt paper crown which his model wore when posing as one of the three kings. My mother and Mlle. Granger (who later became Madame Paul Meurice) both loved painting and became great friends. They copied together Paul Delaroche’s Enfants d’Edouard at the Louvre, a picture which was the rage at that time. My mother’s paintings, in an admirable state of preservation, may be seen at the museum at Dieppe.
I was introduced to Ingres when I was five years old through the Granger family. The distance from the Rue du Jardinet, where we lived, to the Quai Voltaire was not far, and we often went like a procession—the Grangers, my great-aunt Masson, my mother and I—to call upon Ingres and his wife, a delightfully simple woman whom everyone loved.
Ingres often talked to me about Mozart, Gluck, and all the other great masters of music. When I was six years old, I composed an Adagio which I dedicated to him in all seriousness. Fortunately this masterpiece has been lost. As I already played, and rather nicely for my years, some of Mozart’s sonatas, Ingres, in return for my dedication, presented me with a small medallion with the portrait of the author of Don Juan on one side, and this inscription on the other: “To M. Saint-Saëns, the charming interpreter of the divine artist.”
He carelessly omitted to add the date of this dedication, which would have increased its interest, for the idea of calling a knee-high youngster of six “M. Saint-Saëns” was certainly unusual.
Ingres, the painter famous for his violin
In addition to the calls I paid him, when I was older I often met the great painter at the house of Frederic Reiset, one of his most ardent admirers. They made much of music in that household and we often heard there Delsarte, the singer without a voice, whom Ingres admired very much. Delsarte and Henri Reber were, in fact, his musical mentors, and, in spite of his pretence of being a great connoisseur, he was in reality their echo. He affected, for example, the most profound contempt for all modern music, and would not even listen to it. In this respect he reflected Reber. Reber used to say quietly in his far-away nasal voice, “You’ve got to imitate somebody, so the best thing to do is to imitate the ancients, for they are the best.” However, he undertook to prove the contrary by writing some particularly individual music, when he thought he was imitating Haydn and Mozart. Some of his works, in their perfection of line, their regard for details, their purity and their moderation remind one of Ingres’s drawings which express so much in such a simple way. And Ingres, as well, although he tried to imitate Raphael, could only be himself. Reber would have been worthy of comparison with the painter, if he had had the power and productiveness which distinguish genius.
What about Ingres’s violin? Well, I saw this famous violin for the first time in the Montaubon Museum. Ingres never even spoke to me about it. He is said to have played it in his youth, but I could never persuade him to play even the slightest sonata with me. “I used to play,” he replied to my entreaties, “the second violin in a quartet, but that is all.”
So I think I must be dreaming when I read, from time to time, that Ingres was more appreciative of compliments about his violin-playing than those about his painting. That is merely a legend, but it is impossible to destroy a legend. As the good La Fontaine said:
“Man is like ice toward truth;
He is like fire to untruth.”
I do not know whether Ingres showed talent for the violin in his youth or not. But I can state positively that in his maturity he showed none.
Gustave Doré was also said to be famous on the violin, and his claims to consideration were far from inconsiderable. He had acquired a valuable instrument, on which he used to play Berlioz’s Concertos with a really extraordinary facility and spirit. These superficial works were enough for his musical powers. The surprising things about his execution was that he never worked at it. If he could not get a thing at once, he gave it up for good and all.
He was a frequent attendant at Rossini’s salon, and he belonged to the faction which supported melody and opposed “learned scientific music.” His temperament and mine hardly seem compatible, but friendship, like love, has its inexplicable mysteries, and gradually we became the best of friends. We lived in the same quarter and we visited each other frequently. As we almost never were of the same opinion about anything, we had interminable arguments, entirely free from rancor, which we thoroughly enjoyed.
I finally became the confidant of his secret sorrows, and his innermost griefs. He was endowed with a wonderful visual memory, but he made the mistake of never using models, for in his opinion they were useless for an artist who knew his metier. So he condemned himself to a perpetual approximation, which was enough for illustrations demanding only life and character, but fatal for large canvasses, with half or full sized figures. This was the cause of his disappointments and failures which he attributed to malevolence and a hostility, which really did exist, but which took advantage of this opportunity to make the painter pay for the exaggerated success of the designer that had been extravagantly praised by the press from the beginning. He laid himself open to criticism through his abuse of his own facility. I have seen him painting away on thirty canvasses at the same time in his immense studio. Three seriously studied pictures would have been worth more.
At heart this great overgrown jovial boy was melancholy and sensitive. He died young from heart disease, which was aggravated by grief over the death of his mother from whom he had never been separated.
I dedicated a slight piece written for the violin to Doré. This was not lost as the one to Ingres was, but it would be entirely unknown had not Johannes Wolf, the violinist of queens and empresses, done me the favor of placing it in his repertoire and bringing his fine talent to its aid.
Hébert was the most serious of the painter-violinists. Down to the end of his life he delighted in playing the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven, and, from all accounts, he played them remarkably. I can say this only from hearsay, for I never heard him. The few times that I ever saw him at home in my youth, I found him with his brush in hand. I saw him after that only at the Académie, where we sat near each other, and he always greeted me cordially. We talked music from time to time, and he conversed like a connoisseur.
Henri Regnault was the most musical of all the painters whom I have known. He did not need a violin—he was his own. Nature had endowed him with an exquisite tenor voice. It was alluring in its timbre and irresistible in its attractiveness, just as he was himself. He was no “near musician.” He loved music passionately, and he was unwilling to sing as an amateur. He took lessons from Romain Bussine at the Conservatoire. He sang to perfection the difficult arias of Mozart’s Don Juan. He also liked to declaim the magnificent recitative of Pilgrimage in the third act of Tannhauser.
As we were friendly and liked the same things, the sympathy which brought us together was quite natural. At the beginning of the war in 1870 I wrote Les Melodies Persanes and Regnault was their first interpreter. Sabre en main is dedicated to him. But his great success was Le Cimitière. Who would have thought as he sang:
“To-day the roses,
To-morrow the cypress!”
that the prophecy would be realized so soon?
Some imbeciles have written that the loss of Regnault was not to be regretted; that he had said all he had to say. In reality he had given only the prologue of the great poem which he was working out in his brain. He had already ordered canvasses for great compositions which, without a doubt, would have been among the glories of French art.
I saw him for the last time during the siege. He was just starting for drill with his rifle in his hand. One of the four watercolors which were his last work, stood uncompleted on his easel. There was a shapeless spot at the bottom. He held a handkerchief in his free hand. He moistened this from time to time with saliva and kept tapping away on the spot on the picture. To my great astonishment, almost to my fright, I saw roughed out and finished the head of a lion.
A few days afterwards came Buzenval!
When the question of publishing Henri Regnault’s letters came up, some phrases referring to me and ranking me above my rivals were found in them. The editor of the letter got into communication with me, read me the phrases, and announced that they were to be suppressed, because they might displease the other musicians.
I knew who the other musicians were, and whose puppet the editor was. It would have been possible, it seems to me, without hurting anyone, to include the exaggerated praise, which, coming from a painter, had no weight, and which would have proved nothing except the great friendship which inspired it. I have always regretted that the public did not learn of the sentiments with which the great artist, whom I loved so much, honored me.
The End