An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

"I never knew what it meant to snore," said Auber, apologetically, "until I took to sleeping in Véron's box; and as it is, I do not snore now except under provocation. But there would be no possibility of sleeping by the side of Véron without snoring. You have to drown his, or else it would awaken you."

Auber was a brilliant talker, but he scarcely ever liked to exert himself except on the subject of music. It was all in all to him, and the amount of work he did must have been something tremendous. There are few students of the history of operatic music, no matter how excellent their memories, who could give the complete list of Auber's works by heart. We tried it once in 1850, when that list was much shorter than it is now; there was not a single one who gave it correctly. The only one who came within a measureable distance was Roger, the tenor.

In spite of his world-wide reputation, even at that time, Auber was as modest about his work as Meyerbeer, but he had more confidence in himself than the latter. Auber was by no means ungrateful to the artists who contributed to his success; "but I don't 'coddle' them, and put them in cotton-wool, like Meyerbeer," he said. "It is perfectly logical that he should do so. The Nourrits, the Levasseurs, the Viardot-Garcias, and the Rogers, are not picked up at street-corners; but bring me the first urchin you meet, who has a decent voice, and a fair amount of intelligence, and in six months he'll sing the most difficult part I ever wrote, with the exception of that of Masaniello. My operas are a kind of warming-pan for great singers. There is something in being a good warming-pan."

At the first blush, this sounds something like jealousy in the guise of humility, but I am certain that there was no jealousy in Auber's character. Few men have been so uniformly successful, but he also had his early struggles, "when perhaps I did better work than I have done since." The last sentence was invariably trolled out when a pupil of the Conservatoire complained to him of having been unjustly dealt with. I remember Coquelin the younger competing for the "prize of Comedy" in '65 or '66. He did not get it, and when we came out of Auber's box at the Conservatoire, the young fellow came up to him with tears in his eyes. I fancy they were tears of anger rather than of sorrow.

"Ah, Monsieur Auber," he exclaimed, "that's an injustice!"

"Perhaps so, my dear lad," replied Auber; "but remember that the verdict on all things in this world may be summed up in the words you have just uttered, 'It's an injustice.' Let me give you a bit of advice. If you mean to become a good Figaro, you must be the first to laugh at an injustice instead of weeping over it." Wherewith he turned his back upon the now celebrated comedian. In the course of these notes I shall have occasion to speak of Auber again.

Auber need not have generalized to young Coquelin; he might have cited one instance of injustice in his own profession, to which, fortunately, there was no parallel for at least thirty years. In the forties the critics refused to recognize the genius of Félicien David, just as they had refused to recognize the genius of Hector Berlioz. In the seventies they were morally guilty of the death of Georges Bizet, the composer of "Carmen."

I knew little or nothing of Hector Berlioz, but I frequently met Félicien David at Auber's. It was a pity to behold the man even after his success—a success which, however, did not put money in his purse. His moral sufferings, his material privations, had left their traces but too plainly on the face as well as on the mind. David had positively starved in order to buy the few books and the paper necessary to his studies, and yet he had the courage to say, "If I had to begin over again, I would do the same." The respectability that drives a gig when incarnated in parents who refuse to believe in the power of soaring of their offspring because they, the parents, cannot see the wings, has assuredly much to answer for. Flotow's father stops the supplies after seven years, because his son has not come up to time like a race-horse. Berlioz' father does not give him so long a shrift; he allows him three months to conquer fame. Félicien David had no father to help or to thwart him in his ambition. He was an orphan at the age of five, and left to the care of a sister, who was too poor to help him; but he had an uncle who was well-to-do, and who allowed him the magnificent sum of fifty francs per month—for a whole quarter—and then withdrew it, notwithstanding the assurance of Cherubini that the young fellow had the making of a great composer in him. And the worst is that these young fellows suffer in silence, while there are hundreds of benevolent rich men who would willingly open their purses to them. When they do reveal their distressed condition, it is generally to some one as poor as themselves. These rich men buy the autographs of the deceased genius for small or large sums which would have provided the struggling ones with comforts for days and days. I have before me such a letter which I bought for ten francs. I would willingly have given ten times the amount not to have bought it. It is written to a friend of his youth. "As for money," it says, "seeing that I am bound to speak of it, things are going from bad to worse. And it is very certain that in a little while I shall have to give it up altogether. I have been ill for three weeks with pains in the back, and fever and ague everywhere. I dare say that my illness was brought on by my worries, and by the bad food of the Paris restaurants, also by the constant dampness. Why am I not a little better off? I fancy that the slight comforts an artist may reasonably expect would do me a great deal of good. I am not speaking of the body, though it is a part of ourselves which considerably affects our intellect, but my imagination would be the better for it, for how can my brain, constantly occupied as it is with the worry of material wants, act unhampered? Really, I do not hesitate to say that poverty and privation kill the imagination."

They did not kill the imagination in David's case, but they undermined his constitution. It was at that period that he fell in with the Saint-Simoniens, to the high priest of which, M. Enfantin, who eventually became the chairman of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway Company, he took me many years later. After their dispersion, the group to which he belonged went to the East, and it is to this apparently fortuitous circumstance that the world owes not only "Le Désert," "La Perle du Brésil," and "L'Eden," but probably also Meyerbeer's "Africaine." Meyerbeer virtually acknowledged that but for David's scores, so replete with the poetry of the Orient, he would have never thought of such a subject for one of his operas. M. Scribe, on the other hand, always maintained that the idea emanated from him, and that it dated from 1847, when the composer was given the choice between "La Prophète" and "L'Africaine," and chose the former. One might almost paraphrase the accusation of the wolf against the lamb in La Fontaine's fable. "M. Scribe, if you did not owe your idea to Félicien David, you owed it to Montigny, the director of the Gymnase, who in the thirties produced a play with a curious name, and a more curious plot, at the Ambigu-Comique."[28] One thing is certain, that "L'Africaine" was discarded, if ever it was offered, and would never have been thought of again but for Meyerbeer's intense and frankly acknowledged admiration of Félicien David's genius.

To return for a moment to Félicien David, whose melancholy vanished as if by magic when he related his wanderings in the East. I do not mean the poetical side of them, which inspired him with his great compositions, but the ludicrous one. I do not remember the dress of the Saint-Simoniens, I was too young at the time to have noticed it, but am told it consisted of a blue tunic and trousers to match, a scarlet jersey, which buttoned at the back, and could not be undone except with the aid of some one else. It was meant to symbolize mutual dependence upon one another. "As far as Marseilles everything went comparatively well," said David; "we lived by giving concerts, and though the receipts were by no means magnificent, they kept the wolf from the door. Our troubles began at Constantinople. Whether they did not like our music, or ourselves, or our dresses, I have never been able to make out, but we were soon denounced to the authorities, and marched off to prison, though our incarceration did not last more than a couple of hours, thanks to our ambassador, Admiral Roussin. Our liberation, however, was conditional; we had to leave at once. We made our way to Smyrna, where my music seemed to meet with a little more favour. I performed every night, but in the open air, and some one took the hat round, just as if we had been a company of ambulant musicians to the manner born. We were, however, not altogether unhappy, for we had enough to eat and to drink, which with me, at any rate, was a paramount consideration. Up till then sufficient food had not been a daily item in my programme of life. My companions, nevertheless, became restless; they said they had not come to eat and drink and play music, but to convert the most benighted part of Europe to their doctrines; so we moved to Jaffa and Jerusalem, then to Alexandria, and finally to Cairo. By the time we got there, only three of us were left; the rest had gone homeward. Koenig-Bey had just at that moment undertaken the tuition of Mehemet-Ali's children—there were between sixty and seventy at that time; it was he who presented me to their father, with a view of my becoming the professor of music to the inmates of the harem. 'It is of no use to try to get you the appointment of professor of music to the young princes, because Mehemet, though intelligent enough, would certainly not hear of it. He would not think it necessary that a man-child should devote himself to so effeminate an accomplishment. I am translating his own thoughts on the subject, not mine. When I tell you that my monthly report about their intellectual progress is invariably waved off with the words, "Tell me how much they have gained or lost in weight," you will understand that I am not speaking at random. The viceroy thinks that hard study should produce a corresponding decrease in weight, which is not always the case, for those more or less inclined to obesity make flesh in virtue of their sitting too much. Consequently the fat kine have a very bad time of it, and among the latter is one of the most intelligent boys, Mohammed-Said.'"