Spohr may have profited by Eck's experience, when some years later he met the beautiful and brilliant Dorette Scheidler; she was eighteen years old, and played that most becoming instrument, the harp, as well as the piano and violin. They appeared together in a court concert, and on the way to her home, in the carriage, he made the not particularly original proposition: "Shall we thus play together for life?" She, with hardly more originality, wept her consent upon his shoulder. They were married without delay, and began a series of very successful concert-tours. They seem to have been happy together for twenty-six years, and they reared a large family. Her death in 1832 broke down his health for several months. But two years later, he then being fifty, he married the skilful pianist, Marianne Pfeiffer, over twenty years his junior. They also made a brilliant concert-tour together.
PAGANINI, THE INFERNAL
Paganini, as everybody knows, sold his soul to the devil for fame. He made the best of the gamble, as he usually did when he gambled; for the poor, innocent Lucifer got only a fourth-rate soul, while Paganini secured a fame that will not be surpassed while fiddlers fiddle.
Gambling was not Paganini's only vice. In spite of the fact that he will always be almost as famous for his multiplex ugliness as for his skill, women found him fascinating, and kept him busy. When he was only seventeen, a beautiful dame of Bologna abducted him and held him prisoner in her country chateau, as once Liszt, his rival in technical fame, was kept a few months. Can there be any secret technical virtue in being kidnapped thus? The fair Bolognese kept Paganini captive for three years in this retreat, where he fed upon scenery, love, and music. For her sake he practised her favourite instrument, the guitar, and worked miracles with it as with the violin. At the age of twenty, Paganini broke the spell and resumed his gipsying, persuading the public, and not without reason, that he was aided by magic. He lived for many years with the singer, Antonia Bianchi, who bore him a son, Achille, whom he legitimised. Antonia was devotion itself, until she was gradually driven to a jealousy that was almost fiendish, and led to a separation. Paganini himself tells this story:
"Antonia was constantly tormented by the most fearful jealousy. One day, she happened to be behind my chair when I was writing some lines in the album of a great pianist, and, when she read the few amiable words I had composed in honour of the artist, to whom the book belonged, she tore it from my hands, demolished it on the spot. So fearful was her rage, she would have assassinated me."
When he died, he left his son a fortune of $400,000. Surely this sum alone proves the justice of the popular belief that he had sold himself to the devil, and, knowing it, none can doubt the story Liszt quotes in one of his essays concerning the G string of Paganini's violin: "It was the intestine of his wife, whom he had killed with his own hands." There is no record of the secret marriage, but there is record enough of the superhuman power of the melodies he drew from that string.
DE BÉRIOT, SONTAG, AND MALIBRAN