The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2

by Rupert Hughes

Close upon so noble a life, artistic and personal, comes the career of Georges de la Hèle, who, being a priest, gave up his lucrative benefice to wed the woman he wished.

And yet again with disconcerting effect comes the story of Ambrosio de Cotes, who was a gambler and a drunkard, who kept a mistress, and was rebuked publicly for howling indecent refrains to the tunes in church. Which of these is fairly typical as a musician?

Then comes the most notable man in all English music, Harry Purcell, who wrote the best love-songs that ever melted the reserve of his race. He must have been a good husband, and his married life a happy one, seeing how ardent his wife was for his memory, and how she celebrated him in a memorial volume, as the Orpheus of Great Britain, and how eager she was that the two sons that survived out of their six children, should be trained to music.

And speaking of types, what shall we say of this cloud of witnesses, bearing the most honoured name in music, the name of Bach?

There were more than twenty-five Bachs, who made themselves names as makers of harmony, and they earned themselves almost as great names as family makers; all except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who was as lacking in virtue as he was abundant in virtuosity. He was notoriously immoral, and yet the greatest organist of his time, as his father had been before him; and it was this father, Johann Sebastian Bach, who by his life and preëminence in music, offers the biggest obstacle to any theory about the immoral influences of the art. For surely, if he, who is generally called the greatest of musicians, led a life of hardly equalled domesticity, it will not be easy to claim that music has an unsettling effect upon society. And yet there are his great rivals, Handel and Beethoven, whose careers are in the remotest possible contrast.

It is neither here nor there, that "Father" Bach left little money and many children when he died, and that the sons seized upon his MSS. and drifted away to other cities, leaving the mother and three daughters to live upon the charity of the town. It is unfortunate to have to include among the ungrateful children the stepson, Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, who seems otherwise to have been a pleasant enough fellow, a fair family man, and a great composer. He first too much eclipsed his father's fame, and has since been too much eclipsed thereby. He had family troubles, too, and left a wife and children to mourn him. So much for the Bachs.

A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of Cremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began his life romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen or eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who had been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari, and they were married on July 4, 1667. In the following December the first of their six children was born. Two of his sons took up their father's trade. Both of them died bachelors, and the third son became a priest.

At the age of fifty-eight Francesca died. After a year of widowerhood, he wedded again; this time, a woman fourteen or fifteen years younger than he. She bore him five children, and he outlived her less than a year. His descendants dwelt for generations, flourishing on his fame, at Cremona.

The Amati were also a numerous family of luthiers, as were the Guarnieri, but I have not been able to poke into their private affairs, though he who called himself "Jesus," was addicted to imprisonment, and is said to have made violins out of bits of wood brought him by the jailer's daughter. She sold the fiddles to buy him luxuries.

But now, lest we should too firmly believe that music exerts an amorous and domestic effect, we are confronted with the ponderous majesty of one of the proudest spirits that ever strode the creaking earth, Georg Friedrich Händel, who was born the very same year as the much-married Bach, but led a life as opposite as North Pole from South. The first snub he dealt to Cupid, was when he was eighteen, and sought the post of organist held by the famous old Buxtehude, who had married years before the daughter of an organist to whose post he aspired, and had left behind him a daughter thirty-four years old as an incumbrance upon his successor. Händel could have got the job, if he would have had the girl. But she was almost twice his age, and he left her for another musician to marry in. Then he went to Italy, and was pursued in vain under those bewitching skies by no belated German spinster, but by a beautiful and attractive Italienne. Her, he also spurned. When he was in England, he seems to have come very near falling in love with two different women. The mother of the first objected to him as a mere fiddler. After she died, the father invited him into the family, only to be told that the invitation was too late. The other woman, a lady of high degree, offered herself as a substitute for his career, only to be declined with thanks and possibly with a formal statement that "rejection implied no lack of merit." Seeing that these things happened in the eighteenth century, I need not add that both women were romantic enough to go into a decline, and die beautifully.