The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2). Hughes Rupert

While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a revelation of the exact identity of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or misunderstood.

Love it is an hatefulle pees,

A free acquitaunce without re lees.

An hevy burthen light to here,

A wikked wawe awey to were.

It is kunnyng withoute science,

Wisdome withoute sapience,

Bitter swetnesse and swete errour,

Right eville savoured good savour;

A strengthe weyked to stonde upright,

And feblenesse fulle of myght.

A laughter it is, weping ay;

Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.

Also a swete helle it is,

And a soroufulle Paradys.

Romaunt of the Rose.

CHAPTER I.

THE OVERTURE

Table of Contents

Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion—these are music's very own.

So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have expressed. And yet—! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that corner.

Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover; that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in tune.

But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune; and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.

If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and condition of love and lover

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