The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2). Hughes Rupert
receive from your incomparable Music. My D: I intreat you to inform me how you do and if you get any Sleep to Night. I am extremely anxious about your health. I hope to hear a good account of it. god Bless you my H: come to me to-morrow. I shall be happy to See you both morning and Evening. I always am with the tenderest Regard my D: your Faithful and Affectionate
"Friday Night, 12 o'clock."
This is the last of these letters to which one could apply so fitly the barbarous word "yearnful," once coined by Keats. After Haydn's return to London, in 1794, there are no letters to indicate a continuance of the acquaintance, but it doubtless was renewed, judging from the sagacious guess based upon the fact that Haydn did not come back to his old lodgings but took new ones at No. 1 Bury Street, St. James's.
This much more pleasantly situated dwelling, he probably owed to the considerate care of Mrs. Schroeter, who, by the same token, thus brought him nearer to herself. A short and pleasant walk of scarcely ten minutes through St. James's Palace and the Mall (a broad alley alongside of St. James's Park) led him to Buckingham Palace, and near at hand was the house of Mrs. Schroeter. Perhaps he preferred the walk to letter-writing. When he went away from London for ever, he left behind him the scores of his six last symphonies "in the hands of a lady," probably Mrs. Schroeter. It was this same woman to whom Haydn dedicated three trios, his first, second, and sixth. It was undoubtedly she to whom he referred when he made that little speech which Dies probably misquoted, in telling the answer Haydn gave him when he was asked what the letters were. "They are letters from an English widow in London who loved me; she was, though she already counted her sixty years, still a pretty and lovely woman, whom I would very probably have married had I then been single."
Let us remember that these old love letters, so fragrant with faded affections, were being received by Papa Haydn even while he was writing to Polzelli, rejoicing in the closing of two of those four baleful eyes that forbade their union. And let us not judge too harshly the Italian woman who had given this unbeautiful Austrian of such beautiful genius so much of her sunshine and tenderness. Nor let us judge too harshly the enamoured English widow. Why indeed need we judge harshly at all?
When Haydn died he had no child to leave his wealth to—even the fable that Anton Polzelli was his natural son is taken away from us by Pohl, who points out how small and temporary was the provision made for him in Haydn's will.
Among the heirlooms left by Haydn was a watch given to him by that Admiral of Admirals, Lord Nelson—and that points to us as a by-path, which it were pleasant, though forbidden now, to wander, the story of Nelson's fervent amour with Lady Hamilton, that beautiful work of art, that pet of artists.
As a postscript to Haydn's story we may tag on here a concise statement in his note-book, of the domestic affairs of one whom we do not think of now as a musician.
"On June 15th, I went from Windsor to Slough to Doctor Herschel, where I saw the great telescope. It is forty feet long and five feet in diameter. The machinery is vast, but so ingenious that a single man can put it in motion with ease. There are also two smaller telescopes, of which one is twenty-two feet long and magnifies six thousand times. The king had two made for himself, of which each measures twelve Schuh. He gave him one thousand guineas for them. In his younger days Doctor Herschel was in the Prussian service as an oboe player. In the seven years' war he deserted with his brother and came to England. For many years he supported himself with music, became organist at Bath, turned, however, to astronomy. After providing himself with the necessary instruments he left Bath, rented a room not far from Windsor, and studied day and night. His landlady was a widow. She fell in love with him, married him, and gave him a dowry of £100,000. Besides this he has £500 for life, and his wife, who is forty-five years old, presented him with a son this year, 1792. Ten years ago he had his sister come; she is of the greatest service to him in his observations. Frequently he sits from five to six hours under the open sky in the severest cold."
CHAPTER X.
THE MAGNIFICENT BACHELOR
Two young and flamboyant musickers, boon companions, one twenty-two and the other eighteen, strike the town of Lübeck in 1703. They are drawn thither by a vacancy in the post of town-organist. And their competition is to be friendly.
Two flamboyant young musickers leave the town of Lübeck as soon as can be. For they have learned that the successful candidate must marry the daughter of the man in whose shoes they would fain have trodden the pedals. One look at the daughter was enough. She was not fair to see, and her years were thirty-four—just six years less than the total years of the two young candidates.
Back to Hamburg the two friends go, and the next year their friendship suffers a serious strain. The elder, now aged twenty-three, is producing "Cleopatra," an opera of his own composition, and incidentally playing the role of Antony. The younger of the friends is the conductor, and presides, as is the custom of the time, at the clavecin. There is another custom in the performance of that opera, a curious one, too. For it is the wont of the composer-singer, when he has died as Antony, to come to life again and conduct the rest of his opera at the clavecin.
But the younger friend, now full of the importance of nineteen years, and being the successor to the great Reinhard Keiser, is not disposed to yield the clavecin, even to his versatile friend. A quarrel that narrowly escapes ruining the melodious swan-song of Cleopatra, is postponed till after the final curtain. Then it takes the form of a duel. The composer manages at last to elude the parry of the conductor; he throws all his weight and venom into a lunge that must prove fatal—but a large brass button sheds the point of the sword and saves its wearer for a better fate.
By the strange medicinal virtue of duels, the wound in the friendship is healed, honour is poulticed, and the friendship begins again, lasting with healthful interruptions until the younger musician goes his way toward the fulness of his glory; the elder his way along the lines of versatility—which leave him in the eyes of posterity rather valued as a writer than aught else.
The old organist whose death had brought these two younkers on their wild-goose chase was Dietrich Buxtehude, the famous man whom Johann Sebastian Bach walked fifty miles on foot to hear, and whose compositions he studied and profited from. Old Buxtehude, himself the son of an organist, had himself married the daughter of the organist who had preceded him. The daughter he left behind to frighten away aspiring candidates did not languish long. According to Chrysander, a certain J.C. Schieferdecker, who is famous for nothing else, wed the daughter, and "got the pretty job" ("erhielt den schönen Dienst").
The elder of the two young men was Johann Mattheson (1681—1764), a sort of "Admirable Crichton," who married in 1709 Catherine Jennings, daughter of an English clergyman and the relative of a British admiral. That is all of his story that belongs here.
The younger man, whose life hung on a button, was that great personage whose name has been spelled almost every way imaginable between Hendtler and Handel—the later form being preferred by the English, who, as somebody said, love to speak learnedly of "Handel and Glück." It is not needful here to tell the story of his brilliant life and the big events it crowded into the four and seventy years between 1685 and 1759. His friend Mattheson, like Beethoven, spent his later years in the dungeon of deafness. Händel, like his great rival Bach (who was born the same year), spent seven years in almost total blindness, three operations having failed. In almost every other respect the careers of these two men were unlike, particularly in the obscure and prolific married life of the one and in the almost royal prominence of the other's bachelorhood.
Händel never married, and seems never even to have been in love, though he was an unusually pious son and a fond brother.
The only time on record when he took a woman into his arms was the occasion when the great singer, Cuzzoni, refused to sing an air of his the way he wished it. He seized her, and, dragging her to a window, threatened to throw her out,