The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2). Hughes Rupert
of his life; but it also turned out to be his saddest, for the father refused his consent. This man, haughty with his wealth, rejected the honoured artist, since he was only a musician, and since, besides, his art offered no sufficient promise or surety for the proper support of a young woman. The lovers accepted the separation thus enforced, with patience, promising themselves that it should not be for long, and that they would preserve unbroken fidelity."
Gluck was called to Rome the next year, and there he had the news that the stern father was dead. Accordingly, as soon as he could release himself from his engagements, he hastened back to Vienna—as Schmid puts it—"auf dem Flügeln der Liebe nach Wien zurück" On the 15th of September, he was married to his Maria Anne, "with whom to his death he dwelt in the happiest wedlock, and who went with him on his triumphal journeys four years later." In 1754 the Pope knighted him; made him Cavaliere, and henceforth this once poverty-smitten street fiddler and strolling singer was known as Ritter von Gluck, the friend and protégé of his countrywoman, Marie Antoinette.
No children were born to the couple, but they took into their home a niece, and Gluck's wife devoted much of her time to the poor.
"He left his wife the chief heir. He even left it to her pleasure whether his brothers and sisters should have anything or not, and said in his will, 'Since the fundamental principle of every testament is the appointment of an heir, I hereby appoint my dear wife, M. Anne von Gluck, née Pergin, as my sole and exclusive heir; and that no doubts may arise, as to whether the silver and other personal property be mine or my wife's, I hereby also declare all the silver and other valuables to be the sole property of my wife, and consequently not included in my previous bequests,'"
None of the letters of Gluck, that I have been able to find, concern his married life, though many of them are in existence concerning his operatic warfare.
Burney met him in 1773 in Paris, where he was living with his wife and niece. In 1775, on his way back home from Paris, he stopped off at Strasburg to meet the poet Klopstock. D.F. Strauss quotes a description by a merchant of Karlsruhe of this scene: "Old Gluck sang and played, con amore, many passages from the 'Messiah' set to music by himself; his wife accompanying him in a few other pieces." On the 15th of November, 1787, when Gluck was seventy-three years old, he was at his home in Vienna under doctor's care. After dinner, it was his custom to take coffee out-of-doors, in the free, fresh air and the golden sunlight, where he used to have his piano placed when he would compose. Two old friends from Paris had dined with him, and they were soon to leave. Frau von Gluck left the guests for a moment, to order the carriage. While she was gone, one of the guests declined the liqueur set before him. Now Gluck was always addicted to looking upon the champagne when it was yellow; in fact, he used always to have a bottle at each wing of his piano, when he composed, and was wont to end his compositions, his bottles, and his sobriety in one grand Fine. But now he was forbidden to take wine, for fear of heating his blood.
On this day, however, he pretended to be angry at his guest for refusing the choice liqueur. In a burlesque rage, he seized the glass, drained it at a gulp, and jokingly begged the guests not to tell his wife. She came back to the room to say that the carriage was ready. Frau von Gluck and the guests left him for half an hour, and he bade them a cheerful farewell. Fifteen minutes later his third stroke of apoplexy attacked him, and his horrified wife returning found him unconscious. In a few hours he was dead. This wife, with whom he lived so congenially, and whose money gave him even more luxury than his operatic success could have procured—indeed, the very house he died in she had bought for eleven thousand florins—outlived him less than three years, dying March 12, 1800, at the age of seventy-one. She was buried near him, and her tomb, built by her nephew, has the following epitaph:
"Here rests in peace, near her husband, Maria Anne, Edle von Gluck, born Pergin. She was a good Christian, and without ostentation a mother to the poor. She was loved and cherished by all who knew her."
ROUSSEAU THE CONFESSOR
During the fierce battles Gluck fought in Paris, one of his most ardent partisans was Jean Jacques Rousseau, who was a musician in a small way, wrote songs, an enormously successful opera, "Le Devin du Village," and other musical works, besides making an attempt to reform musical notation, and writing a dictionary of music. The world, however, does not accept him as a musician but as a writer, and his numerous and curious love affairs are told in so much detail in his immortal "Confessions," that I cannot attempt to treat them here. Vandam, in his book on "Great Amours," dissects Rousseau's heart ruthlessly. For his ability to do this, he must thank Rousseau most, for the unequalled frankness of his own biography, Francis Greble, dissecting "Rousseau's first love," has neatly dubbed him "the Great High Priest of those who kiss and tell."
THE AMIABLE PICCINNI
In this same war of operatic schools and composers which raged in Paris upon the reforms of Gluck, the Italian composer Piccinni was haled to the front as an unwilling opponent of Gluck.
The world is needlessly cruel to those who happen to interfere in any way with the favourites of posterity, and Piccinni's name is a byword in the history of music. We hear much of the unscrupulous opposition that his partisans made to the reforms of Gluck, but we should also take into consideration the unscrupulous opposition that the partisans of Gluck made to the prosperity and honest endeavours of Piccinni, a man of no mean talent, whose misfortune and not whose fault it was, that he was not a genius of the first order.
But we are not concerned here with the history of music, only with the intimate history of musicians. Piccinni's domestic life was so beautiful, that it makes it all the more pitiable that he should have been dragged willy-nilly into a contest for which he had neither inclination nor ability. Piccinni fell in love with a pupil, like him an Italian, Vicenza Sibilla. When he was twenty-eight he married her. His biographer Ginguené says: "She joined to the charms of her sex, a most beautiful and touching voice. All that happy disposition, assiduous study under so good a master could accomplish, especially when teacher and pupil loved each other passionately, and were equally impassioned for the art, which one taught, and the other learned, it is all that which you must imagine, to get an idea of the talent of Mme. Piccinni. He did not wish her to go on the stage, where everything promised her the greatest success and the most brilliant fortune; but at home almost every evening, at the private concerts, or, as the Italians say, in all the 'academies' where one is glad to be invited, she sang only her husband's music. She rendered it with the true spirit of the master; and I have it from him, that he never heard his works, especially his 'Cara Cecchina' sung with such perfect art, and what would put it above art, so much soul, and expression, as by his wife."
In 1773 Piccinni found himself suddenly deprived of the fickle support of the Roman public. Worst of all, it was his own pupil and protégé, Anfossi, who supplanted him. The tender-hearted Piccinni, like Palestrina, was so overcome with this humiliation, that he fell ill, and kept his bed for several months. Two years later, the Prince of Brunswick's younger brother went to Naples to visit him, and there he happened upon a domestic scene which gives us a pretty notion of Piccinni's home life.
"He surprised Piccinni in the midst of his family, and was amazed at the tableau. Piccinni was rocking the cradle of his youngest child, born that same year; another of his children tugged at his coat to make him tip over the cradle; the mother revelling in the spectacle. She fled in dismay at seeing the stranger, who stood at the door, enjoying the scene himself. The young prince made himself known, begged pardon for his indiscretion, and said with feeling, 'I am charmed to see that so great a man has so much simplicity, and that the author of "The Good Daughter" [one of his most successful operas] can be so good a father.'"
The next year, 1776, Piccinni was called to Paris as an unwilling conscript in the musical revolution, which was raging no less fiercely than the American Revolution of the same time. It was a bitter December day when Piccinni arrived in Paris with his wife, and his