The Love Affairs of Great Musicians (Vol. 1&2). Hughes Rupert
an illustrious family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second couplet."
Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he died.
CHAPTER III.
THE MEN OF FLANDERS
The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siècle," with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer. Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537—1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels. All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he died—so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only twenty-six at the time—so we can imagine how young and lithely beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia—a sweet name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless, like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.
Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with documents of musty interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and sly advertisement, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free man, and need lick nobody's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.
Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy (1680—1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,—which was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes a pitiful letter still preserved.
"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness. Infirmities, the result of old age, and twelve children raised at great cost, to enable them to earn their bread, have left me at his death in indigence the greater since my son Laurent Boutmy, who for many years gave with approbation assistance to his father, in the hope of succeeding to his post, has been deprived of this boon by others.
"The hope of finding subsistence in the heritage of my ancestors made me go back to Germany, where unhappily the death of my brothers, my absence, the disorder of war, of law, and a faithless administration, have prevented, at least during my lifetime, all that I could hope. Save for the tenderness of a daughter, who is herself hardly in easy circumstances, having a family, I should lack the necessaries of life. The infirmities, resulting on an age of seventy, passed in adversity and work, prevent me from gaining my own living."
Van der Straeten says that her name was Katrina, that she came from Westphalia. Save a few titles of his works and a few accounts of this pathetic struggle, this is all we know of poor Josse Boutmy and his old wife. Then there is Jacques Buus, who makes various appeals for aid for his increasing family. A refreshing novelty in these annals of sordid poverty is given us of H.J. De Croes, court-organist at Brussels in the eighteenth century, who was forced to make an appeal for charity because the son whom he had sent abroad to study did not return to support his father, but decided to marry a woman he met at Ratisbon; it is pleasant to add that the appeal was granted.
Adrian Couwenhoven, who died in Spain in 1592, left there a widow, Ana Wickerslot, who implored the king to grant her money to go back home to Flanders with her children.
The Brebos family were famous organ-builders in the fifteenth century; they were famous marriers, too,—but one of them met his match, Jean, called to Spain, married there a widow, Marianna Hita, with one son. The widow outlived the husband and her son succeeded him in business. Gilles Brebos, the best organ-builder in Europe, according to his son, who ought to have known, married in Spain a woman who was also Flemish. When he died she was a widow raised to the third degree, and she was compelled to appeal to the king for charity. In her quaint appeal she naïvely points with pride to the fact that in thirty years she had married with three of his Majesty's servants. (Casada con tres criados de V.M.) These three were a royal mathematician, a captain in the royal navy, killed in the Flanders rebellions, and finally a royal organ-builder. We are not told what further royal alliances she achieved.
Among the most famous of early Flemish musicians is Adrian Willaert (1480?-1562), who was born in Bruges, and was counted the founder of the Venetian school. He was a pupil of that "Prince of Music" Josquin Desprès (of whom too little is known save that the Church got him), Willaert was the teacher of Zarlino, and of Ciprien de Rore (who from his epitaph seems to have left a son, though nothing is known of his marriage).
We know nothing of Willaert's life-romance, but he must have been happily married, for he made six wills before he died, and they are all preserved. In every one of them he mentions his wife Susana, though he never gives her family name. In each of his wills he leaves her the bulk of his fortune; in the fourth will he says the last word in devotion by bequeathing his widow his fortune to enjoy whether she remarries or not.
As Van der Straeten says, "it appears that the affection the old man vows for his wife grows greater and greater the nearer the fatal day approaches. The most minute dispositions are made in her regard."
Strangely enough Willaert never mentions either his compositions or his daughter Catharine, who was a composer, too. Perhaps this gifted daughter had a little romance of her own and found herself disinherited.
One of the darkest of the royal English tragedies concerns a musician, one David Ricci or Rizzio, who was born at Turin, the son of a poor music-teacher, and who, when grown, managed to join the train of the Count de Moretto, then going as ambassador to Scotland. There, thrown upon his own resources in a far cold country, this forlorn Italian managed to ingratiate himself among the musicians of Mary, the unhappy Queen of Scots. She eventually noticed him and engaged him as a singer. He gradually rose higher in her political and personal favour till he became secretary for French affairs, and conducted himself with such odious pride and grew so rich and so powerful that at last he was dragged from the very presence of the queen and slain. And this was in the year 1566.
CHAPTER IV.
ORLAND DI LASSUS AND HIS REGINA
A contemporary of the Rizzio, so humble as a musician and so soaring in his intrigues, was the great Roland de Lattre, better known as Orland di Lassus