The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2

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had reached the mature age of six before he began to study the piano; compared with Mozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert-namely, nine years. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of his father found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and he was sent to Vienna to study. When he was

s, the difference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Even then he used to throw money among the gamins, as late

died, leaving his sixteen-year-old son alone in Paris. That stalwart self-reliance and sense of honour, which gave nobility to so much of Liszt's character, now showed itself; he sold his grand piano to pay the debts his father had left hi

man of great fame, and the grind of acquiring technic was all passed. Moscheles had already said of him in print: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses everything

At fourteen he had begun to rebel against his nickname, "Le petit Litz." It was with the utmost difficulty that his father had been able to keep him from making religio

rt his mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really his first love. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior, had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. The young comtesse' mother gave her into Liszt's charge for musical educ

nd when suddenly she saw that she was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that he should not refuse the young lovers their happiness. He allowed his wife to die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without the faintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of his daught

he spent the night on the steps. Another evening, Franz and Caroline found parting such sweet sorrow, that when he reached her outer door, he found it locked for the night. He was compelled to call the porter from those slumbers which only doorkeepers know, and this man was doorkeeperishly wrathful at having his beauty-sleep broken; he growled his rage. This is the

m, and murdered the young love with most suave apologies for the painful amputation. The difference in rank, it went without saying, put marriage out

pure and ardent. It had been found impossible. His hopes had been put to death; therefore an end to the world. He bent his burning head low upon the cold steps of Saint Vincent de Paul, and resolved to renounce the world. He wrote ten years l

er, who had so easily exiled her lover, knew how to persuade her to marriage. A few months later she became Madame d'Artigou; they say she gave her

Church in its effort to engulf this brilliant artist. After a long struggle he yielded to her, but for a time he was a recluse, and his melancholy gradually wore out his health; un

he began a restless orgy of effort for mental divers

ith the Revolution of 1830; Saint-Simonianism enmeshed him; later he fell under the spell of the Abbé Lamennais. Then Paganini came to Paris and fascinated and frightened Liszt, as he frightened the world with his unheard-of fiddling. It was his privilege to drive Liszt back to the piano with an ambition to rival Paganini; as rival him he did. Next Be

my friend, Chopin for my hu

s by, or victimising, him is the Comtesse Adèle Laprunarède, afterward Duchess de Fleury. She, of course, was, as De Beaufort says, "sparkling, witty, young, beautiful." Her home was lonely and rural; her husband was very old; Liszt, to repeat, was a musician and Hungarian. The old comte was blind enough to invite him to spend the winter months at his chateau. Fo

e curious state of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women were beginning to demand freedom and to experiment wi

the guise of religion, as the old crusaders out-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisat

that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely be alarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the more genuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steeped in passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty, exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you have never loved my personal self.' It also appears to correspond with this casuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, of sky-storming earnes

and thirty, that he was caught in the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry." Alfred de Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to Chopin-or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as later th

e Comtesse Marie Cathérine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in 1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in 1834. It was not till six years later that

The comte was forty-five, she only half his age. He seems to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion in the brilliant

This is the more strange, since, at least at first, s

and interesting contrast with the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her countenance; these were the general features which rendered it impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the eleg

lities of flirtation were hastily overpassed. But once they were embarked on the maelstrom of passion, they seem to have been of exquisite torment and terror to each other. Liszt fell into a period of atheism which, to his constitutionally

uiet part of the city, where his life consisted of music, literature, and the comtesse, who visited him incessantly. Her love had quite infatuated her, to take the tone of the time; nowadays we might say that she found it so serious that she desired to make it honest.

gn exile with him, he felt that the comtesse was taking the bit into her teeth with a vengeance, but saw

ssor; his staying hand was shaken loose. He called on the venerable family notary; the old

daughter was determined to leave Paris with Liszt, went with her in the desperate effort to save appearances. But, however that may be, we find the comtesse and the mother at one hotel, and Liszt at another. A few days

everybody knows it, and they know that everybody knows it, except possibly the one other person most interested. But Paris was dumbfounded that a very prominent and beautiful comtesse should leave her husband and her children in broad daylight, and go

d found-as usual, too late to change its opinion of him-that he did everything in his power to undo the evil into which his passion had hurried him, and

ed a legal separation from his wife, retaining their daughter. Liszt now proposed marriage. Both being Catholics, it was necessary to experience a change of heart and b

ng to Liszt's secretary, during the time of her stay with Liszt, she spent sixty thousand dollars, the most of which Liszt earned himself by his concerts. The pianist and the comtesse soon left Basle fo

iously in love with the woman who had been so imperious and unreasonable. A few conservatives outlawed him, but there were p

d the wanderings in her "Lettres d'un Voyageur," where Franz represents Liszt, Arabella, the comtesse, and where one may read

that Sand prints such ill

which are nearer the t

ns. The experience of life ought to precede art; art requires repose, and does not suit wi

what is contrary; the white light only results fro

ave never gone astray,' Alas, poo

pons of which were not pianos, but those invisible stilettos with which two women conduct a deadly feud, and politely tear each other's eyes out. George Sand was famous then beyond her present-day esteem, and she was a woman of vigour almost masculine and of a straightforwardness which was almost an affectation. She loved to go about in boots and blouse, and to ride bareback; she smoked cigars, and wrote

comtesse away from Nohant. He seems to have sided with her against Sand, and said afterward: "I did not care to expose myself to her insolence" (sottise). Chopin, however, took sides with Sand, and it is said that his heart chi

rity, but even gave money, and whole tours. Besides this concert at Lyons, and various others, one might mention the concert given for the flood sufferers at Pesth, and for the poor of his native town, and the concert tour by which he made Beethoven's monument possible at Bonn. Add to this the other sums he scattered to poor artists like Wagner from his meagre purse, and you will see one reason why women, who are more susceptible and perceptive of such qua

ned a considerable fame, as I have said, under the name of Daniel Stern. In the fall of 1837 Liszt and the comtesse went to Ita

no allurement for the senses, but only wing the soul to devotion, and if you saw at her side a youth of sincere and fa

almost the only composition of his that she would praise; it was a fantasia on the "Huguenots." The two lovers continued their wanderings through Italy and Austria, he giving concerts for the flood sufferers and the Beethoven monument and she travelling with him. While in Rome

n to be Liszt's Muse, and made strong demands for the acceptance of her opinions upon his works. We can easily imagine the situation: A sensitive, fiery composer, who is incidentally the chief virtuoso of the world, dashes off a gorgeous composition, and in the first warmth of enthusiasm plays it to his companion. She,

earance of discrimination and remove the taste of unadulterated gush, inserts a mild implication that this one or these two compositions are not the greatest works in existence-that unhappy critic is practically sure to find

comtesse was stubborn in her views, and her artistic conferences with Liszt degenerated into violent brawls. The young French poet, De Rocheaud, "assisted," as the French say, at one of these comb

er words as to revelations. Be thou Dante, and she Beatrice." "Bah, Dante! bah, Beatrice!" cri

ildren with him. With much difficulty he persuaded her to go to Paris and live with his mother, since she was on bad terms with her own family. Later he succee

, at the age of seventy-one. How long

h the Comtesse d'Agoult. It had lasted, all th

n of Schumann and Wieck and his daughter Clara. Then came the famous struggle between father and suitor for the possession of the girl. Liszt took Schumann's side, becaus

litting from ovation to ovation, from flirtation to flirtation. But he was drifting unwittingly toward the grand affa

different way, we shall find him-who had slain his hecatomb of hearts-helpless i

r brought her up, as La Mara tells, as if she were a boy. He made her the companion of his conversations late into the night; and, in order to make her the more congenial a comrade, he taught her to ride wild hors

ngs, now in the midst of the world, now in the deep so

Sayn-Wittgenstein, seven years her senior. He was at the time a cavalry captain in the Russian army, a handsome, but intellectually unimpressive man. To quote La Mara ag

home, and sought solace from her loneliness in the full blaze of literary and artistic society. In February, 1847, Franz Liszt floated in across her horizon, "auf Flügeln des Gesanges."

here were many meetings. The concert affected the princess deeply (when she died she bequeathed that programme to her daughter). The day after the concert, she heard a Pater Noster of his sung in the church. L

zt should visit her at her estate, Woronince. He arrived on the tenth birthday of her little daughter, Marie. This was in February, the same month of their first meeting. But he could not s

music. Separation from her husband was tame, but this was a horrifying breach of conventionality, such another as the Comtesse d'Agoult had smitten Paris with thirteen years before. But none the less, in April, 1848, she

and announced that she was asking the Church to grant her freedom. Being a Catholic, it was necessary for her to persuade the Pope himself to permit her to wed Liszt. In the meanwhile, her husband went t

's friend, the Prince Lichnovski, who some months after fell a martyr to the revolution. He conducted her to Liszt. A few days later they visited the prince for two weeks a

ood. She chose the Altenburg chateau for her home. A year later, Liszt, who had found a neighbouring hotel too remote, took up his home in one of the wings of the chateau. Here he spent the most profitable years of his artistic life. His twelve Symphonic Poems, his Faust and Dante Symphonies, his Hungarian Rhapsodie

st they should forbid her return to Liszt. Even threats to declare her an exile and confiscate her goods, would not move her. Eventually the property she had inherited from her father was put in her daughter's name, by the

ince Constantin zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, aid-de-camp and later grand steward of the Austrian emperor. Now that the daughter was safely disposed of, the princess took active steps for her own freedom. She chose, as a pretext for the dissolution of her marriage, the statement that she had

upon it. In the spring of 1860, she had gone to Rome to further her divorce proceedings. Liszt was to arrive and be married on his fiftieth birthday, the princess then being fort

ted. On the very eve of the wedding, when Liszt was with the princess, they were startled to receive a messenger from the Pope, demanding a postponement of the marriage, and the del

pe they charged her with securing the divorce by perjury. The princess had friends at court, who could have procured the satisfactory conclusion of the mat

arch, 1864, her former husband died and gave her that divorce which even Rome considers sufficient, she would not wed. Her stay of one year in the Holy City had brought her into the whirlpool of Churc

was her influence over Liszt, she thought to begin her new work at home

he Church; small wonder, then, that when, in the evening fatigue of his life, the wom

dmitted into Holy Orders on the 25th of April, 1865, and the Cardinal Hohenlohe, who had not been granted the

conducted a mass of his own, at Saint Eustache. The critic and dictionary-maker, Fétis, declared that the whole affair was simply an advertising scheme of

was not sincere; in Liszt's case it would rather prove its sincerity. And by

taking a dwelling in the Via Felice; later, in June of the year 1863, he moved to the Oratorio of the Madonna del Rosario, where the Pope, Pius IX., visited him to hear his mira

ut price. To his excursions we owe four volumes of letters to the princess. The volumes average over four hundred pages each of smallish type. They are in French, and have been all published, the last volume appearing in 1902, under the

le he had affected after his first elopement with De

e and my good angel here below! I incessantly have recou

ys to you as my pra

ing, let me at least tell you that I will pray with you before

e sweetest and dearest are those I

at preserves me from temptation. Be well assured that I

rs are full of minute details of their busy lives and of other notable people. There is much, of course, about music and travel, and a vast amoun

ted even Liszt. There are biographers who deny this, but in this letter to the princess, Liszt encloses Wagner's letter of most affectionate appeal fo

e world, I am not uneasy as to its interpretation of that page of what you call 'my biography.' The only chapter th

it-motif" like the wail of Tristan. But nothing could

id she fairly "sputtered spirituality." She began to write, and certain of her essays were revised by Henri Lasserre, under the name, "Christian Life in Public," and were widely read, being translated into English and Spanish. Her chief work was

she and Liszt were lovers, however remote. And his letters are rarely more than a few days apart. He continues to sign himself, even in the final year of his life, "Umilissimo sclavissimo." His last letter concerned the marriage of

nother famous musician, and for the charitable comfort of how numberless a throng, and in what countless ways! It was doubly appropriate that his last appearance in public

cutrix. She outlived him no long time. On the 8th of March, 1887, she died of dropsy of the hear

Liszt had written for the death of the Emperor Maximilian.