Part 7

All went splendidly at rehearsal; Fétis did his best for me, and everything seemed to smile, when, with my usual luck, an hour before the concert there broke over Paris the worst storm that had been known for fifty years. The streets were flooded and practically impassable, and during the first half of the concert, when my _Tempest_--damned tempest!--was being played, there were not more than three hundred people in the place.

_Extracts from Letters to_ H. FERRAND.

“_April 1829._--Here is _Faust_, dear friend. Could you, without stinting yourself, lend me another hundred francs to pay the printer? I would rather borrow from you than from anyone else; yet had you not offered, I should not have dared to ask. Your opera (_Franc-Juges_) is splendid. You are indeed a poet! That finale of the Bohemians at the end of the first act is a master stroke. I do not believe anything so original has ever been done in a libretto before. And I repeat, it is magnificent.”

“_June._--No word from you for three months. Why is it? Does your father suppress our letters, or can it be that you, at last, believe the slanders you hear of me?

“I got a pupil, so have managed to pay the printer.

“I am very happy, life is charming--no pain, no despair, plenty of day dreams; to crown all, the _Francs-Juges_ has been refused by the Opera Committee! They find it long and obscure, only the Bohemian scene pleases them; but Duval thinks it remarkable and says there is a future for it.

“I am going to make an opera like _Freyschütz_ of it, and if I win the prize perhaps Spohr (who is not jealous, but is most helpful to young musicians) will let me try it at Cassel.

“No word have I had from you since I spoke of my hopeless love. Nothing more has happened. This passion will be my death; how often one hears that hope alone keeps love alive--am I not a living proof of the contrary?

“All the English papers ring with her praises; I am unknown! When I have written something great, something stupendous, I must go to London to have it performed. Oh for success!--success under her very eyes.

“I am writing a life of Beethoven for the _Correspondant_, and cannot find a minute for composition--the rest of my time I copy out parts. What a life!”

Once more came June, and with it my third attempt on the Prix de Rome. This time I really did hope, for not only had I gained a second prize, but I heard that the musical judges thought well of me.

Being over-confident I reasoned (falsely, as it turned out), “Since they have decided to give me the prize, I need not bother to write exactly in the style that suits them; I will compose a really artistic cantata.”

The subject was Cleopatra after Actium. Dying in convulsions, she invokes the spirits of the Pharaohs, demanding--criminal though she be--whether she dare claim a place beside them in their mighty tombs. It was a magnificent theme, and I had often pondered over Juliet’s--

“But if when I am laid into the tomb,”

which is, at least in terror of approaching death, analogous to the appeal of the Egyptian Queen.

I was fool enough to head my score with those very words--the unpardonable sin to my Voltairean judges--and wrote what seemed to me a weird and dramatic piece, well suited to the words. I afterwards used it, unchanged, for the _Chorus of Shades_ in _Lelio_; I think it deserved the prize. But it did not get it. None of the compositions did. Rather than give it to a “young composer of such revolutionary tendencies” they withheld it altogether.

Next day I met Boïeldieu, who, on seeing me, said:

“My dear boy, what on earth possessed you? The prize was in your hand, and you simply threw it away.”

“But, monsieur, I really did my best.”

“That’s just it! Your _best_ is the opposite of your _good_. How could I possibly approve? I, who like nice gentle music--cradle-music, one might say.”

“But, monsieur, could an Egyptian queen, passionate, remorseful, and despairing, die in mortal anguish of body and soul to the sound of cradle-music?”

“Oh, come! come! I know you have plenty of excuses, but they go for nothing. You might at least have written gracefully.”

“Gladiators could die gracefully, but not Cleopatra. She had not to die in public.”

“There! you _will_ exaggerate so! No one expects her to dance a quadrille. Why need you introduce such odd, queer harmonies into that invocation? I am not well up in harmony, and I must own that those outlandish chords of yours are beyond me.”

I bit my lip, not daring to make the obvious reply:

“Is it my fault that you know no harmony?”

“And then,” he went on, “why do you introduce a totally new rhythm in your accompaniments? I never heard anything like it.”

“I did not understand, monsieur, that we were not to try new modes if we were fortunate enough to find the right place for them.”

“But, my dear good fellow, Madame Dabadie is a capital musician, yet one could see it took all her care and talent to get her through.”

“Really, monsieur, I have yet to learn that music can be sung without either talent or care.”

“Well, well! you will have the last word. But do be warned for next year. Come and see me and we will talk it over like _French gentlemen_.”

And, chuckling over the point he had made (for his last words were a quotation from his own _Jean de Paris_), he walked off.

Yes, Boïeldieu was right. The Parisians liked soothing music, even for the most dramatic and harrowing situations. Pretty, innocent, gentlemanly music, pleasant and making no demand upon one’s deepest feelings.

Later on they wanted something different, and now they do not know what they want, or rather they want nothing at all. Ah me! what was the good God thinking of when He dropped me down in this pleasant land of France?

Yet I love her whenever I can forget her idiotic politics. How gay she is, how dainty in wit, how bright in retort--how she boasts and swaggers and humbugs, royally and republicanly! I am not sure, though, that this last _is_ amusing.

XV

A NEW LOVE

_To_ HUMBERT FERRAND.

“_July 1829._--I am sorry I did not send your music before, but I may as well own that I am short of money. My father has taken another whim and sends me nothing, so I could not afford the thirty or forty francs for the copying. I could not do it myself, as I was shut up in the Institute. That abominable but necessary competition! My only chance of getting the filthy lucre, without which life is impossible.

‘Auri sacra fames quid non mortalia pectora cogis!’

My father would not even pay my expenses in the Institute. M. Lesueur did so for me.”

“_August._--Forgive my negligence. My only excuses are the Academy competition and the new pangs of my despised love. My heart can be likened only to a virgin forest, struck and kindled by the thunderbolt; now and again the fire smoulders, then comes the whirlwind, and in a second the trees are a mass of living, hissing flame and all is death and desolation.

“I will spare you a description of the latest blows.

“That shameful competition!

“Boïeldieu says I go further than Beethoven, and he cannot even understand Beethoven; and that, to write like that, _I must have the most hearty contempt for the Academicians!_ Auber told me much the same thing, and added, ‘You hate the commonplace, but you need never be afraid of writing platitudes. The best advice I can give you is to write as insipidly as you can, and when you have got something that sounds to you horribly flat, _you will have just what they want!_’

“That is all very well, but when I go writing for butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers I certainly shall not go to the passion-haunted, crime-stained Queen of Egypt for a text.”

_To_ FERDINAND HILLER.

“1829.--What is this overwhelming emotion, this intense power of suffering that is killing me? Ask your guardian angel, that bright spirit that has opened to you the gate of Heaven. Oh, my friend! can you believe that I have burnt the manuscript of my prose elegy? I have Ophelia ever before me; her tears, her tragic voice; the fire of her glorious eyes burns into my soul--I am so miserable, so inexpressibly unhappy, oh, my friend!

“I seem to see Beethoven looking down on me with calm severity; Spontini--safely cured of woes like mine--with his pitying indulgent smile; Weber from the Elysian Fields, whispers consoling words into my ear....

“Mad, mad, mad! is this sense for a student of the Institute; a domino-player of the Café de la Régence?

“Nay, I _will_ live--live for music--the highest thing in life except true love! Both make me utterly miserable but at least I shall have lived! Lived, it is true, by suffering, by passion, by lamentation and by tears--yet I _shall_ have lived! Dear Ferdinand! a year ago to-day I saw _her_ for the last time. Is there for us a meeting in another world?

“Ah, me! miserable! Alone! cursed with imagination beyond my physical strength, torn by unbounded, unsatisfied love!--still, I have known the great ones of the heaven of music; I have laughed as I basked in the radiance of their glory! Immortals, stretch out your hands, raise me to the shelter of your golden clouds that I may be at rest!

“Voice of Reason:

“‘Peace, fool! ere many years have passed your pain will be no more.’

Henriette Smithson and Hector Berlioz

will rest in the oblivion of the grave and other unfortunates will also suffer and die!” ...

_To_ H. FERRAND.

“_November 1829._--Oh Ferrand! Ferrand! why were you not here for my concert? Yesterday I was so ill that I could not crawl; to-day the fire of hell that inspired my _Francs-Juges_ overture, courses through my veins.

“All my heart, my passion, my love are in that overture.

“After the crowd had dispersed the performers waited for me in the courtyard and greeted me with wild applause. At the Opera in the evening it was the same thing--a regular ferment!

“My friend, my friend! Had you but been there!

“But it was more than I could stand, and now I am a prey to the most awful depression and despair; tears choke me, I long to die.

“After all, there will be a small profit--about a hundred and fifty francs, of which I must give two-thirds to Gounet, who so kindly lent it me--I think he is more in need than you. But my debt to you troubles me, and as soon as I can get together enough to be worth sending, you shall have it.” ...

* * * * *

“_December._--I am bored! wretched! That is nothing new, but I get more and more soul-weary, more utterly bored as time goes on. I devour time as ducks gobble water, in order to live and, like the ducks, I find nothing but a few scrubby insects for nourishment. What will become of me! What shall I do!”

_To_ H. FERRAND.

“_January 1830._--I do not know where to turn for money. I have only two pupils, they bring me in forty-four francs a month; I still owe you money besides the hundred francs to Gounet--this eternal penury, these constant debts, even to such old and tried friends as you, weigh on me terribly. Then again your father still nurses the mistaken idea that I am a gambler--I, who never touch a card and have never set foot in a gaming house--and the thought that he disapproves of our friendship nearly drives me mad. For pity’s sake, write soon!”

* * * * *

“_February._--Again, without warning and without reason, my ill-starred passion wakes. She is in London, yet I feel her presence ever with me. I listen to the beating of my heart, it is like a sledge-hammer, every nerve in my body quivers with pain.

“Woe upon her! Could she but dream of the poetry, the infinite bliss of such love as mine, she would fly to my arms, even though my embrace should be her death.

“I was just going to begin my great symphony (_Episode in an Artist’s Life_) to depict the course of this infernal love of mine--but I can write nothing.”

* * * * *

“_May._--Your letter comforts me, dear friend, how good it is to be blessed with a friend such as you! A man of heart, of soul, of imagination! How rare that kindred spirits such as ours should meet and sympathise.

“Words fail to tell the joy your affection gives me. You need not fear for me with Henriette Smithson. I am no longer in danger in that quarter; I pity and despise her. She is nothing but a commonplace woman with an instinct for expressing the tortures of the soul that she has never felt; she is quite incapable of appreciating the noble, all-devouring love with which I honoured her.

“The rehearsals of my symphony begin in three days; all the parts are copied--there are two thousand three hundred pages. I hope to goodness we shall have good receipts to pay for it all. The concert takes place on the 30th May. And you alone will not be there! Even my father wishes to come. Ah, my symphony!

“I wish the theatre people would somehow plot to get _her_ there--that wretched woman! But she certainly would not go if she read my programme. She could not but recognise herself. What will people say? My story is so well known.”

At this time a new influence came into my life which, for a time, eclipsed my Shakespearian passion.

Hiller, the German composer-pianist, whom I had known intimately ever since his arrival in Paris, fell violently in love with Marie Moke, a beautiful and talented girl, who, later on, became one of our greatest pianists.

Her interest in me was aroused by Hiller’s account of my mental sufferings, and--so Fate willed--we were thrown much together at a boarding-school where we both gave lessons--she on the piano and I on--the guitar! Odd though it be, I still figure in the prospectus of Madame d’Aubré as professor of that noble instrument.

Meeting Mademoiselle Moke constantly, her dainty beauty and bewitching mockery of my high-tragedy airs and dismal visage soon turned my thoughts from my absorbing passion and won her a shrine in my heart. She was but eighteen!

Hiller, poor fellow, behaved admirably. He recognised that it was Fate, not treachery on my part and, heart-broken as he was, he wished me every happiness and left for Frankfort.

This is all I need say of this violent interlude that, by stirring my senses, turned me aside for a while from the mighty love that really held my heart. In my Italian journey I will tell of the dramatic sequel. Mademoiselle Moke nearly proved the proverb that it is not well to play with fire!

* * * * *

In 1830 the Competition took place later than usual--on the 15th July. For the fifth time I went up, firmly resolved, if I should fail, to go no more.

As I finished my cantata the Revolution broke out and the Institute was a curious sight. Grape shot rattled on the barred doors, cannon balls shook the façade, women screamed and, in the momentary pauses, the interrupted swallows took up their sweet, shrill cry. I hurried over the last pages of my cantata, and on the 29th was free to maraud about the streets, pistol in hand, with the “blessed riffraff” as Barbier said.

I shall never forget the look of Paris during those few days. The frantic bravery of the gutter-snipe, the enthusiasm of the men, the calm, sad resignation of the Swiss and Royal Guards, the odd pride of the mob in being “masters of Paris and looting nothing.” One day, just after this harmonious revolution, I had a strange musical shock.

Going through the Palais Royal, I heard some young men singing a familiar air; it was my own:

“Forget not our wounded companions, who stood In the day of distress by our side; While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood They stirred not, but conquered and died.”[7]

Not used to such fame I, in great delight, asked the leader whether I might join in, and incontinently began a hot argument with him as to the time at which it should be taken. Of course I was not recognised.

As we sang, three of the National Guard handed round their shakos to collect money for the wounded and there was a welcome deluge of five franc pieces. The crowd increased and our breathing space became less and less; we should have ended in being smothered had not a kindly haberdasher asked us up to her first floor windows, that looked out upon the covered gallery, whence we could rain down our music upon the crowd below, as the Pope does his blessing from the balcony of St Peter’s.

First we gave them the _Marseillaise_. At the opening bar the noisy crowd stood motionless; at the end of the second verse the same silence; even so with the third. Irate at their apparent coldness, I roared out--

“Confound it all! SING!”

And they sang.

Remember, those four or five thousand tightly packed people were--men, women and children--hot from the barricades, inflamed with lust for combat, and imagine how their

“Aux armes, citoyens!”

rolled out.

Aghast at the explosion we had provoked, our little band stood silent as birds after a thunder clap.

I, literally not metaphorically, sank on the floor.

Some time before this I had arranged the _Marseillaise_ for full orchestra and double chorus and had dedicated it to Rouget de Lisle, who wrote inviting me to go and see him at Choisy, as he had several proposals to make to me.

Unfortunately I could not go then, as I was on the point of starting for Italy, and he died before I returned. I only heard much later that he had written many fine songs besides the _Marseillaise_ and had also a libretto for _Othello_ put aside; it is probably this that he wished to discuss with me.

As soon as peace was patched up and Louis Philippe introduced by Lafayette as “the best of republics” the Academy started work once more.

And as the judges, thanks to a piece which I have since burnt, believed me reclaimed from my heresies, they gave me the first prize. Although, in former years, I had been greatly disappointed at not getting it I was not in the least pleased when I did.

Of course I appreciated its advantages; my parents’ pride, the kudos, the freedom for five years from money troubles--yet, knowing the system on which prizes were awarded, could I feel any proper pride in my success?

Two months after came the distribution of prizes and the performance of the successful work. It was all very hackneyed.

Every year the same musicians perform pieces turned out on the same pattern; the same prizes, awarded with the same discrimination, are handed over with the same ceremony. Every year on the same day, at the same time, standing on the same step of the same staircase, the same Academician repeats the same words to the winner.

Day, first Saturday in October; time, four in the afternoon; step, the third; the Academician--we all know who.

Then comes the performance with full orchestra (in my case it was not quite full, for there was only a clarinet and a half, the old boy who played the first--having only one tooth and being asthmatic besides--being only able to squeeze out a note here and there). The conductor raises his baton----

The sun rises; ’cello solo, gentle crescendo.

The little birds wake; flute solo, violin tremolo.

The little rills gurgle; alto solo.

The little lambs bleat; oboe solo.

And as the crescendo goes on and the little birds and little brooks and little beasts finish their performance, one suddenly discovers that it is noon; then follow the successive airs up to the third, with which the hero usually expires and the audience once more breathes freely.

Then the secretary, holding in one hand the artificial laurel wreath and in the other the gold medal, worth enough to keep the recipient until he leaves for Rome (in point of fact, I have proved that it is worth exactly a hundred and sixty francs) pompously enunciates the name of the author.

The laureate rises,

“His smooth, chaste forehead, newly shorn, is wreathed with modest blushes.”

He embraces the secretary--faint applause. He embraces his master, seated close by--more applause. Next come his mother, his sisters, his cousins, and his aunts to the tune of more applause; then his fiancée, after which--treading on people’s toes and tearing ladies’ dresses in the blind confusion of his headlong career--he regains his seat, bathed in perspiration. Loud applause and laughter.

This is the crowning moment, and I know lots of people who go for nothing but the fun of it.

I do not say this in bitterness of spirit, although, when my turn came, neither father nor mother, nor fiancée[8] were there to congratulate me. My master was ill, my parents estranged, my mistress--ah!

So I only embraced the secretary, and I do not fancy that my “modest blushes” were noticed because, instead of being “newly shorn,” my forehead was buried in a shock of long red hair, which, in conjunction with certain other points in my physiognomy certainly earned me a place in the owl tribe.

Besides, I was not in at all an embrace-inspiring humour that day. Truth obliges me to confess that I was in a howling, rampant rage.

I must go back a little and explain why.

The subject set was the _Last Night of Sardanapalus_, and it ended with his gathering his most beautiful slaves around him and, with them, mounting the funeral pyre.

I was just going to write a symphonic description of the scene--the cries of the unwilling victims; the king’s proud defiance of the flames, the crash of the falling palace--when I suddenly bethought me that that way lay suicide--since the piano, as usual, would be the only means of interpretation.

I therefore waited and, as soon as the prize was awarded and I knew I could not be deprived of it, I wrote my CONFLAGRATION.

At the final orchestral rehearsal it made such a sensation that several of the Academicians came up and congratulated me most warmly, without a trace of pique at the trick I had played upon them. The rumour of it having gone abroad, the hall was packed--for I found I had already made a sort of bizarre reputation.

Not feeling particularly confident in the powers of Grasset, the conductor, I stood close beside him, manuscript in hand, while Madame Malibran, who had been unable to find a seat in the hall, sat on a stool at my elbow between two double-basses. That was the last time I ever saw her.

All went smoothly; Sardanapalus assembled his slaves, the fire was kindled, everyone listened intently, and those who had been at rehearsal whispered:

“Now it’s coming. Just listen. It’s simply wonderful!”

Curses and excommunications upon those musicians who do not count their rests!! That damned horn, that should have given the signal to the side-drums, never came in. The drums were afraid to begin, so gave no signal to the cymbals, nor the cymbals to the big-drum.

The violins went wobbling on with their futile tremolo and my fire went out without one crackle!

Only a composer who has been through a like experience can appreciate my fury.

Giving vent to a wild yell of rage, I flung my score smash into the middle of the band and knocked over two desks. Madame Malibran jumped as if she had been shot, and the whole place was in an uproar.

It was a regular catastrophe--worst and cruellest of all I had hitherto borne; but alas! by no means the last.

XVI

LISZT

_To_ HUMBERT FERRAND.

“_24th July 1830._

“DEAR FRIEND,--All that the most tender delicate love can give is mine. My exquisite sylph, my Ariel, loves me more than ever and her mother says that, had she read of love like mine, she could not have believed it.