Rupert Hughes

“ Taken in the entirety, in shine and shade, footlights and firelights, for poorer, for richer, for all that could torment or delight a sensitive artist, a great gentle-souled creative genius, as well as a tender and sympathetic woman, the married life of Wolfgang and Constanze Mozart must be placed among the most satisfactory in the catalogue of the relations of man and woman. They were lovers always. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Grove moralises thus on Mendelssohn with sane philosophy:
"He was never tried by poverty, or disappointment, or ill-health, or a morbid temper, or neglect, or the perfidy of friends, or any of the other great ills which crowded so thickly around Beethoven, Schubert, or Schumann. Who can wish that he had been? that that bright, pure, aspiring spirit should have been dulled by distress or torn with agony? It might have lent a deeper undertone to his songs or have enabled his Adagios to draw tears where now they only give a saddened pleasure. But let us take the man as we have him. ”

“ And then his deafness! When he was only thirty, the black fog of silence began to sink across his life; two years later he was stone-deaf, and nearly half his days were spent in the dungeon of isolation from real communion with man or with his own great music. He lived, indeed, as he said, inter lacrimas et luctum.
The blind are usually placid and trustful; it is the major affliction of the deaf that they grow suspicious of their intimates and abhorrent of themselves. There is nothing in history more majestic than the battle of this giant soul against his doom ”

“ An unmarried man, in my opinion, enjoys only half of life.
"But now, who is the object of my love? Do not be startled, I entreat you. Not one of the Webers, surely? Yes, one of the Webers,—not Josepha, not Sophie, but the third daughter, Constanze. I never met with such diversity of dispositions in any family. The eldest is idle, coarse, and deceitful—crafty and cunning as a fox; Madame Lange (Aloysia) is false and unprincipled, and a coquette; the youngest is still too young to have her character defined,—she is merely a good humoured, frivolous girl; may God guard her from temptation! ”

“ It was probably the beauty and tender reciprocation of Giulietta that inspired Beethoven to write to Wegeler in 1801:
"Life has been a little brighter to me of late, since I have mingled more with my fellows. I think you can have no idea, how sad, how intensely desolate, my life has been during the last two years. My deafness, like a spectre, appears before me everywhere, so that I flee from society, and am obliged to act the part of a misanthrope, though you know I am not one by nature. ”

“ And so Beethoven never married. The women, indeed, whom he loved, whom he proposed to, always awoke with a shock to the risk of joining for life a man of such explosive whims, of such absorption in his own self and art, of such utter deafness, untidiness, and morose habit of mind.
But Beethoven himself was not always eager to wed. He could write to Gleichenstein:
"Now you can help me get a wife. If you find a pretty one—one who may perhaps lend a sigh to my harmonies, do the courting for me. But she must be beautiful; I cannot love anything that is not beautiful ”

“ He had always drouth in his purse and despair in his mind. It is a true miracle that a genius in such a contrast could create the wonderful works that all the world knows.
"It was at this time that, seeking solace in friendship, he contracted that bond of sentiment which lasted till death with Boselli, a singer in the service of Prince Esterházy. This friendship, rousing jealous suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Anna, ended by rendering her unendurable. The hostile fates willed that no fruit should be borne of Haydn's marriage." ”

“ They flow from a pure heart, that knows no other wish than your happiness. When time shall have gone by, and you can look back in peace and quiet on the broken tie between us, you will then acknowledge that never was a truer heart than mine. Thanks, my dearest life, my never-to-be-forgotten love, for the many sweet flowers you have woven into the garland of my life, for all your love, for all your care. ”

“ It is hard to find in story or history a more pitiful struggle against fate and the frustration of every deep desire than the last days of Carl Maria von Weber, hurrying from triumph to triumph, and dying as he jolted along his way, or stood bowing with hollow heart before uproarious multitudes. Homesickness grew to be a positive frenzy with him.
"They carry me in triumph," he wrote to Caroline: "they watch for every wink to do me kindnesses. ”

“ Every one was captivated by her gay, unassuming manner, her freedom from all the usual virtuoso caprices in society, and her readiness to give pleasure by her talent to every one, as if a portion of the tender spirit with which Mozart once loved her had passed into her soul and brought forth fresh leaves from a withered stem. But years of faults and follies intervened for Aloysia. ”

“ My darling is now one hundred times more joyful at the idea of going to Salzburg; and I am willing to stake—ay, my very life, that you will rejoice still more in my happiness when you really know her; if, indeed, in your estimation, as in mine, a high-principled, honest, virtuous, and pleasing wife ought to make a man happy."
Now we enter upon the test of this romantic devotion—this wedlock of the twenty-six year old musician and the maiden of nineteen, who married in spite of the opposition of both families and in spite of the poverty that awaited them. ”

“ But unfortunately for English music this beautiful moon, who is the most nearly great of all the composers England has furnished the world, was speedily obscured in the blinding glare of the sun of English music which came shouldering up from the east, and which has not yet sunk far enough in the west to cease from dazzling the eyes of English music-makers. But of Händel as a lover, we must postpone the gossip till we have mouthed one of the most delicious morsels in musical scandal, a choice romance that is said to have affected Purcell very deeply. ”

“ To-day we will hardly permit an artist an extra half-inch of hair, and he must be very well groomed, very prosperous, businesslike, and, in appearance at least, athletic—even if he must ask his tailor to furnish the look of brawn. Personally, I prefer the mode of to-day, but with to-day's fashion we should not have had Chopin, such music as he drew from his familiar and dæmon, the piano, and such letters as he wrote about the Gladkovska to his friend Matuszynski:
"God forbid that she should suffer in any way on my account. ”

“ Weber had lived hardly more than half of the allotted three score and ten, but he had lived life in all its phases, from riotous dissipation amid royal splendour and insolence to a brave and whole-souled battle for the welfare of his home. It is futile to attempt judging the effect of music upon life, and of life upon music. ”

“ Only a perfectly pure spirit could give the gentle look in her large, dark eyes. She spoke with inimitable beauty and clearness, because she was inwardly so transparent and beautiful, almost like a beatified spirit."
He told Fräulein Tenger the story of an early encounter of Thérèse and Beethoven. She was a pupil who felt for him that mingled love and terror he instilled in women. One bitterly cold and stormy day he came to give the young countess her lesson; she was especially eager to please him, but grew so anxious that her playing went all askew. ”

“ The man whom all posterity knows by the name of his birthplace, as Palestrina, was the greatest composer the Catholic Church ever had. He was a younger contemporary of Willaert's, but was born an Italian. And all his glory belongs to Italy. Of his youth nothing is known. He first appears as the organist and director at the chief church in Palestrina from 1544 to 1551.
Of his early love-making nothing is known; it is only certain that he married young, and it would seem very happily. Yet this marriage brought him the greatest shock of his life. ”