Читать книгу The Love Affairs of Great Musicians - Hughes Rupert - Страница 7

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The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular god of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted, ended in the death of the lady; as for himself—being a god, he was denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many another woman, was soon blasé of divine courtship, and, for variety, turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always claimed.

Old Boetius—who had affection enough for both a first and a second wife—tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections more open than that of hearing."

The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant turtle-shell, by Mercury, the god of gymnastic exercises and of theft, that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with his affections also; among his progeny was the great god Pan, who is frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him, and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx. Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family—one of the first families of Arcadia—was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed! But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.

The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs—a fact which should not be cherished against him—seems to have loved no one except himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain mariners, he was carried to shore on the back of a dolphin, is only Jonah's adventure turned inside out.

Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and violinists at the hands of the matinée Bacchantes.

The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all his poesy.

The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal worship accomplished much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians to be monks. This banishes them from a place here—not by any means because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but because it greatly prevented a record of most of them—though happily not all. Abélard, for instance, was a monk, and his Héloise became a nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also an abbé? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hèle, who about 1585 gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Très-Haut, ministre du Christ, il sut garder la chastété et se preserver du contact de l'amour sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always necessarily so.

Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music, tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politianus, who flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the children of Lorenzo dei Medici.

"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who passed for the finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of 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.