The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 eBook

Rupert Hughes
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1.

The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 eBook

Rupert Hughes
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 224 pages of information about The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1.

THE OVERTURE

Musicians as lovers!  The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours!  The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of “the inexpressive She;” the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion—­these are music’s very own.

So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have expressed.  And yet—!  Round every corner there lurks an “and yet.”  And if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that corner.

Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover; that a broken heart alone can add the Master’s degree to the usual conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in tune.

But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the world’s greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune; and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers’ arithmetic which begins:  1 plus 1 equals 1.

If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and condition of love and lover that humanity can include.  And incidentally—­to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be skipped—­let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.

In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to be true.  Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the aim throughout.  Where the facts are sparse, I have not hesitated to say so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference without frankly branding it as such.

Furthermore, as far as space permits and documents exist, the musicians tell their own stories in their own words.

For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all the books ever published in all the world’s languages:  and yet, that I have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books at the back.  This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the reader could consult with pleasure.

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Project Gutenberg
The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.