HEROLD AND BIZET

The Frenchman Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, “Le Pre aux Clercs,” had been produced and had wrung from him the wail:  “I am going too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage.”  He had married Adele Elise Rollet four years before, and she had borne him three children, the eldest of whom became a Senator; the next, a daughter, married well, and the third, a promising musician, died of his father’s disease at twenty.

Bizet, like Herold, died soon after his masterpiece was done.  Three months after “Carmen’s” first equivocal success, Bizet was dead, not of a broken heart, as legend tells, but of heart-disease.  Six years before he had married Genevieve, the daughter of his teacher, the composer Halevy.  In his letters to Lacombe he frequently mentions her, saying in May, 1872:  “J’attends un baby dans deux ou trois semaines.”  His wife, he said, was “marvellously well,” and a happy result was expected—­and achieved, for in 1874 he sends Lacombe the greetings “des Bizet, pere, mere, et enfant.”  He began an oratorio with the suggestive name of “Sainte Genevieve,” which his death interrupted.  His widow told Gounod that Bizet had been so devoted that there was not a moment of their six years’ life she would not gladly live over again.

Cesar Franck married and left a son.  At his funeral Chabrier said, “His family, his pupils, his immortal art:  viola all his life!” But Auber, though too timid to marry or even to conduct his own works, was brave enough to earn the name of a “devotee of Venus.”

THE PASSIONS OF BERLIOZ

Some of the most eminent musicians were strictly literary men, to whom music was an avocation.

Thus Robert Schumann was an editor, who whiled away his leisure writing music that almost no one approved or played for many years.  Richard Wagner was well on in life before his compositions brought him as much money as his writing.  Hector Berlioz was a prominent critic, whose excursions into music brought him unmitigated abuse and ridicule.  The list might be multiplied.

The tempestuous Berlioz was in love at twelve.  The girl was eighteen; her name was Estelle, and he called her “the hamadryad of St. Eynard.”  Years later she had grown vague in his memory, and he could only say, “I have forgot the colour of her hair; it was black I think.  But whenever I remember her I see a vision of great brilliant eyes and of pink shoes.”  When he was fifty-seven years old, he found her again and his old love revived.  But before that time there was much life to live.  And he lived it at a tempo presto con fuoco.

He went to Paris, which was a cyclone of conflict for him.  At the age of twenty-seven he won the Prix de Rome and went for three years to Italy, not without the amorous adventures suitable to that sky.