Volume II Part 6 (1/2)

Taken to the nearest hotel, he went into hysterics, and was unconscious for forty-eight hours The doctor said travel was necessary The as provided for, and, leaving her forever, Tschaikovski fled to foreign countries barely in time to save his sanity To the last he absolved the poor wretched wohtest blaraphy, corows reticent, except to release the wife of all bla soard cynically or pityingly, as your edy was the sordid tinge of poverty The wretched man alone in Switzerland ithout reat secrecy, offered him an annual income of 6,000 rubles--about 4,500--purely in payiven her He accepted a gift so graciously and gracefully made Tschaikovski was thenceforth an institution fully endowed

Modeste says that without this relief from anxiety Tschaikovski would have died He wrote to the benefactress: ”Let every note from my pen henceforth be dedicated to you”

This was not the first tie, notable woman, she; a true phenomenon--or a phenomena, as one would be tempted to say who had even less Greek than I or Shakespeare, if such an one exist

Nadeschda Filaretovna, being poor, had ineer; they lived carefully, and raised eleven children A railroad invest into the millions In 1876 she lost her husband, but all of the children and the riches remained to keep her busy She lived in almost complete seclusion

Tschaikovski's strenuous music penetrated her solitude and her heart

The stories of his small income touched her She planned schee for them munificently Yet she would not receive the composer personally, and when they lance

In Du Maurier's perfect romance, Peter Ibbetson and the duchess of Towers lived their hearts out in a dream-world So Frau von Meck and Peter Iljitsch lived theirs in a letter-world

In 1877, before hisof his financial troubles, she had offered to pay him well for a corade his art for a price So she paid his debts to the extent of three thousand roubles This he could accept These theories of art!

It was to her that he unburdened in his letters the wild schee It was to her that he poured out his soul in endless letters not yet publishable entire Their life apart see his last years, after a period of travel, he lived al in 1893, only three years over fifty

Whatever posterity e perplexities, in which apparent frenzies of effeminacy and hysteria, of passionate terror and helplessness at self-control fall in strange contrast with the teentle and at its fiercest is virile to the point of the barbaric

I am haunted by the vision of that poor Antonina Ivanovna, helpless to keep silence in her love, and winning her bridegrooive her his Heart And al is the vision of the co hi that love cannot follow theSo he stands in the icy river, and its gloom and cold are no more bitter than the despair in his own mad heart It is Abelard and Heloise without the love of Abelard or the joy Heloise knew for a while at least

CHAPTER IV

THE HEART OF A VIOLINIST

”Froanini comb the fierce Electric sparks, or to tenuity Pull forth the inut could swoon out so ht-Cap Country_”

Many people have based their idea of the moral status of musicians and the moral effects of music upon a certain work by Tolstoi, who is no more eminent as a crusader in the fields of real life and real fiction, than he is incompetent as a critic of art His novel, ”The Kreutzer Sonata,” is musically a hopeless fallacy And Tolstoi's claim, that Beethoven must have written it under the inspiration of a too amorous mood, is pretty well answered by the fact that Beethoven, as so liberal of his dedications to women, whenever they had inspired him, dedicated this work to two different violinists, both ustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a h to be born in Europe, was not ostracised from paleface society This can be only too well proved by the fact that Beethoven--who spelled thethe sonata to him, found that the Africo-European had been his successful rival in one of those numberless flirtations of his, in which Beethoven always canant at his dusky rival's success, Beethoven erased his nae and substituted that of Rudolphe Kreutzer The curious thing about this great piece of music, known to fame as the ”Kreutzer Sonata,” is that Beethoven had never seen Kreutzer, and that Kreutzer never played the sonata

I have not discovered whether or no Kreutzer was married; he probably was, for he died insane A Gerht be confused, had a daughter whoetower, heof violinists, ould become of them if there never had been makers of violins, especially such luthiers as the Amati? Yet all I know of the Amati is that they forh how, or when, I do not learn

The great Antonio Stradivari, however, began his love- in love with a woman ten years his senior, when he was only seventeen She was Francesca Capra; her husband had been assassinated three years before, leaving her a child The boy Stradivari and the ere hter named Julia was born Francesca bore Stradivari six children Her second child was a son named after her, Francesco; but Francesco died in infancy, and the naiven to the next son, who followed his father's profession, but never hter, who died a spinster; the next was a son, who became a priest, and the next a son, who died a bachelor The failure of all their children to marry does not indicate a particularly happy home-life, but this is mere speculation We only know that Stradivari's first wife died, after athirty-four years

A year and a half later Stradivari irl fifteen years his junior; Antonia Zambelli was, indeed, born the very year Francesca's first husband had been assassinated Antonia bore Stradivari five children: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one who handed down the family name How happy Antonia ith her husband, we do not know ”As rich as Stradivari,” becae of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less than one year; this rief; or because he was already nearly ninety years of age

In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named Pietro, and a enius, and blaspheave himself the nickname, ”del Gesu” Of hi sent to prison for debt, he won over the jailer's daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and implements hich he made the so-called ”prison fiddles,” of whose curious shape Charles Reade said: ”Such is the force of genius that I believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they are so full of chic” As Giuseppe called himself ”Gesu,” so there was a nini as called ”John the Baptist,” and of whoe family

TARTINI

But to turn from these unsatisfactory violin reat Corelli's personal history; his pupil Geminiani is said to have led a life full of roues of chess-playing The great Tartini, whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his fa university student he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and ht him separation and exile His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe He fled from Padua, and took up the violin to save hireatness thrust upon the at the monastery where he was in retirement, the wind blew aside a curtain just as a fellons He took home the news, and by this ti ere permitted to resume their romance

They went to Venice Later his ambition for the violin caused them to separate, but finally they returned to Padua to live Burney says that his as ”of the Xantippe sort” His love story soests that of Desmarets, who also had to flee for his life in consequence of a secretthe wrath of the aristocratic family