The House of Rothschild, Volume 1

by Niall Ferguson

  The Frankfurt Rothschilds had rather different tastes again. It is hard to imagine Wilhelm Tischbein’s Goethe in the Campagna di Roma (which Mayer Carl bought in 1846) hanging in Paris or London, for example. In any case, Mayer Carl was a good deal more interested in gold and silver ornaments than in paintings. Although his English cousins collected objets d’art too—among Lionel’s prized possessions was the so-called “Lycurgus cup,” an ancient Alexandrian or Byzantine glass goblet—they were less systematic. By the 1870s Mayer Carl had accumulated a dazzling “Goldschatz” of 5,000 items, among them such treasures as Wentzel Jamnitzer’s Merkelsche Tafelaufsatz, a masterpiece of the German Renaissance, and an ivory horn on silver gilt in the same style—in fact a contemporary forgery by Reinhold Vasters, but a brilliant one.

  Evidently, the Rothschilds were little interested in the art of their own day—although the myth-makers have exaggerated this indifference. The story that James antagonised two artists, Jadin and Horace Vernet, in his efforts to secure a cut-price portrait seems implausible; it cannot be right that Vernet took his revenge by depicting James as a cowardly Jew in On the way to Smala, because the figure in question bears no resemblance whatever to him or any other Rothschild. What is true is that, with very few exceptions, the only contemporary paintings the family owned were portraits they commissioned themselves: for example, Alfred de Dreux’s portait of Lionel driving a gig (1838), Sir Francis Grant’s portrait of the four brothers riding to hounds (1841), Ary Scheffer’s portrait of James’s daughter Charlotte and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ portrait of his wife Betty (1848)—not to mention the numerous family pictures painted by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim and the portraits of James by artists like Charles-Emile Champmartin, Louis-Amié Grosclaude and Hippolyte Flandrin.

  It would be a mistake to explain all this solely in terms of family (or individual) “taste.” For the “Old Masters” were attractive to men like James and Lionel for reasons other than the strictly aesthetic. Quite apart from their value as “status symbols,” celebrated paintings were as much a form of investment in the nineteenth century as they are today. The fact that James’s entire collection was insured for 10 million francs (£400,000) is indicative of the scale of the investment undertaken in this period: in 1844 that sum was equivalent to a quarter of James’s share in the combined capital of the five houses. Moreover, the market was a lively one, still feeling the ripples generated by the French Revolution: by uprooting so much of the French aristocracy, the Revolution had made numerous private collections available to new buyers, and the practice of selling them en bloc at auction had continued into the nineteenth century. It was another revolution, that of 1830, which ultimately led to the sale of the duchesse de Berry’s collection, one of the most important early sources of Rothschild art; 1848 saw the great Stowe auction. Despite the frequency of such sales, the demand for Old Masters often tended to outstrip supply. It speaks for itself that a picture like Velazquez’s Lady with Fan could sell (to Nat) for 12,700 francs in 1843, more than three times more than the banker Aguado had paid for it just six years before.

  Given their immense wealth, the Rothschilds could afford to outbid almost anyone, and some members of the family seemed inclined to do so. As Mayer said while shopping for Italian sculpture in 1846, “one ought always to buy the very best of everything and not to mind the price,” on the ground that “the very best” could only appreciate in value. But the political upheavals of 1848-9, when the art market slumped as steeply as the financial markets, called that bullish assumption into question. In later life, James was always content to let a picture go to another bidder if he felt the price was excessive. In 1860 he bid 3,000 guineas for a Rubens, only to see it go to someone else for 7,500. “Fabulous prices,” commented James; “I don’t have the money to pay 10,000 guineas for a Murillo” (especially when the artist’s Christ as the Good Shepherd had cost just over £3,000 twenty years before). Of course, he of all people did have the money; but, compulsive investor that he was, he hated the idea of buying at what might prove to be the peak of the market.

  Piano Lessons

  Art, then, was an investment as well as a form of decoration. The Rothschilds’ enthusiasm for music is perhaps less easily explained. That the Rothschilds patron ised some of the most famous composers and performers of the nineteenth century is well known; and the most obvious reason for this is that musicians were a prerequisite for a successful soirée or a ball. In January 1828, for example, Nathan was able to treat his dinner guests to a post-prandial performance by Ignaz Moscheles—Felix Mendelssohn’s tutor. Similarly, when the maréchal de Castellane had dined with James the year before, the star performer was Rossini, to whom Salomon had been introduced by Metternich at the Congress of Verona five years before. It is also said—though scholars debate the authenticity of the story—that Chopin’s career in Paris was launched by a performance he gave at the rue Laffitte in 1832. He played there again in 1843 alongside his pupil Karl Filtsch, whose playing James was reported to “adore.” Other notable performers who played at Rothschild houses included Mendelssohn himself, Franz Liszt, the pianist and conductor Charles Hallé and the violinist Joseph Joachim.

  Even more important than their role as performers, however, was their role as teachers. This was especially important for female Rothschilds, who were encouraged from an early age to excel at the keyboard (the piano was perhaps the nearest thing the nineteenth century had to the television, with the difference that it required skill to operate). Not surprisingly, Nathan and his brothers gave them the best tutors money could buy. Charlotte’s livre d’or, in which she invited her teachers to jot musical mementoes, records many of their names: Moscheles appears there, as does Mendelssohn, Vincenzo Bellini (who inscribed the song “Dolente immagine di Fille mia,” which he had composed in 1821), Louis Spohr (who contributed a version of his song “Nachgefühl”), Rossini (who added one of his many settings of “Mi lagnero tacendo” from Metastio’s Siroe) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (who offered a song called “The Rare Flower”). In the 1840s Charlotte’s contributors included the elderly Luigi Cherubini (who wrote in the aria “Canto d’Armida” from his opera Armida abbandonata) and Chopin (who added a version of the Mazurka Op. 67 no. 4). Rossini also wrote a six page piano solo for her as a “Petit Souvenir.” Charlotte’s sister Hannah Mayer was also an accomplished harpist and took lessons from Parish Alvars, who dedicated his Serenade Op. 83 to her; and when the youngest sister Louise showed musical leanings, Rossini himself offered to give her singing lessons. He was, she reported to her father, “very good natured and always comes at the hour and day I like.” When the two were together in Frankfurt three years later, she had lessons with him every day. Chopin too gave lessons to a number of Rothschild women: not only to Nathan’s daughter Charlotte but also to her daughter Hannah Mathilde and to Betty’s daughter, another Charlotte. Indeed, he dedicated two pieces to members of the family: the Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2 and the Ballade, Op. 52. With such a source of inspiration, it is not surprising the girls themselves tried their hand at composition: the younger Charlotte published four short piano pieces while Hannah Mathilde composed piano pieces, an orchestral waltz and six sets of songs, including settings of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, Goethe and Longfellow—the most successful of which (“Si vous n’avez rien à me dire”) was performed at the Paris Opéra by the soprano Adelina Patti.

  The Rothschilds not only employed musicians to perform and teach, however; they also mixed with them socially and enjoyed their company. Meyerbeer dined with Betty and James in 1833, for example, and Rossini was invited to Lionel’s wedding in 1836 primarily as a friend—“to add to the gaiety of our party”—rather than as an entertainer or teacher. As he himself put it, “the entire purpose . . . was to attend at Frankfurt the marriage of Lionel Rotschildt [sic], my very dear friend.” James and he remained friendly throughout their lives. Similarly, Chopin was said to have “loved the house of Rothschild and that this house loved him”; after his p
remature death in 1848, his pupil Charlotte preserved “a touching remembrance of him”—a cushion she herself had embroidered for him. Such intimacy with musicians was somewhat unconventional. When the Rossinis dined with Nathan at a fairly aristocratic gathering shortly before the wedding, Lady Grenville commented sniffily that it was “Madame Rossini[’s] . . . first appearance in decent company I believe.” But the composer and his wife were there partly in order to liven up the proceedings. Anthony’s account of the private recital he heard Liszt give in 1842 is illuminating, showing how the Rothschilds derived pleasure not only from the playing but also from the company of such stars of nineteenth-century romanticism. “The most extraordinary player in the world,” he reported to his wife, was

  as curious to look at as to hear, with his long hair at times streaming over his face, at others completely thrown back by a violent toss of the head, his wild eyes which he now and then turns on every side as if to mean sometimes “Am I not wonderful?” at others that he is delighted with his own performance. Dearest, he is an agreeable and talkative man in society, and is no doubt a dear and pleasant companion.

  Musicians educated and entertained—and not just by their playing. In return, the family were happy to give their favourites a measure of financial assistance—usually in the form of personal banking services. Johann Strauss senior’s tour of England in 1838 was partly financed by Lionel; after 1842 Rossini banked at de Rothschild Frères; Niccolo Paganini used the Rothschilds to relay a gift of 20,000 francs to Hector Berlioz; and Adelina Patti on one occasion borrowed more than £4,000 from the Paris house while on tour in Argentina. Even that most vociferous of musical anti-Semites, Richard Wagner—who demonised the influence of “Jewry in Music”—may be said to have banked with the Rothschilds as his second wife Cosima had an account with the Paris house. The beneficiaries were more privileged than they may have realised: the Rothschilds generally offered such facilities only to royalty and the political elite. It was a sign of the value they attached to their relations with the musical world; and perhaps this sprang from a certain sense of affinity. Like the self-made millionaire revered for his money, the musical star idolised for his (or her) virtuosity was a nineteenth-century invention. Both were to some extent parvenus (and foreigners): Nathan as much as the Rossinis at the dinner mentioned above. Indeed, many of the nineteenth century’s most gifted musicians—Meyerbeer and Joachim spring to mind—were, like the Rothschilds, beneficiaries of Jewish emancipation.

  Men of Letters

  Musicians gave private lessons and performances. Nineteenth-century writers, by contrast, wrote for a burgeoning public and were supposed to be freeing themselves thereby from the traditional constraints of patronage. Yet men of letters too were recipients of Rothschild favours—and two of the best-documented cases were Heinrich Heine and Honoré de Balzac, both of whom became closely associated with James in the 1830s and 1840s. (Because of its political significance, the analogous relationship between Lionel and Disraeli is discussed separately in volume II.)

  On the face of it, it is amazing that the wealthiest banker in Paris, the confidant of kings and ministers, should have had anything to do with either. In political terms alone, they were extremists: Heine was exiled from Germany for his liberal views and remained a lifelong enthusiast for revolutionary and nationalist causes; Balzac, by contrast, was by temperament a romantic conservative who considered seeking election as a Bourbon legitimist in 1831-2, and devoted a lifetime to portraying the society of the July Monarchy in a less than flattering light. Financially, they were both feckless, and without question had mercenary motives for cultivating good relations with the Rothschilds. And above all they periodically depicted James in their writings in ways which would have sent a thinner-skinned man rushing to his lawyers. Yet James evidently liked both; and if the relationships he formed with them were not quite unalloyed friendships, it seems that he would have liked them to be. Nothing gives a better insight into James’s complex personality than this.

  We have already encountered some of Heine’s most penetrating commentaries on the nature of Rothschild power before and after the 1830 revolution. It is now time to say something about his relationship to the family. The nephew of the Hamburg banker Salomon Heine, he had been intended by his mother for a career in banking and seems to have had some sort of encounter with Nathan—“a fat Jew in Lombard Street, St. Swithin’s Lane”—in London in 1827. Indeed, Nathan may have been the “famous merchant, with whom I wished to be an apprentice millionaire” who told him he “had no talent for business.” By 1834, however, he had struck up a very different relationship with the French Rothschilds. A number of anecdotes exist which cast Heine as a kind of licensed jester at the court of Baron James. When the Austrian playwright Grillparzer dined with Heine (and Rossini) at the Rothschilds’, he was shocked: “It was apparent that his hosts were afraid of Heine, and he exploited their fear by slyly poking fun at them at every opportunity. But it is not admissible to dine with people whom you don’t care for. If you despise a person you should not dine with him. In point of fact, our acquaintance did not progress after this.”

  Barbs of the sort Grillparzer alluded to invariably cast James as Heine’s slow witted straight-man. “Dr Heine,” he asks, “could you tell me why this wine is called ‘Lachrymae Christi’?” “All you have to do is translate,” Heine answers. “Christ weeps when rich Jews can afford such good wines while so many poor folk go hungry and thirsty.” “Comment trouvez-vous mon chenil?” says James, welcoming some guests to his house. “Don’t you know that chenil means dog-kennel?” chips in Heine. “If you have so low an opinion of yourself, at least don’t trumpet it abroad!” Rothschild contemplates the filthy state of the River Seine and observes that its source is perfectly clear; Heine replies: “Yes, M. le baron; and I hear that your late father was a most honest man.” A third party expresses a desire to meet James. “He only wants to get to know him,” quips Heine, “because he doesn’t know him.”

  Such anecdotes seem superficially plausible in the light of the more satirical passages about James in Heine’s journalism. Yet the surviving correspondence suggests a rather different relationship, in which Heine increasingly came to play the more or less humble supplicant to James’s indulgent patron. As we have seen, one of the first references Heine made to James was in Ludwig Börne, in which he suggested that James’s development of financial capital made him as much of a social “revolutionary” as Richelieu and Robespierre. Though a fairly outrageous parallel, this was far from insulting; if anything, it rather exaggerated James’s influence. Surprisingly, Heine felt nervous enough about the liberties he had taken—apparently quoting at length from a private conversation with James—that he took the precaution of sending a copy of the proofs to his wife Betty. “You now have in your hands the corpus delicti that gives me some anxiety,” he wrote. “May I still appear before you? . . . Perhaps you will forgive me with a merry smile. For my part I cannot reproach myself enough for having spoken, not with ill intent, but in an unbecoming manner, of a family that conceals so much nobility of feeling and so much good will.”

  A few months before, he had publicly denied being the author of some malicious remarks about a ball given by James which had been attributed to him in the columns of the Quotidienne. In his Augsburger Zeitung articles of the early 1840s, he repeatedly went out of his way to praise James, comparing him favourably with other bankers like Benoît Fould, for example, and praising his philanthropic work. The most fulsome—if faintly facetious—praise of all came in the article published in June 1843 (later incorporated in his “Lutetia”) which likened James to Louis XIV for his ability to identify talent in others: “In order to make quite sure of not causing offence I will today compare M. de Rothschild to the sun. I can do this, firstly, because it costs me nothing; and secondly, I can well justify it at a time like the present because now everyone pays homage to M. de Rothschild in the hope of being warmed by his golden rays.” A few months lat
er Heine was able to do more than merely praise James when his publisher Julius Campe sent him the manuscript of a highly critical history of the Rothschilds—the radical republican Friedrich Steinmann’s The House of Rothschild: Its History and Transactions. Heine wrote that if the manuscript were to be suppressed it would repay the service “which Rothschild has shown me for the past 12 years, as much as this can honestly be done.”

  Many subsequent writers have assumed that the main reason for Heine’s kid-gloved treatment of James at this time was financial. But there is no record of any financial assistance from James to Heine until 1845, for the reason that before then Heine did not need such help. That, in fact, is the whole point of the passage in “Lutetia” which follows the comparison with Louis XIV, in which Heine explicitly denies wishing to join the horde of beggars who surround James: