He sat at the table and opened his score, flipping idly through the first few dozen pages, remembering the thought and sweat that had gone into every familiar bar; the crossings-out, the rewrites, the marginalia. He’d have to write to Joachim tomorrow to tell his side of the story while his friend read the reviews. Dear God – what those reviews would be like.
His mind was clear. What could he learn from this disaster?
First, most importantly: he was three-quarters of the way there with the piece, still feeling his way in some matters of structure and orchestration. They were nothing that further revisions couldn’t improve. The performance’s failure that night was the fault of the audience; not the work, not his playing or that of the orchestra. Most of the players hadn’t liked the piece either, but they’d done an excellent job by him. That unhelpful arsehole Rietz on the podium was of no consequence. Lesson One.
Following on from that, Johannes had to be realistic about his immediate prospects: itinerancy and comparative poverty would be a part of his circumstances for some time yet. He’d have to go back to Hamburg and live with his parents until he could afford a place of his own and make a stable base. Supporting himself would be hard enough, without the burden of trying to support someone else. Lesson Two.
Which led him to Lesson Three.
Agathe.
He understood now why he was taking the events of the night so well.
Because I don’t have to explain this to anyone.
He imagined Agathe – any wife – at home, waiting to support him in his adversity, to comfort him, tell him that it would all be better next time.
To pity him.
She couldn’t understand that he wasn’t unhappy about this, nor that an artist like him might have a vision that continued to burn bright despite her empty, consoling words. She would feel and look concerned, thinking it a problem shared.
What a hell that would be. A hell in chains: Marriage.
He couldn’t stand it. Not now, not ever.
Agathe would have to be told. He’d write a letter. Somehow, he’d try to make it as light as possible to lessen the blow; insouciant and breezy – everything the First Piano Concerto wasn’t.
Now was as good a time as ever. Johannes grabbed a pen and a sheet of clean paper, and began writing.
‘My dearest Agathe! I love you, and I must see you again! But …’
And so on.
Two hours later, the lamp in his room burning low, the chill of the winter night leaking in through the window glazing, Brahms signed his first name, sealed the completed letter in an envelope and wrote her name on the front.
He suspected the letter’s tone was not its strong suit and wondered if its sum effect would be as disastrous as that night’s concert. Agathe’s reaction was hard for him to predict; the Grimms’ less so. He could imagine what Julius would say. Johannes felt much the same himself.
He pressed the palms of his tired hands against his eyes and said aloud: ‘Johannes Brahms – you are a fucking scoundrel.’
POSTSCRIPT
Agathe von Siebold replied to Brahms’s letter by breaking off the engagement and returning his ring. They never saw each other again. Likewise, Julius Grimm and his wife severed all contact with the composer.
Agathe spent several more years in Göttingen before leaving Germany to become a governess in Ireland. She finally married ten years after the rupture with her former fiancé.
Brahms’s First Piano Concerto was performed in Hamburg in March 1859, two months after the Leipzig disaster. This time it was a huge success, launching the composer’s career. A subsequent Hamburg performance in 1861, conducted by Brahms, featured Clara Schumann as soloist.
Brahms and Clara Schumann remained close until her death in May 1896. Brahms died less than a year later.
THE UNKNOWN ISLAND
Love was always essential to Hector Berlioz: the only other preoccupation of his life apart from music, and the inspiration for much of his work. A brief episode in the sunset of his years became the purest of his romantic episodes, teaching the composer that age was not necessarily the end.
‘A love came to me, smiling. I did not seek it and even resisted for a time, but this inexorable need of tenderness overcame me. I let myself be loved. Then I myself loved even more.’
Hector Berlioz, letter to Humbert Ferrand, 3 March 1863
PARIS, 1862
‘Monsieur! Your handkerchief!’
She walked quickly towards him along a path lined with gravestones, her hand outstretched.
His face still streaked with tears, Hector Berlioz felt embarrassed to be identified as the owner of the mislaid item.
‘Merci, mademoiselle,’ he said before noticing the ring on her finger. ‘Pardon me – madame.’
Her chestnut hair was parted in the middle and gathered at the back of her head by side braids. Very à la mode, he guessed – as one might expect from a well-kept married woman who looked to be only in her twenties.
She had noticed him weeping long before he began to move on from the gravesite where his handkerchief had fallen to the ground. He made a striking sight; fine-checked trousers and well-cut grey long coat with an upturned fawn collar, sheathing a slender, still youthful figure. Even without the decoration of tears, anyone’s attention would have been drawn to the head designed in antiquity: an aquiline, beak-like nose, deep-set eyes shining below a broad expanse of forehead. And his hair! Even in his youth, friends had described the almost comically abundant reddish-blond thatch as ‘a forest tumbling over the edge of a precipice’. Age had changed its colour, but not its density.
All Berlioz saw in his mirror each day was the whitening hair of age, and this sudden apparition of youth in a cemetery made him feel even older. The pains that had kept him awake the night before flared again. He winced, placing his hands over his stomach.
‘Are you all right, monsieur?’ she said, concerned.
‘Ah! My neuralgia,’ he said, through shortened breath. ‘The affliction of my years.’
‘Perhaps you will allow me to help you to a bench.’
He was not altogether happy about the spectacle of his infirmity requiring such public assistance. A moment later he realised there was little point in feeling self-conscious when surrounded by people whose views were obscured by six feet of earth.
It was a fine day for late autumn. The trees in Montmartre Cemetery were more alive than its inhabitants, and bouquets placed on the graves lent an almost festive look to what he called the ‘charnel house’. The irony was not lost on Berlioz that lingering here was a less depressing prospect than mouldering at home.
‘That would be a benefit, madame,’ he said, ‘much more comfortable than the last time I felt this way while here. Then, I had to lie on a tombstone for hours.’
Besides, she really was quite beautiful, he thought. Berlioz was reassured to notice there was more curiosity than pity in her eyes. Or was he just being fanciful?
Of course I am, he thought. That’s how artists are. We conjure fancies for a meagre living. This sweet girl is helping an afflicted old man in a graveyard.
‘And the name of this kind stranger would be…?’ He waited for her to complete his sentence.
The informality of her reply was a surprise.
‘Amélie,’ she said. ‘The rest is of no importance.’
‘I shall give you mine in case you need to seek help,’ he said, half in earnest. ‘I am Monsieur Berlioz. My apartment is not far from here, in the rue de Calais.’
‘Berlioz … I know your name. I have seen it,’ she said. ‘Of course! The Journal des débats. You are the music critic?’
‘Paris is not a city crowded with people bearing my name. You are indeed correct, madame – although you know me only for what I do for a living, not for who I was.’
She did not detect the deliberate irony in his remark.
‘And that would be?’
‘I was condemned by Fate to be a composer of music,’ h
e said with faux theatricality. ‘Paris, in her wisdom, ensured that news of this was not spread throughout the land.’
Amélie wasn’t sure whether she was meant to feel complicit in the scale of such public ignorance. Then she was aware of his sideways glance through what she now saw to be blue-grey eyes, and the beginning of a smile on lips no longer tightened by pain.
‘I presume you are not here today merely to mourn your reputation, monsieur,’ she teased.
‘All of those tears were shed long ago, Madame Amélie. The resurrection of that particular corpse is a hundred years away. No – today I weep as we all do who visit. Too much of my past is beneath this earth. I once wrote a song about it in a cycle about the loss of love. The singer is in a cemetery by moonlight, hearing a dove above a white tomb. The ghost of his lover asks if he will come back to her grave, but he knows he will not.’
‘Since you are here, you are clearly not he,’ she said.
‘I have not such strength of character.’
‘Shedding tears for the dead is not a sign of weakness, Monsieur Berlioz,’ she said gently. ‘What is your cycle called? Perhaps I should find your music.’
‘Summer Nights,’ he said. ‘I wrote it twenty years ago, before I had any friends in this place. The music in that song captures exactly the exhaustion with life I now feel. How could I have known of it then? All I did was to imagine what it might be like. Experience teaches us nothing new; it only confirms the direst predictions of youth.’
‘Then I have a great deal in which to look forward, for none of my predictions are so dire,’ she said. ‘And not all of yours are correct, monsieur. You look much better than you did a few minutes ago.’
‘That’s because I have encountered life and beauty in a place where it was least expected. Do not blush, madame; I say that with the sagacity of the old.’
She looked at him. ‘You are not old, Monsieur Berlioz. You are simply more experienced. I should like to hear more about those experiences that have left you so innocent of knowledge.’
They spent a further hour at the cemetery, exchanging platitudes about the state of the world. When she suggested that the approaching winter would only make both the trees around them and any further platitudes more funereal, Berlioz invited her to meet him again the next week in the warmth of the Café Le Cardinal on the corner of rue de Richelieu and the boulevard des Italiens, where conversation could outlast the light of the afternoons.
‘I pretend that it is convenient – and it is. I live around the corner,’ Berlioz admitted after greeting her at a table by the window. ‘The real reason is that of sentiment; I have been coming here for nearly forty years. You remember, don’t you, mon vieux?’ he called to the old patron presiding at the bar.
‘How could one forget, Monsieur Berlioz? It must have been 1827? ’28? You came in one night looking very upset and then collapsed on the table over there. Nobody was game to approach in case you had died. You slept there for most of the night.’
‘I was probably about your age, Amélie,’ said Berlioz. ‘I had spent the entire day and much of the night wandering around the city and surrounding plain. Montmartre was a hamlet on the edge of the country in those days.’
‘Too much exercise, monsieur?’ she said.
‘No, madame: too much passion – always being in love.’
‘Unhappy songs, tears in a cemetery, fainting in cafés; love seems to bring you much grief.’
‘It has brought me a great deal of music, and a wonderful son, Louis, whom I see too rarely. Music and love are the two wings of the soul.’
Amélie remembered the hurt creature she had first seen. He is nursing a broken wing, she thought. He was a sad, earthbound eagle – but at least he had flown. She had not, she convinced herself – not yet in her short life, anyway.
‘Monsieur Berlioz, I cannot speak for music, but in my limited experience love offers no guarantee of happiness,’ she said. It was a second before she realised what a self-revealing comment she had made.
He looked at her keenly, just as surprised. Her face had the same neutral expression as if she’d remarked on the colour of the tablecloth, but her voice betrayed cynicism, rather than melancholy. As indispensible as love had been in his own life, Berlioz had come to exactly the same conclusion as the one Amélie had just voiced. Yet he would never be cynical about it. That was the difference between their generations: his had discovered Beethoven and Shakespeare; hers danced the cancan. Perhaps not her, though. He felt that she was a kindred spirit.
He looked out into the street. People were emerging from so many more carriages than before, shoulders hunched against the cold, some of them coming into the Cardinal, which had been made into something more respectable than in the old days when he slumped over the furniture.
All was change. The newly installed gas lamps were just being lit, bringing day to night in a way he had never known when he was young. Baron Haussmann’s new boulevards were gouging their way through his neighbourhood. Not that he minded; he liked the new aesthetic. But there were inconveniences. Even the dead had to make way for the ‘new’ Paris; soon, his first wife would have to be disinterred.
Whichever way Berlioz looked at it, the past was being dug up. He had even dredged up his own and written it down in his memoirs. Would the young woman sitting in front of him ever read them? If she did, would she care? Something in him suddenly wanted her to care.
The lessons of his life might be instructive. This new acquaintance from the cemetery sounded as if she needed her cynicism put to bed for a few decades. She could always be old and bitter later.
His decision took only a few seconds. Then he drew himself up, brightening his voice.
‘I want to make a suggestion to you, Madame Amélie. If it sounds too generous, be assured that the person who will benefit most is myself. On the other hand, the thought of it may bore you to tears – but you did invite me last week to tell you something about my “experiences”.’
‘Monsieur Berlioz, I cannot imagine being bored in the slightest,’ she said, smiling. ‘Tell me your idea.’
‘I would like to tell you what I know of love, Amélie. It’s an unlikely novel that spans my life, but to prevent it becoming the ramblings of an old man I’ll confine it to those parts that eventually made their way into my music. And should you ever hear my music someday, you will then have the dubious privilege of knowing me completely. We could have some tisane as an accompaniment. Do you have the inclination – and the time?’
‘I am inclined to hear whatever you wish to say, Monsieur Berlioz,’ she said. ‘And my husband is always away, so I have all the time in the world.’
‘You will need it. My son is at sea for his profession, and we shall take a voyage too. Let us have the wind at our backs. We are setting sail for a place that may not exist.’
‘What is its name, monsieur?’
‘The place where love lasts forever,’ he said.
Berlioz talked into that evening and through more weekly meetings, confessing more to this unusual young woman than he did to many of his friends. The ones who lived nearby kept an open door for Hector Berlioz; he would sometimes arrive unannounced and sit by their fires, saying nothing apart from the usual niceties. When he was in a better mood, he would fire bon mots over dinner, or talk sagely to their grandchildren. Handle Hector with care, they counselled each other; he was recently widowed for a second time, he was unsettled, his belongings had been moved to a lower floor of his apartment block while repairs were being made to the building.
The Opéra had just rejected his huge opera The Trojans that he talked about as the crowning achievement of his creative life. He still worked in a job he detested, writing about music he knew to be not a patch on his own, and the mysterious illness in his guts was pulling him down inch by inch. There were plenty of reasons for him to carry a handkerchief, even if he wasn’t visiting a grave.
At least his new opera based on his beloved Shakespeare’s Much Ado Ab
out Nothing had been a success recently in Baden, where the wealthy took a break from the gambling tables and spa baths to talk through, and then applaud, what he called his ‘caprice written with the point of a needle’. He knew it would be his last work, and after all the unhappiness in his life, he intended to go out with a smile.
His musical labours over, he now had an audience more available than any his Trojans might have delivered him, more attentive than the socialites and gamblers of Baden. On her part, Amélie was happy to be a captive, too enthralled by both the stories and the raconteur to leave.
Berlioz alluded to his age as the excuse for any unintended mistakes when finishing another tale: ‘Of course I would say that now – I am almost fifty-nine!’ She found the mantra increasingly hard to believe. His animated facial expressions, the precise movements of the hands that had made him such a renowned conductor of orchestras, and the way in which he would flick back his extravagant hair when it threatened to lose control were all the traits of a much younger man.
The stories of love began with his first, in 1816. Her name was Stella – his ‘star’ – and she wore pink boots. He was twelve, blushing furiously, staring at those boots in a crowded room in country France, and if he looked up into the eyes of the person wearing them he knew he would swoon.
He was already prone to being overwhelmed by music, scenery and the romance of antiquity. The sound of plainchant by a distant congregation would send him rolling around the nearest hill in agony, and the vision of poor Dido on her funeral pyre in Virgil’s Aeneid caused him to stammer and fall silent during a Latin lesson with his father. Berlioz senior was a good country doctor, but even without such medical insights he knew his firstborn was a most unusual child.
Estelle’s family were friends of his grandfather, who the Berlioz family visited each summer. From his village above the Isère Valley near Grenoble you could see the jagged horizon of mountaintops marching away to the Alps.
Symphony of Seduction Page 19