The Europeans

2

A Revolution on the Stage

I said to myself: ‘The July Revolution is the triumph of the bourgeoisie: this victorious bourgeoisie will want to cut a dash and be entertained. The Opéra will become its Versailles, it will flock there to take the places of the banished court and nobles.’ The idea of making the Opéra at once magnificent and popular seemed to me to have a good chance of success.

Louis-Désiré Véron, Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris (1857)

1

At the end of April 1846, the Viardots began their long trip back from Berlin to Courtavenel. They would spend the summer there while Pauline made up her mind where she would appear in the coming autumn season. Turgenev wrote to Pauline frequently. His correspondence was conversational, full of news and observations, witty, light in tone. Knowing that his letters would be shown to Louis, he composed them with this in mind, but if she read between the lines, Pauline would have understood his emotions. At his most passionate Turgenev would switch from French to German, a language Louis did not speak at all.¹

Turgenev longed for her to return to Russia that autumn. ‘As regards the next season,’ he wrote to her in May, ‘you will be the best judge of that yourself. I am persuaded in advance that your decision will be well made, but I must tell you that your absence here this winter (if that is the outcome, which I still do not want to accept) will sadden many people. Ich bin immer der selbe und werde es ewig bleiben [‘I am still the same, and always will be’] … In any case, do me the goodness of informing me of your decision. Farewell, be healthy and happy … come back; you will find everything here as you left it.’²

Louis was reluctant to return to Russia. He could not tolerate its cold climate, and felt himself at odds with the tsarist government because of his left-wing views (an article on Moscow he had published in the journal L’Illustration had been censored in Russia).³ Berlin was the obvious alternative. Meyerbeer, the Generalmusikdirektor of the Berlin Opera, was a keen admirer of Pauline’s voice and wanted her to sing the leading role in Le Prophète, his next opera, which he had been working on since 1838. Meyerbeer had shelved the opera in 1843 after Léon Pillet, the director of the Paris Opéra, had rejected his request that Pauline sing the leading female role. Pillet wanted the part for Stolz, the prima donna at the Opéra, who was also his mistress, but Meyerbeer would have nothing to do with the overrated soloist. From that moment, as the music critic Eduard Hanslick quipped, the composer carried his opera ‘back and forth between Berlin and Paris in his suitcase, possibly in an effort to determine whether prophets may travel customs-free’.⁴

Meyerbeer believed that an opera’s success depended above all on the leading singers’ vocal and dramatic skills. He travelled throughout Europe looking for the best singers. In Pauline he had found the range of voice and acting qualities that made her perfect for the all-important role of Fidès, the prophet’s mother, on which the tragic power of his opera would depend. He wrote the part for her.⁵

In 1845, he persuaded her to come to Stolzenfels, the neo-Gothic castle near Koblenz where the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm, marked the completion of rebuilding works with a gala concert for the visit of Queen Victoria at which Pauline performed Gluck and Handel arias. The next year, he lured her to Berlin, a major capital of the ‘newspaper countries’, where George Sand had insisted her career would be made.⁶ In Berlin, Viardot could strengthen her credentials for the Paris Opéra, where she still had not appeared, by taking on the part of Valentine in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, the first time she had sung Grand Opera. After ten years of singing only the Italian repertoire, it required a great deal of effort to learn to sing in German and prepare her voice for this demanding role. ‘The day after tomorrow I sing for the first time … in German!!!!!!,’ she wrote to Sand on 22 January 1847.

You would not believe how hard I have had to work. First you have to prune the text of words too harsh and ugly to sing. When you have finished with the text you have to learn it all over again, then make it fit your tongue, and then your voice. It’s a terrible labour. They say my pronunciation isn’t bad, and I believe it, given all the work I have put in.⁷

Pauline triumphed in Les Huguenots. The critics were ecstatic. The Berlin public ‘boiled with enthusiasm’ for the singer who could sing with equal conviction ‘all the repertoires in every language’, as Louis reported to George Sand on 22 February.⁸ From March, Pauline sang the role of Alice in Robert le diable, another Meyerbeer Grand Opera. The production was extended for two months, such was the demand to hear her sing. On one famous evening, when another singer fell ill at the last moment, Pauline amazed everyone by singing both the female parts.

Turgenev could only read about her triumphs in the press, which he scoured every day. ‘I read all the articles about you in the Prussian newspapers,’ he wrote to her from St Petersburg in November. ‘You have made progress, by which I mean the progress that a master makes and never stops to make until the end. You have now mastered the tragic element, the only element that you had not entirely mastered yet.’⁹ Turgenev was too restless and too obsessed with Pauline to remain an armchair follower. In January 1847, he left Russia to join her in Berlin. He spent the last of his allowance from his mother on his travel costs. For the next three months he religiously attended her performances. The painter Ludwig Pietsch, who would become a good friend, met him for the first time in a beer hall in Berlin. ‘Buttoned up in a fur coat’, Turgenev’s ‘impressive figure’ reminded Pietsch of the young Tsar Peter the Great, ‘although he had nothing in common with the semi-wild and unchecked nature of the founder of the modern Russian state. His massive head and body contained the finest intellect and the softest, kindest temperament.’¹⁰

Turgenev followed the Viardots to Dresden, where Pauline was engaged for a series of recitals during May, and that autumn went with them to London, where she had a two-month contract to sing at Covent Garden, worth £1,000 (25,000 francs), the highest level of remuneration she had yet achieved outside Russia.* She was at the height of her powers and could virtually dictate her conditions to any opera house. At Covent Garden she was able to insist that her jealous rival Grisi should not be employed at the same time. Only the Paris Opéra was yet to be conquered by Pauline. ‘Why have you not been engaged yet in Paris?’ George Sand wrote to her on 1 December. ‘I don’t understand. Grisi is collapsing in ruins and you are the greatest singer in the world.’¹¹

By this time, in fact, things were opening up for Pauline at the Opéra. The director, Pillet, was at last forced out, his mistress, Stolz, had gone following some terrible performances when she had been hissed off the stage, and the new directors, Nestor Roqueplan and Henri Duponchel, were now looking for a blockbuster to pay off the huge debts Pillet had amassed. Verdi’s opera Jérusalem, a reworking of I Lombardi, premiered in November, but was no more than a moderate success, with only thirty-five performances. So they turned to Meyerbeer, promising to secure special funds from the Ministry of the Interior to meet the costs of the expensive scenery and technical effects which his Grand Operas demanded, as well as to secure the services of Pauline Viardot, who wanted 75,000 francs to sing in Le Prophète for a season. Without her Meyerbeer would not let them have his long-awaited opera.¹²

Only Meyerbeer was capable of setting terms like this. To put on one of his operas was an almost certain guarantee of big profits. Born in Berlin to a Jewish banking family, he changed his name from Jacob Beer to Meyerbeer on the death of his grandfather, Liebmann Meyer (Jacob was changed to Giacomo during his years in Italy between 1816 and 1826). At that time he was composing in the Italian style of Rossini, a friend and supporter, who encouraged Meyerbeer to follow him to Paris after his appointment as musical director of the Théâtre Italien.

Paris was the key to Meyerbeer’s success. It was a truly international metropolis, the ‘great European and cosmopolitan capital par excellence’, in the words of one of its nineteenth-century historians, a city with more foreign residents than any other on the Continent.¹³ Meyerbeer’s music was perfectly adapted to this cosmopolitan environment. It was an eclectic mix of German harmony, French rhythm and orchestration, and the Italian bel canto style. The critic Blaze de Bury explained Meyerbeer’s success by his ability to assimilate these diverse elements into a distinctive ‘French system’ – a synthesis of the German and Italian – that had characterized the development of opera in Paris under Gluck and Rossini. His eclectic style sounded natural to Parisian society.¹⁴

‘Would I be interested in composing for the French stage, you ask?’ Meyerbeer had written to the Paris Opéra in 1823. ‘I assure you that it would be a much greater honour for me to write for the French opera than for all the Italian theatres put together … Where else but in Paris can one find the immense resources that French opera offers to the composer who longs to write truly dramatic music?’¹⁵

Paris at that time was the capital of the operatic world. Success in Paris made an opera likely to succeed in theatres all around the Continent. The greatest stage composers – Rossini, Meyerbeer, Bellini, Donizetti, Wagner and Verdi – were all keen to work in the French capital. The advanced protection of copyright in France, where laws of 1791 and 1793 had given artists lifetime rights of property in their own work, were a major draw. Whereas in Italy or Germany a composer earned a one-time fee for writing an opera, in Paris he received a royalty not only for the score but for every performance of his opera, provided its libretto was in French. Until the 1840s, France was the only European country where performance royalties were not only recognized in law but effectively enforced – a system introduced in 1776 but strengthened by the law of 1793. ‘If you are worth one thousand, you receive one thousand, if one hundred thousand, one hundred thousand,’ Bellini wrote in praise of the French laws in 1834.¹⁶

Paris was the ideal legal environment for Meyerbeer, the first composer to take full control of the creative elements that went into the making of an opera and profit from them in commercial terms. He reversed the old relationship between the impresario, the librettist and the composer: where previously an impresario would employ the composer to write the music for a libretto, Meyerbeer employed a librettist (usually Scribe) to write the words for his scenario and score. It was Meyerbeer alone who shaped the work. He gave the librettist detailed comments on the changes he required, and in the latter stages, when Scribe’s patience would run out, employed a second and even third librettist to make the final modifications.¹⁷ Where Rossini had been a tradesman working for an impresario, Meyerbeer had made himself the boss of his own opera business, employing the librettist as an artisan to make a work to order for a theatre and his publisher.

The Paris Opéra was Meyerbeer’s ideal stage. It was a large-scale entertainment business with high expectations of ‘magnificence’ which came with its licence from the crown. Where else could Meyerbeer expect to find the ‘immense resources’ he needed for Grand Opera?

Grand Opera was the largest form of music drama before Richard Wagner’s revolution on the operatic stage. Technically, it meant a five-act opera with a ballet and, in contrast to the Opéra-Comique, which had dialogue, without any spoken words. It was characterized by large-scale human dramas, choruses on stage, sumptuous sets and costumes, and spectacular effects. First developed in Paris, the model quickly spread to Germany and Italy; it would be emulated and adapted by composers throughout Europe in the nineteenth century; but however global it became, Grand Opera remained in essence a Parisian phenomenon.¹⁸

It had its roots in the 1831 reform intended to put the Paris Opéra on a more commercial footing and reduce its debts. By the middle of the 1820s, the Opéra was heavily indebted, despite growing subsidies. Its privileged position became a target for the liberal opposition, which also called for a renovation of its conservative repertoire. The public had grown tired of Gluck and Spontini. It wanted dramas with themes more relevant to the present. It wanted to see elements of spectacle such as it could see in the boulevard theatres, where all kinds of special effects (revolving panoramas, light changes and optical illusions of visual depth) were borrowed from the dioramas of Daguerre (who worked in the theatre before turning his attentions to the invention of the daguerreotype, a form of photography). It was in response to these demands that in 1828 the Opéra commissioned Daniel Auber’s five-act opera, La Muette de Portici, technically the first Grand Opera, based on the story of a popular uprising against Spanish rule in seventeenth-century Naples. The stage designer, Charles Ciceri, who had worked with Daguerre in the boulevard theatres, created a series of visually stunning sets, and produced spectacular effects, culminating in the use of gas lighting for the eruption of Vesuvius at the end of the fifth act. Auber’s opera was seized upon as a symbol of rebellion. Its heroic depiction of the people in the chorus emboldened revolutionaries, especially in Belgium, where its performance on 25 August 1830 became the signal for revolt against King Willem of the Netherlands.¹⁹

Following the July Revolution in Paris, the Opéra was turned over to Véron, its first entrepreneur-director. Financed by Aguado, Véron saw himself as the leader of a bourgeois revolution in the theatre. In his Mémoires d’un bourgeois de Paris (1857), Véron later claimed that on taking over at the Opéra his revolutionary business plan had been to turn the theatre into the Versailles of the bourgeoisie, which would ‘flock there to take the places of the banished court and nobles. The idea of making the Opéra at once magnificent and popular seemed to me to have a good chance of success.’²⁰ Much of this was myth-making. It was not yet the case that the bourgeoisie was replacing the aristocracy at the Opéra, whose public continued to be dominated by the old élite, even if there was a growing contingent of bankers, businessmen and their families in the most expensive seats.²¹ But Véron’s words can certainly be taken as a statement of intent. Without compromising on the splendour of the opera house, he introduced a series of reforms to make the Salle Le Peletier, the Opéra’s auditorium, more accessible to the bourgeois élites of the July Monarchy. He increased the number of small boxes (with four seats) by taking out the larger (six-seat) boxes on the upper circles. He opened two new boxes by the stage, furnished in the style of the gentlemen’s clubs which were springing up in Paris at that time, where ‘luxury and pleasure’ (by which he meant a close view of the ballerinas’ legs) ‘could be purchased inexpensively’.* He added more rows to the stalls, where tickets could be bought for a single performance, and upgraded them from benches into comfortable armchairs, appropriate for women, who were now admitted to this area. He lengthened the season, extending it into the summer break, when the aristocracy left Paris for the countryside, making it easier for others to get tickets for this period (the Salle Le Peletier was ‘invaded’ by provincial doctors and their families in the summer, according to the memoirist Tamvaco). Finally, he made the start of performances an hour later, at 8 p.m., allowing more time for business people and professionals to get to the theatre after work.

The idea was not in any way to downgrade the Opéra. No expense was spared on the smallest details to maintain the theatre’s opulence (even the tickets cost a fortune to produce).²² Rather, his aim was to make the Opéra more attractive to the newly moneyed bourgeoisie, which he believed would be a growing source of revenue. ‘The taste for music, or to be more exact, for opera, has seized everyone,’ wrote the critic Charles de Boigne. ‘Each wants his box at the Opéra, some once, others twice, and still others three times a week. The solicitors, attorneys, and stockbrokers, who wish to show their rank, appear on two nights: on Monday, the petit jour, with their wives, and on Friday, the grand jour, with their mistresses.’²³

To entertain this market Véron realized that he had to come up with a fresh repertoire. What this public wanted was entertainment, pleasure and distraction from their daytime business. They wanted music dramas they could understand, enjoy, without knowledge of mythology, or recourse to printed librettos where all this was explained. In Grand Opera he had found the medium to give them that.

In his Mémoires Véron talked about the main ingredients which he believed were needed for the success of Grand Opera as a commercial enterprise:

An opera in five acts must have a very dramatic action, bringing into play the grandest human emotions with powerful historical interests. This dramatic action, however, must be capable of being understood by the eyes alone, as in the action of a ballet; the chorus has to be impassioned and play an active role in the drama. Each act must have different sets, costumes and above all scenes … When you have at your disposal a vast stage with fourteen depths, an orchestra of over eighty musicians, a chorus of the same size … and a team of sixty machinists to move the scenery, the public expects and demands great things from you.²⁴

Grandeur, luxury and spectacle – all these contributed to the success of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, Véron’s first production for Paris, which packed the Salle Le Peletier, earning an impressive 10,000 francs per night from its premiere in November 1831. The box office triumph saved the Paris Opéra from bankruptcy.²⁵

There had been Grand Operas before – La Muette de Portici and William Tell were both in that category – but Robert le diable was the first to qualify on all the elements outlined by Véron. It was truly a spectacular event. The smaller, three-act operas of Rossini could no longer compete with its huge scale and dramatic power, nor with its popularity. According to Liszt, it was the success of Robert le diable that finally persuaded the Italian to give up writing operas.²⁶ Within three years of its premiere, it had been produced by seventy-seven different companies in ten countries around the world, from New York to St Petersburg, and had made more money than any other opera until that time. At the Paris Opéra, alone, it brought in 4 million francs during its first quarter of a century; it was the first opera to become a constant fixture in its repertoire, with 470 performances by 1864, when Meyerbeer died.²⁷ More than any other work, Robert le diable became the model of what Grand Opera should be.

Loosely based on the medieval legend of Robert the Devil, a Norman knight who discovers that his father is Satan, the opera tells the story of Robert’s struggle to obtain the hand of his beloved Princess Isabelle. In scene after scene, Robert veers between his virtuous desires and the influence of his companion, Bertram, the embodiment of Satan, whose real purpose is to get Robert to sign away his soul to the Devil in exchange for magic powers to help in his quest. Bertram fails, he is pulled down into Hell at the stroke of midnight, and Robert wins the hand of Isabelle.

The Faustian parallels of Eugène Scribe’s libretto explain part of the opera’s appeal. ‘Faustmania’ was at its height in the early 1830s. There had been numerous productions of Goethe’s story in the boulevard theatres, from which Scribe (who had worked in vaudeville and learned from it what was required to hold an audience) derived many of the opera’s most striking scenes, narrative techniques and characters. Despite the opera’s medieval setting, Scribe’s Robert is a psychologically complex and ‘modern’ character, ‘the hero who does not know precisely what it is he wants’, as Heine put it, ‘in perpetual conflict with himself’ – in short a ‘veracious portrait of the moral uncertainties of the epoch’. He was a character in which a bourgeois public was able to see itself.²⁸

Robert derived much of its popularity from its historical drama – a defining element of Grand Opera where stories of individuals caught up in the turmoil of historical events replaced the classical and mythological subjects of eighteenth-century opera seria. History was at the heart of the Romantic imagination, in particular the Gothic and medieval themes that Meyerbeer and Scribe presented in their opera. The international craze for Walter Scott was an expression of this interest. Translations of his historical novels sold in mass editions right across the Continent. He had imitators everywhere, from Victor Hugo, whose Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) borrowed from a range of his Waverley books, to Mickiewicz in Poland, who compared his own work to a ‘few pages torn from Walter Scott’. There were numerous adaptions of Scott’s novels for the stage, with no fewer than fifty operas in the nineteenth century.²⁹

But the main appeal of Robert le diable, according to Véron, was the spectacle created on the stage – a feast of movement, light and colours – and the splendour of its costumes, scenery and technical effects. The visual highlight was the ‘Ballet of the Nuns’: white-clad ghosts rise from their graves to dance erotically by moonlight – an effect made even more ghostly by the use of gas lighting and the veils attached to the dancers’ bodices (the origin of the tutu). Chopin, who was in the audience for the opera’s opening night, described its stunning impact in a letter to his friend from Warsaw, Tytus Woyciechowski:

I don’t know whether there has ever been such magnificence in a theatre, whether it has ever attained the pomp of the new 5-act opera ‘Robert le Diable’ by Mayerbeer [sic] … It is a masterpiece of the new school, in which devils (huge choirs) sing through speaking-trumpets, and souls rise from graves … in groups of 50 and 60; in which there is a diorama in the theatre, in which at the end you see the intérieur of a church, the whole church, at Christmas or Easter, lighted up, with monks, and all the congregation on the benches, and censors – even with the organ, the sound of which on the stage is enchanting and amazing, also it nearly drowns out the orchestra; nothing of the sort could be put on anywhere else. Mayerbeer has immortalized himself!³⁰

The dramatic novelty of these effects can only be compared to the introduction of sound and colour to the silent films of Hollywood. As one reviewer put it, ‘no longer must we suffer with the ancient palaces disturbed by the last glimmerings of a dying Argand lamp, or the antique relics and flimsy columns which tremble at the slightest touch of a Venus in curlpapers or a Cupid in ballet shoes.’³¹ Opera had entered the industrial age.

*

The box office triumph of Robert le diable also owed a great deal to publicity and marketing, aspects of the opera business in which Véron excelled. He maintained close relations with music publishers, journalists and agents, who were often journalists or publishers themselves, and used the proliferating music press to publicize his productions. His most important connection was with Maurice Schlesinger, the editor and owner of the influential Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, who also owned the publication rights to Robert le diable.

Born in Berlin, Schlesinger had moved to Paris as a young man during the 1820s. Following in the footsteps of his father, Adolf Schlesinger, the founder of the Berliner Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, he moved into music publishing, buying mainly German works, and, in 1834, launched the music journal Gazette musicale de Paris to promote that business. Within a year the Gazette had taken over its main rival, the Revue musicale, and renamed itself the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, for which he secured the services of writers such as Scribe, Sand, Dumas and Balzac by paying handsome fees. Their fame helped him to attract composers to his publishing house. Young composers accepted low fees for their works because they knew that Schlesinger could help them get established in Paris. An eye for the value of publicity was not his only business skill.* Schlesinger was quick to adapt to the new realities of the capitalist system, in which publishing was part of a multi-media industry. It did not unduly worry him that the Revue operated at a loss, because he saw it as a means of promoting those composers, such as Meyerbeer, whose works he also published. There were larger profits to be made from the publication of the musical arrangements of opera arias than he could make from a music periodical. It was an early example of what today would be called a loss-leader. Seizing on the new popularity of serialized fiction, Schlesinger commissioned a wide range of stories to promote his published music list in the Revue, including Balzac’s Gambara, which centres on a long and largely positive conversation about Robert le diable (albeit with some of the usual reservations about Meyerbeer’s eclectic style and commercialism, which would haunt him later on).³²

Schlesinger’s Revue was partisan in its support of his composers and attacks on rivals such as Verdi, who was published by another house. There was no such thing as impartial music criticism in the nineteenth century: the major music journals were too closely tied to the publishing and concert businesses, and the critics of the time, who were not usually musicians,* generally wrote their musical reviews to promote the journals’ interests.³³ The largest of them all, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, was produced as an in-house magazine by the Leipzig music publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, and rarely published positive reviews of works not in its catalogue. The smaller periodicals were notoriously venal and would publish anything if they were paid. The Bologna journal L’Arpa even printed on its masthead the instruction, ‘Articles for insertion must be paid for in advance’.³⁴ Music journals depended heavily on subscriptions, so publishers and agents would subscribe to them to guarantee a puff for their clients (according to the impresario Alessandro Lanari, it was difficult to get a mention otherwise). Bribing journalists for favourable reviews was common practice. The critic Jules Janin was said to earn up to 8,000 francs from a premiere. Charles Maurice, the editor of Courier des théâtres, ran his journal as a protection business. Famous for his critical reviews and sharp putdowns, Maurice received fawning letters accompanied by money from artists.³⁵ Even the high-minded Berlioz, who relied on music journalism, much of it in Schlesinger’s Revue, was not beyond corruption – although in his case writing good reviews was motivated less by monetary gain than by the need to protect himself as a composer, and perhaps the hope of winning favours from the powerful. Wanting a commission from the Paris Opéra for his opera Benvenuto Cellini (1838), Berlioz could not afford to give a bad review to Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, first performed at the Opéra two years before.³⁶ What he published in the musical reviews was often far removed from what he really thought. He praised Halévy’s opera La Juive (1835) in Le Journal des débats but poured scorn on it in conversations with his friends.

Véron was particularly active in making sure that Robert le diable received a welcome reception. He paid for mentions in the press to build interest in the production, spent large sums on taking critics out to lunch before the opening night, and gave them boxes and passes to the foyer de la danse.³⁷

He also employed a claque, a long-established institution of organized applause which he regarded as a ‘business necessity … as much a part of the production scheme as anything that took place on the stage’. The organizer of the Opéra claque was Auguste Levasseur, an intimate of all the best-known Parisian singers, actors and musicians, who was paid by them to arrange cheering for their performances and drown out the boos of rival claques. Véron gave him a hundred tickets for a premiere, more for the next performances if a production needed extra help. Levasseur would sell these tickets to his claque. Their work was planned carefully. Levasseur attended the rehearsals and discussed with Véron where loud applause was needed most. The positioning of the claque was critical: it had to surround the audience from all sides to galvanize them into more applause. Levasseur, a tall figure dressed in bright colours, would coordinate it from the stalls. ‘I have seldom seen a more majestic demeanour than his,’ wrote Berlioz. ‘Never was there a more intelligent or braver dispenser of glory enthroned in the pit of a theatre.’ Véron called Levasseur his ‘director of success’ and justified his employment as essential for the creation of an atmosphere. The critic Gautier agreed. A claque, he argued,

renders as much service to the public as to the administration of a theatre. If it has at times protected mediocrity, it has often sustained a new, adventurous work, swayed a hesitant public, and silenced envy. In delaying the failure of a piece that has necessitated much expense, it has prevented the ruin of a vast enterprise and the despair of a hundred families. The claque enlivens performances that without it would be dull and cold.³⁸

Meyerbeer was also a believer in publicity campaigns to support a new production, particularly during the first performances, when a cool reception could spell financial disaster. He courted the critics, invited them to dinners in expensive restaurants, gave them complimentary tickets, and often loaned them money which was not repaid.* It was said that he bribed journalists for good reviews, but there is little evidence to support the rumour, which was fuelled by resentment of his wealth and anti-Semitic prejudice. Meyerbeer had the insecurity of an outsider. He was deeply sensitive to any criticism. Despite his immense success, he was always anxious about the reception of his latest work, and fussed neurotically about every detail of its production. Heine wrote of him in the 1830s that ‘he lacked a winner’s self-belief, he showed his fear of public opinion, the slightest adverse comment frightened him.’³⁹

Meyerbeer was modern in his media management. Others took a more old-fashioned view. ‘Nowadays,’ wrote Verdi, ‘what an apparatus for an opera!? Journalists, artists, choristers, conductors, musicians, etc. etc., each of them has to bring his own stone to the edifice of publicity, creating in this way a miserable little frame that adds nothing to the merits of an opera.’⁴⁰ But the growing power of the press made it hard for anyone involved in opera production to neglect these aspects of the business.

The chief source of profit from Robert le diable was the publication of various arrangements for the domestic market in the form of sheet music. Although an opera had to make a profit for the house, the real money came from its spin-offs. Meyerbeer would make his fortune from these reductions of his operas. They sold many thousands of copies and, from each, he earned a royalty. The law in France gave artists rights of property in their own work, including foreign artists if their work appeared there first in French.

There was a mutual dependence between the commercial success of an opera and the publication of these morceaux détachés. Melodies from Robert le diable were published in a large variety of arrangements (for voice and piano, piano duet, violin and piano, string quartet, wind ensemble, even for small orchestra), and these in turn became important for the opera’s longer-term success. The public was more likely to attend a performance at the opera house when it already knew the music from playing it at home or hearing it performed in a concert.

This connection was not new. Stendhal claimed that The Barber of Seville had owed much of its success ‘to the abundance of waltz-tunes and quadrilles it has supplied to our dance orchestras! After the fiftieth or sixtieth society-ball,’ he wrote in 1824, ‘the Barber suddenly begins to sound strangely familiar, and then a visit to the Théâtre Louvois becomes a real pleasure.’⁴¹ From the 1830s, however, there was a boom in music publishing, driven by the growing popularity of music-making in the home, which accelerated this cycle. The invention of lithography made it possible to print cheap mass editions of sheet music. Published opera arias migrated from the theatre to the living room, the salon, ballroom, music hall and tavern; they were played by bands in parks, by street musicians, until everybody could sing them; and once they knew these tunes, they wanted to find out where they came from. A virtuous circle was thus formed between the production of an opera and the reproduction of its music through sheet music sales with each side of the business adding to the success of the other. This was the moment when the music business became part of the modern capitalist economy.

There were arrangements of Robert le diable for every level of musical proficiency. Liszt and Chopin both wrote virtuoso pieces based on extracts from the opera, but there were also fantasies and variations by Sigismond Thalberg, Adolphe Adam and Carl Czerny easily playable by amateurs. All these sold in Schlesinger editions in enormous quantities. By 1850, the Revue et Gazette musicale listed more than thirty piano pieces from Robert le diable that could be bought from its publishing division for a few francs each. Thirty years later there were more than 160 transcriptions, variations and other arrangements for military bands, dance orchestras, piano, voice and other instruments.⁴²

Music publishers were always on the look-out for playable arrangements from successful operas – and for composers it was an easy way to make some cash. Mozart and Beethoven both paid their rent by composing simple variations on well-loved opera tunes. The Viennese composer Josef Gelinek, a ‘one-man wholesale piano-variation factory’ with export sales throughout Europe, amassed an estate of 42,000 gulden (110,000 francs).⁴³ The pianist and composer Henri Herz churned out more than 100 opus numbers based on opera melodies. Czerny was even more industrious. In 1848, his English publisher, Robert Cocks and Co., issued a list of Czerny’s printed works to date. Of his 798 opus numbers published so far, 304 were based on melodies from some eighty-seven operas. Three years earlier the London concert manager John Ella had seen how Czerny worked in his Vienna studio: he had four desks set up with a different composition on each one, allowing him to write the music on one page and turn to the next desk while the ink dried on the previous manuscript.⁴⁴

Underlying this new industry was the tremendous growth of piano ownership in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth, the pianoforte was an expensive novelty. Delicately built, like a harpsichord, it lacked the power or range of notes and volume to play large-scale works. But technical improvements by makers such as Sébastien Érard in Paris and John Broadwood in England made the piano much more robust, with a heavier action and foot pedals producing a bigger sound, longer sustained notes and a more extensive range – improvements which enabled Beethoven to write his mature piano works.

By the end of the 1810s, Broadwood was manufacturing pianos on a factory scale and selling basic models for as little as £40.⁴⁵ In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the piano was an item found not only in the homes of the upper landed gentry such as Lady Catherine De Bourgh, but also in the Bennet household and other minor houses in Longbourn – in the Lucas household and the Bingleys’ leased mansion, though not in the home of the less prosperous Uncle Philips, where card-playing had to take the place of music as the main form of evening entertainment.⁴⁶ By the 1840s, piano ownership had become widespread in Britain: 200 firms were producing pianos, totalling 23,000 pianos per year, 10 per cent of these by Broadwood alone. Britain led the world in piano manufacturing.⁴⁷ But French and German piano-makers were catching up, particularly Érard and Pleyel, the two most prestigious French makers, whose export business benefited most from the development of the railways (unlike the English, they did not have to ship their pianos across a sea). The French manufacturers also profited from promotional European tours by virtuoso pianists such as Liszt (who played for Érard) and Thalberg (for Pleyel), which allowed these companies to advertise their pianos and show what they were capable of producing in the best hands (perhaps one of the earliest examples of celebrity branding). In 1845, there were an estimated 60,000 pianos and 100,000 people playing them in Paris, a city with a population of about a million people. ‘There is not a home, even of the smallest bourgeois, where one does not find a piano,’ wrote Édouard Fétis, with some exaggeration, in 1847. ‘The instrument forms, in all necessity, a part of the furniture of every family; you will find it even in the concierge’s lodge.’ Heine complained that ‘one drowned in music, there is almost not a single house in Paris where you can be saved as in the ark before the flood.’⁴⁸

Piano ownership was also common further east. ‘There is almost no house where the thumping of a piano is not heard,’ claimed the Warsaw Courier in 1840. ‘We have pianos on the ground, first, second and third floors. Young ladies play the piano, mothers play the piano, children play the piano.’ Eight years later the same newspaper was more sober in its estimate of perhaps 5,000 pianos in Warsaw – that is one for every thirty people in a city with a population of around 150,000 – which is impressive enough. Most of the pianos in Warsaw were imported from Vienna or Leipzig.⁴⁹

In Moscow and St Petersburg, by contrast, there were at least a dozen piano manufacturers protected by restrictive tariffs on imports. A grand piano made in Moscow could be bought for 800 roubles (920 francs), a quarter of the sum it would cost to import a Broadwood or Pleyel, and affordable to the landed gentry and wealthier merchants with an annual income of 3,000–4,000 roubles (3,500–4,600 francs).⁵⁰ By the 1840s, upright pianos were found in many homes. Manufacturers marketed the piano as a symbol of respectability, and piano tutors were in high demand as younger generations of the Russian gentry sought to acquire the trappings of Western civilization.

In Turgenev’s novel Home of the Gentry (1859), set in provincial Russia in 1842, the piano appears frequently to illustrate the artificial manners of the aristocracy, as in this scene, where Panshin, an official from St Petersburg assigned to the local town, and Varvara Pavlovna, the daughter of a retired major-general from the Russian capital, sing a duet from Rossini’s Soirées musicales (1835):

Varvara Pavlovna sat down at the piano. Panshin stood beside her. They sang the duet in a low voice, with Varvara Pavlovna correcting him a number of times, and then they sang it aloud and twice repeated. ‘Mira la bianca lu … u … una.’ Varvara Pavlovna’s voice had lost its freshness, but she used it very cleverly. Panshin was diffident at first and slightly out of tune, then he carne into his own and, if he did not sing irreproachably, he at least made his shoulders quiver, swayed his whole body and raised his hand from time to time like a real singer. Varvara Pavlovna played two or three pieces by Thalberg and coquettishly ‘spoke’ a French ariette.⁵¹

Throughout Europe the piano was perceived as a key marker of gentility. Playing it was deemed one of the ‘accomplishments’ for a young woman that made her worthy of marriage.⁵² Nineteenth-century fiction is full of courtship scenes in which a romantic heroine and her young suitor play duets – the touching of their hands being just about as close as they could get without kissing. Along with the harp, the piano was the instrument deemed most physically appropriate for women – woodwind instruments forcing them to purse their lips, violins to twist their bodies, and cellos to spread their legs; whereas at the piano they sat with their feet together, preserving decorum. Compared to woodwind or stringed instruments, on which players were required to make the notes themselves, the piano was considered relatively ‘easy’ and accessible to women, who needed only an ability to hit the right keys.⁵³ There is no plausible means by which one can measure the impact of the piano on women’s lives, but it was clearly an important cultural and societal shift. Where women had once been the silent members of the family, meekly doing needlework in the salon, they now had a central role in music-making in the home.

The ease with which the piano could be played accounts for its popularity. Its upright design was important too, enabling the piano to be fitted in the smallest living rooms by placing it against a wall. Any family that owned a piano could now entertain itself at home. Whereas opera or concert tickets were too expensive for middling families to buy on a regular basis, sheet music was easily affordable, and weekly piano lessons were not beyond the means of a reasonably well-off family.

There was a whole industry of second-rank composers who churned out piano albums and arrangements for this new market. Thalberg, Herz, Franz Hünten, Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska – these and many others made their names from the sort of pieces (sentimental, easy on the ear, with brilliant effects, but not too hard to play) that gave the piano popular appeal. One of the most common forms of sheet music was the four-hand piano transcription. It swept aside the string quartet or trio as the main means of making music in the home. No other medium was so important to the dissemination of the opera, choral and orchestral repertory until the invention of the phonograph and radio. With four hands the full sound of a large-scale work could be reproduced; while such works would be hard for pianists to manage on their own, with two players the difficulties could be shared. The range of music for four hands was staggering: in Germany alone, a Hofmeister catalogue of 1844 listed almost 9,000 different works, including 150 entries for Beethoven, with all his symphonies, overtures, masses, concertos and chamber music, along with his opera, Fidelio.⁵⁴

Such was the demand for duet transcriptions of the latest opera arias that publishers employed their own in-house arrangers to turn them out as fast as possible (in 1840, Schlesinger paid 1,000 francs to the young Richard Wagner – at that time trying to make his name in Paris – for what Wagner called the ‘shameful labour’ of making a whole series of arrangements of Donizetti’s opera La Favorite).⁵⁵ Some composers undertook their own transcriptions, or employed assistants to do them, as Verdi did with Emmanuele Muzio, starting with Macbeth in 1846. As publishers and composers both realized, the rapid publication of multiple arrangements of a new opera was the most effective way to promote that work, disseminating knowledge of its winning tunes and stimulating interest in its performance. It was the public’s familiarity with an opera’s tunes that drew them to the opera house.

The sheet music industry changed the way composers earned their living in the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

In the eighteenth century, composers were the servants of their employers, who often assumed the ownership of their music. When Haydn went to work for Prince Anton Esterházy in 1769, his contract stipulated that he was obliged to ‘compose such pieces of music as His Serene Princely Highness may command, and neither to communicate such new compositions to anyone, nor to allow them to be copied, but to retain them wholly for the exclusive use of his Highness’. The pirate publication of his works in Paris led to this restriction being dropped when the contract was renewed in 1779. This allowed Haydn to develop his relations with music publishers in Vienna, Germany, France and Britain, where his works were well known when he arrived in London in the 1790s.⁵⁶

In the opera world, meanwhile, as we have seen, composers would receive a one-time fee for their music. Once they had sold the score to a theatre or an impresario, they earned no more if it was resold or copies of it were made for other impresarios. Nor was there any money to be earned from other theatres putting on their work, unless the composer was a citizen of France, the only country to recognize performance rights in law before the 1840s, or had their work performed in French in that country.*

The development of music publishing opened up a new source of income, enabling composers to become the owners of their music and collect a fee or royalty for the right to publish it. For all but the most commercial composers it took many decades before such earnings came close to their earnings from performing and teaching. As late as the mid-1850s, the young Brahms (who would later make a comfortable living from his published works) was paid more for a single piano recital than he received from his publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, for his Four Ballads (Op. 10).⁵⁷ In the early decades of the century the money to be made from publishing was insignificant: the market was too small, and there were too many pirate copies of a newly published work. Mozart earned extremely little from his published scores, but lost a lot to piracy, mostly by his copyists. He tried to contain the problem by making them work in his apartment, where he could keep an eye on them. Beethoven was more organized. He would protect himself by copying out the last few pages of his works himself.

Beethoven struggled to achieve economic independence through his music. As a freelance composer, he scraped a modest living by various means: teaching; concerts; composing on commission; soliciting donations from wealthy men and women by dedicating works to them; and selling scores to publishers. He was a competent and at times artful businessman, pushing hard for higher fees from publishers, and in his last years, as he became increasingly indebted, even double-dealing between them. To counteract the problem of international piracy, he would sell the same work to several publishers in different countries and try to coordinate the publication simultaneously – a difficult operation before the railway and the telegraph but the most effective policy without laws of copyright. Beethoven’s earnings from these publications were modest. For the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Op. 69 Cello Sonata and the two Piano Trios of Op. 70, Breitkopf and Härtel paid him just 400 gulden (1,050 francs), enough for him to live on for three months.⁵⁸ His highest fees were earned from easy piano pieces (‘bagatelles’) and arrangements (such as the British folk songs he arranged for the Edinburgh publisher George Thomson). But the ‘tiresome business’ of negotiating payment was demeaning. Beethoven yearned for a simpler and more dignified way to sell his work, one that would give him independence and security. ‘I call it tiresome,’ he wrote to the publisher Friedrich Hofmeister, ‘because I should like such matters to be differently ordered … There ought to be in the world a market for art, where the artist would only have to bring his works and take as much money as he needed. But, as it is, an artist has to be to a certain extent a businessman as well.’⁵⁹

As the market for sheet music developed, composers became more business-minded in their dealings with publishers. They could not expect royalties, except of course in France, but they could hold out for higher fees to reflect the earnings from these arrangements.

Vincenzo Bellini was particularly determined in this respect. Born in Sicily in 1801, and rising as a young man to international fame with Il Pirata (1827), La Sonnambula and Norma (both in 1831), he was, in the words of his biographer, ‘a conscious modern artist’ who thought he should be paid in accordance with the economic value of his work.⁶⁰ Before his death, in 1835, he was earning 16,000 francs for an opera, over three times more than Rossini’s highest fee of 5,000 francs only a few years earlier. He justified his monetary demands by claiming that he spent as long on one opera as others did on three or four. Certainly, he could not get away with Rossini’s practice of recycling bits of earlier operas because his were published and disseminated internationally. Without effective laws of copyright, Bellini could also argue that he lost much of his deserved income to pirate publications of his works. ‘All of Italy, all of Germany, all of Europe is flooded with Normas,’ complained his publisher, Giovanni Ricordi. The best copyists were capable of reproducing an entire score after listening to it a few times in the theatre. Bellini became so annoyed by the pirated productions of his operas in his own native Sicily, a lawless state when it came to copyright, that several times he appealed to its government to take measures against them (nothing came of these appeals). Bellini would have liked to find a means of earning royalties on a more regular basis: he would have been a rich man if he had. But piracy prevented that. All he could do with any of his works was to sell the publication rights for the biggest one-time fee that he could get.⁶¹

From 1840, when the first laws of copyright were introduced in the Kingdom of Piedmont–Sardinia and Austrian-ruled Lombardy and Veneto, Italian composers could start to earn royalties. The development of copyright turned the opera score into a form of capital, whose income was derived from its stage productions and its publication in various arrangements for the home. Gaetano Donizetti, four years older than Bellini and slower to attain his international fame, was the first to spot the potential of his publication rights. Negotiating the contract for his opera Adelia in 1840, he wrote to Vincenzo Jacovacci, the impresario for the Teatro Apollo in Rome:

As to the ownership of the score, I would not ask you for the entire ownership, but only for the reductions for piano and voice [Donizetti’s emphasis], which would not at all diminish your right to have it performed or to sell it for performance wherever, and if that does not please you, or you think you will lose a lot, I would concede half the price I would expect to earn in Italy … provided I could reserve for myself the ownership in France, where, even if you wanted to, you would have no right to prevent me from selling it to whoever wished to publish it.⁶²

In Italy, where the laws remained weak until the country’s unification in 1861, composers would depend on publishers to enforce their copyright and stamp out piracy – as far as that was possible in places like the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, where pirate publishers were actively protected by the government. The royalty system united the composer and his publisher in a natural economic alliance.

Verdi was the first Italian composer to make substantial profits from the new laws of copyright. The key to his success was his relationship with Giovanni Ricordi, who acted not just as his publisher but as his agent and impresario, promoting his operas, collecting royalties, and using all his powers to protect him against piracy – no easy task. Ricordi was the most important music publisher south of the Alps when he bought the rights to Oberto, Verdi’s debut opera at La Scala, in 1839. Beginning as a lowly copyist in a small theatre in Milan, he ventured into business, like many copyists, by making his own pirate copies of the scores and selling them to theatres and impresarios. There were no laws against this trade, on which hundreds of small provincial theatres in Italy depended in those years.

The high demand for scores had persuaded Ricordi to set up as a publisher as early as 1808. He also turned to buying scores, building up an important rental library for theatres. His breakthrough came in 1825, when he managed to secure exclusive rights to La Scala’s huge archive. It allowed him to rent out scores, sell handmade or printed copies, and publish any number of arrangements from the theatre’s complete range of operas. From this base his business grew. He acquired the rights to publish the arrangements of Rossini’s operas, the subject of the first real boom in music publishing, and bought new works from composers such as Bellini.

As a young man setting out to make his name and fortune, Verdi was attracted to the charismatic Ricordi by his willingness to be not just his publisher but to manage his affairs. Verdi had a good head for business and always drove a hard bargain. But he did not like to deal directly with the theatre management, fearing that he would get less than he deserved. According to the contract he signed with Ricordi for Oberto, Verdi would receive 2,000 Austrian lire (2,290 francs) for rights to the score but no publication royalties. Although the contract was an opportunity for the unknown young composer to stage his work at La Scala, Verdi thought it was ‘unjust’ that Ricordi could pocket all the earnings from the published score and arrangements. In 1843, with his next major opera, Nabucco, Verdi ceded half the rights to Ricordi’s junior and most bitter rival, Francesco Lucca, a tactic intended to increase his leverage with the senior publisher. It was a risky strategy – he might have lost Ricordi altogether – but it worked. In November 1843, after the success of Nabucco, Ricordi paid Verdi 9,000 Austrian lire (10,300 francs) for the rights to Ernani (one third more than the value the composer had given it himself the previous May, when he had offered it to La Fenice in Venice).⁶³

From this point, as Verdi’s fame increased, publishers competed for his signature. Ricordi paid the most: 9,000 lire for I due Foscari in 1844, 18,000 lire for Giovanna d’Arco in 1845, and 16,000 lire (18,300 francs) for Macbeth in December 1846.⁶⁴ All these sums were one-time payments by Ricordi to own all the rights to the score. But starting with Gerusalemme, in 1847, there was a fundamental change. Verdi had just been in Paris, where the opera had received its first performance (as Jérusalem) in La Salle Peletier. He had been impressed by the droits d’auteur system in operation there – it guaranteed a fair reward – and demanded payment from Ricordi on these terms. In the contract for Gerusalemme Ricordi lowered the fixed sum (to 8,000 lire) but paid 500 lire (570 francs) every time the score was rented in the first five years, and 200 lire after that.

The publisher was eager to secure monopoly control of Verdi’s work – the surest guarantee of profit there could be in the opera industry, as he was quick to recognize. Ricordi had been put out by Verdi’s decision to sell the rights to three further operas (Attila, I masnadieri and Il corsaro) to Lucca since 1846. For his next work, La battaglia de Legnano, first performed in Rome in 1849, Ricordi proposed a new type of contract in which Verdi would receive a modest up-front fee (4,000 francs, as opposed to the 24,000 Verdi had been given for Il corsaro by Lucca), but agreed to pay 12,000 francs for publication rights for the next ten years in Italy with a further payment of 6,000 francs for publication rights in France and Britain. Crucially, the contract also guaranteed a royalty for Verdi of between 30 and 40 per cent on every sale and rental of the score and a similar amount from the sale of its arrangements, whether in a country that had copyright agreements with Lombardy or not. This became the model of Verdi’s future contracts with the Milan publisher, although from 1857 and Simon Boccanegra his royalties would rise by 10 per cent.⁶⁵

Once he had acquired the rights to a work, Ricordi made it his business to protect and promote it. This was his attraction for Verdi. From the start of their relationship, Ricordi had been placing warnings in the press against pirate publications of the Oberto score. He used his in-house journal, La gazzetta musicale di Milano, to publicize his operas, advertising reductions for domestic use and offering copies of them free to subscribers as a supplement to the newspaper.

Ricordi was quick to publish arrangements. He knew how much money could be made from them, and understood their role in the creation of new markets for an opera. As soon as the success of Oberto became clear, he brought out arrangements of its winning scenes and arias for piano solo and duet, voice and piano, flute and piano, violin and piano, cello and piano, two violins, mixed combinations of voices, etc. Cheaply priced, they flew off the shelves and into homes across the Continent. The number of arrangements increased steeply with the popularity of each successive Verdi opera: there were seventy for Oberto, 253 for Nabucco and 267 for I Lombardi in the Ricordi catalogue – most of them appearing within a few months of the opera’s premiere.⁶⁶

Ricordi could not sell these publications fast enough. The piano-vocal and piano-solo reductions of I Lombardi were published barely a few days after the opera’s premiere in February 1843. For Ernani, Ricordi started advertising the arrangements weeks before the premiere in March 1844. He wrote to La Fenice begging for the swift return of the full score so that the arrangements could be quickly made: ‘Any delay would greatly damage me, since the music sells abundantly when hearts are still warm from the successful result produced by the performance in the theatre.’ For Macbeth, Verdi employed Muzio to make the reductions while he composed the orchestral score. The operation entered a new phase of high-speed production and delivery. ‘I am so busy with the arrangements of Macbeth that I can hardly keep up with the engravers, and Ricordi is in a fiendish rush,’ Muzio wrote on 14 April 1847, shortly after the opera had opened at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence. A week later he wrote: ‘Macbeth is finding enthusiastic supporters in Milan; it’s played in all homes, and the numbers are on every piano.’⁶⁷

Pirate editions of these reductions would appear just as fast. On the appearance of each new Verdi opera they would pour out of Naples. So would pirate versions of the orchestral score. Ricordi did his best to combat them by writing to the managers of theatres warning them against their use: they were neither accurate nor authentic. He would shame their publishers by placing notices about their ‘thefts’ in the local press – a tactic he had used since the early 1830s to defend the works of Bellini.⁶⁸ He appealed to the censors in Milan to protect his copyright. After the success of Nabucco, when the Lombard market was flooded with reductions by pirate publishers, the censor’s office was clogged with complaints by Ricordi. In this chaos, understandably perhaps, the Milan censors took the view that it was not in their authority to guarantee the property rights of authors or their publishers. To defend their copyright, Verdi and Ricordi would need stronger and more international laws.

2

In Berlin, Pauline Viardot met her old friend Clara Schumann. They had become acquainted in 1838, when Pauline gave a concert in Leipzig, the home town of Clara Wieck, as the pianist was known before her marriage to the composer Robert Schumann in 1840. The two women, just three years apart in age, had struck up a warm friendship. But it had cooled with Pauline’s growing wealth and fame during the 1840s. Clara, who had come to share her husband’s serious approach to music, believed her friend had compromised her artistic principles to court popularity. Writing in her journal in 1843, Clara had expressed her disappointment at Pauline’s choice of virtuoso songs at a concert she had given in Berlin: ‘A pity that such a thoroughly musical creature as Pauline, who certainly has the sense for really good music, completely sacrifices her taste to the public, and thus follows in the footsteps of all the ordinary Italians.’⁶⁹

Clara and Robert Schumann, c. 1850.

Now, in February 1847, Clara wanted Pauline to perform in the Berlin premiere of Schumann’s oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri. Schumann had been having problems with the lead female singer intended for the part and had asked Clara to beg a favour from Pauline, who had come to Berlin to sing in Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Pauline declined, saying that she did not have the time to learn a new part in the few days left before the premiere. Over-sensitive and distrustful, Clara took the rejection as a personal slight to her husband. Writing in her diary, she accused Pauline of ‘lacking feeling’ for his ‘intimate and German music’. She thought success had gone to her head, that she was motivated by money, and had ‘sold her soul’ to Meyerbeer, the cosmopolitan embodiment of the new commercialism in music which Robert had been fighting for the past decade.⁷⁰

In 1834, Schumann had founded the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik with Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck. The aim of the Leipzig magazine was to renew interest in the music of the past, Mozart and Beethoven in particular, and promote contemporary composers, such as Berlioz and Chopin, who were writing ‘serious music’ for the ideals of art rather than money. The magazine attacked the commercialism of Grand Opera and its attendant industry of piano arrangements for pandering to the lowest taste. Meyerbeer was the main target – the leader of the ‘Philistines’ opposed by the righteous ‘League of David’ (Davidsbündler) in Schumann’s Carnaval (1834–5). His wealth and popularity were obviously galling to Schumann, whose own dramatic works were failures. In a vitriolic review of Les Huguenots, Schumann accused Meyerbeer of writing ‘vulgar’ and ‘immoral’ music whose sole purpose was ‘to flabbergast or titillate’: music for ‘the circus’, Schumann claimed.⁷¹

Schumann was not alone in his campaign against commercial music. In Britain, France and Germany there were similar reactions against the ‘philistine’ and ‘vulgar’ trends of opera, salon and virtuoso music; and similar initiatives by music journals and critics, musical societies and institutions, to develop a new type of concert life for ‘serious music’. The inspiration of this movement was the Romantic notion that music, like all art, should elevate the soul; that artists were the spiritual leaders of humanity, prophets and idealists, not businessmen. According to this view, any music with commercial motives could not be considered art. In the journals dedicated to ‘serious music’ there was moralistic scorn for the ‘mercenary speculations’ of benefit concerts with crowd-pleasing medleys from familiar operas, for shallow salon music, and for the flashy showmanship of virtuoso soloists, which Turgenev, jumping on the bandwagon, also blamed for the decline of music in St Petersburg in a critical review for the Russian press in 1846.⁷² The backlash against the virtuoso was particularly strong. ‘Art for him is nothing but gold coin and laurel wreaths,’ complained Berlioz.⁷³ But there was more to it than a reaction against the mercenary egotist. The virtuoso soloist was free to embellish on a piece of music to display his skills. But this was sacrilege in a music culture where value was increasingly attached to the integrity of ‘the work’ itself. In this culture the performer’s role was to play the work as faithfully to the composer’s intentions as he could.

By the 1840s, the virtuoso concert was starting to decline as a more serious concert culture developed. Instead of the old miscellanies of a dozen or so pieces – generally a mix of opera numbers, virtuoso instrumental solos, chamber music, overtures, and bits of symphonies and concertos – concert programmes were increasingly devoted to a smaller number of works performed whole. The fall of the miscellany was in part financial: the concert manager had to pay large fees to the soloists. But audiences were also showing signs of tiring of virtuoso potpourris and of wanting something more substantial in their place.⁷⁴

In London the new trend had begun with the foundation of the Philharmonic Society in 1813. Established by professional musicians to assert their independence from noble patronage, the Society was devoted to the promotion of serious music, especially the holy trinity of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. Works were performed in their entirety in subscription concerts in the Argyll Rooms. In some ways attendance at such concerts was part of the assertion of a middle-class identity, a way for subscribers to align themselves with the aristocracy as gatekeepers of high culture. Beethoven occupied a dominant position in the Society’s repertoire. His Ninth Symphony was commissioned by the Society, which paid £50 for it, although it was performed in Vienna several times before the score arrived in London in 1824.⁷⁵

In Paris the cult of Beethoven was equally strong in the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire established in 1828. Formed by the conductor François-Antoine Habeneck and made up of professors from the Conservatoire and their pupils, its orchestra performed more symphonies by Beethoven than by all other composers combined (360 of the 548 symphonies performed from 1828 to 1871). Its repertoire was dominated by the orchestral works of dead masters, the surest way to guarantee an audience. ‘The public accustomed to attending is so used to Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn that it is almost always cold to the unknown, and especially to the new,’ wrote the Paris correspondent of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung in 1847.⁷⁶ Like the London Philharmonic, the Société drew subscribers from the intelligentsia, including many well-known cultural figures, such as Balzac, Hugo, Delacroix and Alfred de Vigny. A devoted follower of Beethoven, Berlioz reviewed the Conservatory concerts in a reverential tone, referring to the public that frequented them as the only group of people capable of appreciating great music and setting them above the merely fashionable bourgeois public that went to the Opéra.⁷⁷

Leipzig had a thriving music culture based on its Conservatory, the leading music college in the whole of Germany, the Leipzig Opera and the Gewandhaus Orchestra. It had more music publishers than any other city in Europe.⁷⁸ Many of its citizens belonged to singing clubs and the Bach Society, which kept alive the choral music of the city’s famous Cantor of St Thomas’s church and director of its Collegium Musicum from 1723 to the composer’s death in 1750. The Gewandhaus, or cloth hall, where concerts had been held since the 1780s, was the focus of the city’s serious musical life in the nineteenth century. Mendelssohn became the director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835 and, until he died in 1847, developed a stable repertoire of ‘historical’ music, focusing on Beethoven and Bach, whose works he rescued from relative obscurity, and reviving interest in Schubert, whose Ninth Symphony he premiered in 1839, ten years after Schubert’s death. A growing share of the repertoire was made up of the works of dead masters: 48 per cent in 1837–47 compared to 23 per cent in 1820–25 and just 13 per cent in 1781–5.⁷⁹

Music festivals played an important role in the dissemination of a serious music culture in the 1830s and 1840s. They took off with the coming of the railways, which made it possible for amateur musicians, singing clubs and choirs to travel in large numbers to perform in them. In Germany the male-voice choral movement of the 1840s numbered in excess of 100,000 amateur singers. They were mostly organized into Liedertafel (singing clubs) in the Rhineland, Stuttgart and Bavaria, though they were also found in Bohemia and Austria, where the Vienna Männergesangsverein, established in 1843, was similar. Proudly civic and middle class in their values, these groups served as a democratic focus for the broader cultural aims of German nationhood. With the coming of the railway the highpoint of their concert life became the Lower Rhine Music Festivals, which since 1817 had rotated between Aachen, Cologne, Elberfeld and Düsseldorf. All four towns were connected to the railway by the end of the 1840s, enabling them to draw a large and growing public of music lovers and performers for their mainly German repertoire of oratorios, masses and cantatas, overtures and symphonies. Beethoven, Handel and Mozart were consistently the most performed composers at these festivals.⁸⁰

Chamber concerts also played a growing part in the development of a serious music culture at this time. Until the 1800s, there had been no such thing as a professional string quartet playing regular public concerts. Chamber music was for skilled amateur players in a private setting or salon, in contrast to the public music genres of the symphony or opera. The first professional string quartets emerged only in the 1800s. The quartet formed by Ignaz Schuppanzigh was the most important. It put on a series of public subscription concerts in a restaurant in Vienna in 1805. Two years later, the Schuppanzigh Quartet gave the first public performance of Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets, three long works that took the genre of the string quartet to a new level of technical complexity requiring performance by professionals. As chamber music became harder on the fingers, it moved from the salon to the concert hall.

Societies for chamber music were established throughout Europe during the 1840s. In London the number of chamber concerts increased steeply in the early 1840s, largely due to the establishment of the Beethoven Quartet Society and John Ella’s Musical Union, which put on regular concerts of chamber works by the great German composers. The concerts of the Musical Union were characterized by intellectual rigour. Ella was the first to provide detailed programme notes for his audience. He encouraged a purist attitude to music which set itself in opposition to the ‘mercenary’ motives of virtuoso concerts, miscellanies and benefits. A programme of the Musical Union in 1845 denounced the ‘speculations’ of commercial concerts which did ‘nothing for art’ but ‘fill the pockets of shopkeepers and Jew speculators’.⁸¹

In Paris there were several societies promoting chamber works. They were mostly set up by professional musicians, such as the violinist Pierre Baillot, who aspired to the same ideals as the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. Music publishers became involved as well. In 1838, Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale organized a long-running series of concerts for its subscribers to promote the chamber works published by its owner which, the journal feared, were not performed enough because of the popularity of piano pieces and romances in salons.⁸²

Piano concerts were changing too. Pianists such as Liszt and Clara Schumann moved away from performing virtuoso pieces in commercial concerts and turned instead to the solo concert, or ‘recital’ (a term first used by Liszt in 1840). In these recitals they played longer pieces, whole sonatas, from a more serious list of works. Clara Schumann shaped the piano repertoire more than anyone. The programming of her concerts – which would often start with historical (‘classical’) works by Bach and Beethoven and end with new and more Romantic pieces by Chopin or Schumann – became the model for the modern recital.⁸³

It was in the middle decades of the nineteenth century that ‘classical music’ developed as a concept and a separate category from ‘commercial’ or ‘popular’ music. The term ‘classical’ had been applied to ‘ancient music’ since the eighteenth century; in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was sometimes used to describe general qualities of excellence. From the 1830s, however, it came to be associated with a more specific corpus of canonic works by dead composers – Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn, in particular – who dominated the performance canon of serious music from the 1830s and 1840s. Although the term was applied to all music, it was most closely linked to chamber works because of their demanding, intellectual character.⁸⁴

In the early nineteenth century there had been no real distinction between ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music. They were played together in miscellanies. But in the mid-century there was a split between the two, expressed in the antagonism felt by Schumann for Meyerbeer: on the one hand, serious classical recitals, chamber and orchestral concerts of whole works; and, on the other, commercial promenade concerts, led by conductor impresarios like Johann Strauss in Vienna, Philippe Musard in Paris, August Manns or Louis-Antoine Jullien in London, in which a mixture of ‘popular’ orchestral works, dance music, opera arias and virtuoso piano pieces were performed for a much larger audience. The Saturday matinée concerts conducted by Manns at the Crystal Palace (after it was moved to Sydenham in 1854) attracted crowds of 30,000 people, many of them coming down by train from London for the day.*

Pauline was unusual in singing for both these markets. It was mistaken and unfair of Clara Schumann to accuse her of selling out to commercialism in music. Although she performed in popular concerts, Pauline also sang a demanding repertoire in concerts for connoisseurs. In London, for example, she appeared in several concerts at the Dudley Gallery in the Egyptian Hall, where she joined forces with the soprano Clara Novello and the pianist Charles Hallé to pioneer the cause of chamber works by Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann, which at that time were performed rarely because they were thought too avant-garde and difficult. Pauline’s performances of Schubert’s Lieder were particularly important in helping them to become better known. From the start of her career, she also took an active interest in the rediscovery of ‘ancient’ music, restoring Monteverdi, Lully, Pergolesi, Cimarosa, Gluck and Johann Gottlieb Graun to their place in the concert repertoire, and singing arias from Handel’s operas, which at that time were unheard (no Handel opera was performed in full during the entire nineteenth century).⁸⁵

In 1842, on his first tour of Russia, Liszt gave a recital for the Tsar, who arrived late and then talked while the great pianist played. Liszt stopped playing. When the Tsar asked why, Liszt replied: ‘Music herself should be silent when Nicholas speaks.’⁸⁶ Liszt’s sarcasm may have lost him a medal from the Tsar but it struck a mighty blow for the artist’s dignity.

By the 1840s, in most of northern Europe if not Russia, the public had become silenced during opera and concert performances. It was a radical departure from the customs of the court, where music was an accompaniment to social intercourse, dinners, balls. Traditionally, from its origins in Italy, the opera house had been a meeting place for the aristocracy. It was not unusual for the audience to move around and talk throughout a performance, only quietening down during the main arias. The French were horrified by the noisiness of Italian audiences. In his memoirs Berlioz describes a visit to the Cannobiano Theatre in Milan for a performance of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore in 1832:

I found the theatre full of people talking in normal voices, with their backs to the stage. The singers, undeterred, gesticulated and yelled their lungs out in the strictest spirit of rivalry. At least I presumed they did, from their wide-open mouths; but the noise of the audience was such that no sound penetrated except the bass drum. People were gambling, eating supper in their boxes, etc., etc.⁸⁷

On their honeymoon, in 1840, the Viardots attended a performance of La Sonnambula at La Scala in Milan. Pauline was so outraged by the audience’s constant talking, eating, getting up, walking around the theatre, calling out to the singers after every aria, that she vowed never to perform on stage in Italy.⁸⁸ She never did.

From the 1830s, audience behaviour began to change. Silence gradually became the norm in the major opera houses north of the Alps. Concert audiences became silent as patterns of behaviour came to be dictated by serious music lovers, mostly drawn from the professional classes, rather than by members of the aristocracy. Various explanations have been advanced to account for this shift, from the immersion of the audience in the visual spectacle of Grand Opera to the anonymity and insecurity of the new bourgeois public, for whom the silence was synonymous with respectability and decorum.⁸⁹ No doubt all these factors played their part. But at the heart of the phenomenon was the new seriousness towards music: it demanded to be listened to.

The silencing of the concert audience was reflected in the layout of the seating in the public concert hall. In contrast to the informal arrangement of the chairs in the private concert or salon, which left room to move around, the seating in the concert hall was organized in formal rows, so that any movement caused a noisy disturbance. Strict rules of silence were imposed at the London Musical Union, where serious music lovers from the liberal professions were the majority. ‘Il piu grand’omaggio alla musica, è nel silenzio’ (‘Silence is the greatest homage to music’) was the Union’s motto. From 1847, programmes for its concerts carried the following notice: ‘We entreat members unable to remain throughout the performances, to take advantage of the cessation between each movement of the compositions, to leave WITHOUT DISTURBING ARTISTS AND AUDIENCE.’⁹⁰

At the Leipzig Gewandhaus there was also enforced silence in the concert hall. Above the stage was a motto from Seneca – Res Severa est Verum Gaudium (True Joy is a Serious Matter) – reminding listeners that music was an art for stoic contemplation and quiet introspection. Even the layout of the Gewandhaus seemed designed for spiritual reflection: it was closely modelled on St Thomas’s church, with the seats parallel to the long aisle walls and facing in towards the nave, so that the listeners were brought together like a congregation; the orchestra was at the far end of the hall, where the altar would be in a church. There was a similar arrangement in the Hanover Square Rooms and the Salle du Conservatoire, where the hall was also darkened by dimming the gas lights before the music started to focus attention on the orchestra and promote inward contemplation by the audience.⁹¹

Where the centre of medieval cities had been marked by cathedrals, the great bourgeois cities of the nineteenth century were dominated by their concert halls, opera houses, libraries, art galleries and science museums. In contrast to the aristocracy (defined by its leisure) and the labouring classes (by manual work), the bourgeoisie asserted its identity through the idea of culture as a free and independent sphere of action for the development of a higher personality. It placed a special value on the artist as a representative of ‘genius’, the ideal expression of individual enterprise, to whom it looked for spiritual content in its materialist society.

The Leipzig Gewandhaus, engraving, c. 1880.

The bourgeoisie identified with the artist’s struggle for professional autonomy and independence from the State and aristocracy. There was a concerted effort by composers and musicians to break free from the lowly status of tradesmen and receive recognition as professionals. Liszt was in the forefront of the campaign. In 1835, he wrote a tract on the ‘Situation of Artists and Their Place in Society’ in which he argued that not much had changed since Mozart’s day, when musicians had been forced to eat with the servants. Influenced by the Saint-Simonians and their ideals of music as a morally improving and social form of art, Liszt concluded with a manifesto proposing, among other things, to set up an international association of musicians, develop choirs and music festivals, establish music schools, and publish ‘cheap editions of the most important works of old and new composers’, which he called the ‘Pantheon of Music’.⁹²

Most of these ideas were widely shared in the music world of the 1830s and 1840s as the basis for improving the material and social position of composers. They were taken up by Berlioz in his futuristic vision of a whole society organized for music in his tale Euphonia, published in the Revue et Gazette musicale in 1844. They underpinned the activities of publishers like Schlesinger, who printed cheap editions of the classic works not just for commercial gain but to disseminate a musical canon ‘at prices such that any home with a piano may collect the masterpieces of Beethoven, Weber, Hummel and Moscheles’.⁹³ These aims were the driving force of music festivals and the many singing clubs and choirs in provincial towns – an enormous market for the ‘flood of compositions’, from oratorios to drinking songs, published for these groups during the 1840s.⁹⁴ A musicians’ union was established in 1843, with Liszt, Berlioz, Meyerbeer and Schlesinger on its committee, along with a dozen socialists. By 1848, when it came out with a radical manifesto for musicians’ rights, it had 2,688 members.⁹⁵

Liszt’s ideas were also at the heart of the ever-growing cult of Beethoven. Within a few years of his death, Beethoven was championed as both the first composer to have achieved independence in the marketplace and as the divine creator of a ‘heaven-born Art’, as the playwright Franz Grillparzer famously described him at his funeral in 1827. The cult reached its peak at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, organized by Liszt in 1845. A monument was unveiled to the great composer before a gathering of European dignitaries. Pauline Viardot was the principal attraction in a concert at the Prussian king’s nearby Brühl Castle, where, Berlioz recalled, she ‘sang three pieces with her usual exquisite skill and poetic expression … a dainty cavatina by Charles de Bériot, the infernal scene from [Gluck’s] Orphée, and a song of Handel’s – this last by request of Queen Victoria, who knows how admirably Mme Viardot interprets the old Saxon master’. Chopin was appalled by the merchandising at the Beethoven Festival. There was so much memorabilia on sale, ‘véritables cigares à la Beethoven, who probably smoked nothing but Viennese pipes; and there has already been such a sale of old bureaus and old desks which belonged to Beethoven, that the poor composer de la Symphonie Pastorale would have had to drive a huge trade in furniture’.⁹⁶

3

In August 1847, the Viardots returned from London to Courtavenel, their country house south-east of Paris. Turgenev went with them, and stayed on at Courtavenel when they left for Pauline’s autumn tour of Germany (Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin). Without a salary or allowance from his mother, he could not afford to travel any more. For two months he lived alone in the château, drafting the first stories of his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, and then, in late October, moved to Paris, where he took a small apartment near the boulevard des Italiens.

Desperate for news about Pauline, Turgenev spent a lot of time with her mother, Joaquina, and the Garcia family, who lived nearby. They read to him the daily letters they received from her. Practically a member of the family, Turgenev wrote to Pauline every day:

I will not let you leave Dresden without greeting you another time, even though I do not have much news to give … Everything with us is going very well. We are getting on quite perfectly, we work, we often see each other, we think a lot about those who are absent – we gather every evening at a Spanish brasserie and speak Spanish. In four months’ time [when Pauline would return from Germany] I will be speaking only that language. My teacher pays me lots of compliments for my intelligence. But that’s only because he doesn’t know about my true incentive for learning.⁹⁷

Despite their separation, Pauline and Turgenev were emotionally closer than they had been before. He wrote to her so frequently – and she to him as often as her busy schedule would allow – that their correspondence took on the character of an intimate conversation between two people accustomed to sharing their news every day. They discussed everything – what they were reading, each other’s work, the latest opera performances, the smallest details of their lives. ‘Ah! Madame,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline on 4 January 1848, ‘what a splendid thing long letters are!’

With what pleasure one begins to read them! It is like entering an avenue of trees, green and cool, in the summer. Ah, it is nice here, you say to yourself, and walk more slowly, listening to the twittering of the birds. You twitter so much better than they do, Madame …

Also, willkommen in Berlin. I know where you are living; it is not far from the Brandenburg Gate. Forgive me if I allow myself to mention certain details of your apartment, but why are there certain rooms in it which are only named in English … and why are they exposed to the elements and rigours of the cold? Please, take care of yourself, and rectify this; it is more dangerous than it seems in this season of influenza and rheumatism.⁹⁸

There was nothing compromising in Turgenev’s letters. They could be shown to Louis. But they had a cheerful and flirtatious tone that comes only to a person in love who knows that his feelings are returned.

During the next two and a half years, Turgenev would spend a lot of time at Courtavenel, much of it on his own, writing, reading, walking and hunting with the dogs, while Pauline came and went on tour. Courtavenel was ‘the cradle of my literary fame’, he explained to the Russian poet Afanasy Fet, who visited him there. ‘When I had no means to live in Paris my kind hosts permitted me to spend the winter here alone, fed on chicken broth and omelets which the old housekeeper cooked for me. Here too, in my desire to make some money, I wrote most of the Sketches.’⁹⁹

It was at Courtavenel, on 26 June 1849, that Turgenev noted in his diary the ‘first time’ he was ‘with’ Pauline – an elusive reference, which could mean anything but does suggest that they were physically intimate. Certainly, around this time, the language in his letters becomes noticeably sensuous.* A few weeks later, when Pauline was in London, he wrote to her from Courtavenel, using for the first time the familiar you (‘tu’) and once again expressing his most passionate emotions in German (italicized below) to conceal them from Louis Viardot:

Yesterday evening was unusually still and soft, the air seemed to have taken a bath in milk (Holy Gorgon, what a daring image!), and sounds floated away into the distance over the fields as if they were destined never to die out. I was just about to open the gate, when I suddenly noticed that some living creature was approaching me; it was little Manon, who has been put out to grass. She let me stroke her, and we returned home together. I can’t tell you how often I have thought of you all day; as I was coming home I shouted your name so loudly, I held out my arms to you with such longing! You must have been able to hear it! … Beloved! Dearest! God be with you and bless you! … Until tomorrow … What is wrong with V[iardot]? Is he perhaps annoyed that I am living here?¹⁰⁰

The Viardots had bought Courtavenel at an auction for 100,000 francs and spent another 30,000 francs restoring it. Courtavenel was a typical château from the reign of Henry IV in the early seventeenth century. Built in grey stone and surrounded by a moat, it had a spacious courtyard, formal gardens, an English park, large trees, orchards, stables and farm buildings, all set amidst the fertile plains of Brie, known as some of the best hunting country in the whole of France. The interior of the house was modernized but filled with antique furniture. The large salle des gardes was converted by the Viardots into a theatre where a long tradition of family theatricals began. They called it the Théâtre des pommes de terre because the price of entry was a potato picked from the vegetable garden.¹⁰¹

Without a railway or important road near by, it was a five-hour journey by diligence from Paris – remote enough to remind Turgenev of his native Orel province, with its poplars, willows, ponds and woods, and to serve as a surrogate for it in his literary imagination. It is ironic that Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which are usually perceived as his most ‘Russian’ work, were written at Courtavenel. Looking at the countryside of France, he felt so much nostalgia for his native Russia that he could see its rural landscape and describe it perfectly. The Sketches also bear the influence of the pastoral novels of George Sand, who met Turgenev at Courtavenel in June 1845. They probably discussed their mutual interest in the countryside and the lives of the peasants, for both of them believed in their literary mission to convey to their readers the suffering of the rural poor and their human dignity.¹⁰²

The château at Courtavenel drawn by Pauline Viardot in a letter written by her in French and German to Julius Rietz, 5 July 1859. The château was destroyed after its sale by the Viardots in 1864.

It was George Sand who had suggested the idea of buying a country house. The Viardots had spent two summers at Nohant, Sand’s manor in the Berry countryside. Louis had enjoyed the hunting there, and Pauline had been able to relax in the company of friends, including Chopin, Liszt and Delacroix. Nohant had been bought by Sand’s grandmother, and Sand herself had grown up there. It was an ‘unpretentious house’, as Sand described it in The Story of My Life. After her first visit to Courtavenel, she had mocked the ‘bourgeois pretensions of grandeur’ she had detected in her hosts. They had filled their château with expensive furnishings. ‘We live here, dear Madame Sand, far more simply here than you down there [at Nohant],’ Louis insisted unconvincingly in his reply, ‘having no one but a cook and a gardener to serve us all [Nohant has a staff of ten], and living very well off the milk of our cow, the eggs of our chickens and the vegetables from our kitchen garden … We go out in our heavy shoes to pick our plums and chat with the shepherds or labourers we meet.’¹⁰³

In Sand’s circle of artistic friends there was an attitude to property that Pauline never really shared. Sand’s remark about Courtavenel was indicative of a broader disapproval for what she felt increasingly was Pauline’s mercenary approach to art. She had sensed it first in 1843, when Pauline had accepted pots of tsarist gold to sing in Russia, a land of tyranny, as far as Sand was concerned, not least because of her intimate relations with Chopin, living in voluntary exile from Poland following the Russian suppression of the Polish uprising in 1831. After Pauline’s return from St Petersburg, in 1844, Sand had invited Pauline to visit her and Chopin at Nohant, bringing Chopin’s sister Ludwika on her way through Paris from Courtavenel. But Pauline was too busy arranging furnishings at her own château, and kept Ludwika waiting for ten days. Sand was livid. Chopin had not seen his sister in fourteen years, and Ludwika had only a few weeks before her Polish passport would run out. Sand wrote to Pauline accusing her of having lost all sense of decency. Pauline’s success had given her delusions of grandeur. She was obsessed with her own celebrity, with ‘jewels and roubles’, Sand maintained, still reproaching her for her Russian involvement.

It was certainly the case that Pauline made a principle of always pushing for the highest fee. She knew from her family history that her career would be at its height for a small number of years, and she had to make the most of it. By 1855, just ten years after they had reached their peak, her fees were already in decline. It was a typical career pattern for stage actresses and singers of the time; Pauline was not unusual in trying to maximize her earnings when she could. She saw herself as a professional, expected to be highly paid, and refused engagements if the payments offered were not good enough. In 1847, for example, she turned down a contract with Jullien, the impresario, to appear at his promenade concerts in London’s Regent’s Park. The fee he was proposing was 100 guineas a night for forty performances – promising to earn her £4,200 (106,000 francs) – a sum almost any other singer would have gladly accepted, but she felt he could pay more.¹⁰⁴

There were many who regarded such behaviour as mercenary, vulgar. Donizetti certainly thought so when he refused her demand for 20,000 francs to sing in Don Pasquale in Vienna in 1843, telling Louis that she should wait until she was considered the top singer in Europe before asking for such fees.¹⁰⁵ Gye’s diaries show that he too became exasperated by her demands when he tried to engage her for the 1849–50 season at Covent Garden. She wanted £60 (1,500 francs) per night with all expenses paid by the theatre, whereas he could not afford to pay her more than £40 per night. The theatre was in a serious financial crisis; its artists and technicians did not want to work before they were paid but there was no money to pay them. The season was saved only by the chief performers organizing their own company (they called it a ‘republic of artists’) to share the production costs. Pauline joined the company in 1849 to enable Le Prophète to go ahead. But she refused to recommit to it the next season, insisting that she would not come at all ‘unless assured her money’, and demanding guarantees that she would earn a minimum of £50 per performance. Negotiations rumbled on for several months, until Gye, exhausted, caved in to her main demand and promised she would earn her usual fee of £500 (12,600 francs) per month.¹⁰⁶

It is hard to say how far she had merited this mercenary reputation – whether it derived from the malicious rumours engineered by Stolz to block her progress in Paris, or whether, perhaps because of this setback, she had grown more pushy than she would have been, had she received the recognition she deserved at the start of her career. The rejection she had suffered at the Opéra had made her tougher as a character. Forced to go abroad to earn a living on the stage, she had become, for a woman in her twenties, unusually resilient, self-assured and strong-minded in her determination to realize her potential. She saw her earnings as a token of her value as a professional artist. This need of validation was certainly part of what made her so determined to maximize her fees. Her credo was a simple one: singers were respected when they were well paid. ‘Never sing for nothing!’ she would later advise her pupils.¹⁰⁷

For Sand, money was not a token of respect, but a means of buying independence and freedom to write. Her attitude to money was part of her Bohemian identity. In 1831, she had left her husband and children to start a new life as a writer in Paris. She was one of the thousands of poor students, would-be writers and artists living in the garrets of the Latin Quarter, the cheapest area in Paris at that time. The French called them ‘Bohemians’ because of their scruffy appearance, which they associated with the gypsies from Central Europe, or Bohemia. The label was adopted by the students as a badge of non-conformity. It was soon taken up by Henri Murger (1822–61), a struggling poet who began writing stories about his poor artistic friends, who in the mid-1840s included the poet Baudelaire, the painter Courbet and the writer Champfleury. Published in a minor magazine, in 1849 the stories were adapted as a play, La Vie de Bohème, and two years later were collected in a book, Scènes de la vie de Bohème, which became an international bestseller. It fixed the idea of ‘Bohemia’ and attracted tourists to the Latin Quarter, which Murger soon abandoned for the more expensive streets of the Right Bank. Murger was the son of the concierge in the house where the Garcias lived from 1828 to 1832. Pauline, who had known him as a child, recalled his being ashamed of his origins.¹⁰⁸

George Sand was the queen of the Bohemians. Her numerous affairs, her dressing in men’s clothes and smoking of cigars became part of her Bohemian celebrity, generating interest in her autobiographical writings. In 1847, Sand signed a contract for the serialization of The Story of My Life which earned her a staggering advance of 130,000 francs.¹⁰⁹ Sand was not averse to using her own notoriety to increase sales. She made her life a work of art. But the fees she earned did not make her mercenary. Money bought her freedom to pursue her art, it made her independent as a woman and professional writer, but in itself it did not interest her.

Unlike Viardot or Sand, Chopin had no head for money management. In an age when fortunes could be made from piano music for the domestic market, the money that he made from his published works was modest. In 1844, he sold the publication rights in France for his Mazurkas (Op. 55) and Nocturnes (Op. 56) to Schlesinger for just 300 francs apiece. Even smaller payments were made by Breitkopf & Härtel for the rights in Germany. Fees such as this were not enough to support his lavish spending – on luxurious furniture, expensive restaurants and elegantly tailored clothes – nor his generous gifts and loans of money to his needy fellow exiles in Paris. ‘You think I am making a fortune?’ Chopin wrote to an old schoolfriend, Dominik Dziewanoski, in 1832, when he was still not properly established in Parisian society. ‘Carriages and white gloves cost more, and without them one would not be in good taste.’ To supplement his income he relied on giving piano lessons to the women of the aristocracy – and in time he made a decent living from teaching. He would try to drive the hardest bargain that he could with publishers and, following the strategy of Beethoven, would attempt to organize the simultaneous publication of his works in different countries to minimize the losses from pirate editions. But he did not succeed. Rarely satisfied by the fees he earned, Chopin developed a strong mistrust of publishers, accusing them of cheating him. With Schlesinger and Pleyel (who were both Jews) he frequently resorted to anti-Semitic diatribes about ‘Jewish scoundrels’ and their ‘Jewish tricks’.¹¹⁰

The real problem was Chopin. He did not write the sort of piano music – light and cheerful, easy on the ear, not too difficult for amateurs to play – that publishers would pay high prices for. His works were unconventional in their improvisatory character, intimacy and interiority, and although they were much loved by his circle of admirers, which numbered several thousand in Paris alone, they did not sell in the same quantity as the more popular works of Thalberg, Mozart or Schubert. Schlesinger and Pleyel paid Chopin more than any other publishers. Breitkopf & Härtel thought his prices were too high. Heinrich Probst, their agent in Paris, advised them to let him go because his music was too ‘gloomy’ and his demands ‘exorbitant’.¹¹¹

Chopin would not compromise his principles. ‘For the bourgeois class,’ he wrote to his old friend Wojciech Grzymała, ‘one must do something dazzling, mechanical, of which I am not capable.’ Nor could he work quickly. He was a perfectionist and often long delayed the publication of his finest works. Some were published only posthumously, such as the Nocturne in C sharp minor, which he had composed for Ludwika. Sensitive and shy, Chopin was ‘not at all fit for giving public concerts’, as he explained to Liszt: ‘the crowd intimidates me, its breath suffocates me, I feel paralyzed by its curious look, and the unknown faces make me dumb.’ He was only comfortable in the relatively intimate environment of the salon, where he would often play to recruit pupils and patrons. When at last, in 1841, Sand got him to agree to give a public concert by subscription, Chopin was so nervous, wanting no publicity at all, that she suggested he might play to ‘an empty unlit hall on a dumb piano’, as she told Pauline. In the end the concert on 26 April was sold out and Chopin made 6,000 francs. But he would not give another one.¹¹²

Chopin had asked Pauline to perform at the subscription concert in Paris. It would calm his nerves, Sand explained to her, ‘if she sang for him, accompanied by him’.¹¹³ Pauline did not sing on that occasion – Chopin gave a solo recital in the Salle Pleyel packed with his aristocratic supporters on 26 April – but she did take part in a second concert with Chopin in February 1842. Chopin was a keen admirer of Pauline’s voice, as he had been of Malibran’s before. He went to the opera frequently and loved the music of Bellini in particular. In his piano compositions he tried to emulate the bel canto singing style with its rubato elements and sustained melodies – a cantabile effect made possible by Érard’s new invention of the double escapement action which helped to make the piano ‘sing’. Chopin thought that Pauline’s voice was ideal for the piano sound he sought to re-create. At Nohant he would ask her to sing, accompanying her as she sang anything from a Spanish song to a Mozart aria. Sometimes she would follow the piano’s lead as he played one of his own pieces, perhaps helping him to shape the long melodic lines with her own vocal improvisation.

Pauline was particularly fond of singing Chopin’s Mazurkas. At some point during the mid-1840s she arranged six of them for voice and piano in a manuscript with Chopin’s markings, suggesting they had worked on them together at Nohant.* In that milieu of comradeship Chopin had probably approached it as a bit of fun – perhaps also to encourage Pauline as a composer. He was annoyed to discover later on, in 1848, that she had been performing the Mazurkas in a series of concerts in London without due acknowledgement. Pauline had omitted Chopin’s name from the programme following her first performance of the arrangements, at Covent Garden on 12 May, when the influential critic J. W. Davison had attacked her in his journal The Musical World for choosing to arrange such ‘ugly and affected’ mazurkas. From that point, when she performed the pieces, they were billed as ‘Mazurkas, Madame Viardot, arranged by Madame Viardot’.¹¹⁴ ‘In Viardot’s programmes,’ Chopin wrote to Marie de Rozières on 24 June, ‘there is no longer the item, “Mazurkas of Chopin” but merely “Mazurkas arranged by Mme Viardot” – it appears that it looks better.’

Pauline Viardot’s arrangement of six Mazurkas by Chopin with words by Louis Pomey, 1866 edition by E. Gérard & Cie.

It is all the same to me; but there is a pettiness behind it. She wants to have success and is afraid of a certain newspaper which perhaps does not like me. It once wrote that she had sung music ‘by a certain M. Chopin’, whom no one knows, and that she ought to sing something else.¹¹⁵

The six Mazurkas were frequently performed by Pauline – not always with acknowledgement to Chopin – in public concerts and private recitals after 1848. They were published, individually and as a collection, during the 1860s. They were evidently popular because new editions and arrangements were brought out in 1885 (by Breitkopf & Härtel) and 1899 (by Gebethner and Wolff in Warsaw).¹¹⁶

Turgenev’s decision to leave Russia cost him dearly in financial terms. In 1847, he received his full allowance of 6,000 roubles from his mother; but the next year she reduced it and then cut it off entirely, leaving Turgenev without any income except what he could earn from his writing or else raise in loans from publishers and friends. In Paris he could barely afford to heat his small apartment on the boulevard des Italiens. As always, he tried to hide his poverty, attending salons smartly dressed but borrowing money for a carriage home. Among his friends he became known for leaving restaurants before the time arrived to pay the bill. According to the literary critic Annenkov, who saw him often in Paris from November 1847, Turgenev ‘was a master of concealment, and no one realised how poor he was. We were taken in by the swagger of his speech, so prominent when he told anecdotes, and by his extravagance when it came to expensive adventures and pleasures, for which cleverly he never paid.’¹¹⁷

His earnings from his writings were modest. But he lived in expectation that he would inherit a fortune from his mother, which gave him the confidence to continue acting like a gentleman and make generous gestures to his friends. ‘He never lost hope of becoming a grand landowner,’ recalled Annenkov, ‘and, despite his poverty, he once even promised to give Belinsky 100 peasant souls as soon as that was possible. Belinsky took the present as a joke, calling to his wife to “come and thank Ivan Sergeevich: he has made us landowners”.’¹¹⁸

As the most influential literary critic in Russia, Belinsky was Turgenev’s biggest champion. The son of a humble rural doctor, Belinsky was the leading critic at the journal Annals of the Fatherland, where many of Turgenev’s early stories were published (and several others promised against advances from its editor, Andrei Kraevsky). In 1847, Belinsky was involved in the relaunching of The Contemporary (Sovremennik), a journal founded by Pushkin that had gone into decline following his death. With its relaunch it was destined to become the leading literary magazine for the socially progressive, Westernizing circles to which Turgenev comfortably belonged. ‘We have succeeded in founding a new journal here which will appear from the new year under the most favourable auspices,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline from St Petersburg in November 1846. ‘I will be one of its contributors.’¹¹⁹ When the first number of the magazine appeared, it contained nine poems by Turgenev, a long theatrical review by him, and ‘Khor and Kalinych’, the first of what would go on to become his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. The Contemporary’s new editor, Nikolai Nekrasov, tried to persuade Turgenev to write exclusively for the journal by paying off his debts to Kraevsky. Turgenev rejected the offer, honouring his promise to deliver his promised stories to Annals of the Fatherland, although he later used that to beg for further loans from Kraevsky.* Turgenev realized that it was to his advantage to have two journals competing for his work.

‘Khor and Kalinych’ was glowingly reviewed by the well-known Slavophile writer Konstantin Aksakov in the March 1847 issue of The Contemporary. Turgenev’s reputation had been launched. The journal published four more of his stories in the May number, along with a series of articles and letters on cultural life in Berlin, Dresden, London and Paris, cities he knew from his travels with the Viardots across Europe. Turgenev was a prolific feuilletonist. It was an easy way to pay his travel costs. Most of all in these feuilletons he wrote about opera. His partisan support of Viardot was sometimes hidden by a pseudonym, sometimes not. He was highly critical of Pauline’s rivals Jenny Lind (whom he heard in London) and Fanny Persiani (in Paris). He also wrote a scathing article about the cult of Verdi, knowing that Pauline had never sung in any of his operas. ‘Yesterday was the premiere of Mr Verdi’s Lombardi – given here the title of Jerusalem – at the Grand Opera,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline in Berlin on 27 November. ‘Mr Verdi has composed some new parts that are perfectly detestable.’¹²⁰

4

On 26 February 1848, Turgenev was in Brussels when he heard the news from Paris. It was early morning and he was in bed in his hotel when someone started shouting, ‘France has become a republic!’ Two days of street demonstrations by the citizens of Paris had forced the abdication of Louis Philippe, who fled to England with the help of Ary Scheffer, placed at the head of a detachment of the National Guard. A Second Republic had been declared by a provisional government. ‘A revolution without me!’ Turgenev wrote in his notebook. Within half an hour he was dressed and on his way to the railway station to board a train for the French capital.¹²¹

He found Paris in turmoil. Omnibuses had been overturned and trees felled to erect barricades in many streets. The provisional government provided little leadership. Dominated by a poet, Alphonse de Lamartine, it called new elections to the National Assembly, introduced universal suffrage for adult men, and promised citizens the ‘right to work’, establishing National Workshops to relieve the unemployment crisis behind the street protests.

Excitement grew as the revolution spread to other capitals. Railways, telegraphs and newspapers quickly turned the revolution in Paris into a European revolution as other cities followed its example with uprisings of their own. Inspired by the news from Paris, popular revolts broke out from mid-March in Vienna and Berlin, Baden, Dresden, Leipzig, the Palatinate and other German states. Liberal ministers were put in place of the old reactionary governments; political reforms were carried out; and a German national assembly, the Frankfurt Parliament, was elected on a wide male franchise on 1 May. The revolution spread to northern Italy, where the Milanese rose up against the Austrians and the Venetians declared a republic during March; and to Poland, where an uprising against Prussian rule began in Poznán on 20 March. It was soon joined by Polish exiles from Berlin and Paris travelling by rail to join a national independence movement with organized militias to fight the Prussian army and potentially the Russians too, should the Tsar decide to intervene.

The hopes of spring were quickly dashed by violent clashes in Paris during May and June. Disappointed by the moderate government elected to the National Assembly, workers came out on the streets in protests organized by Louis Blanc and other socialists. They fought against the National Guard, loyal to the government. Turgenev witnessed the big street demonstration of 15 May, when workers marched from the place de la Concorde to the Palais Bourbon, where the National Assembly was in session, forced their way into the chamber to read a declaration in support of Poland, and then laid siege to the Hôtel de Ville, proclaiming an ‘insurrectionary government’ made up of socialists, until they were finally dispersed by the National Guard.¹²² To counteract the threat of a socialist uprising, a ‘Party of Order’ was established and the National Workshops were closed, prompting three days of fighting between workers and the National Guard from 23 June, the June Days. The workers were suppressed and their leaders arrested, and a new government was formed by the Party of Order.

The February Revolution had been greeted with enthusiasm by artists and intellectuals. Socialists from across Europe hastened to Paris to join in the events, among them Herzen, who had emigrated with his family from Russia in 1847 and lived in Italy until the downfall of the July Monarchy. Six years older than Turgenev, Herzen changed his initial opinion of him as a superficial socialite – the young man had matured and become more serious – and the two men became friends, firmly united by their mutual friendship with Belinsky and their commitment to democracy. Turgenev and the Viardots had high hopes for the revolution. Louis was an active member of the radical republican circles which led the revolution from the start. He had played a leading role in the banquet campaign for political reform, beginning in July 1847. At the Banquet de Coulommiers, in October, he proposed the main toast, ‘To Reform!’ His speech was too inflammatory to be published. He became an energetic propagandist for the revolutionary cause, publishing articles not only in France but in French newspapers in Berlin, where his radical opinions were less likely to attract the attention of the censors.¹²³ In the April elections to the National Assembly he stood as a candidate in the Seine-et-Marne district, presenting himself to the voters not as a ‘man of yesterday’ but as a ‘man of the day’.¹²⁴ Unsuccessful there, Viardot asked George Sand to help him find a seat – she was close to Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, the new Minister of the Interior – but nothing came of her efforts.

Sand was more left-wing than Viardot. She espoused a sort of utopian socialism based on love. In the Bulletin de la République, published by the Ministry of the Interior, she wrote a series of ‘Letters to the People’ in which she declared that the Republic was the ‘government of all the people, the organization of democracy, the republic of all rights, of all interests, of all intelligences, and all virtues!’. From her sixteenth bulletin, in mid-April, she moved further left, going beyond the calls of Ledru-Rollin for a parliamentary republic to add her voice to those of Louis Blanc for a workers’ revolution to establish a socialist one.¹²⁵

Pauline too was swept along by republican hopes. On 23 March, Sand persuaded Ledru-Rollin to commission Pauline to compose an updated version of the Marseillaise (a cantata called ‘The Young Republic’) for a gala evening in the Salle Le Peletier to mark the renaming of the Paris Opéra as the Théâtre de la République (as the Comédie-Française had been called from 1789 to 1793). Sand was placed in charge of the arrangements for the inaugural ceremony, which the new government would all attend. Her idea was to stake a claim for women artists, to show they could be artists on a par with men. She wanted Pauline to be widely seen, admired by the government, as a symbol of the Republic. She hoped too that Louis might be appointed as the new director of the Opéra to rescue it from its crisis. On the outbreak of the February Revolution the Opéra had been forced to close its doors. Its management was frightened of the mob. The new government set up a commission to support the Opéra financially; but support also meant control. The radicals resented the privileged position of the Opéra, and wanted supervision of its expenses.

On 23 March, in a ceremony presided over by Ledru-Rollin, the Opéra reopened its doors and declared its allegiance to the new Republic by adopting its new name and planting a Liberty Tree in its courtyard. The position of its director, Duponchel, accused of mismanagement, was very weak, and the radicals were calling for his dismissal.¹²⁶ There were all sorts of rumours about who might take over, but Sand thought she could secure it for the Viardots. ‘I want to see you reign as queen, because I know that you alone are not a bad queen,’ she wrote to Pauline towards the end of March. ‘Do you get my drift? Let Louis consider it but answer quick. The Opéra will be closed and reconstituted on a grander scale at the expense of the State; Meyerbeer has plans but will not take the lead. Ledru-Rollin is looking for someone else.’¹²⁷

On 31 March, Pauline finished the cantata (‘a masterpiece’, according to Sand), but migraines prevented her from singing it, so it was performed by the tenor Gustave Roger, accompanied by a choir of fifty girls, all dressed in white with sashes in the tricolour.¹²⁸

Nothing came of Sand’s plan to get Louis to become director of the Opéra. He refused to have his name considered, arguing that, if the plans for Pauline to appear in Meyerbeer’s new opera were to go ahead, it would represent a conflict of interest. Yet again, he had put her career before his. Under Duponchel the Opéra struggled on. Its director called for extra funds, failed to get them, and again closed the theatre’s doors, and, although they were reopened during May, performances were frequently cancelled because people were too scared to venture out onto the streets and the audience was too small. The June Days forced the Opéra to close again.

The chaos of the summer was a disaster for the arts. There was a collapse in the art market. Concert life in Paris came to a standstill. Chopin departed for London. The aristocracy had fled the capital, and Chopin’s earnings from giving piano lessons had dried up. One of his devoted followers, Jane Stirling, invited him to England, promising to find him paying pupils and engagements. In London he was helped by Manuel Garcia, Pauline’s brother, who had fled Paris, where, having volunteered for the National Guard, he had been horrified by the violence he witnessed during the June Days (at one point he had seen George Sand, standing on the top of a barricade, who, recognizing him, had cried, ‘N’est-ce-pas que c’est magnifique, n’est-ce-pas que c’est beau!’).¹²⁹ Pauline thought that Manuel would hate England, but it became his permanent home. The celebrated singing teacher became a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.

Pauline also called on Chopin when she came to London for the Covent Garden season that summer. Chopin’s catastrophic rupture with George Sand in 1847 – the result of ill-feeling, anger, pride and misunderstandings over several years – had brought him closer to Pauline. She pitied him for his broken heart and health – his tuberculosis caused him awful suffering. To help the poor composer she sang in some of the concerts organized for him by Henry Broadwood, the piano manufacturer, beginning with Chopin’s recital in Lord Falmouth’s mansion in St James’s Square on 7 July. Instead of her usual fee of fifteen guineas for a concert, Pauline sang for ten guineas.¹³⁰

On her return to Paris, Pauline moved into a new house she had bought in rue de Douai in the leafy ‘New Athens’ area in the 9th arrondissement. The Viardots had chosen to live there to escape the overcrowded centre, where cholera was rife, and because their dear friend Ary Scheffer had a villa in the neighbouring street. Theirs was a ‘pretty little house’ on three floors with a large conservatory extending into a garden surrounded by trees at the back, and a courtyard at the front where there were a stable and staff quarters. They bought the house for 75,000 francs and spent at least as much again on converting the conservatory into a gallery for Louis’s art collection, where Pauline also had her ‘grand salon’, a large room decorated with a light-green floral wallpaper, in which she housed an extensive library, her Pleyel piano and an organ made for her by the famous organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, for which she had paid 10,000 francs. Ary Scheffer had supplied a portrait of Pauline as a haloed Saint Cecilia on a wooden oval panel, which Cavaillé-Coll attached to the instrument. Pauline justified her lavish spending in a letter to George Sand:

It is an amusement, which we need – not to spend our lives in earning money only to hoard it. For my part, I am spending quickly all that is possible to spend but trying not to be foolish. [Louis] insists that I should be a propriétaire – which is good but not to my profit – and that I should build a nest. I have chosen the frailest branch and stormiest moment to build that nest. We have employed every type of worker, except masons, and our money has been pouring through their hands. I assure you, my Ninounne, that however much amusement I may have in doing up this little house, until it is finished it is just a dream – decidedly, Ninounne, I have no gift for property and Mr Proudhon can be pleased with me. If all property should ever be destroyed, I myself would put the flames to the four corners of my house …¹³¹

Sand replied sarcastically, assuring Pauline that she had done ‘good business to buy today when properties are selling for half of what they were worth yesterday, and when those who have the money can double their capital. It is sad for those who are forced to sell! That’s what happened to my daughter. Her house was worth 200,000 francs but it is up for sale at 100,000 francs. If you have any more money to spare, I would advise you to buy it.’¹³²

The Opéra’s financial crisis continued to worsen. In July it needed to be rescued by the government with an ‘extraordinary credit’ to have any prospect of putting on a season that autumn.¹³³ All hopes rested with the long-awaited premiere of Meyerbeer’s Grand Opera Le Prophète. Ledru-Rollin made a point of this, praising Meyerbeer and his forthcoming work, which he believed ‘would draw the whole of Europe to Paris’.¹³⁴ Negotiations over the contract dragged on for several months. The Opéra no longer had the money for the lavish set designs and costumes Meyerbeer requested, nor for the high fees Viardot demanded to sing the leading female role. But in the end these were agreed. The Opéra needed the ‘celebrity’ of Madame Viardot, Meyerbeer explained in a letter to Louis, and the only way to obtain her was to concede to her demands.¹³⁵ An extra subsidy was advanced by the government, enabling the contracts to be signed in October, when rehearsals were slated to begin.

Before he arrived in Paris, Meyerbeer had spent the past few months travelling by rail round Germany and Austria checking on productions of his operas. He liked to compose on trains. The final arias for Le Prophète were written in this way, and were then completed in Paris against the noisy background of the revolution in the streets. Marching rhythms and intonations of the Marseillaise crept into the score.¹³⁶

The subject of his opera could not have been more topical. It told the story of the prophet John of Leiden, who led the Anabaptists in an uprising against the Prince-Bishop of Münster in 1534. The Anabaptist revolutionaries took the Westphalian town, established a theocratic community, and held out for a year until they were defeated by the army of the Prince-Bishop. Everybody was aware of the parallels with the revolutionary situation in Europe long before the premiere. ‘Meyerbeer has begun rehearsing his Prophète,’ Berlioz wrote to Count Wielhorski, ‘he is a courageous man to risk launching a work of such dimensions at a time when riots or a change of government can cut him short, however great his eloquence.’¹³⁷ Even before it was premiered, there were parodies of the dangerous opera, including one at the Théâtre du Vaudeville whose witty title played on the similarity between the words in French for ‘Anabaptist’ and ‘donkey’: L’Âne à Baptiste, ou, Le Berceau du socialisme (‘The Baptist Donkey, or the Cradle of Socialism’).¹³⁸

Meyerbeer had always been aware of the political dangers in his opera. ‘The preaching of revolt that accompanies the destruction of power will cause much trouble,’ he had told Scribe when he read the first draft of the libretto in 1836.¹³⁹ He took great care to avoid giving Le Prophète a revolutionary message that might get it banned.¹⁴⁰ Whereas Scribe’s libretto had ascribed social motives to the Anabaptist uprising, in the final version used by Meyerbeer the popular revolt is manipulated by its dogmatic prophet, who leads it to disaster. Jean (John of Leiden) is portrayed as a jealous lover inspired by revenge, a religious fanatic deluded into thinking that he is the Messiah by the adulation of his naive followers. It is his mother, Fidès, who makes him see the error of his ways.¹⁴¹ By making her the moral anchor of the opera (arguably the first to have a mother as the leading female role), Meyerbeer ensured that the only possible conclusion to be drawn was not to trust in false prophets.

As the premiere approached, Meyerbeer became more and more nervous about the reception of the opera, his first for thirteen years. There were over fifty rehearsals in the Salle Le Peletier and Meyerbeer’s apartment in rue Richelieu. He made constant changes to the score, called in the leader of the claque to get his opinion, and questioned the musicians of the orchestra on what they thought about the passages that worried him. Above all he depended on the advice of Pauline. She suggested a number of improvements, all of which he accepted.¹⁴² Rarely had a singer played such an important part in the writing of an opera. According to the critic Henry Chorley, who attended the rehearsals, the final version of Le Prophète owed almost as much to her as it did to Meyerbeer. ‘She is conductor, stage-manager – in a word, the soul of the opera, which owes at least half its success to her,’ concurred Ignaz Moscheles, the composer. Meyerbeer was so pleased with the work of his ‘captain’, as he called her, that he made it a condition for the performance of the opera in other cities that she sang the role of Fidès, and, in his absence, as in London in 1849, placed her in charge of the rehearsals.¹⁴³

There was also much work to be done with the technical effects, upon which the opera’s success would heavily depend. In the third act there would be a dazzling sunrise created by projecting electric light onto a screen from the back of the stage. It was the first time electric light was used in operatic history. The effect was so astonishing that it seemed to Gautier ‘to be no longer a painting but reality itself’.¹⁴⁴ Act III would also have a ‘skating ballet’ performed on roller skates, an unknown invention in Paris at that time which Meyerbeer had seen in a street act. The skater was immediately hired at the Opéra to teach the chorus how to roller-skate. Meyerbeer was keen on introducing new inventions to his operas. It gave them an aura of modernity that appealed to his largely bourgeois audience. For the fourth act of Le Prophète he composed music for an on-stage band of twenty-four brass instruments, including eighteen saxhorns, a new instrument patented in Paris in 1845 by Adolphe Saxe, the inventor of the saxophone.

As the opening night approached, the build-up of excitement was intense. People had been waiting for this opera for years. The newspapers were full of the political parallels (Gautier reported that the dialogue ‘could have been drawn from the prose of communist journals’). The first forty performances were sold out immediately. Tickets in the stalls exchanged hands for 250 francs, boxes for 1,200 francs, reported Le Messager des théâtres. The production was a windfall for the Opéra, which Le Crédit compared to ‘all the gold of California’.¹⁴⁵

Dignitaries arrived from all over Europe for the opening night, 16 April 1849. The recently elected President, Louis-Napoleon, was in the royal box. A large delegation from the National Assembly was in attendance. Turgenev was in the stalls. So was Berlioz. Chopin, back from London and suffering from tuberculosis, dragged himself from his sickbed to the Opéra. Heine could not get a ticket. Nor could Delacroix.

The ‘skating ballet’ from Le Prophète by Meyerbeer: a photograph of hand painted clay models, 1860s.

The evening was a triumph for Pauline. As the curtain came down on the last explosive scene – in which Jean and Fidès throw themselves into a vast conflagration of electric light engulfing the whole stage – there was a ‘long hosannah of bravos, cheers, and foot-stamping’, according to the Journal des théâtres. There were a dozen calls for Viardot, whose performance, the first of her career at the Paris Opéra, was singled out for praise by Meyerbeer and the critics. None mattered more than Berlioz, who reported in the Journal des débats that she had

displayed a dramatic talent which no one in France had believed her to possess to such a high degree. All her poses, her gestures, her expressions, even her costume, are studied with profound art. As to the perfection of her singing, the extreme skill of her vocalization, her musical assurance – those are things that are now known and appreciated by everyone, even in Paris. Madame Viardot is one of the greatest artists who comes to mind in the past and present history of music.

Returning from the theatre late that night, Pauline wrote a short note to George Sand: ‘Victory! VICTORY, my dear Ninounne! and good night!’¹⁴⁶

The opera was a big commercial hit. The box office took in 10,000 francs a night, enough to rescue it from its financial crisis, until a cholera epidemic in July forced the Opéra to close its doors after only twenty-five performances. The production was brought back in the autumn, however, and ran for two more years at the same high level of receipts.¹⁴⁷ Pauline had been ‘rather nervous’ on the first night of the revival, Turgenev wrote to Chorley on 6 November, thanks to ‘absurd rumours’ that were being spread by her enemies ‘to punish her for having taken part in a republican banquet in London’ (she had even been accused of hiding socialists from the French police); but ‘honest people paid no attention to such calumny and insults against people who cannot defend themselves,’ Pauline’s loyal friend continued, and ‘her reception was superb’.¹⁴⁸

Within three years of its Paris premiere, Le Prophète had been produced in fifty cities around the world – from New York and New Orleans to Constantinople and St Petersburg. Pauline toured with the opera, starting out in London, where Thackeray and Dickens were at the opening night on 24 July 1849, and ending in Vienna and Berlin. From Courtavenel, Turgenev read the reports of her progress in the press. He wrote to her incessantly. On the day of her London premiere he followed the action by looking at his watch and imagining the performance. ‘Eleven o’clock,’ he wrote that night. ‘The fourth act has just finished, and they are calling for you; I am applauding too: bravo! bravo! well done! Midnight: I am applauding still with all my might and throwing a bouquet of flowers at your picture. Everything was splendid, wasn’t it?’¹⁴⁹

For the rights to the score Meyerbeer received the highest sum of money ever paid to a composer – 19,000 francs from Brandus for the rights in France, 17,000 francs from Delafield and Beale for the English rights, and 8,000 from Breitkopf & Härtel for the rights in Germany: a total of 44,000 francs. He made a lot more money from the publication of the arrangements, which soon appeared in sheet music for every conceivable instrument and combination of instruments – ‘for two and four hands at the piano, one and two violins, two flutes, even for a flageolet!’ sneered Berlioz – and at every level of technical difficulty.¹⁵⁰

Critical opinion was mixed. Berlioz, who had taken a genuine interest in Meyerbeer’s music and praised it in the past, was less keen on Le Prophète. He thought that it contained good music but went too far in its coloratura (ornamentation of the vocal line) and in other musical effects designed to appeal to vulgar tastes. According to the Escudier brothers in their journal La France musicale, the music showed much craftsmanship but lacked melodic inspiration. Turgenev too had doubts. Writing in Annals of the Fatherland, he recognized the opera’s dramatic strength and thought the orchestral writing was extraordinary, but overall the music was eclectic, the work of a composer who had passed his best. Delacroix detested everything about the opera. ‘This monstrous work, Le Prophète,’ he noted in his journal on 23 April, ‘is the very abasement of art.’¹⁵¹

No one, however, was more critical than Richard Wagner, Meyerbeer’s old protégé. He was, he later claimed, so ‘filled with rage and despair’ when he first heard Le Prophète at the Opéra, in February 1850, that, despite being seated in the centre of the stalls, he got up in the middle of the performance, disturbed everybody around him, and left the house.¹⁵²

Wagner had come to Paris as a young man in 1839 to make his name and fortune as an opera composer in the musical capital of Europe. At that time he was composing Rienzi, a work modelled on the conventions of Grand Opera (only even longer, at five hours), with ballets, stage effects and huge choral numbers set in Ancient Rome. He wanted Rienzi to ‘outdo all the previous examples [of Grand Opera] with sumptuous extravagance’. Looking for supporters, Wagner approached Pauline Viardot, who sang some of the music he had written but would not commit herself to perform it publicly. But it was Meyerbeer whose patronage he really sought. On his way to Paris from London he had travelled via Boulogne to meet him and had played him extracts from his opera. Meyerbeer admired Wagner’s music and wrote two letters of recommendation to the Paris Opéra, which rejected Rienzi. Failure in Paris was normal for a young composer, but Wagner took it as a slight against his genius, and turned against the city, claiming it had lost its soul to commercialism and the love of money, which he rejected for what he claimed to be a higher ‘German’ form of art. Nonetheless, in 1841 he was grateful to his patron, Meyerbeer, whose letter of support was enough to get Rienzi accepted for production in Dresden.¹⁵³

Wagner’s artistic debt to Meyerbeer was pointed out by the critics (Hans von Bülow would later joke that Rienzi was ‘Meyerbeer’s best opera’). Liszt believed the scores of Rienzi and Les Huguenots must have been placed side by side because, he said, some of the pages from Meyerbeer’s opera had accidentally made their way into Wagner’s. Stung by the plagiarism charge, and still hurting from his failure in Paris, Wagner wrote to Schumann in 1843:

I don’t know what ‘Meyerbeerish’ signifies, except a cunning angling for shallow popularity … But if there really were anything actual, anything consistent that could be called ‘Meyerbeerish’ … then I must confess it would be a marvellous joke on Nature’s part if I had drawn anything out of that stream, the mere odour of which is repugnant to me even from a distance.¹⁵⁴

During his years in Dresden, from 1842 to 1849, Wagner continued to receive support from Meyerbeer. Wagner wrote grovelling letters to him, begging him to get The Flying Dutchman (1843) launched at the Paris Opéra. His deference to him continued for as long as Meyerbeer advanced him money and threw banquets for him at his house. ‘I weep tears of emotion when I think of the man who is everything to me, everything,’ he wrote. ‘My head and heart are no longer mine to give away; they are your property, my master.’ But at some point the loans dried up. Wagner’s slavish devotion turned to detestation of his generous mentor. ‘He disgusts me beyond measure,’ Wagner wrote to Liszt. ‘This eternally amiable and pleasant man reminds me of the turbid, not to say vicious period of my life when he pretended to be my protector; that was a period of connections and backstairs when we are made fools of by our protectors whom in our hearts we do not like.’¹⁵⁵ Meyerbeer had no idea of Wagner’s hatred towards him.

Wagner clothed his poisonous resentment in nationalist ideology. A few years before, in 1837, he had written sycophantically to Meyerbeer: ‘I see you fulfilling the mission of the German by taking the virtues of the Italian and French schools as a model so as to make the creations of German genius universal.’¹⁵⁶ But now he attached his cause to a more xenophobic strand of German nationalism in hostile opposition to such cosmopolitanism. In the music world this nationalism had already been expressed by Schumann in his critical assaults on Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. The ideological force of this critique was couched in terms of a contrast between the spiritual qualities of serious ‘German’ music, which belonged to the higher realm of art, and the frivolity of Italian and French music, which was part of a mere entertainment industry (music ‘for the circus’, as Schumann had dismissed Les Huguenots). This was the polarity by which Wagner now resolved to set himself against Meyerbeer. He wrote to Hanslick in 1847:

If I were to try to sum up precisely what it is that I find so offensive about the … opera industry today, I would lump it all together under the heading ‘Meyerbeer’. I see in Meyerbeer’s music a great skill at achieving superficial effects which prevents his art from attaining a noble maturity … it denies the essential inwardness of art and strives instead to gratify the listener in every way possible.¹⁵⁷

This artistic nationalism was sharpened by the German revolutions of 1848–9. Actively involved with Bakunin in the Dresden uprising in 1849, Wagner conceived the revolutions as a national liberation from the bourgeois system of money, and in particular from the domination of international Jewry. It is from this time that his anti-Semitism became a component of his musical philosophy, as articulated in his article ‘Jewishness in Music’, published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1850, shortly after he had stormed out in disgust from Le Prophète.

Published under a pseudonym (‘to prevent the question being dragged down by the Jews to a purely personal level’, as he explained to Liszt), Wagner’s article was at its heart a personal attack on Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer. Wagner argued that the Jews lacked national character. They were ‘disagreeably foreign to whatever European nation they belong’. From this premise he launched an assault on Mendelssohn, who had died only three years previously, claiming that his music was pastiche without true feeling or nationality. The culmination of the article was a veiled attack on Meyerbeer, who, though unnamed, was clearly the target. Associating the Jews with the rule of money and commercialism in the arts, Wagner explained the popular success of this ‘famous opera composer’ by his ‘Jewish’ willingness to cater to the lowest tastes for monetary gain. Two years later, in his Opera and Drama, published under his own name, Wagner made the object of his attack clear. Describing Meyerbeer as ‘a Jew banker to whom it occurred to write some music’, he argued that Le Prophète was a shallow, incoherent work striving for effects to gratify the audience (‘effects without causes’, as he famously described the sunrise at the end of the third act).¹⁵⁸

Meyerbeer was no stranger to attacks. Being rich and successful earned him many enemies. He had even been betrayed by friends before. In 1847, after Meyerbeer had failed to lend him money, Heine wrote an article accusing him of lacking talent and being a ‘colossal egotist’ who used friends to promote his own celebrity. That was bad enough. But being attacked as a Jew was different. It wounded Meyerbeer, who had always thought of himself as a German, but whose insecurity was rooted in his Jewishness. To be wealthy and successful as a Jew in Germany made him vulnerable, even with the support he received from the Prussian court and the crowned heads of other German states. He suffered Wagner’s attack silently, did not defend himself, and gave hints of his feelings only in his diary. He became ill, complaining of stomach pains, which usually appeared when he was stressed, and spent months recovering in spas. How much of his illness was directly caused by Wagner’s betrayal is hard to say. But Meyerbeer was changed by it. He did not write another major work for many years. L’Africaine, his last Grand Opera, was finished only just before he died.¹⁵⁹

Meyerbeer was a giant of the nineteenth-century opera world. But in the longer term his reputation fell; his music became a watchword for bad taste and vulgarity, for art’s subordination to commerce; in the twentieth century his works lost their place in the opera repertory. Wagnerism’s triumph saw to that.

5

After a long struggle with tuberculosis, Chopin died in Paris on 18 October 1849. His sister Ludwika and George Sand’s daughter were with him when he died, but not Sand herself. In the last days, as his sickness worsened, Chopin tried to insist that he only be visited by his friends. Pauline saw him several times. But, as she wrote to Sand, she always found a crowd around his deathbed. ‘All the grand Parisian ladies considered it de rigueur to come and faint in his room, which was congested with artists making sketches, and a man making daguerreotypes wanted to have the bed moved closer to the window so that the dying man should be in the light.’¹⁶⁰

The funeral took place in the church of the Madeleine on 30 October. A large crowd gathered in front of the church, whose colonnaded façade was draped in black for the occasion. Admission was by ticket only. Around 4,000 people had been invited. Observing the square with its crush of coaches and the guests assembling at the entrance to the church, Berlioz concluded that ‘the whole of artistic and aristocratic Paris was there’. On the request of the family, Meyerbeer was one of the pallbearers, along with Delacroix, Prince Adam Czartoryski and Camille Pleyel. Meyerbeer had not known Chopin well, but Chopin had been one of his admirers. Turgenev was in one of the front pews. He had arrived early to be in a good position to hear Pauline sing the contralto part in Mozart’s Requiem, as Chopin had requested for his funeral, along with the soprano Castellan, the bass Luigi Lablache and the tenor Alexis Dupont, old friends of Chopin. Because women were forbidden from performing in the church, it had taken days of pleading from Chopin’s most powerful friends to persuade the Archbishop of Paris to make a special dispensation, allowing Viardot and Castellan to sing on the condition that they remained invisible. They sang their parts from behind a black curtain.¹⁶¹

Pauline wanted money to perform at Chopin’s funeral. She insisted on a fee of 2,000 francs, almost half the costs for the entire funeral. It was a demand that many would ascribe to mercenary motives. But Pauline once again saw this as a professional engagement, just like any other, and she had always said that a singer should not sing for nothing. By all accounts, she earned her fee. Turgenev, for one, was very pleased. ‘She sang her part magnificently, showing that grandiose but simple church technique of which she has the secret,’ he wrote to Chorley.

The funeral service was very beautiful and moving, too: not a ceremony so much as a genuine goodbye to a beloved friend. There were a lot of women in the church and many of them wept behind their veils. The orchestra played a March by Chopin, sad and plaintive; and one of his little preludes, given on the organ, might have been more moving still had the organist not overdone the ‘vox humana’ stop … By the way, your article on Chopin in the Athenaeum pleased me greatly; I think it would be hard to be more understanding or more just: that’s the way to speak about the dead.¹⁶²

* She sustained this level until 1855, when Frederick Gye, the manager of Covent Garden, found that ‘her name did not draw as formerly’ and offered her £1,000 for a season of four months (the Viardots ‘turned their noses up at this’, he noted in his diary). After long negotiations they settled on £1,200 for a season of three months (ROH, Gye Diaries, 13 and 18 Mar. 1855).

* One of his reforms was to allow patrons into the foyer de la danse, where they could watch the ballerinas warming up. At the Salle Le Peletier, access to the foyer de la danse had previously been reserved for members of the court. The doors to it were guarded by the king’s troops. Degas’s painting Le Foyer de la danse à l’Opéra de la rue Le Peletier (1872) captures the voyeurism of this scene.

* Many of his traits would reappear in the character of Jacques Arnoux, the publisher of L’Art industriel, in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education (1869). Flaubert had known Maurice Schlesinger as a young man. At the age of fifteen, on holiday in Trouville, the seaside Norman town, Flaubert had fallen hopelessly in love with the publisher’s mistress, who would soon become his wife, Élisa Schlesinger. Flaubert had struck up a friendship with the couple which would provide the basis of his novel’s plot.

* Berlioz, Ernest Reyer, Victorin de Joncières, Schumann and Saint-Saëns were exceptional among composers in writing music reviews for the press.

* One loan was to Heinrich Börnstein to help him start the weekly journal Vorwärts with Karl Marx in 1844.

* Performance rights were introduced in Britain in the Dramatic Copyright Acts of 1833 and 1842, but for foreign composers the enforcement of such rights was dependent on bilateral treaties between their countries and Britain.

* Pauline Viardot was among them one day in the summer of 1858, when she was performing in London. She came with Henry Chorley, the violinist Joseph Joachim, Anton Rubinstein, Frederick Gye and Charles Hallé, who had just founded the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. After an alcoholic picnic in the park, they went to the Crystal Palace, where the music competed with various entertainments (jugglers, acrobats, that sort of thing), and then travelled to Greenwich for dinner and more alcohol, where Chorley, drunk, passed out under the table (Héritte-Viardot, Une famille de grands musiciens, pp. 146–8).

* Many of these passages were cut by Pauline from the first publication of Turgenev’s letters to her in 1906 (LI, pp. xvi–xvii).

* The Mazurkas were: Op. 50, No. 2 in A flat major (which became ‘Seize ans’); Op. 33, No. 2 in D major (‘Aime-moi’); Op. 6, No. 1 in F sharp minor (‘Plainte d’amour’); Op. 7, No. 1 in B flat major (‘Coquette’); Op. 68, No. 2 in A minor (‘L’Oiselette’); and Op. 24, No. 1 in G minor (‘Séparation’).

* On 22 October 1849, he wrote to Kraevsky claiming that he ‘did not have a penny’ and would ‘die of hunger’ if he did not get a loan of 300 roubles, promising a list of forthcoming works for Annals of the Fatherland. Receiving the money on 13 December, he wrote to thank the editor, adding histrionically, ‘This money has surely saved me from death by hunger’ (PSS, vol. 1, pp. 333, 337).