The Europeans

5

Europe at Play

It has every requisite for a place of listless idleness. There seems nothing to be done (but play), and the people do it. There never was such a mixture of green, gold, sunshine, flowers, dining, dressing, flirting, and promiscuous idleness as in Baden.

Charles Clark, ‘Baden-Baden in 1867’

1

In 1863, the Viardots left France and made their home in Baden-Baden, the fashionable German spa town on the edge of the Black Forest. They had spent four months in Baden (as it was generally known) in the summer of 1862, when Pauline was engaged to sing there for the season, and had enjoyed themselves so much that they decided to move there. Towards the end of their stay they had bought a large house with extensive grounds in the Tiergarten area, a wooded hillside on the southern outskirts of Baden, from which there were lovely views across meadows towards the old ruined castle above the town. Ordering major renovations and the building of a gallery-cum-concert hall, the Viardots returned to Paris for the winter, but they came back at the start of May, after Pauline’s last performance of Orphée.

Turgenev followed them with Paulinette, then aged twenty, and her governess, renting rooms for the three of them in Lichtental, not far from the Viardot villa, although his daughter did not like it there, could not stand the Viardots, and soon returned to Paris, where she lived at first at their old address in the rue de Rivoli, and when the lease on that expired, in a smaller apartment in Passy. Whether Pauline felt guilty for driving her away is hard to say. In her diary, in July 1863, she remarked only that Paulinette was ‘a bad girl’ whose main fault was not to appreciate her ‘adorable father’.¹

After years of separation, Turgenev and Pauline had become reunited during recent months. Their relationship was calmer and more stable, closer to a marriage than a love affair, and the move to Germany represented a new start for them. ‘We are in paradise,’ Turgenev wrote to his friend, the poet Louis Pomey, shortly after his arrival in Baden: ‘the countryside is delightful, the weather delightful, the atmosphere delightful, and I have found a delightful small apartment where I intend to give you a delightful evening.’²

The move was mainly Pauline’s decision. Her singing voice had lost its force, worn out after years of stretching over its extraordinary range, and was ‘no longer beautiful’, in the view of Clara Schumann’s daughter, Eugenie. Having been rejected for a major part in Les Troyens, Pauline had decided to retire from the Paris Opéra and the other major houses of Europe to concentrate instead on teaching and composing, limiting her stage performances to small provincial theatres, which in her view were of a higher standard in Germany compared to France. ‘In Paris it is impossible for me to do anything satisfactory,’ she wrote to Rietz. ‘I should have to sing bad music prettily (I hate prettiness in art), and do other things that honourable women ought not to do. Ah, dearest friend, you have no idea of the baseness which rules here now in art and in every sphere of public life.’³

The seriousness of German music culture was an attraction for the Viardots, but politics was also driving them away from France. For Louis, a convinced republican, the move was rooted in a ‘great hatred’ of Napoleon III, as Turgenev described it in a letter to Flaubert. Unlike other radicals of 1848, who had made their peace with the Empire’s authoritarianism, Louis remained implacably opposed to the imperial regime, whose crackdown against the press and academic freedom continued to offend his democratic principles well into the 1860s, when censorship was loosened and liberal reforms were introduced. Still, as long as Pauline had a chance of singing on a major Paris stage, he remained with her in the capital and refrained from writing anything that might make life more difficult for her. Following her triumph in Orphée, she appeared for two more seasons at the Théâtre Lyrique, and even made a comeback at the Paris Opéra, singing in Alceste, Il Trovatore and Les Huguenots, the last in a performance for Napoleon III and the King of Sweden in August 1861. The next year she had a successful run with La Favorite at the Opéra.⁴ But as soon as Pauline had retired from the Paris stage, Louis’s opposition to Napoleon drove them both into self-imposed exile.

As for Turgenev, he had never liked Paris, though how much that was due to his own situation as a foreigner is difficult to judge. ‘I cannot tell you how deeply I hate everything French and especially Parisian,’ he wrote to his friend Fet in 1860. The French thought that ‘everything that is not theirs is wild and stupid’, he told Tolstoy; their heads were filled with clichés and received ideas.⁵ Germany was more to his liking. He had been a student in Berlin, spoke the language fluently, and felt a close affinity to German culture. But he would have followed Pauline anywhere. He could not live without the Viardots, he told his friends, and would go wherever they went – to Copenhagen or Stockholm, ‘the two most boring cities in the world’, or even to Australia.⁶

There was another reason for Turgenev’s readiness to follow them to Baden, which for him involved a final rupture with Russia. In 1862, his novel Fathers and Sons had received a hostile reception in his native land. Everyone attacked the book – the left because they thought Turgenev had sided with the fathers and because they saw in Bazarov a monstrous caricature of the student radicals; the right because they believed on the contrary that he had taken the side of the sons by failing to denounce the novel’s radical hero. Turgenev was dismayed by these attacks. For a while he thought of giving up writing. He was particularly upset by the vitriol of the young Russian radicals, who had thrown at him a ‘huge amount of mud and filth (and continue to throw it)’, as he explained to Pietsch in 1869. They had cursed Turgenev as a ‘Judas, fool, and donkey’, even as a ‘police spy’. These attacks were behind his decision to make a home in Europe in 1863. They were why he would remain there – making only short trips back to Russia – during the next twenty years.

Baden was an excellent choice for all three of them. It was located near the French border, with a good train service to Paris, following the opening of the Rhine Bridge near Strasbourg in 1861; it had an active cultural and social life; and there was excellent hunting in the lovely countryside around the town. ‘In effect,’ wrote Louis, ‘it has all the advantages of nature – a fertile and pretty country with well-kept farms, mountain forests, healthy air and beneficial thermal waters, hunting, fishing and amusements of all sorts – and moreover it is at the centre of Europe, where all the major routes converge, easily reached by visitors who may not have it as their final destination but who willingly would stop there for a while for the pleasures it offered.’⁷ As one of Europe’s leading spas, famous for its doctors, sulphurous baths and healing waters, Baden was an ideal place to live for Louis, now in his sixties with an ailing liver, as well as for Turgenev, who suffered terribly from gout. With its luxurious hotels, landscaped parks and promenades, casino, opera house and music festival, it was one of the most fashionable watering places in Europe, a playground for the aristocracy, regularly visited by kings and queens, leading statesmen and ambassadors. So many politicians spent their summers there that it became known as ‘Europe’s summer capital’. According to a French guidebook of 1858, ‘When someone wants to know what is Europe’s capital city, one must answer: in winter Paris, in summer Baden.’⁸

Baden was an international town, cosmopolitan in its outlook, liberal in its attitudes – in many ways a symbol of European culture before the age of nationalism ushered in by the Franco-Prussian War and Bismarck’s unification of Germany.

Baden was part of a European network of continental spas and sea resorts which became the focus of the summer ‘season’ for an international public. Its winter population was 8,000 inhabitants, three quarters of them German, but in the ‘season’ between April and October it played host to 50,000 visitors, who came from all around Europe. The most numerous were the French, who arrived by steamers up the Rhine and by trains that took just ten hours from Paris. There was a Franco-German atmosphere in this summer capital. French was spoken in the town; the local newspaper, the Badenblätter, was printed both in French and in German; and French food was served in all the restaurants. But Russians also came in large numbers, around 5,000 every year. The Grand Ducal house of Baden had strong connections to the Romanovs going back to the marriage arranged by Catherine the Great between her grandson, the future Tsar Alexander I, and Princess Louise of Baden in 1793. Since then Baden had become one of Europe’s major destinations for the Russian aristocracy, who built mansions there, as well as a retreat for writers such as Vasily Zhukovsky and Gogol.⁹

The town existed solely for pleasure. Mornings were given over to the mineral baths, but in the afternoons promenaders strolled along the Lichtentaler Avenue, a tree-lined parkland walk where men would sit at tables playing dominoes or chess, and pass the time in conversation with other passers-by. Conversation was a prized activity – the simple pleasures of sociability being one of the main attractions of spa resorts such as Baden. The art of conversation was so highly valued that the central landmark of the town, the casino, was housed in the Konversationshaus, or Salle de Conversation, where all the promenaders would converge to take refreshment in the garden cafés in front of the casino and listen to the orchestra, which played all day in the bandstand. This is the scene that opens Smoke (1867), Turgenev’s novel set in Baden, when the orchestra performs ‘a potpourri from La Traviata, then a Strauss waltz, then “Tell Her”, a Russian romance set to music by a diligent kapellmeister’ – the last to please the many Russians in the crowd. Carriage rides with picnics in the woods, shooting and fishing were also popular activities. Every other afternoon there were horse races at nearby Iffezheim, the ‘Goodwood of the Continent’, in the estimation of one English visitor, where ‘princes, barons, dukes and duchesses’ were seated in the stand, there was ‘the best music’ between races, and ‘an excellent restaurant’ supplied ‘hock, champagne, fruit, and the creature comforts so necessary to refresh the exhaustion of excitement’. In the evenings, the main excitement was to be found in the casino in Baden, but there were also operas and concerts in the Baden Theatre, and sometimes in the Salle de Conversation, when the gambling rooms were closed.¹⁰

The casino was the key to the development of these cultural attractions. Its profits helped to pay for Baden’s parks and walks, grand hotels, pavilions, theatres, music festivals, resident bands and orchestras. Jacques Bénazet, an immigrant from France, had spotted its financial potential during the 1830s. He was following the example of Barbaja, who had used his gambling concessions to finance opera houses in Naples twenty years before. Securing the concession for the Baden casino in 1838, Bénazet invested heavily in the lavish restoration of its gambling rooms. He turned it into a major international attraction, especially for visitors from neighbouring France, where gambling had been outlawed by the July Monarchy. On Bénazet’s death, in 1848, the concession was taken over by his son Édouard, an astute businessman and impresario who had studied at the Paris Conservatory and had good connections in the music world. In 1855, he built new rooms in the casino, opulently furnished in a classical French style, and three years later opened the racecourse at Iffezheim. From the profits of his gambling enterprise, Bénazet financed the annual music festival run for him by Berlioz with a budget large enough to attract the top musicians from Europe. He also paid for the building of an opera house. Completed in 1862, the Theater Baden-Baden was inaugurated in August of that year with the premiere of Berlioz’s opera Béatrice et Bénédict.

Berlioz had first come to Baden for a concert series in 1853, and had been the mainstay of its music festival since 1856. He loved the natural beauty of the place, a ‘paradise’ he called it, with its ‘woods, mountains, streams and fragrant air’. He was in his element in its society, ‘intelligent and cultured people who speak French’. But most of all he liked the money he made there, 2,000 francs for organizing just one concert every year. Bénazet was the ideal impresario for Berlioz. His generosity ‘has greatly exceeded anything ever done for me by the princes in Europe to whom I am most indebted’, Berlioz wrote in his Memoirs. What satisfied him most was that he was left alone by Bénazet. As he wrote in 1859,

everything is organized in favour of the conductor who is in charge; he does not have to put up with penny-pinching and no obstacles of any kind are placed in his way. In the conviction that the best course of action is to let the conductor act with complete freedom, M. Bénazet does not interfere in any way and considers his only function is to pay the bills. ‘Do everything in a royal style,’ he says, ‘I am giving you a free hand.’ Three cheers! With music that is the only way to achieve something elevated and beautiful.

No expense was spared on the lavish decoration of the Salle de Conversation when it was ‘transformed into a concert hall, adorned with shrubs, flowers, brilliantly lit up, and filled with the most fashionable public in Europe’, in the words of Berlioz.¹¹ The best singers and virtuoso players came to Baden for the festival – among them Clara Schumann and Anton Rubinstein, the violinist Henri Vieuxtemps, and Pauline Viardot, who was the star guest every year from 1859 to 1864.

*

The Viardot villa was soon established as the centre of this musical community. It was a three-storey house designed in the style of a Swiss chalet, large enough to accommodate the entire Viardot household of eleven people, including servants. It had stables and a carriage house, an aviary, and a wooded garden descending to the concert hall and gallery, a long basilica-shaped building, where Louis kept his Old Masters and Pauline hosted musical soirées. The superb Cavaillé-Coll organ was transported from their Paris house and installed in the concert hall flanked by two grand pianos. The score of Don Giovanni was also brought to Baden in its special box and placed on a table by the organ, as it had been in the rue de Douai.

The Viardots had spent a fortune on the house. The purchase price of 108,000 francs was almost doubled by the renovation costs, including the building of the concert hall. Then there was the furniture they had to buy, because their Paris home had been rented out furnished. Louis sold some railway stocks and, in an auction at the Hôtel Drouot on 1 April 1863, around fifty of his finest paintings, including landscapes by Poussin, Bruegel, Ruysdael, Wouwerman and Van der Neer, as well as works by Ribera and Zurbarán, and a Velázquez portrait of the infant Maria Theresa (probably the one now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York).¹² He had been slowly selling paintings since the middle of the 1850s, as Pauline’s earnings had declined. In 1857, he had sold one of his two Rembrandts, Slaughtered Ox (1655), receiving just 5,000 francs from the Louvre, because the painting was damaged.¹³ Continued sales could not keep up with the mounting costs of their new house. In 1864, the Viardots put Courtavenel up for sale. Their old country manor was pulled down for materials by its buyer.¹⁴ The Baden house, once it was completed, made quite a statement about Pauline’s wealth and status in the fashionable world of Europe’s summer capital. Mostly paid for by the money she had earned, the mansion was a symbol of her achievements.

Turgenev, too, was earning money from his work. He had enough to buy a plot of land and build a house. In 1864, the woodland by the Viardot villa came up for sale on the death of its owner. Turgenev bought it for 50,000 francs. He commissioned an architect from Paris to build a mansion in the Louis XIII style – a mixture of the Gothic and Renaissance elements of old French châteaux – favoured by opponents of the Second Empire. A garden was laid out with a ‘river’ walk through the trees leading to the concert hall.* Turgenev was delighted with the building plans. To live so close to the Viardots had been his dream. After years of restless wandering, he now felt that he was putting down his roots, making his own ‘nest’ at last.¹⁵

The Turgenev Villa in Baden viewed from the garden. Photograph, 1986, by Nicholas Zekulin. The Viardots’ neighbouring house was pulled down long ago.

The grandeur of Turgenev’s building project marked his arrival as a major writer on the European scene. But the costs of building quickly outstripped his earnings. His daughter’s dowry was a further drain on his finances. In February 1865, Paulinette was married to Gaston Bruère, the owner of a glass factory in Rougemont near Besançon in eastern France, where the newly married couple occupied an outbuilding in the courtyard of the factory. Turgenev had promised her a dowry of 100,000 francs on her marriage, and another 50,000 francs within a few years. He also paid her an annual allowance of 2,500 francs. To buy the Baden house he had been forced to cash the railway shares he had bought in 1858 as a saving for her dowry. His daughter accused him of putting his own comfort first.¹⁶

His landed estates did not make enough to meet his mounting costs. They would have earned him more if he had not been quite so generous to his former serfs on their emancipation in 1861. At Spasskoe, Turgenev left his peasants twice as much land as he was obliged to under the terms of the Emancipation Decree. He gave it to them free, relinquishing his rights under the decree to receive payment for the land. It was what one might expect from the author of the Sketches, which had done so much to turn opinion against serfdom, but was generous nonetheless. Turgenev’s income from the various estates which he retained – 6,000 hectares of fertile land – was never more than 5,000 roubles (20,000 francs) per annum, and in years of harvest failure it was far less (his brother Nikolai, who managed his own estates, earned four times as much from the same amount of land). Turgenev’s estates were terribly mismanaged by his uncle, an ‘old, dilatory and idle’ man, as Botkin described him, who received an annual salary of 2,000 roubles (8,000 francs) but fraudulently earned a good deal more by cheating his absent nephew at every opportunity. Turgenev was naive. Being fond of his uncle, he trusted him. He was himself also careless with money, which did not interest him so long as his needs were met. It took him fifteen years to realize the extent of his uncle’s mismanagement, calculating that in one year alone he had lost a staggering 36,500 roubles (146,000 francs) in cash, farm tools and livestock. In 1867, he finally decided to get rid of him. To do so cost him 80,000 francs – the amount his uncle claimed he had been promised by Turgenev in the event of the writer’s death and which he now insisted to be paid.¹⁷ A new manager was put in place, a young and energetic local businessman called Kishinsky, who turned out to be even more dishonest.

Turgenev’s income from his writing only partly made up for his losses on the land. By the 1860s, he was earning large advances for his works from Russian publishers. Mikhail Katkov paid him 4,300 roubles (17,200 francs) to publish On the Eve in the literary journal Russian Messenger in 1860; and 5,000 roubles (20,000 francs) for Smoke. This was an amount equivalent to 400 roubles (1,600 francs) for every printer’s page – five times the rate he had been paid ten years before. The Russians were great readers of literary periodicals, and Turgenev’s earnings from the Russian Messenger were high by any standards in Europe. As his need for money grew, he pushed hard for even higher fees, demanding 500 roubles per printer’s page for his story ‘Phantoms’ from the Russian Messenger in February 1863. Yet there was only so far he could go, so much he could earn from publishers. Other Russian writers wrote long novels for the periodicals, and earned well by doing so because they were paid by the printed sheet. But Turgenev’s novels were all short. He simply could not write in any other form.¹⁸

Turgenev did not earn much more from his novels published in book form, which had a smaller market in Russia than novels in serialized form. Turgenev told the Goncourts that a book in Russia ‘brought in very little, 4,000 francs at the most’.¹⁹ He did better with complete editions of his works, of which three were published for the Russian market during the 1860s. For the first, in 1861, he received an advance of 8,000 roubles (32,000 francs), and he succeeded in negotiating higher fees for the later editions. But there were no other sources of income he could count on from his books. He earned almost nothing from abroad. While many of his works had been translated into foreign languages, he was not paid by publishers in countries that did not have a copyright agreement with Russia. Turgenev cursed the ‘robber publishers’ of these pirated editions of his works, not just because they deprived him of an income, but because they often made such bad translations that his literary reputation was damaged.²⁰ In the years to come he would become a campaigner for international copyright. But even in those countries, such as France, where bilateral copyright agreements with Russia were already in existence and should have been applied, publishers were slow or even failed completely to pay authors from abroad.

Overall, Turgenev had an annual income of about 10,000 roubles (40,000 francs), roughly half from his estates and half from his writing. It was a substantial sum for any gentleman, practically a fortune for any highbrow writer,* but not enough to keep up with the costs of his Baden house and the payments that he owed to Paulinette. Turgenev was constantly in debt. He sold off bits of land, nearly always cheaply because of his steward’s cheating and incompetence; mortgaged parts of his estate; and begged his publishers for loans on promises of delivering a manuscript. Money took a long time to come through from Russia, so he was forced to borrow from his friends to solve his problems of cashflow. Increasingly he borrowed from the Viardots. But still he could not raise enough to pay his daughter’s dowry; he even fell behind in paying Paulinette her allowance. Building work on his mansion slowed. Paying out his uncle was the final straw, leaving him so short of cash that he was forced to sell his Baden house to Louis Viardot – at a loss of 60,000 francs. When the building was finally completed, in April 1868, Turgenev moved into the house as a paying tenant of his friend.²¹

A pleasurable routine was established by Turgenev and the Viardots. ‘I am happy with my Baden life,’ Turgenev wrote to Botkin on 3 October 1863. ‘I have never felt as good as this before. I go hunting frequently – and work very little.’ He would write in the mornings, and break at lunch to spend the rest of the day with the Viardots, or go hunting with his gun dog Pegasus, who became well known and liked around Baden.²² There was a steady stream of visitors seeking his advice or help, or just wanting to meet him.

Louis had a peaceful existence. Now well into his sixties, he settled down in Baden to the quiet joys of scholarship. He wrote two books in these years: Espagne et les beaux-arts (1866), a collection of essays about art; and Apologie d’un incrédule (1867), a statement of his atheist philosophy, which distinguished him from both Turgenev (who was indifferent rather than opposed to religion) and Pauline (who was freethinking but never atheist). The only surviving statement Pauline made was in a letter to Julius Rietz in 1859:

I cannot propound any formula for my faith, but I have the firm conviction that the soul is immortal, and that all loves shall one day be united – the great loves, whatever their nature, provided that they have made themselves worthy of it … Do not laugh at me, dearest friend; I know no more about it than anybody else, and, above all, I cannot give a definite shape to my thoughts on a subject so difficult, so impossible to explain. All that I know is this – that there is within us all a divine spark which does not perish, and which will end in becoming a part of the great light.²³

The Apologie was written in the context of a Europe-wide debate about the divinity of Christ sparked in France by the publication of Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863), in which the philosopher had portrayed Jesus as a human and historical figure, whose godly status was created by his followers. Renan was a friend of Louis Viardot. In 1856, he had married Cornélie Scheffer, the niece of Ary Scheffer, which had brought him even closer to the Viardot circles. Written in a lively and accessible prose, his Vie de Jésus became a succès de scandale. It sold 168,000 copies in France by the end of 1864, and was soon translated into all the major European languages. The book’s success, according to Sainte-Beuve, was its appeal to what he called the ‘large and indecisive floating mass of minds’ – the religious disposition of most people in the nineteenth century who were ‘neither believing nor disbelieving’ in the Bible but accepted it as a source of moral values while they got on with the pursuit of their worldly happiness. Catholics attacked the book. Some Church leaders tried to get it banned. Others condemned its appearance as a mark of the decadent immorality of the Empire’s liberal culture and called for stricter censorship.²⁴

Viardot’s book was written largely to defend Renan, whose endorsement appears as a footnote to the text. ‘My dear friend,’ Renan wrote to him on 17 April 1867, ‘I have read your Apologie, which should not be called that, because the wise man has nothing to defend. It is an account of your own beliefs written not for others but yourself, and it strikes me as exact and rigorous.’ Like Renan, Viardot saw the divinity of Christ as a human invention. From the earliest times, mankind had needed divine myths to explain the universe, but science was now answering the questions of creation, argued Viardot, who maintained that Darwin’s theory of ‘auto-creation’ could equally apply to the cosmos: planets were not formed by God, but by the heat of their suns, which could also destroy them.²⁵

At the heart of Louis’s atheism was his belief in human agency. ‘It is not God that directs me, but my own liberty, my conscience,’ he concluded. This was the real message of his book, which, like Renan’s Vie de Jésus, was as much a statement of freedom – the liberty to question and reject religious orthodoxy – as an examination of the Bible’s claims. It was a defence of freedom of expression against Church and State.

Louis spent most of the day in his study, appearing only with the family at meals or sometimes to join Turgenev on hunting trips. Pauline was the busiest of the three. She filled the house with her various activities. Up by dawn, she would spend two hours with the children, teaching them Italian, music and drawing, before seeing her pupils.²⁶ Singers came from all around the world to study with the famous soprano, who charged twenty francs per hour for lessons. Pauline’s reputation as a teacher was consolidated by the publication of her L’École classique du chant, recommended by the Paris Conservatory, in 1863, which became a standard work.²⁷ Pauline’s pupils found her to be strict and demanding but generous with her time and always ready to help launch their careers by giving them advice and writing to her contacts in the music world. ‘She has something of the hussar in her character,’ noted the soprano Aglaja Orgeni, who started lessons with Pauline in May 1863. ‘She is dashing, strong-willed, frank in character, sometimes even blunt, and devoid of any sentimentality, but she has a good heart.’²⁸

In the afternoons Pauline received visitors, wrote letters, practised or composed music. Evenings belonged to family and friends. They were taken up with music-making, amateur theatricals, spoofs, charades and the portrait game, much as they had been at home in the rue de Douai and Courtavenel, only now such entertainments could take place every evening, because Pauline was no longer absent at the theatre. The Viardot household was almost wholly given over to the pursuit of pleasure and frivolity, according to the serious-minded Clara Schumann, who had bought a cottage near the Viardots in Lichtental to spend the summers with her seven children resting from her winter concert tours.²⁹

On Sunday afternoons Pauline hosted a musical salon in the concert hall to which she invited Baden’s high society. The Prussian queen, Augusta, an old friend of Pauline’s, was a regular at these concerts, often with her tone-deaf husband, King Wilhelm, later to become the German emperor, although their friendship with the Viardots, convinced republicans, was treated with discretion in the German press on instructions from the court.³⁰ The Queen of Holland, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden, the Russian Grand Duchess, Elena Pavlovna, even the French empress, Eugénie, came along to hear their host perform with Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Nikolai and Anton Rubinstein, among other musicians, including some of Pauline’s pupils, who were thus exposed to the experience of performing. Clara Schumann thought these concerts showed Pauline to be a snob. Reporting on the opening concert, in 1864, she complained to Brahms, who had just spent the first of several summers in a boarding house in Lichtental so as to be close to her:

Madame Viardot consecrated her Palace of Arts (as she calls it) the other day, and to the first ceremony she invited high society (the Queen of Prussia etc.), but she naturally did not want me; and afterwards she had a reception for the populace, for which I was considered good enough. The whole thing was not very dignified …³¹

Clara Schumann did not move in the same high circles as Pauline. Too poor to afford a house in Baden, she felt excluded from this society, and became resentful and jealous. Others saw the Viardot salon in more idealistic terms. Ludwig Pietsch, for one, believed it was a bold attempt ‘to realize the concept of a cosmopolitan society, uniting people of different national origins around the ideals of Art’.³²

The German writer Adelheid von Schorn recalls one of Pauline’s more informal musical salons where ‘everybody in her artistic circle was gathered’. In the middle of them all was Turgenev, suffering from gout and ‘lying in a big armchair, his bandaged leg stretched on a foot-rest … The striking white-haired figure of the writer was the focal point of this whole society.’³³

The move to Baden had allowed Turgenev to become a member of the Viardot household – practically a member of the family – in ways that had not been possible before. In Paris he could be no more than a visitor. People gossiped about his relations with Pauline, and few thought they were platonic. To avoid a scandal they had needed to maintain respectable appearances – probably the reason why Turgenev had gone away during her last pregnancy. But in Baden attitudes were more relaxed. Pauline was accepted in the highest circles there, despite her stage background, and was not subjected to the social snubs and insults endured by many singers in Paris. People came to Baden for pleasure. Great men were seen there with their mistresses. Courtesans like Cora Pearl, the famous English beauty, mistress to Charles de Morny, the half-brother of the emperor, lived in Baden in an opulent lifestyle. In this live-and-let-live town it was easier for Pauline and Turgenev to maintain their unconventional relationship. There was less gossip about them than there had been in Paris. The only sign of awkwardness, if that is what it is, comes from Pauline’s diary, in an entry for 23 July 1863, where she writes of being with Turgenev at a reception in the old castle given by the Grand Duke and Duchess of Baden. Pauline notes that Turgenev appears nervous, and that ‘there is always a certain discomfort with him [il y a toujours un certain gêne avec lui]’ at social gatherings – an observation she marked for deletion in the last years of her life, when she prepared her papers for posterity.³⁴

Turgenev and Pauline now lived more freely together, practically as man and wife, in a domestic setting with Louis. They were both in their forties, Turgenev forty-five and Pauline forty-two, when they settled in Baden, an age when they might expect an active sexual life, whereas Louis, at the age of sixty-three, was, as far as one can tell, happier with the pleasures of the mind than with those of the body. Turgenev made no effort to conceal his feelings for Pauline, nor the nature of their relationship from his visitors. Natalia Ostrovskaya, the wife of an old acquaintance of Turgenev, recalls visiting the writer at his house in 1863. Shown into a sparsely furnished room by his housekeeper, she waited for Turgenev, who had been called away by Madame Viardot. Seated by his writing desk, Ostrovskaya looked around the room: there were a painting on the wall, a portrait drawing just above his desk, a framed photograph and bronze bust on it – all of Pauline Viardot.³⁵

Pauline’s children were not all aware of Turgenev’s true relationship with their mother, who confessed her feelings for him only to her diary.* Paul, the youngest, who was only six years old when the family moved to Baden, thought of him as his mother’s friend. But the eldest, Louise, in her early twenties, was bitterly resentful of his constant presence in her family. Headstrong and judgemental, she had felt neglected by her mother since childhood and argued with her frequently. Soon after their arrival in Baden, Louise married Ernest Héritte, a French diplomat in Berne, and departed with him for the Cape Colony in southern Africa, where he took up a new post.³⁶

Turgenev was particularly fond of Pauline’s second daughter, Claudie, or ‘Didie’, who at that time was entering her teenage years. A vivacious beauty with a striking resemblance to her mother, she was affectionate, even flirtatious with Turgenev, who lavished her with feelings of paternal affection he had never shown to his own daughter. Whereas Claudie had a talent for painting and spoke several languages, Paulinette was an ordinary girl. ‘I have nothing in common with my daughter,’ he wrote to Countess Lambert; ‘she likes neither music nor poetry nor nature – not even dogs – and these are the only things I love.’³⁷

Louis took a benevolent view of Turgenev’s involvement with his children. He had always played an unassuming part in the household. But there were moments when he suffered from a sense that his own role as a father and a husband had been usurped by his friend. In November 1865, Louis wrote a letter to Pauline assuring her that he had never once suspected her of anything unworthy of herself, but warning nonetheless that gossip had arisen from certain ‘appearances’. A little prudence was thus necessary. Without naming Turgenev, Louis then expressed his own regret at feeling far too often – when it came to conversations about music, for example, or even to relations with the children – that the role he ought to occupy had been occupied by someone else.³⁸

2

The 1860s were the heyday of the Continental spa. Only twenty years before, Europe’s best-known mineral spas – Vichy, Plombières, Aix-les-Bains, Bad Ems, Davos – had been simple rural places frequented only by the aristocracy and Europe’s royals, whose need for cures was reinforced by their tendency to eat and drink too much. The railways opened up the spas to the bourgeoisie and professional classes, fattened by prosperity. Their new money fuelled the growth of luxury hotels, casinos, theatres, restaurants, high-class brothels and other entertainments in these health resorts. Connection to a railway was the surest guarantee of popularity: new spa towns such as Karlsbad and Semmering were made by their location on a major line, while old ones such as Plombières and Vichy were revived by the arrival of branch lines. By the 1870s, the railways had connected the great spas of Europe in a network of resorts with the same type of pleasure culture in each place.³⁹

Light music was everywhere. It was played by the spa orchestra, morning, noon and night, in bandstands and pavilions; by chamber groups and ensembles in concert rooms; by pianists and singers in cafés and restaurants. There was no escaping it.

Strauss II was omnipresent in spa towns. His dance music was the soundtrack of society at play. Johann Strauss I had conquered Europe with his waltzes, beginning in Vienna during the 1820s. His orchestra would pack the Sperl, the city’s biggest dance hall. Because the waltz required body contact between the dancers, it was attacked by defenders of morality, but it was its sexual danger (memorably described by Flaubert in the waltz scene of Madame Bovary) that gave the dance its popularity. All the Strauss family were involved in this music business – Johann and his wife Anna, as well as their three sons, Johann, Josef and Eduard. They exported the ‘waltz craze’ into Germany, the Low Countries, France and Britain through their tours in the 1830s and 1840s. After the death of Johann Strauss I, in 1849, the family business was taken over by his eldest son, Johann Strauss II, then aged twenty-four, who led it to new heights of international fame. His orchestra was wanted everywhere – in dance halls and casinos, cafés, restaurants, and pleasure gardens like the Vienna Volksgarten. By the 1850s, the Strauss business had 200 employees, including music copyists, coach drivers and bookkeepers. It was a sophisticated company with clever strategies of marketing and publicity. Strauss II, for example, who composed only waltzes until the age of forty-four, would give them topical names and themes or add gimmicks to help them ‘catch on’ with a public always keen for novelty. New technologies inspired many of his tunes: ‘Telegraphische Depeschen’ (1858) mimicked the sounds of the telegraph machine; while ‘Accelerationen’ (1860), composed for the Engineering Students Ball, had its waltz theme speed up like a train. Strauss assumed control of every aspect of the family business. Having fallen out with his music publisher, Carl Haslinger, for instance, he set up as a publisher himself.⁴⁰

In 1853, Strauss broke down from exhaustion. Handing over control of the business to his brothers, he went to the spa at Bad Gastein to recover. While he was there he was approached by a Russian businessman, the new director of the Tsarskoe Selo Railway Company, who offered him a lucrative contract at the summer resort of Pavlovsk, near St Petersburg. The company hoped to boost its traffic by offering day-trippers the attraction of Strauss concerts in the ‘Vauxhall Pavilion’, named after the Vauxhall Gardens in London, a public entertainment space dating back to the seventeenth century, on which many nineteenth-century spa towns would be based (Spa in Belgium had its own Waux-hall for concerts and balls). In Pavlovsk the Vauxhall Pavilion served both as the railway station and as the entrance to the park (hence the derivation of the Russian word ‘vokzal’ for a station). The concerts took place every evening between May and September, and went on for many years. They proved extremely popular, producing a booming trade for the railway. Strauss would bring the concerts to an abrupt halt when the last train to St Petersburg sounded its whistle, although there were some occasions when the audience refused to leave and urged the band to play on.⁴¹

Strauss toured widely in Europe. He made good use of the railways to circulate around the spa resorts of the German-speaking lands, which were an important market for his orchestra. For many years he did a summer season at Baden, where he had a grand villa. A compulsive gambler, he was frequently seen in the casino, often losing badly yet undeterred. Brahms was a great admirer of Strauss’s music. The two men met in Baden in 1862 when they were introduced by Richard Pohl, the music critic and editor of the Badenblätter, the town’s newspaper. Strauss’s presence in Baden was, along with Clara Schumann, a major draw for Brahms, who spent several summers there, renting rooms in a boarding house in Lichtental. In the evenings he would walk to the spa’s park to hear Strauss’s orchestra.⁴² His own interest in dance music was influenced by Strauss. The sixteen Waltzes Op. 39 were composed in 1865, the Liebeslieder waltzes (Op. 59) in 1868, while the Hungarian Dances date from 1869.

Strauss and Brahms in the spa town of Ischl, Austria, 1894.

Strauss’s influence was ubiquitous. His waltzes were the main attraction in the dance fever that swept Europe. In Paris dancers flocked to the Jardin Mabille, which reached the height of its popularity in the 1860s. It was a place for tourists to meet prostitutes and watch the high kicks of the cancan dancers, who in those days did not wear underskirts.⁴³ Dance music was also dominant at venues like the Jardin Turc, a café in the Marais district with a music garden decorated in the Chinese style, confusingly, where the dashing young conductor Louis-Antoine Jullien (he wore white gloves and used a jewelled baton) had established a tradition of popular orchestral concerts of polkas and quadrilles accompanied by fireworks, cannon fire, light shows, and so on. It was a winning combination, largely copied from his friend Philippe Musard, which Jullien then exported to London as the basis of his promenade concerts – visually spectacular events with huge orchestras, military bands and choirs that attracted thousands from the ‘one-shilling public’ (the lower-middle and artisan classes) to pleasure parks and gardens such as Vauxhall and Cremorne or the Surrey Zoological Gardens.

Jullien’s concerts were part of a revolution in the middle decades of the nineteenth century: the appearance of a popular-music industry. Throughout Europe a new breed of entrepreneur-conductors and composers were responding to a growing demand for entertainment music. Jullien and Musard in Paris and London, Strauss in Vienna, Josef Gung’l in Berlin and Munich, Hans-Christian Lumbye (the ‘Strauss of the North’) in Copenhagen, Joseph Labitzky in Karlsbad – all churned out waltzes, polkas and quadrilles.⁴⁴ There were commercial openings for light music everywhere. Paris had the concerts populaires, cheap Sunday concerts in the vast rotunda of the Cirque d’Hiver given by the orchestra of Jules Pasdeloup from 1861, where a new audience was introduced to the popular classics. A more eclectic mix of music – from chansons to opera medleys – could be heard at the café-concerts, which became popular in the 1850s and 1860s, when the development of the great boulevards by Baron Haussmann attracted crowds in search of entertainment in the evenings. Cafés opened on all the main boulevards. They drew the most varied crowd, from gentlemen in top hats with their wives in crinolines to foreign visitors and a new class of prostitutes, according to the Goncourts, who noted in their journal in 1864 that Paris whores were ‘now seated underneath the gas-lights at the tables in the boulevard cafés’.⁴⁵ The main attraction of the café-concert was that members of the audience were allowed to smoke and drink. There was no entry charge, but prices were raised on concert nights and waiters went round the tables pressing customers to order more. The singers and musicians were paid a performance royalty (5–6 per cent of earnings) regulated and collected by their union, the Syndicat des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Éditeurs de Musique. Most were street musicians but some came from the opera and operetta houses – they were either out of work or moonlighting – for high fees could be earned by star performers capable of bringing in a crowd.⁴⁶

No star was bigger than Thérésa – the stage name adopted by Emma Valladon sometime around 1863 when she emerged from the popular theatres and cafés of the boulevard du Temple and started singing chansons at the newly opened Café Eldorado for 200 francs a month. She was soon lured away by Arsène Goubert, the owner of the rival Café Alcazar, who paid her 300 francs a month. Soon the whole of Paris was coming to see her. ‘She is a big woman with a good-natured air, completely natural, with an incisive voice that allows her to express clearly the meaning of the words she is singing,’ wrote Henri Dabot, who heard her sing at the Alcazar in 1865. Her repertoire was not obscene but some of her comic songs – most famously her ‘Rien n’est sacré pour un sapeur!’ (Nothing’s Sacred for a Sapper) – were full of sexual innuendoes which she communicated through her body language, acting and expression in her voice (a performance captured by Degas in a series of paintings in the 1870s (see Plate 17)).⁴⁷

Until 1867, café-concerts were forbidden by French law to imitate theatres. They could not have a stage, or singers dressed as actors, and they had to start at an earlier time than the theatres. But from 1864, when theatres were released from state control, the rules for café-concerts were liberalized, allowing them to become more like theatres, vaudevilles or music halls. The Goncourt brothers described the Eldorado at this time:

A large circular auditorium with two rows of boxes, decorated with gilt and imitation marble; dazzling chandeliers; a café inside, black with men’s hats; bonnets of women from the barrières [outlying districts]; soldiers, children with caps; a few hats of prostitutes accompanied by shop assistants; a few pink ribbons in the boxes; the visible breath of all these people, a cloud of dust and tobacco smoke.

At the back a stage with footlights: on it a comedian in evening dress. He sang ditties interspersed with farmyard noises, the sounds of animals on heat, and with epileptic gesticulations – a Saint Vitus’s dance of idiocy. The audience was delirious with excitement.⁴⁸

Another well-known vaudeville, the Bataclan (1864), began as a café-concert in the chinoiserie style made popular by the French campaign in Indochina between 1858 and 1862, but with acrobats and jugglers it gradually moved from concerts into vaudevilles. The Folies Bergère (1869) took a different route. It charged an admission fee, as in a theatre, but allowed customers to drink inside (hence Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère), and to come and go at any time, as they might at a café-concert, where there was no entrance fee. The offering at the Folies Bergère was a mix of comic operettas, popular songs, dancing girls and acrobats. Although it catered to a mainly bourgeois public, it offered them a taste for the demi-monde of the music hall. Widely imitated in the 1870s, this hybrid form of entertainment, known as ‘théâtre promenoirs’, marked the start of the sex industry around Pigalle, a few streets away from the Viardots’ house in the rue de Douai. The bargirls at the Folies Bergère were also prostitutes, who would openly approach the men and haggle with them over their prices.⁴⁹

The commercial-music industry developed just as quickly in Britain. The London music halls evolved in a similar manner to the Parisian vaudevilles, although most had started out as saloon bars or entertainment rooms at the back of a pub so that drinking could be carried on. For a small admission fee or higher price for drinks, customers were entertained with songs, comedy and a wide variety of ‘speciality acts’, from sword-swallowing to drag artists. The Canterbury Hall (1852), the first tavern music hall with 700 seats, was converted by its owner, Charles Morton, from a skittle alley. Resembling a café-concert with seating around tables, it specialized in operetta numbers and ballads. It was so successful that it was replaced by a hall twice its size in 1856 with a grand entrance and staircase ascending to a bar on the upper floor. Encouraged by his success, Morton opened the Oxford Music Hall, a huge entertainment complex with a combined music hall and tavern on the site of a demolished public house on Oxford Street. ‘The great gay glaring hall and balconies were crammed in every part,’ noted Arthur Munby, who visited the newly opened music hall in 1862; ‘there was barely standing room in the crowd, which was chiefly made up of men; business men, clerks, & others, of no very refined aspect.’

Socially speaking, the audience were a good deal higher than those I have seen in similar Halls at Islington and elsewhere. One result of this was that the women present were whores, instead of respectable wives & sweethearts. Therefore another result was that there was nothing wholesome or genial in the folks’ enjoyment: they drank their grog staring gloomily or lewdly grimacing; and the worthless dread of your neighbour which half-educated respectability creates kept them silent and selfish.

Such grim excitements counted as pleasure in Britain, where 400 music halls were opened in provincial towns during the 1860s.⁵⁰

Music publishers played an important part in the development of this entertainment industry. The 1860s saw the introduction of faster mechanical lithographic presses able for the first time to combine words and music in one printing. It was a breakthrough for the sheet music business, enabling publishers to produce cheap but quality editions of classic works and popular arrangements of songs and ballads in print-runs of tens and hundreds of thousands. Most of the biggest publishers organized or sponsored concerts to promote their sheet music. Novello was among the first. Inspired by its success at the Handel Festival in 1859, Novello launched a series of one-shilling choral and orchestral concerts, where its popular editions and arrangements could be cheaply bought. The publishers Chappell and Cramer co-financed the building of the St James Concert Hall in Piccadilly (1858), where they sold sheet music and instruments at ‘Pops’ concerts. Boosey launched its Ballad Concerts in the St James Hall. The company had realized that its biggest profits came from the sale of sheet music for the sort of ballads sung in music halls, and had begun to focus its activities on these ballads. To promote its songs Boosey engaged famous singers for such concerts. Large amounts of money could be made on the ballad concert circuit, especially by women, for female-voice arrangements were by far the largest market for ballads.

One of the most successful performers was Antoinette Sterling, an American who studied with both Pauline Viardot in Baden and with her brother, Manuel Garcia, in London during the 1860s. Sterling made a fortune by opting for a royalty on sales of the sheet music she had promoted instead of a flat fee for her concert appearance, as most other singers had been paid. Boosey was the first to encourage the royalty system as a way of sharing publication risks with the singers, as well as giving them an interest in promoting its music by performing in as many concerts as they could. Sterling’s earnings from her royalties were modest to begin with, but she struck gold when she promoted ‘The Lost Chord’ (1877), the sentimental and pious ballad by Arthur Sullivan, which sold half a million copies in its first quarter of a century. With a royalty of 6d (sixty-two centimes) for each sale, Sterling earned £12,500 (315,000 francs), or £500 per year, from this one song alone.⁵¹

3

The move to Baden allowed Pauline to spend more time composing. She had been writing songs and chamber music since the 1830s but she now turned her hand to other forms, writing operettas with Turgenev for her pupils to perform in the theatre they were building in the garden of his house. Turgenev had been sketching the libretto of an operetta, Le Dernier Sorcier, since 1859. The plot is very silly, even by the standards of an opéra bouffe. It involves Krakamiche, an old and once-powerful sorcerer now deprived of his magic, whose presence in the forest has upset the woodland elves; there is a romance between his daughter, Stella, and Prince Stelio, whose marriage comes about through the intervention of the Queen of the Elves. Full of humour and satire, the operetta followed in a long tradition of home entertainment at the Viardots’ – amateur theatricals, charades and spoofs – where Pauline and Turgenev indulged their love of childish fun (Louis was too stiff and serious to participate and usually retreated to his study).*

The first performance of Le Dernier Sorcier, in Turgenev’s villa in Baden, 20 September 1867. Drawing by Ludwig Pietsch.

The first performance of Le Dernier Sorcier took place on 20 September 1867 before invited friends in the completed but still unoccupied Villa Turgenev. Lanterns in the driveway guided guests towards the brightly illuminated entrance-hall, from which they entered the salon, where, as Ludwig Pietsch described it, ‘a plain green curtain pinned against the wall and surmounted by oleander branches’ defined the stage area. Around the stage the thirty guests were seated in chairs and armchairs, informally arranged, and there was a piano, where Pauline took her place. As she played the overture, the curtains parted to reveal the set: ‘flower-pots and oleander trees represent a forest and the windowed cardboard wall in the corner represents the [sorcerer’s] ruined hut.’ Louis Pomey played the role of Krakamiche, although for a gala performance in October, when the Prussian king attended, the sorcerer was played by Turgenev. ‘I did not sing, I hasten to say, but only acted, and not as badly as might have been expected,’ he explained to Annenkov. ‘The guests enjoyed the speech of Krakamiche and understood it as a parody of His Imperial Highness Napoleon III, which brought forth heavy laughter from King William.’ Pauline’s pupil Marie Hasselmans sang the part of Stella – one of the aims of the operettas being to provide her students with the experience of performing for an audience. But the stars of the production were the three youngest children of Pauline – the fifteen-year-old Claudie as the Queen of the Elves, Marianne (thirteen) as the main elf, and Paul (ten) as Krakamiche’s servant, Prelimpinpin. Their involvement gave the operetta the informal atmosphere of a family theatrical, from which its charm derived. At the centre was Pauline, not just the composer, but piano-orchestra, conductor and stage manager. ‘My mother,’ recalled Paul, ‘accompanied on the piano, supervised everything, ran into the wings in the intermissions to re-attach a fairy wing or fasten a pin.’

After the performance a supper invariably consisting of cold meats and potato salad was offered to the performers. The supper took place in our house and the entire length of the two gardens had to be crossed; these nocturnal processions, with everyone still in costume, were not the least picturesque aspect of those memorable evenings.⁵²

There were other Viardot–Turgenev operettas – Trop de Femmes, L’Ogre (with Turgenev in the title role) and Le Miroir – all performed in the Thiergarten Theatre in Turgenev’s garden in 1868–9. But none was as successful as Le Dernier Sorcier, which had two seasons of performances before receiving its public premiere at the Weimar Court Theatre on 8 April 1869, the birthday of Princess Sophie, the Grand Duchess consort of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (in Weimar there was a long tradition of celebrating the birthdays of the Grand Ducal couple with festival performances of operas and plays in the Court Theatre).⁵³ The European press had picked up on its success. One of the invited guests at a performance in the Thiergarten Theatre was Sextius Durand, a correspondent of La France musicale, who told its readers that the operetta was ‘worth a hundred times more than those you see in our Paris theatres’. Turgenev was delighted. His starting point had been his admiration for Jacques Offenbach, whose opéras bouffes he had seen many times. He adored their humour and satire. Since his first trip to Paris, in 1845, Turgenev had been a devotee of the boulevard theatres. He was often to be seen at the Variety or the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. Pauline shared his enthusiasm for Offenbach. She had been going to the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, the composer’s own theatre, since the 1850s, many times accompanied by Turgenev. Louis did not go with them. The bouffes were not his sort of thing. So this was an interest that Turgenev could embrace, knowing that it would unite him with Pauline in an artistic marriage of their own. ‘“Vive Offenbach!”,’ he had written to Pauline after a performance of La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein at the Variety Theatre in Paris. ‘Viardot will crush me with contempt but I must confess that I was enormously amused … The humour and high spirits are stunning.’⁵⁴

Offenbach was a regular visitor to the spas of Bad Ems and Baden, only 250 kilometres apart, where he cut a dandyish figure in yellow trousers and waistcoat, light-blue velvet coat, grey gloves and grey hat. He spent most of his spare time in the casino, but came at least on two occasions to the Viardot villa, once for a performance of Le Dernier Sorcier, which he enjoyed.⁵⁵ He had started going to Bad Ems for his rheumatism in 1858, but liked it there so much, apart from his wife and family, free to work and visit the casino and his mistresses, that he spent in all ten seasons there (he once quipped in the curious Franco-German jargon he had made his own that he would have been as rich as Meyerbeer had it not been for his three passions: ‘le cigare, la femme, und dann noch un peu le jeu!’). Offenbach’s operettas were the cultural highlight of the summer season at Bad Ems, and many people went there because of them alone. In 1863, a bonanza year, he had ten operettas playing at Bad Ems, including Lischen et Fritzchen, which became a big commercial hit with its best-loved tune, ‘Je suis Alsacienne, je suis Alsacien’, being sung by everyone. The story goes that Offenbach composed the whole operetta in a week to win a bet.⁵⁶

Jacques Offenbach, c. 1870.

The cosmopolitan atmosphere of the spa towns attracted Offenbach. A Jew from Cologne, born in 1819, the year of the last great pogrom in nineteenth-century Germany, Offenbach had made his home in France. His composition style was an eclectic mix of influences from Mozart and Rossini, French comic opera, the cancan and dance music of many nationalities. The course of Offenbach’s career had zig-zagged to avoid obstacles posed by anti-Semitism, which he encountered even at the height of his success. Cartoons emphasized his Jewishness by giving him an elongated crooked nose, and many critics followed Wagner’s lead in characterizing his ‘commercial’ music as ‘Jewish’.⁵⁷ According to the Goncourts, the journalist Ernest Daudet liked to say that Offenbach was ‘the worst type of Jew’ because he kept his wife on ‘the small change that tumbled from his pockets’ while he lived the life of a bon vivant.⁵⁸

The young Jakob (as he was known in Germany) had been drawn to France because of its greater liberties for Jews. Trained at the Conservatory, Offenbach had soon made a name for himself in the salons, dance venues and comédie en vaudeville theatres of Paris with his light dance music and burlesque skits during the 1840s. But what he really wanted was to write for the Opéra-Comique, the stage on which the works of Auber, Adam and Donizetti had been premiered. For several years, he lobbied its director, but no commission came, so he worked as a composer at the Comédie-Française. In desperate financial straits, in 1854 he considered emigrating to America. But then he thought ‘of starting a musical theatre myself’:

I said to myself that the Opéra-Comique was no longer the home of comic opera, and that the idea of really gay, cheerful, witty music – in short the idea of music with life in it – was gradually being forgotten. The composers who wrote for the Opéra-Comique wrote little grand operas. I felt sure that there was something that could be done by the young musicians who, like myself, were being kept waiting in idleness outside the portals of the lyrical theatre.⁵⁹

A precedent had been set already by Hervé (the theatre name of Florimond Ronger). Hervé had established his own theatre on the boulevard du Temple in 1854, where he staged his one-act comic operettas (he called them Folies concertantes).* He commissioned one by Offenbach, a nonsense piece, Oyayaye, ou La Reine des îles, about a double-bass player (played by Hervé), shipwrecked on a cannibal island, who escapes from the cannibals by sailing off on his double bass. Encouraged by this success, Offenbach secured the lease on the Salle Lacaze, an abandoned theatre on the Champs Élysées opposite the entrance to the Exposition Universelle, which had only just opened when the theatre began business on 5 July 1855. The Salle Lacaze was tiny but sumptuously furnished with velvet chairs, which made it appear rather princely to the bourgeois public that frequented it. The theatre was largely financed by the editor of Le Figaro, Hippolyte de Villemessant, who had taken over the newspaper in 1854, the year he befriended Offenbach, filling it with lively stories, anecdotes and gossip to attract the same public Offenbach was entertaining with his opéras bouffes. Villemessant invested in the theatre and promoted it in Le Figaro.⁶⁰

The Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens opened with Offenbach conducting four of his own opéras bouffes, one-act satirical farces. The Salle Lacaze was packed to the rafters. A significant proportion of the audience was made up of foreign tourists and visitors to the Exposition who wanted entertainment in the evenings. But many others came from the banlieues: they could travel into Paris for an evening on the new suburban trains to join the promenaders on the boulevards.

Offenbach appealed to the subversive humour of the boulevard. He poked fun at pomposity, hypocrisy and false sanctity – all easy targets in Second Empire France. He had no shortage of subjects. In a society where money could be quickly made and quickly lost through speculations on the stock market there were ample opportunities for satire, and Offenbach exploited most of them. Many of his plots revolve around fortunes being made, only to be lost again. They show people spending money without care, losing themselves in luxury and pleasure, living for today because they know that what they gained from speculation might disappear tomorrow as easily as it had come yesterday.

Offenbach himself was on the run from creditors when he wrote his first full-length operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld (1858). A subversive parody of Greek mythology, it used the Orpheus story to show the gods behaving badly, subject to the same lusts, jealousies and intrigues as humans. Orpheus and Eurydice are not star-crossed lovers but a nagging married couple. Jupiter is shown making love to girls in the presence of his jealous wife. The other gods all follow his example, putting on a semblance of correct behaviour when Public Opinion, a character-narrator introduced by Offenbach to represent the Greek chorus, appears in the interests of Morality. In the end Public Opinion is dismissed by Jupiter, and the gods descend to Hell in a Bacchanalian orgy dancing the ‘Infernal Gallop’ or music hall cancan.

The plot suggests that Offenbach intended Orpheus in the Underworld as a satire on Napoleon III (Jupiter) and his cronies (all the other gods), but this passed unnoticed on the opening night. Although the reviews were good, early ticket sales were disappointing. Offenbach was afraid he would have to close after only eighty performances. But fortune struck in the form of Jules Janin, the emperor of the critics, who six weeks after its first night reviewed Orpheus in the Journal des débats. Normally in favour of Offenbach, he was mildly critical of it. Offenbach saw his chance to stir up controversy: he published a provocative letter to Janin in Le Figaro in which he defended his play. Janin took the bait, responding with a tirade against Orpheus as the profanation of ‘holy and glorious antiquity’, and denouncing it as ‘blasphemous’. That was just what Offenbach had needed to revive his struggling show. To be denounced by the pedantic Janin was the best possible publicity. Attendance rose at once, the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens was packed out every night, takings increased to 60,000 francs a month, and, instead of closing after eighty, Orpheus went on playing for 228 consecutive performances. Its dance music was heard everywhere, from the Jardin Mabille to suburban taverns, even by the barrel-organ players in the street. Finally the production closed, but in April 1860 it was staged again at a gala evening at the Théâtre-Italien. Ironically, Napoleon III had agreed to be present on the sole condition that Orpheus was performed. For this one performance Offenbach received 22,000 francs, a bronze sculpture from the Tuileries as a gift from the emperor, and a note of thanks from His Imperial Majesty for an ‘unforgettable evening’.⁶¹

Orpheus in the Underworld proved so successful, touring all over Europe, that it became a model for all the fifty operettas composed subsequently by Offenbach. Money, sex and war are the constant subjects of his parodies. In La Belle Hélène (1864), performed 700 times in Paris alone, he retold the story of Helen of Troy’s elopement with Paris in a contemporary setting. Helen is presented as a fashionable woman of society who runs off with the handsome Paris because she is bored; she does not care what people think, nor about the consequences of her behaviour, as long as she enjoys herself. As the chorus sings when the lovers are together,

Il faut bien que l’on s’amuse,

Qu’on se donne du bon temps,

Et que de la vie on use

Jusqu’à trente ou soixante ans!

La la la la la la la la …⁶²

[We must have fun,

Have a good time,

And in life spend on it

Up to thirty, sixty years!

La la la la la la la la]

In La Vie parisienne (1866) the object of his satire shifted to the present, and in a sense to the audience itself, in so far as he made fun of tourists in Paris. The operetta starts in the Gare du Nord (only just completed in 1864) and follows the adventures of the Goldremarcks, a Swedish baron and his wife, who, like other tourists from around the world, have come to taste the pleasures of ‘gay Paree’. The Baron longs to drink champagne with courtesans, the Baroness to see the star singers of the city’s opera houses and cafés:

Je veux, moi, dans la capitale

Voir les divas qui font fureur,

Voir la Patti dans Don Pasquale,

Et Thérésa dans Le Sapeur!

[As for me, in the capital

I want to see the divas who are all the rage,

To see Patti in Don Pasquale,

And Thérésa in The Sapper!]

And throughout the chorus sings:

Du plaisir à perdre haleine

Oui voilà la vie parisienne!⁶³

[To let pleasure take your breath away

Yes that is the Paris life!]

By 1867, when the world came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, the opéras bouffes of Offenbach had not only become one of the city’s main attractions for foreign visitors; they were among its biggest exports to Europe and beyond. London, Brussels, Frankfurt, Vienna and Budapest – all were swept up by the craze for Offenbach. The composer was on constant tour, delivering the scores, collecting royalties, helping with productions of his works. In 1867, La Belle Hélène played across the Continent, from Constantinople to St Petersburg; it made its debut in the United States, Japan, Indochina and Australia. The age of global entertainment had begun.

4

Paris, hôtel Byron,

Saturday, 15 June 1867, 8 a.m.

My Dear Madame Viardot, at 5 o’clock precisely we pulled into the station; at 6 I was installed in a room where I can hardly move about; and at 7 I took a bath … for it has to be admitted, only Paris can afford you such comforts.⁶⁴

Turgenev came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle on the Champ de Mars. He set off there after finishing his bath. The gigantic exhibition hall, an oval-shaped complex of six concentric galleries, the outer almost two kilometres in length, was filled with machines of every kind and dimension, their noise drowning out the hubbub of the crowd, steam from their engines billowing to the glass ceiling. After a few hours of walking through the galleries, Turgenev was worn out. ‘My feet could not go any farther,’ he reported to Pauline, ‘I was utterly bewildered by this chaos [tohu-bohu] of machines, furniture, diamonds, emeralds as big as melons, drapery of every colour, crystals, weapons, palaces, kiosks, pottery, porcelain, horses, dogs, paintings, statues, Chinese men and women, signs, waterclosets (I entered them four times) … etc. etc.’⁶⁵

Turgenev was only really interested in the paintings, which he returned to inspect the next day. He was full of praise for the fourteen pictures by Meissonier (‘certainly at present the finest painter in the world’), a view we may now ridicule (Meissonier has been out of fashion for at least a hundred years) but one shared by the crowds that swarmed in front of them. He was also disappointed that he did not have the money to buy a ‘lovely landscape’ by the Bavarian painter Karl von Piloty (another artist seen as staggeringly bad today).⁶⁶ He did not even visit Édouard Manet’s one-man show. More than fifty of his paintings were displayed in a pavilion he had had constructed in the avenue d’Alma, opposite one of the entrances to the Exposition Universelle, just as Courbet had done in 1855. Although Turgenev was a friend and literary ally of the young Émile Zola, a champion of Manet’s art, Turgenev’s tastes in painting were more conservative.

For Napoleon III the Exposition was an opportunity to display to the world the splendour of his newly renovated capital. Baron Haussmann had been given extra funds to make sure his main building projects – a network of grand boulevards, railway termini, blocks of uniform apartment buildings, squares, parks and gardens, a sewage system and underground pipes for street gaslights – were ready for the Exposition’s opening on 1 April. The old Paris of narrow streets was largely demolished; the labouring classes who had lived there were priced out of the centre by new property development. The city was barely recognizable to those who had been away for a few years. Turgenev, who was one of them, thought Paris had become bigger, grander, so that even with a million visitors for the Exposition Universelle, it ‘felt no more crowded’ than he remembered it.⁶⁷

Haussmann’s Paris became a model for renovation projects in other capitals during the 1860s: the Ringstrasse in Vienna, Hobrecht’s plan for the rebuilding of Berlin, Cerdà’s Barcelona Plan, the Lindhagen project in Stockholm, the ‘Radial road’ and boulevards in Budapest, the redesign of Brussels, Cairo with its boulevards and parks constructed under Ismail Pasha – all were inspired, more or less, by the example set by the French capital.⁶⁸ Haussmann’s Paris gave them the idea of what a city ought to be.

Haussmann often emphasized that the city he was building did not belong to Parisians, alone: it was to be an international capital, belonging equally to the people of the French Empire and to foreign visitors, who could get to it by rail from every corner of the Continent. ‘Paris is a capital of consumption, a huge workshop, an arena for ambitions, a rendezvous for pleasure,’ Haussmann told a banquet of financiers.⁶⁹

The idea of Paris as a market-place for pleasure had long been part of its identity. But it became central to the city’s image from the 1860s, when Haussmann’s engineering created new commercial spaces on the boulevards – restaurants, cafés, shops and galleries, vaudevilles and theatres – specifically for enjoyment. Cherished and promoted by Parisians, the cult of Paris as a capital of pleasure was a valuable propaganda tool for its tourist industry. There were books to guide visitors to the city’s grand hotels, department stores and shopping galleries, theatres, racecourses, even night clubs and brothels; they all assured their readers that it was the greatest pleasure city in the world. As Alfred Delvau wrote in his guide for tourists, Les Plaisirs de Paris, published just in time for the Exposition Universelle in 1867,

People can say anything about Paris, but not that it is a dull town. It is, on the contrary, a capital of pleasure and with greater pleasures than in any other town; nowhere else can a man enjoy himself as much and in so many varied ways, and whoever cannot find amusement is a man who does not know how to look for it.

This was the Paris of the flâneur – the idle stroller and anonymous spectator on the crowded boulevard, for whom, in the words of Baudelaire, it was ‘an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement … the fugitive and the infinite’.⁷⁰ To sit in a café and watch the passers-by was a pleasure in itself.

Paris was a flurry of parties, balls and receptions for dignitaries, who came from all around the world for the opening of the Exposition Universelle. The hotels were overfilled, and many, like Turgenev, were installed in tiny rooms. Cafés, restaurants, night clubs, brothels worked around the clock and theatres doubled their performances to keep the tourists entertained: the Vaudeville revived its biggest recent hit, La Dame aux camélias; the Opéra gave the premiere of Verdi’s Don Carlos; the Théâtre Lyrique offered Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet. Meanwhile, on 12 April, Offenbach’s La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein received its premiere at the Variety Theatre with the star Hortense Schneider in its title role.

On his first evening in Paris, Turgenev went to see the operetta with some friends. He loved its energy and comic satire against war. La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein was the biggest theatrical attraction during the Exposition Universelle, earning over 5,000 francs per night in ticket sales (by the time its first run ended on 30 November, it had received 200 performances and earned 870,000 francs).⁷¹ As a parody of petty royal power, the operetta had run into trouble with the French censors, who saw in its libretto references to Bismarck, the Romanovs and the Spanish queen, Isabella, and, not least, a satiric portrait of Napoleon III and his court; but once the action was removed to the relatively distant eighteenth century, it was free to go ahead. All the royal heads of state visiting the Paris Exposition went to see the opéra bouffe. The French emperor saw it on 24 April, and was seen to ‘laugh and smile, but also to wind the tips of his mustache – ever the sign of his perplexity’. Tsar Alexander II, informed that the court of Gerolstein was a parody of Catherine the Great, telegraphed ahead from Germany to his ambassador in Paris to reserve a seat for him so that he could check on it himself. Bismarck saw the operetta shortly afterwards, understood it as a parody of petty German kings, and found it very amusing. ‘That is right! That is exactly how it is,’ he was reported as saying. ‘We are getting rid of the Gerolsteins, there will soon be none left. I am grateful to your Parisian artistes for showing the world how ridiculous they were.’⁷²

The sharpest edge of Offenbach’s satire was pointed at the stupidity of military generals pushing kings to needless wars. The message was timely. Tensions between France and Prussia were rising steadily. Prussia’s military defeat of Austria in 1866 had destabilized the European balance of power, according to the French, who feared the rise of a united Germany under Prussian leadership. In April 1867, the constitution of a North German Confederation was adopted by twenty-two previously independent states, some of which had been annexed by the Prussians following their victory against the Austrians. Bismarck, the Minister President of Prussia, became the Confederation’s Chancellor. The arrival of the Prussian king in Paris (‘without his army’, as Mérimée observed sarcastically in a letter to Turgenev) suggested that the threat of war had receded for the time being. But it had not gone away. ‘If war breaks out, it will be terrible – and no one knows where or how it will end,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline from St Petersburg, where he had made a short trip in April. ‘Let us hope that we shall not hear the cannon in Baden.’⁷³

Along with La Grande-Duchesse de Gérolstein, the biggest cultural event at the Paris Exposition was the instant hit of Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’ (‘An der schönen blauen Donau’, to give the waltz its proper Geman name). When it had been first performed in Vienna in February, the waltz had flopped, receiving only one encore. The problem had been the chorus, which Strauss had included in this original version: its song about the river protecting the Austrians was too close to the bone after their defeat by Prussia. But the melody was good, and Strauss was persuaded to rewrite it in a purely orchestral version for Paris, where Emperor Franz Joseph would host a ball at the Austrian Embassy. The Austrians were interested in closer relations with the French to secure their influence in the southern German states and stop the progress of their common Prussian enemy. They were also keen to restore something of their national pride by promoting Strauss at this glittering international ball. The embassy ballroom and adjoining garden were decked out in white and gold satin, the candelabras filled with flowers in red, white and blue; and a giant waterfall cascaded over roses in the grand reception hall. The ‘Blue Danube’ was a sensation.

Villemessant, who was at the ball, recognized an opportunity to advance his political influence by helping to foster closer relations between France and Austria. Over the next weeks he filled the pages of Le Figaro with articles in praise of Strauss. He gave a dinner for him in the editorial rooms to which both Turgenev and Flaubert were invited, along with Alexandre Dumas fils, Gautier and the painter James Tissot, who praised Strauss’s music in Le Figaro as ‘a delicate embroidery, full of good cheer, releasing suppressed laughter, punctuated with little arias, pirouettes … Strauss! What magic there is in the name!’ Villemessant’s publicity helped turn the ‘Blue Danube’ into a hit tune played in cafés and dance venues everywhere. Strauss’s publisher received so many orders for the piano arrangement that his copper plates were soon worn out – they only printed 10,000 copies at a time. He had 100 new plates made to produce a million copies – the biggest ever printing of a piano score until that time – which went on sale around the world.⁷⁴

5

Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms on 3 October 1867:

I have a little item of musical gossip to tell you.

Mme Viardot has composed some small operettas, two of which she has had played by her children and pupils. I heard each of them three times, always with the same pleasure. What skill, what finesse, what grace, what wit! They are marvellous.⁷⁵

Pauline’s compositions numbered several hundred by the time she died. They never entered the musical canon, but were highly thought of during her lifetime.⁷⁶ Reviewing her Ten Songs, in 1850, Henry Chorley, Pauline’s friend, thought that they were ‘better than much which passes for good in music: they are individual in style – not assuredly Italian – not strictly German – not precisely French. Their originality does not reside in their “melodies” so much as in their entire structure.’⁷⁷ Chopin praised her Spanish songs. Like George Sand, he took an interest in folk music, and liked how Pauline had adapted it to the art music form. Liszt thought she was the first ‘female composer of genius’. In 1859, he wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik:

Her works contain so much tender and delicate feeling, so much skill in harmonic subtleties (which would be envied by many famous composers), that we must regret that Mme Viardot has not invested more effort in her talent as a composer; it is our hope that these sparks of genius so close to the inspiration of Chopin turn into a flame.⁷⁸

Turgenev encouraged Pauline to compose. Battling against her lack of confidence, he was lavish with his praise of her music and did all he could to promote it. With his help as a translator, Pauline composed an album of twelve songs to Russian poems by Pushkin, Fet and Turgenev himself; it was published by August Johansen in St Petersburg in 1864. Five further albums of Pauline’s Russian songs were published by Johansen in the next few years, all of them with the close involvement of Turgenev, who arranged favourable publicity, paid for the later albums to be published, and even got his friends to buy up the unsold stock, without Pauline ever finding out.⁷⁹

In 1865, Pauline’s old friend Julius Rietz stayed with her and Louis in Baden. During his stay he heard her sing her Russian songs. On his return to Dresden, Rietz wrote to Pauline, suggesting that she write a piano sonata and urging her to compose in a larger form, to try a symphony for example, which he would be pleased to conduct in a concert in Dresden, where he was Hofkapellmeister. Turgenev was delighted with Rietz’s letter. He wrote to Pauline from his estate at Spasskoe, where he had gone for a short visit, to encourage her:

That should give you wings – it is so much more than any one of us dilettantes could have said to you – and if you do not finish your sonata, if I return to find not even a lovely adagio almost completed – it will be necessary to scold you. I imagine that a musical idea is easier to develop broadly when its form is not determined in advance … And so, to work! I encourage you as someone who has hardly written anything of late. But no! I give you my word of honour that if you set out to write your sonata, I will renew my literary work [he had not written anything substantial since Fathers and Sons] … A novel for a sonata. How does that suit you?⁸⁰

Pauline did write a sonata – a set of three for violin and piano which have all survived. But she never wrote a symphony or concerto. Nor did she ever try her hand at larger operatic forms, although this too was a possibility proposed to her more than once. After the success of Le Dernier Sorcier at the Weimar Court Theatre, Pauline was invited by the Grand Duke of Weimar to write a Grand Opera. But this never came about. There were also plans for her to write a full-length opera based on George Sand’s novel La Mare au diable. Pauline had received the libretto from Sand in 1859. By 1862, she had completed two of the three projected acts. But then work stopped. Finally, in a long letter dated 7 June 1869, Louis, not Pauline, gave an explanation to their friend:

Pauline has never imagined herself to be a composer, she has written a fairly large number of small pieces of music, always in accordance with the circumstances that presented themselves … In her operettas, for example, one finds a chorus of elves teasing the sorcerer, a song of the rain, a lullaby to put the ogre to sleep; Pauline finds the musical equivalent for the character of these easily. But she is not enough of a composer, she cannot find to a sufficient extent within herself and without the aid of a particular circumstance the musical ideas that are necessary to succeed in all topics. However charming a comedy La Mare au diable may be, it offers only two such circumstances … The other scenes belong to the category of those where the composer must draw from within himself [sic] the melodic ideas and harmonic resources. Pauline has tried to do this on several occasions, at different times; she has never been satisfied with what she has done and has torn up these futile efforts.

Louis suggested giving the libretto to ‘someone who is more of a composer, for example Bizet’.⁸¹

Whether it reflected Pauline’s judgement of her own music or Louis’s personal opinions, the letter points to many of the obstacles preventing women from composing major works and entering the canon on a par with men.

Pauline had received no formal training in a musical academy. Her mother had sent her to study composition with Anton Reicha in her teenage years, but her lessons had stopped short of counterpoint and orchestration, basic skills for composing music on a larger scale. Women were excluded from composition classes in most conservatories. Even when they were admitted to a musical academy, they were taught separately from men, trained for the most part as singers or pianists to prepare them for a career as performers or teachers. If they were taught harmony at all, it was at a lower level than the men. In the Paris Conservatory, for example, women were allowed to take lessons in keyboard harmony for performers from 1859, but it was another twenty years before they received instruction in composition harmony. Until then, only two conservatories in Europe – Brussels and Leipzig – offered composition classes for women.⁸²

Private composition lessons could be organized by supportive families, but such families were very rare. Musically talented daughters might well be encouraged to play the piano or sing well as an accomplishment but few were given the support to compose music, which was seen as a profession exclusively for men.

The young Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–47) was perhaps not as gifted as her younger brother, Felix, in his teenage years, when he composed his early masterpieces, the Octet and the Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but she had precocious talent, which received less encouragement than his. Their father, Abraham, paid for only Felix to be educated musically. ‘Music will perhaps become his profession,’ he wrote to Fanny when she was fifteen, ‘while for you it can and must be only an ornament.’ She married the painter Wilhelm Hensel, who encouraged her composing and found her texts to set to songs. Felix too was supportive. But he thought that women should be wives and mothers first, and did not think she was serious enough to embark on a career in composing music for publication, which required full-time work. As he put it in a letter to their mother in 1837:

From my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that I approve of it.⁸³

Faced with all these obstacles, Fanny felt compelled to conceal her identity on the publication of her first pieces – three Lieder published in the name of Felix Mendelssohn (Opus 8 and 9).* Perhaps, as Pauline thought, she simply lacked the confidence to compete with her brother as a composer.⁸⁴

Clara Schumann published some of her first Lieder in a joint collection with her husband, Robert. They were arranged in such a way that critics could not tell which songs were hers and which were his. Living in the shadow of her husband’s genius, Clara did not have much faith in her own abilities as a composer. In 1839, two years after her engagement to Robert, she had written in her diary that she ought to give up her belief, which had been encouraged by her father, that she had the talent to compose (‘a woman must not wish to compose – there was never one able to do it’). By that time she had written several piano compositions and a Piano Concerto. Reviews of the works she published in her own name were polite but patronizing. They always pointed out her status as a ‘woman composer’ and usually recommended that she focus on the smaller music forms (piano and chamber pieces) because women were not capable of composing large-scale works (symphonies and concertos). Even Robert shared this view. Writing of her G Minor Piano Trio (Op. 17) in 1846, Schumann praised some passages but added: ‘naturally it is still women’s work, which always lacks force and occasionally invention.’ Damned with faint praise by her own husband, Clara lost all confidence. One year later, when Robert published his first Piano Trio (Op. 63), she compared her own piano trio unfavourably to his, deciding that it ‘sounded quite effeminate and sentimental’ (inferior female qualities). From that point, she wrote about her music as if she were ashamed of it; she composed almost nothing more. After Robert’s death, in 1856, when she was left with seven children, she was too busy performing even to consider composing. Pauline certainly discouraged her from doing so, warning her that there was little to be earned from writing music, and that ‘even the biggest talents would die of hunger if they had only their small income from their composing’.⁸⁵

Lack of confidence held back Pauline too. According to the singer Anna Eugénie Schoen-René, who studied with her in Baden, Pauline hid her compositions ‘like a fault’.⁸⁶ She would sing an aria she had composed and let her guests suppose, as she told them, that it was a newly discovered composition by Mozart. It was not until the 1880s that she even thought to enforce her copyright and collect royalties from her published works.⁸⁷ Her insecurity would certainly explain why Turgenev went to such great lengths to encourage her. It would account for the problems she encountered in trying to compose a full-scale opera, and why she left it to Louis to announce her ‘failure’. Pauline had been ‘scared and paralysed’ by the ‘necessity of equalling or nearly equalling the creative level of her illustrious partner’, Louis explained to George Sand, the librettist whom he had in mind. Pauline felt out of her depth.⁸⁸ She was more comfortable composing small-scale works: songs and piano pieces, the violin sonatas and the salon operettas which she wrote with Turgenev in Baden.

Salon music was certainly the music most composed by women in the nineteenth century. It was a sphere of creativity accessible to ‘amateurs’ without formal training in the composition skills necessary to compose larger works (just as women artists, excluded from the art academies where men were instructed in the human nude and history painting, were active mainly in the ‘lower’ painting genres such as landscapes and portraits). In the view of serious music critics the term ‘salon music’ was virtually synonymous with ‘woman’s music’ – a ‘lesser form’ of music for the home. Most of the salon music composed by women remained unpublished, its composers long forgotten. Loïsa Puget wrote several hundred romances, which she sang to great acclaim in the salons of Paris during the 1840s. Josephine Martin performed many of her piano works alongside works by Liszt, Thalberg and others. But only a small fraction of these compositions were published.

Music for the home was a big market, and some women managed to break through. Charlotte Barnard (‘Claribel’) was a prolific hymn and ballad composer whose works were immensely popular, occupying a commercial space between operetta and the music hall. Her best-known song, ‘Come Back to Erin’, became so well known that it assumed the status of an Irish folk song in New York vaudevilles, where sentimental Irish tunes were popular. The Polish pianist and composer Tekla Bądarzewska-Baranowska also struck gold with her ‘A Maiden’s Prayer’, originally published in Warsaw and reissued as a supplement to Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. Pianistically trite with brilliant effects that were not hard to play, the piece remained a bestseller until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it became a symbol of provincial mediocrity (‘And tomorrow morning I won’t have to listen to that “Maiden’s Prayer” any more,’ says Irina, bound for Moscow, in the final act of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, as its saccharine melody wafts into the garden from a drawing-room).⁸⁹

Louise Farrenc (1804–75) and Louise Bertin (1805–77) were exceptional in overcoming the obstacles preventing women from composing music in larger forms – Farrenc wrote orchestral works, Bertin operas – but they had considerable advantages. Both were encouraged by their families: Farrenc was born into a dynasty of distinguished artists, the Dumonts, and she married an amateur composer turned music publisher who championed her work; while Bertin’s father was the editor of the influential Journal des débats. Both Farrenc and Bertin had composition lessons from an early age (Farrenc studied with Reicha, who also taught Pauline; Bertin with the Belgian critic and composer François-Joseph Fétis). Farrenc’s early compositions were reviewed favourably by no less a critic than Schumann; her first Overture was praised by Berlioz. She was made a full professor of piano at the Paris Conservatory in 1842, and even won her battle to be paid the same amount as her colleague Henri Herz. But her orchestral works were infrequently performed – a fact attributed by Fétis, writing three years after Farrenc’s death, to the problems women faced in acquiring the recognition needed for a concert manager to justify the costs of a concert. And without regular performances it was practically impossible to get a large-scale work published:

Unfortunately, the genre of large scale instrumental music to which Madame Farrenc, by nature and formation, felt herself called involves performance resources which a composer can acquire for herself or himself only with enormous effort. Another factor here is the public, as a rule not a very knowledgeable one, whose only standard for measuring the quality of a work is the name of its author. If the composer is unknown, the audience remains unreceptive, and the publishers, especially in France, close their ears when someone offers them a halfway decent work.⁹⁰

6

From 1863, Turgenev made short trips from Baden to Paris, where he kept his apartment in the rue de Rivoli. He went to see his daughter, to buy and look at art, and to meet his literary friends, Mérimée, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and the Goncourts, who regularly convened for long dinners at Magny’s restaurant on the left bank of the Seine. Turgenev was introduced to the Magny circle by Charles-Edmond Chojecki, the Polish émigré writer, translator and librarian of the French Senate, on 28 February 1863. A brilliant conversationalist, the Russian writer made a strong impression on the Goncourt brothers, who noted in their diary:

He is a delightful colossus, a gentle, white-haired giant; he has the appearance of an old and gentle forest or mountain wizard; he looks like a druid or the kindly old monk in Romeo and Juliet. He is handsome, but in a strange and venerable way, grandly handsome like Nieuwerkerke. But Nieuwerkerke’s eyes are a silky blue, whereas Turgenev has the blue of the heavens in his eyes. The kindness of his gaze is matched by the caress and little singing sounds of his Russian accent, something like the humming of a child.⁹¹

It was at that dinner that Turgenev first met Flaubert, who would become a close and lasting friend. Turgenev took an instant liking to the French novelist, whose writing he had read and admired perhaps more than any other writer’s at that time. The next day, he sent him two translations of his books, the Sketches from a Hunter’s Album and Rudin, promising to send him Mérimée’s translation of Fathers and Sons and First Love, both out in French in 1863. He invited him to dinner with Pauline, who was keen to meet him too, at his apartment in the rue de Rivoli. Flaubert could not come, but he wrote a warm reply full of praise for Turgenev’s writing, which ‘delighted’ him: ‘I have considered you a master for a long time. But the more I study you, the more your skill leaves me gaping. I admire the forceful yet restrained quality of your writing, the sympathy that extends down to the lowest human creatures and brings landscape to life. One sees and one dreams.’⁹² Soon afterwards Turgenev left for Baden. He invited Flaubert to visit him, but the Frenchman was famously reclusive and seldom ventured beyond Rouen or Paris, so the invitation was not taken up. But on his trips to Paris Turgenev made a point of seeing him.

Flaubert, c. 1870.

Turgenev and Flaubert were drawn together by a profound mutual affinity. They shared a similar view of art, admired the same writers, and approached their literary craft in a like manner, setting out to show reality rather than expound on it. ‘How many things have I found in your work that I have felt and experienced myself!’ Flaubert wrote to Turgenev in March 1863. Both men were pessimistic in outlook: they had given up all hope of finding rational solutions to the problems of the world through politics (the lesson each had learned from the failure of 1848) or finding happiness through married love (a theme that runs through both their writings).* They both found consolation in their work, the main thing that united them. Their correspondence contained more than mutual flattery. They helped each other as writers. Flaubert was particularly indebted to Turgenev, who could read his works in French (Flaubert could not read Russian). Between 1868 and 1870 Turgenev made several trips to Flaubert’s house in Croisset to help with his problematic novel The Temptation of St Anthony. ‘What a listener, and what a critic!’ Flaubert reported to George Sand:

He staggered me with the depth and crispness of his judgements. If only all those who mess about with books could have heard him, what a lesson! He misses nothing. At the end of a section of a hundred lines, he can remember a weak adjective; he made two or three exquisite suggestions on points of detail for Saint Anthony.⁹³

Isolated intellectually, Flaubert was increasingly dependent on the friendship of Turgenev. ‘You are, I think, the only man with whom I can have a conversation,’ he wrote to him. ‘I no longer see anybody who is interested in art or poetry.’ The feeling of connection between them was mutual. Turgenev wrote to Flaubert in 1868:

From the first time I saw you (you know, in a sort of inn on the other bank of the Seine) I have felt a great liking for you, – there are few men, especially Frenchmen, with whom I feel so relaxed and at ease and yet at the same time so stimulated. It seems to me that I could talk to you for weeks on end, but then we are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.⁹⁴

Turgenev was one of the few literary people to understand the value of Flaubert’s later works. When Sentimental Education came out in 1869 to poor reviews in France, Turgenev tried to boost his friend’s morale by sending him copies of more favourable pieces in the German press, most of which he had himself arranged. ‘Yes, certainly, people have been unfair to you, but this is a time to brace yourself and hurl a masterpiece at your readers,’ he wrote to him encouragingly, reminding him of his earlier successes with Madame Bovary and Salammbô. ‘Don’t forget that people judge you by the standards you yourself have set, and you’re bearing the weight of your past.’⁹⁵

Turgenev campaigned to get Flaubert’s novels published in Russia. He acted in effect as his literary agent, publicist and translator. The liberal climate of reform in Russia during the 1860s encouraged publishers to translate books from Western Europe. Russian readers had been starved of them during the repressive reign of Nicholas I. In 1866, Mikhail Stasiulevich, a liberal history professor, began publishing The Messenger of Europe (Vestnik Evropy), named in honour of the Russian writer and historian Nikolai Karamzin, who in 1802 had established a literary journal by the same name, which had brought to Russians the latest European ideas. Stasiulevich’s aim was to publish works from Europe in translation alongside new Russian works. He also published articles on politics and literature from correspondents in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. Because reports from abroad were not subject to tsarist censorship, these articles were an effective channel for promoting ideas of European progress in Russia, where the journal sold 8,000 copies every month, a high number in itself, though the actual number of readers was likely to be three or four times more as copies passed from hand to hand. Stasiulevich insisted on paying for translation rights, even though there was no legal obligation for him to do so, as there was no copyright protection for foreign works in Russia, and other publishers regularly published pirate translations. But he only paid for advance proofs, insisting on his need to publish first in Russia, because once a book appeared in print there was nothing to protect his investment. ‘You can assert your rights on every page, but that will not stop anyone in Russia from publishing their own translation, if only your original is for sale in a bookshop,’ he explained to the German writer Berthold Auerbach, whose The House on the Rhine (published in Germany in 1869) was serialized in The Messenger of Europe between 1868 and 1870.⁹⁶

Turgenev soon became an important intermediary between the journal in St Petersburg and the European literary scene. He took an active part in selecting works for translation (sometimes on the basis of their likely impact on social attitudes in Russia rather than their literary worth). It was Turgenev who had organized the translation of The House on the Rhine, and who wrote a preface to the novel, which, though rather dull as a story, was of moral interest to Russian readers as an exploration of the legacies of slave-owning (its hero, Sonnenkamp, whose real name is Banfield, is a retired slave-owner from Louisiana with a dark past). As an agent for Stasiulevich, Turgenev introduced a number of the most important European writers to a Russian readership. Flaubert was one of the first. Through Turgenev’s efforts, a long article on Sentimental Education appeared in the January 1870 issue of the Messenger, followed the next month by a review of all Flaubert’s works. Meanwhile Turgenev set about translating The Temptation of St Anthony for publication by Stasiulevich.

As well as introducing European writers to Russia, Turgenev acted as an ambassador for Russian literature in Europe. He collaborated with translators, advised his foreign publishers on what books they should translate, and wrote articles about the latest Russian works in French and German periodicals (in 1868, he announced the arrival of a masterpiece called War and Peace). As the first of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers to attain a popular appeal in other languages, Turgenev had a major influence on the translation of Russian writers in Europe – both in terms of the language used by translators to communicate a sense of ‘Russian-ness’ and in terms of the types of books considered suitable for a Western audience. Turgenev’s views were taken seriously by European publishers, who were eager to exploit this new source of literary talent. Pierre-Jules Hetzel, his French publisher, was particularly keen, publishing The Cossacks (1863) by Tolstoy, Prince Serebrenni (1862) by Aleksei Tolstoy, and the Folk Tales by Maria Markovich, which Turgenev had translated from Ukrainian into Russian in 1859. Most of these translations were by Mérimée, who, like Turgenev, was committed to promoting Russian literature in France. Both men saw it as a means of healing rifts between the two countries after the Crimean War, and as a means of promoting their cosmopolitan ideals against the rise of nationalism in Europe.⁹⁷

Turgenev was considered an important writer in Germany, to some degree because he lived there (and even came to think of himself as a German) during the 1860s. Through translations of his work and articles about him in the press he became well known and popular – perhaps more so than many of the best-known German novelists, such as Raabe and Keller. Even Theodor Storm, who revered Turgenev, found himself in his shadow.⁹⁸ The critic Viktor Hehn talked with irritation about a ‘cult of Turgenev’ in Germany. Turgenev used his influence to get other Russians published in German: Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. He had excellent relations with German publishers and translators, including Friedrich Bodenstedt, a well-known lyricist and travel writer, who was also Professor of Slavic Languages at Munich University. Turgenev was delighted with Bodenstedt’s translation of his story Faust (1862), considering him to be a ‘great stylist’, and offering to pay him to translate his other works so that they would attract publishers and become better known in Germany. Two large volumes of Turgenev’s works were published in translation by Bodenstedt during the 1860s. Fathers and Sons appeared in German translations by Wilhelm Wolfsohn and Claire von Glümer in 1865 and 1868, respectively. And in 1869 Turgenev’s collected works began to be published in twelve volumes by Eric Behre, a German-language publisher in Mitau, Latvia.⁹⁹

Turgenev earned nothing from these translations. Though France and Russia had a bilateral agreement, it was still difficult to enforce copyright. The most a writer could hope for (but not expect) was a small payment as a gesture of good will on the publication of their work by a foreign publisher. Turgenev often warned his fellow Russian writers not to expect any earnings from their works in translation. In 1868, when his friend Mikhail Avdeev asked for his advice on how to find a publisher in France for his recent novels, Turgenev replied:

In Paris translations from foreign languages are published badly and reluctantly, because they do not pay well. Dickens is exceptional – and not even one of his novels has come out in a second edition, whereas the likes of Monsieur, Madame et Bébé by G[ustave] Droz has already come out in 20 editions. My books have been translated – but I personally have never received a kopeck – while the translator, as an act of great kindness, is paid no more than 300 or 400 francs, and not always anything at all.¹⁰⁰

It was not the money that mattered to Turgenev so much as becoming known abroad. Although he complained about the loss of income to foreign publishers who printed pirate versions of his works, what really bothered him was the poor quality of most of these translations, something he also could not control. He was more interested in his moral rights – the preservation of his work’s integrity – than in the protection of his economic property through copyright. The struggle of the artist for moral rights – a campaign pioneered by Verdi from the 1840s – was carried on by writers like Turgenev with greater urgency in the 1860s and 1870s when the development of an international book trade made it even more important to have a good translation for a writer’s reputation in foreign markets. Turgenev did not hesitate to complain when his prose was mangled in translation by pirate publishers. On 1 December 1868, for example, he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette, protesting that their translator’s mutilation of his novel Smoke was bound to damage him ‘in the eyes of the English public, whose good opinion cannot be valued too highly by any man who holds a pen’. He demanded that the London journal publish his protest. Two days later, the full letter was printed under the title, ‘M. Tourgueneff and his English Traducer’.¹⁰¹

By the end of the 1860s, all Turgenev’s books had been translated into French and German (the English were slower to translate from foreign languages). He liked to joke with Russians that his literary stock was worth more in Europe than in Russia.

Turgenev and Pauline were also instrumental in getting Russian music better known in Europe. Their closest contact in the Russian music world was Anton Rubinstein, who regularly came to Baden in the summer, partly to visit his powerful patron, the Russian Grand Duchess, Elena Pavlovna, who held court in her mansion there, but mainly to indulge his weakness for gambling. ‘He constantly plays roulette and has squandered everything, even some of his clothes, so that the next day he had to put on an old frockcoat and go gloveless,’ wrote Mily Balakirev to his fellow Russian composer César Cui in 1863. During that summer Rubinstein came almost every day to the Villa Viardot. He helped Pauline with the composition of her Russian songs, and started making sketches for an opera based on Turgenev’s novel Rudin – until Turgenev, who had agreed to write the libretto, gave up on the task. The following January, in St Petersburg, Turgenev saw Rubinstein again. The two of them promoted Pauline’s songs. Turgenev attended one of his recitals in the Philharmonia, the new concert hall of the Conservatory, which Rubinstein had established in 1862 with the support of the Grand Duchess. Turgenev was not a fan of the pianist’s virtuoso style. ‘He performs as he always does,’ he wrote to Pauline after the concert, ‘he starts by giving you vertigo and ends by boring you, or at least exhausting you.’¹⁰² But he applauded Rubinstein’s campaign to raise music standards in Russia.

In 1859, with that aim in mind, Rubinstein had founded the Russian Musical Society. It put on concerts of mainly German music and gave classes to aspiring musicians at the Mikhailovsky Palace, home to Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, who was German and a proselytizer of her nation’s cause. From these beginnings the idea of a conservatory had taken shape. It was conceived as a European music school dominated by the conventions of composition developed in the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Its German academic orientation was fiercely criticized by a group of nationalist composers, the so-called ‘Mighty Five’ (Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov), all young men and self-taught amateurs, mostly from the minor gentry, who bitterly resented the ‘foreign’ court connections of conservatory composers such as Tchaikovsky (one of its first graduates) and saw themselves as pioneers of a more ‘authentically Russian’ music style. Where Rubinstein was scornful of the amateurism of Russian composers (he called Glinka a dilettante), they retaliated by accusing him of denigrating Russia from the heights of what they called his ‘European conservatorial grandeur’. There was a strong element of personal animosity, even anti-Semitism, in their battles against Rubinstein. They called him ‘Tupinstein’ (‘dull’), ‘Dubinstein’ (‘dumb-headed’) and Grubinstein (‘crude’). They railed against his cosmopolitanism (a synonym for ‘Jewish rootlessness’ in Russian nationalist discourse), which they feared would stifle ‘authentic’ Russian forms. In 1862, in direct opposition to Rubinstein’s Conservatory, the nationalist composers founded the Free Music School, setting it the task of cultivating native talent on the ‘purely Russian’ principles established by their hero, Glinka (whose music is in fact steeped in Italian and German influences). In the words of Vladimir Stasov, the influential critic who acted as their champion, it was time for the ‘hoopskirts and tailcoats’ of the Europeanized St Petersburg élites to make way for the ‘long Russian coats’ of the provinces.¹⁰³

Turgenev sympathized with their artistic desire to break free from academic conventions, but he could not agree with their attacks on the Conservatory, which he thought was essential for the education of professional musicians in Russia. He was critical of the amateurism which he believed characterized the arts in Russia, and even more so of the Slavophiles who dressed it up as Russian ‘genius’ and ‘spontaneity’. He believed that Russia’s artists needed to be brought up to the level of their European counterparts, to immerse themselves in European civilization, in order to transcend its influence and stamp a national character on their own art: it was not enough for them to draw from folk culture, as the Slavophiles argued. Turgenev was equally impatient with the way the nationalists depicted Glinka as a genius ‘greater than any other composer after Beethoven’, as Cui put it in 1864. Glinka was a talented composer, Turgenev conceded, but such inflated claims were dangerous, encouraging delusions about Russian greatness which could not help its integration into Europe. Turgenev’s view is voiced by the character Potugin in his novel Smoke when he declares that Russia has no great artists and dismisses the example of Glinka:

Exceptions, you know, merely confirm the rule, but even in this case we could not refrain from boasting. If you were to say, for example, that Glinka was a really remarkable musician whom circumstances, both external and internal, prevented from becoming the founder of Russian opera, there would be no argument. But no, that’s not good enough. He must immediately be promoted to full general and made Master of the Royal Music. Other nations will be cut down to size; they’ve got nothing like this, it will be said, while some colossal self-taught genius, whose work is nothing but a pitiful imitation of second-rate foreign practitioners, is immediately pointed out. Genuinely second-rate. They are easier to imitate.¹⁰⁴

Turgenev had first heard the music of Mussorgsky and Balakirev at a concert in St Petersburg in 1867. To begin with he was sceptical, reporting to Pauline:

This evening I went to a grand concert of the music of the future – Russian – because there is one of those as well.* But it is absolutely pitiful, devoid of ideas, or originality: it is simply a bad copy of what is done in Germany. And such insolence is reinforced by a total absence of the civilization that distinguishes us. Everyone is thrown into the same bag – from Rossini and Mozart to Beethoven. Come now, it is pitiful.¹⁰⁵

In the 1870s Turgenev would come round to the Mighty Five. He was introduced to them by Stasov, whom he knew as a prolific writer about the arts in Russia and as the director of the Public Library in St Petersburg. Turgenev often argued with Stasov, whose dogmatic promotion of the nationalist school conflicted with his liberal Westernist opinions, but he respected him for bringing Russian culture to the attention of the West. As Turgenev became more acquainted with the music of the Mighty Five, he recognized its originality, and with Pauline campaigned for their works to be included in the European repertoire. He could not agree with their nationalist agenda, nor with any nationalism in the arts, but he admired their vitality.

It was not only in Russia that musical nationalism began to take hold during the 1860s. A similar phenomenon was taking place in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria’s military defeat by France and the loss of most of its remaining Italian possessions in 1859 brought about a relaxation of government controls on the cultural activities of other subject nationalities in the hope that this would prevent them from developing independence movements of their own. In this newly opened cultural space the Czechs were especially active. They published collections of Bohemian folk songs, established choral groups, and organized subscriptions to finance the construction of a national theatre where more Czech plays and operas could be performed than had been licensed by the Austrian authorities in the Estates Theatre, where the repertoire was dominated by German and other foreign works.

A temporary national theatre was completed in 1862, and the first stone of the future National Theatre was laid six years later in a ceremony attended by 60,000 provincial subscribers and visitors brought to Prague by special trains. The opening of the Provisional Theatre prompted the Czech patriot Count Jan Harrach to announce a competition for a national opera – one that would be sung in the Czech language and use folk song and dance to create a feeling of ‘Czechness’. The eventual winner was The Brandenburgers in Bohemia by Bedřich Smetana (1824–84). It told the story of the country’s liberation from German occupation in the thirteenth century. Like most members of the Prague intelligentsia, Smetana had been educated in German: he wrote his diary and letters in German, and when, in 1860, he first switched to Czech he made numerous mistakes. Encouraged by the removal of restrictions on Czech cultural expression, he transformed himself from a composer mainly known for his Lisztian piano works into a composer of Czech music. His comic opera The Bartered Bride (1866) became the most frequently performed in the Czech operatic repertoire. Its folk-like music and dances, colourful costumes and stage designs made it far more than an opera: it was a popular entertainment, attracting a national audience from all social classes, and a cultural symbol of Czech nationhood.

The popularity of The Bartered Bride – not just in Prague but across Europe – rested largely on the notion of its ‘authenticity’ – the fanciful idea that its folk-like elements were deeply rooted in the ancient peasant culture of Bohemia. In fact many of the folk songs in the opera were as much German as Bohemian, and most of them were relatively new, while ‘Czech dances’ like the polka or beseda, which Smetana used to give The Bartered Bride a national character, were performed widely in Europe.¹⁰⁶ Nineteenth-century nationalisms depended on ‘invented traditions’ – on the unifying force of national myths and the popular belief in old (‘authentic’) cultural traditions, which in reality were mostly recent creations.¹⁰⁷

The invention of ‘Hungarian music’ was similar in this respect. The ‘style hongrois’ was a stylized evocation of Gypsy and Turkish music created by composers such as Haydn in the eighteenth century. Liszt developed it in his Hungarian Rhapsodies, nineteen piano pieces composed between 1846 and 1885, as did Brahms in his Hungarian Dances. Both composers recognized the gypsies as the main carriers of Hungarian folk music. They thought the gypsy scale (with two augmented seconds), gypsy tunes and rhythms were the fundamental basis of the folk songs performed by the Hungarian peasantry. In its art-music form the ‘style hongrois’ became popular throughout Europe, played by bands at spa resorts like Baden, where the exotic gypsy element was appreciated by the cosmopolitan public. Liszt had never learned Hungarian. Born in Austria, he spoke and wrote in French and German, the languages of the countries in which he lived the best part of his life. But he identified himself as a Magyar, and he was a prominent supporter of the Hungarian national cause, whose political leaders saw the ancient Magyar tribes as the ethnic basis of Hungarians. Liszt’s ‘Hungarian’ music was recruited by the nationalists, music critics and composers, who denied its gypsy content and claimed instead that it was rooted in the folk songs of the Magyar peasantry. On this invented tradition Hungarian music would be built.¹⁰⁸

7

In the summer of 1867, Dostoevsky came to Baden in a desperate attempt to turn around his fortunes at the roulette wheels. Heavily indebted and pressed by creditors, he had left St Petersburg with his new wife, Anna Grigorievna, previously employed by him as a stenographer to speed up work on his novella The Gambler (1866), written in a hurry to repay his gambling debts. Anna raised the money for the trip herself, hoping a few months abroad would help her husband recover from the stress of his financial worries, which had begun to make him ill. His epileptic fits were becoming more frequent.

The Dostoevskys travelled by rail to Dresden, but after three weeks Dostoevsky became bored and persuaded Anna to let him go off on his own for a few days to Homburg to try his luck in the casino. Two of his many creditors in Russia had filed charges against him, so he justified his gambling passion (the real reason why he had wanted to come to Europe in the first place) by the urgent need to clear his debts to avoid the danger of imprisonment on returning home. In a ten-day gambling frenzy he lost heavily. Anna sent him money which he lost again. Dostoevsky pawned his watch and lost that too. He returned to Dresden filled with remorse, furious with himself for losing self-control and spoiling everything for his new wife, and yet still, like all gambling addicts, convinced he could win it back. Securing a loan from Katkov, whose Russian Messenger was serializing his successful novel Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set off with Anna for Baden, having now persuaded her that, with more time together there, he would avoid the mistakes he had made in Homburg by placing his bets hurriedly. Arriving in Baden, they took two small rooms above a blacksmith, where noisy work began at 4 a.m. They could not afford anything better. Dostoevsky began gambling immediately. Anna recalled the next five weeks as ‘some kind of nightmare which took complete possession of my husband’.¹⁰⁹

In his novel Smoke Turgenev describes the gaming rooms where Dostoevsky joined

the same well-known figures crowded round the green tables with the same dull, avaricious, partly puzzled, partly embittered, essentially predatory expression which gambling fever imparts to even the most aristocratic features; the same plumpish, exceedingly foppishly attired Tambov landowner, with the same incomprehensible convulsive haste, eyes on stalks, chest leaning on the table, ignoring the cold sneers of the croupiers, scattered with his sweaty hand to all four corners of the table the golden discs of louis d’or at the very moment when they announce ‘rien ne va plus’, thus depriving himself of all possibility of winning anything, even when luck was with him.¹¹⁰

Dostoevsky had no luck. He lost all their money in a week and then started pawning possessions. He would get down to his last thaler, and then win, and then lose again, and return to the pawnshop. They fell into debt with their landlady. Anna wrote to her parents begging them for money. She pawned the diamond ring and ruby brooch and earrings, her wedding gift from Dostoevsky, who lost those too. He would go down on his knees, sob and beg forgiveness for the shame he had brought on them – and then go back to the gaming rooms. He was acting like a character from one of his novels.

A few days after their arrival in Baden the Dostoevskys ran into the writer Ivan Goncharov, who told them that Dostoevksy had been spotted by Turgenev, who had not approached him because he knew ‘how gamblers do not like to be spoken to’. Turgenev was the last person Dostoevsky wanted to see. He had borrowed fifty roubles (200 francs) from him after losing heavily at Wiesbaden (the setting of The Gambler) and had not repaid the debt. Now he was obliged to call on him to avoid giving the impression that he was afraid of being asked for the money.¹¹¹

Dostoevsky and Turgenev had a long relationship of ups and downs, going back to the 1840s, when they emerged together on the literary scene in St Petersburg. In the early 1860s they had got on relatively well. Dostoevsky had been one of the few people to understand Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Turgenev had been grateful and agreed to write a story (‘Phantoms’) for Dostoevsky’s journal Time (Vremia) and, when the journal was closed down by the tsarist government, he gave it to its successor, Epoch (Epokha), where it appeared in 1864. Dostoevsky’s growing problems with money (exacerbated by his brother’s death in 1864, which left him with his debts and his wife and children to support) made him resentful of the better-off Turgenev, a landed aristocrat who, he thought, could write at his leisure rather than being forced to rush things out.

Dostoevsky made his visit to Turgenev on 28 June. As he recounted to the Russian poet Apollon Maikov, ‘even before that I disliked the man personally’. The embarrassment of his unpaid debt played its part in that, he admitted, but ‘I also dislike the aristocratically farcical embrace of his with which he starts to kiss you but offers his cheek. The horrible airs of a general.’ The conversation started on the critical reception of Turgenev’s Smoke but soon became an argument about Russia and Europe, the old debate between Slavophiles and Westerners and a central theme of the novel. According to Dostoevksy, whose sympathies were with the Slavophiles, Turgenev stated that his views were expressed by the character Potugin, an extreme Westerner who thought that Russia had contributed nothing to European civilization. Turgenev had abused Russia and the Russians ‘monstrously’ and had ‘said that we ought to crawl before the Germans’, Dostoevsky continued. When Turgenev said that he was writing an article against the Slavophiles, Dostoevsky told him to buy a telescope, because Russia was a long way off from Baden and Paris: ‘Train your telescope on Russia and examine us, because otherwise it is really hard to make us out.’ The implication of this sarcastic insult was obvious: by choosing to live abroad, Turgenev had lost touch with Russia, and that had showed in his last novel. Now the gloves came off. Dostoevsky lost control – the humiliations he had suffered in the past three months in Germany swelled up inside him as he attacked the German people as ‘thieves and swindlers … much worse and more dishonest than ours’. What had European civilization done for them? These words maddened Turgenev, Dostoevsky reported. ‘He turned pale (literally: I’m not exaggerating a bit, not a bit!) and said to me: “In talking like that you offend me personally. You should know that I have settled here permanently, that I consider myself a German, not a Russian, and I’m proud of it!”’ Dostoevsky apologized, saying that, although he had read Smoke, he had no idea he felt that way. He then took his leave, vowing to himself never again to visit Turgenev.¹¹²

At ten o’clock the next morning, when Dostoevsky was still asleep, Turgenev called at the house where they were staying and left a card with the maid. As Dostoevsky had told him that he never rose from bed before eleven o’clock, he took the call to mean that Turgenev did not want to see him either but had repaid his visit as a gentleman. The two men saw each other once again, at the Baden railway station on 13 August, when the Dostoevskys were departing for Switzerland, but they did not even exchange bows.

The feud between them did not end in Baden. Dostoevsky’s letter to Maikov was sent on to the journal Russian Archive (Russkii Arkhiv) with a request to preserve it for posterity but not to publish it until 1890. Told of this by Annenkov, Turgenev wrote to the journal’s editor denying he had said what Dostoevsky claimed he had said about Russia, and claiming he would never have divulged his ‘intimate convictions’ to a man like Dostoevsky, whom he considered ‘a person, who as a consequence of morbid seizures and other causes, is not in full control of his own rational capacities’.¹¹³ Dostoevsky brooded on his hatred of Turgenev and took revenge by satirizing him in The Devils (a work on which he started in 1869) in the character of Karmazinov, a vain, pompous, ‘statesmanlike’ writer, whose ‘shrill voice’ gave him the affected air of a ‘born gentleman’. Karmazinov ‘sneers contemptuously at Russia’, says he is ‘going abroad for good’ because the ‘climate is better and the houses are of stone and everything much stronger’, and claims that the laying down of a new water pipe in Karlsruhe, where he has been for the last seven years, is ‘much dearer to me than all the questions of my beloved mother-country – during the whole period of these so-called reforms [after 1861]’. The cruellest part of the parody was Karmazinov’s long-awaited reading of his latest story to a bored provincial audience:

Imagine over thirty printed pages of the most pretentious and useless chatter; and, besides, this gentleman read it in a sort of mournfully condescending tone of voice, as though he were doing us a favour, so that it sounded rather like an insult to our public. The subject … But who could make it out – that subject of his? It was a sort of account of certain impressions and reminiscences. But of what? And what about? However much we knit our provincial brows during the first half of the reading, we could not make head or tail of it, and we listened to the second part simply out of politeness. It is true, there was a lot of talk about love – the love of the genius for some lady – but, I confess, it produced rather an awkward impression on the audience. For the great genius to tell us about his first kiss, seemed to my mind somehow inconsistent with this short, little fat figure.¹¹⁴

Turgenev was wounded to the quick. He felt betrayed by Dostoevsky, who had praised ‘Phantoms’ (the story parodied) when he published it in Epoch (he did not know that Dostoevsky had written to his brother that it ‘contained a lot of rubbish: there is something sordid, morbid and senile about it; it evidences lack of faith due to impotence – in a word, the whole of Turgenev and his convictions’). Turgenev added that before defaming him, Dostoevsky might have paid him back the money he had borrowed years before.¹¹⁵

The novel at the centre of this long dispute marked a new lowpoint in Turgenev’s relations with his critics in Russia. He had worked on Smoke for several years. Intermingled with its love story and satire of the Russians in Baden is a discourse about Russia’s place in Europe which for Turgenev had its roots in the hostile Russian reception to his previous novel, Fathers and Sons. He had been stung, in particular, by the criticisms he received in left-wing student circles, where he was attacked for drawing in Bazarov a travesty of their kind.

Smoke was Turgenev’s answer to the radicals, especially to those, like his old friend Herzen, living still in exile, who believed in the populist idea that the home-grown egalitarianism of the peasant commune showed a way for Russia to become a socialist democracy without following Europe’s bourgeois path. Turgenev thought this was nonsense. The peasants he had seen on his trip to Russia in 1862 were too worn down by poverty to become agents of democratic change. Police repression of the student demonstrations in St Petersburg that year had persuaded him that nothing basically had changed in Russia – or could change – with the new reforms. This was the pessimism that informed the speeches of Potugin decrying Russia’s backwardness as well as the delusions of the Slavophiles that Russia could be something other than a copy of Europe. As he put it to Herzen: ‘We Russians belong in language and in nature to the European family, “genus Europeum”, and consequently, in accordance with the unalterable laws of physiology, must travel the same road.’¹¹⁶

On its publication in the Russian Messenger, in April 1867, the novel was attacked in Russia from all sides. The fact that it appeared at a time when Moscow was the host to a Pan-Slav Congress that whipped up Russian nationalist feeling did not help. Annenkov reported that the reading public was outraged by a novel ‘inviting them to believe that all of the Russian aristocracy, indeed all of Russian life, is an abomination’. Critics accused Turgenev of abandoning Russia – of even hating it – and blamed the Viardots for his betrayal. Newspapers printed letters from provincial readers claiming that the book was an ‘attack on Russia by the West’. The members of Moscow’s exclusive English Club passed a motion to send a letter to Turgenev banning him from their midst in perpetuity (he had never been inside their precious club). In Baden he was snubbed by the Russian community. ‘Judging from the reviews and letters,’ Turgenev wrote to Annenkov, ‘I am cursed by everyone from one end to the other of our great fatherland. “I have insulted our nation – I am a liar and a slanderer – I don’t know Russia in the least.”’ But Turgenev was defiant, adding in another letter to his friend that he was happy with his ‘persecuted Potugin, who believed only in European civilization’.¹¹⁷

In 1864, Countess Lambert had written to Turgenev reproaching him for not living in Russia. She accused him of abandoning his Christian duty as a Russian writer to serve his people, preferring the comforts and pleasures of the West. Turgenev replied that he was not a Christian, at least not in her sense, or any for that matter, and that the only way he had to serve his country was ‘as a writer, an artist’:

There is no necessity for a writer to live continuously in his own country and write about the changes in its life – at least there is no need to do this all the time … Who knows, maybe one day I will want to write a work that has no particular significance for Russia – to set myself a broader task … I see no reason why I should not settle in Baden. I do this not out of any desire for pleasure (that is the lot of youth) but simply so as to weave a little nest for myself in which to await the approach of the inevitable end.¹¹⁸

8

In November 1868, the Viardot family moved to Karlsruhe for the winter. Baden was a sleepy town at this time of the year, and they wanted to be somewhere bigger with an art school Claudie could attend. There were no art teachers good enough in Baden, according to Pauline.¹¹⁹ An hour’s train ride to the north, Karlsruhe had a population of 30,000 residents, four times as many as Baden, with a ducal palace at the centre of the town, a court theatre, gallery and a large array of cultural societies, including six glee clubs, a Philharmonic Society, a Museum Association, a literary society and an arts club. Three weeks later, Turgenev joined them there, lodging in a hotel by the railway station, a short walk from the Viardots’ spacious apartment in Lange Strasse. Pauline kept a lively salon attended by the leading cultural figures of the town, including the painters Karl Lessing, the director of the gallery, and the Norwegian landscape artist Hans Gude, who taught at the School of Art.

On 29 January, Turgenev organized a party of Russians to see Wagner’s latest opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, at the Karlsruhe Court Theatre. Pauline also went along. She had meant to be in Munich for the Meistersinger’s premiere the previous June but had been unable to travel because of illness. The opera delighted her. In February she made it to Munich and heard it once again, noting in her diary that the music pleased her more and more.¹²⁰ She wrote to Wagner full of praise for it, receiving in reply a copy of the score inscribed by him with the words: ‘An der Meistersängerin Mme Viardot [To the Meistersinger Mme Viardot]’. Pauline had been so intent on listening to the music in the National Theatre in Munich that when some people in a neighbouring box had started talking during the performance she had sternly told them off. The incident had been related to the composer, who wrote to Pauline with his customary arrogance: ‘That gave me almost as much pleasure as Die Meistersinger gave to you.’¹²¹

Overcoming her earlier reservations about Wagner’s music, Pauline had become a committed ‘Wagnerian’ during recent years. She maintained close relations with the composer, who sent his niece to study singing with her in Baden, advised other singers to do the same, and often asked Pauline to send her pupils to perform in his operas.* In February 1869, Pauline wrote to Turgenev from Weimar, where she had gone to see a performance of Lohengrin, an opera she had previously detested: ‘Decidedly, yes, decidedly, Wagner is the only composer whose works have any interest for me. Oh, I will not deny it, I am a Wagnerian to my fingertips, my poor friend! It is a pull I can’t resist.’¹²²

Turgenev was slower to come round to this ‘music of the future’. His musical tastes were, like Louis’s, instinctively conservative. Wagner was the ‘founder of the school of groaning’ in music, he teased Pauline. After attending a rehearsal of Das Rheingold in Munich, he reported to a Russian friend: ‘The music and the text are equally unbearable, but you know among the Germans there are people for whom Wagner is practically Christ.’ Turgenev was hostile to the cult of Wagner. He liked only small parts of his operas (he was ‘mad keen’ on the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’, for example, which he had heard in a concert performance in 1863). But Pauline’s musical opinions were laws to him, and he tried to accept them on Wagner too. ‘I sense that the music could be very beautiful,’ he wrote to her, ‘but it is unlike anything I’ve ever liked before, and still like, so I need a certain effort to change my Standpunkt. I am not at all like Viardot – I can still do that – but an effort is needed.’¹²³

The point at which Pauline had become converted to Wagner was ironically his lowest ebb – the fiasco of Tannhäuser’s Paris premiere back in March 1861. Pauline liked the opera, but it had been hissed in a protest by the young men of the Jockey Club. It was the custom of these Parisian aristocrats to dine before the opera and arrive at the theatre in time for the ballet in the Second Act (many of them kept a mistress in the corps de ballet); they would usually leave immediately afterwards. Wagner had not wanted a ballet scene at all in Tannhäuser but agreed to one (the unballetic ‘Bacchanal of Venusberg’) when told by the Opéra’s director, Alphonse Royer, that a dance scene was compulsory. Insisting that the only place where dancing would make sense was at the start of the First Act, Wagner inserted the scene there, refusing Royer’s pleas to postpone it to the Second Act to accommodate the Jockey Club. To get his way Wagner appealed to his Austrian patron, Princess Metternich, who had got the opera commissioned by Napoleon III. She intervened on his behalf. The members of the Jockey Club were angered by the change, which obliged them to arrive at the start. They saw it as an act of German arrogance by the composer and Princess Metternich. After three nights of disruptive protest, Wagner withdrew Tannhäuser. ‘It was the man, above all, who was hissed, far more than the composition,’ Pauline wrote to Rietz:

Wagner made himself so detested in advance, by artists and public, that he was treated unjustly, in a revolting manner. They did not wish to hear the music. If they had heard it, they might have hissed just the same! Wagner will not have profited by the lesson, but he can always boast that he was the victim of a cabal.¹²⁴

This was Wagner’s second setback at the Paris Opéra, following his failure to get Rienzi performed there in 1841. It put an end to his long-held ambition to become a major player on Europe’s most important operatic stage, and turned his attentions towards Germany. He now sought to promote his ‘music of the future’ as a higher form of art, whose lofty mission was to give expression to the German national spirit and liberate its culture from French civilization and other foreign influences. In his essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ (1849), written in exile in Zurich following the failure of the Dresden Uprising, Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk – a unity of the arts in a single music drama – to define his artistic principles and set his work apart from French Grand Opera with its ‘monstrosities’ of virtuoso singing, sensational effects and entertainments posing as art.¹²⁵

Finally pardoned for his role in the Dresden Uprising, Wagner returned to Germany in 1862 and set about the task of finding for himself a wealthy German patron for his nationalist cause. His luck turned in 1864, when the young Bavarian king, Ludwig II, a passionate admirer of Wagner’s music, invited him to Munich, where all Wagner’s debts were cleared by his royal admirer, and Tristan and Isolde received its premiere in June 1865. Wagner’s ability to extract large amounts of money from Ludwig and his scandalous affair with Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, at that time married to the conductor Hans von Bülow, caused so much unrest at the Bavarian court that Wagner was forced to leave Munich. Maintained by Ludwig in a villa in Tribschen on Lake Lucerne, he finished Die Meistersinger there.

Wagner first conceived of this opera in the spa town of Marienbad, where he had gone to take the waters in 1845. He read about the mastersingers and Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the poet, songwriter, shoemaker and Lutheran reformer, in Georg Gottfried Gervinus’s history of German poetry (1835–42). Wagner made a prose draft at that time for what he then envisaged as a comic opera revolving around the singing contest held by the city’s mastersingers, poets and musicians who practised various trades. But he did the main work on the opera during the 1860s, when his conception of it changed in two main ways: first, the Hans Sachs character became more heroic and noble, partly under the influence of Schopenhauer’s concept of the renunciation of the will in The World as Will and Representation, a work Wagner read in 1854; and secondly, a nationalistic meaning to the opera was now imposed, as set out in Wagner’s essays ‘What is German?’ (1865) and ‘German Art and German Politics’ (1867), in which the mastersingers are meant to represent the traditional values and creative spirit of the German folk. Hans Sachs’s appeal to the people at the end warned against the dangers of foreign influence in Germany:

Beware! Evil tricks threaten us; if the German people and kingdom should one day decay, under a false, foreign rule, soon no prince would understand his people; and foreign mists with foreign vanities they would plant in our German land; what is German and true none would know, if it did not live in the honour of German Masters.

Within a year of its Munich premiere, Die Meistersinger was performed at Dresden, Dessau, Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Hanover and Weimar, with Vienna, Königsberg, Berlin and Leipzig following in 1870. The opera would become a focal point of the German nationalist movement in the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany.

Wagner saw his music dramas as the start of a new German art. ‘I am the most German of all of them, I am the German spirit,’ he noted in his diary in September 1865. To grasp their nationality the Germans had to see themselves, their national drama, on the stage. Wagner filled his operas with German myths, folk legends (some genuine, some appropriated), landscapes and historical figures. Through his propagandists he marketed his music as a purely ‘German’ art – spiritually higher than the commercial forms of operatic art in France and Italy. There was an irony in this campaign: the Wagner movement deployed all the methods of the modern ‘culture industry’ – artistic manifestos, self-promotion and publicity, the cult of the pioneering artist as prophet and celebrity – to promote his ‘music of the future’ as a brand.¹²⁶

The focus of the movement was the founding of a theatre for Wagner’s operas. In 1848, Wagner had made plans for a ‘German national theatre of the kingdom of Saxony’ – state-sponsored but separate from the court – in Dresden and Leipzig. From the 1860s, his preference was to have a theatre where German music dramas would be performed without charge for the people – an idea close to the music festivals that had sprung up in Germany in the early decades of the nineteenth century but also copied from the Greek ideal of theatre in the service of community. He envisaged a festival in a small German town, ‘entirely free from the influence of the repertory system in vogue in our permanent theatres’, where a simple amphitheatre would be built ‘only for artistic purposes’, as he put it in his Preface to the poem of Der Ring des Nibelungen in 1862. He was partly influenced by the modern bourgeois type of theatre he had known in Riga, where he had been musical director from 1837 to 1839, in which there were no tiered boxes, as in the European opera houses for the aristocracy, but a wide auditorium with steeply rising stalls and unbroken sight lines to the stage, a sunken pit to make the orchestra invisible, and lights that were lowered during the performance to focus the attention of the audience. In 1864, he went to Munich with a promise from Ludwig to build such a theatre for the Ring, on which he began to work. Gottfried Semper, who had designed the Dresden Opera House, was brought to Munich to work on plans for a monumental amphitheatre to meet his requirements. But after he was forced to leave Munich, Wagner looked for a smaller German town to build a theatre of his own. The place chosen was Bayreuth. As Wagner explained, he had wanted a location in Bavaria, to benefit from Ludwig’s patronage. He also wanted it to be roughly in the centre of Germany, not in a fashionable spa, which might attract the wrong type of urban crowd, nor somewhere with a commercial theatre of its own.¹²⁷ Bayreuth was to be a site of pilgrimage to his ‘new art’.

On 28 January 1870, the first of two performances of Der letzte Zauberer – the German version of Le Dernier Sorcier – took place in the Karlsruhe Court Theatre. The production had been commissioned by the Grand Duke Friedrich and Grand Duchess Louise of Baden, who had seen the operetta in Baden and heard of its triumph in the Weimar Court Theatre. They wanted it to have a similar success on the Karlsruhe stage.

Eduard Devrient, the director of the Karlsruhe Court Theatre, then aged sixty-nine, was at the end of his career, and neither Pauline nor Turgenev had thought enough of his abilities to have much to do with his company since their arrival in the town a year or so previously.¹²⁸ Musically conservative, Devrient was an enemy of Wagner and known to be opposed to the Grand Duke’s insistence that his operas be included in the theatre’s repertoire. They were expensive to produce and demanding on his singers, and postponements of the opening night were often necessary. Although Die Meistersinger had been performed in Karlsruhe (Turgenev had seen it there in January 1869), Devrient thought it was ‘a tormented, self-contradictory and boring monster, palmed off and forced upon the stupidity of the world with dazzling effrontery. The fact that it has achieved dissemination is a question of fashion, like chignons or Chinese dresses; nobody considers them beautiful, but everybody wears them.’¹²⁹

The animosity between Devrient and Wagner became public in March 1869, when Wagner published a revised edition, this time in his own name, of his notorious essay of 1850, ‘Jewishness in Music’. Devrient denounced it as poisonous lies, and countered it by publishing his own memoirs about Mendelssohn. Pauline too had been disgusted by the reissuing of the anti-Semitic article. Her great patron Meyerbeer, its main target, had died in Paris only five years earlier – his body taken by train from the Gare du Nord to Berlin for burial in the Jewish cemetery with vast crowds lining the streets in both cities to pay their last respects to the composer, who, in the words of Émile Ollivier, the French statesman, had done so much to establish a ‘harmonic bond’ between France and Germany.¹³⁰ Now, more than ever, his death symbolized the passing of the cosmopolitan idea of European culture which his life and work had embodied. Pauline was outraged by Wagner’s racist diatribe. She might be a fan of Wagner’s art, but she detested his politics and did not much like the man. She wrote in protest to Wagner, a fact that became known to the public. Wagner replied by claiming that her sympathy for Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer made Pauline ‘a Jew’ herself.¹³¹

Der letzte Zauberer was received coldly by the Karlsruhe audience, and there was some hissing at the end. The applause was ‘scanty’, according to Devrient, and none of the performers received a curtain call. Turgenev put a brave face on the failure, insisting in a letter to Pietsch that it had been ‘far from a fiasco’. But the German press was merciless. ‘A total failure,’ reported a Leipzig music weekly. ‘The high expectations were in no respect satisfied. The applause, which was weak from the beginning, gradually diminished and ended in a perceptible hissing.’ In the influential Leipzig music paper, the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, on 9 February, an anonymous reviewer was scathing about Pauline, who had sung the leading female role: ‘Nothing but silence is appropriate not only for the impression that this artist, who was justly feted decades ago, now makes, but also for the text and music of the entire work.’ The public reaction was menacing. Turgenev was accosted in the street by a German army officer indignant at the high fees rumoured to have been paid to Viardot and Turgenev, which he said had deprived him of hearing the best tenors of the day.¹³²

There was little doubt that the operetta had been sabotaged in a well-orchestrated campaign – a fact confirmed by a later article in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, on 23 February, which reported that there had been ‘certain circles’ spreading ‘dark rumours’ about the operetta during the rehearsals, circles which had also organized the cold reception and hissing of the performance. Elsewhere in the press there were heavy hints that the people who had been responsible for this were Wagner and his nationalist supporters in Karlsruhe. They had interpreted the comic satire about the sorcerer and the forest elves as an attack on Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold and sought revenge on Viardot and Turgenev. But nationalism was at the bottom of it all. The German nationalists who followed Wagner were violently opposed to the cosmopolitanism represented by the Viardots’ presence in Baden. As Turgenev wrote to Pietsch, of all the factors behind the hostility they met, the most important of them was the ‘deep disparagement of foreigners and their presumptuousness’ in putting on an opera in Germany.¹³³

9

In February 1870, Turgenev and the Viardots moved to Weimar. For the next three months they lived in the Hôtel de Russie. The Karlsruhe art school had been a disappointment to Claudie, who now pursued her studies at the Grand Ducal Art School in Weimar, where the Belgian painter Charles Verlat, an old friend of Ary Scheffer, took an interest in her work.¹³⁴ Supported by Liszt, a former Kapellmeister at the Weimar court and a frequent presence there, Pauline was invited by the Grand Duke, a musical enthusiast, to reproduce her roles in Orphée and Le Prophète at the Weimar Court Theatre. She decided that these were to be her last appearances on the public stage. She also sang in a number of concerts in the Weimar area, including one in Jena, on 3 March, where she gave the first performance of Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody.

In May they returned to Baden, and from there Turgenev soon departed for St Petersburg, where he met Stasiulevich, before travelling to Spasskoe, where he set about the task of ‘making money’ by selling off a large chunk of his land and completing his new story, ‘A King Lear of the Steppes’.¹³⁵ On 12 July, Turgenev began the journey back from Russia to Baden. Stopping in Berlin, he found himself in the hotel dining room eating ‘directly opposite General Moltke’, Chief of the Prussian General Staff.¹³⁶ It was the evening of 15 July. Earlier that day the German army had been mobilized for war with France. Famous for his view that no war could be planned beyond the first encounter with the enemy, Moltke had a lot to think about, but with his calm exterior, refined manners and evident intelligence, he seemed to Turgenev the personification of power.

The immediate cause of the Franco-Prussian War was the Ems Despatch, Bismarck’s craftily edited press-release version of a telegram he received from King Wilhelm’s secretary on 13 July. The telegram informed him of the king’s meeting with Count Benedetti, the French ambassador to Prussia, during his morning stroll in the Kurpark of Bad Ems. Relations between France and Prussia had been strained by the question of the Spanish succession: fearful of the growth of Prussian power and afraid of encirclement by an alliance of Germany and Spain, France had protested against Spain’s offer of the Spanish throne to Prince Leopold of the Prussian Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen lands. On 2 July, Leopold had withdrawn his acceptance of the crown, but the French now wanted more from the Prussian king: a guarantee that no member of the Hohenzollern dynasty would ever reign in Spain. That was the assurance Benedetti sought in what was in fact a polite and friendly meeting with Wilhelm on the promenade of the Kurpark. The king rejected the request in decisive but diplomatic terms, conveyed in the telegram to Bismarck from his secretary. Bismarck, though, was eager to provoke a war with France, which he thought was necessary for the Prussian takeover of the southern German states. The Chancellor released the king’s answer to Benedetti in a form designed to make it seem like a cold refusal, an insult to the French. Mistranslated into French by a news agency in a way that made it even worse, the despatch was published in France the following day, 14 July, or Bastille Day, to an outcry from excited crowds in Paris demanding war. The emperor’s declaration of war duly followed on 19 July.

By the time Turgenev left Berlin, on 16 July, Prussian troops were on the move, destroying bridges and cutting communication lines across the Rhine. Turgenev arrived in Baden just before civilian railway travel to the town became impossible. A few days later, Brahms was unable to get through from Vienna via Bad Wildbad to come to the relief of Clara Schumann, terrified of the ‘barbaric Turkish’ soldiers rumoured to be in the French army. She wrote to him from Baden:

Everybody who has a house (the Rosenhayns, the Viardots, the Guaitas) is advising me to stay quietly here, for if they can’t get enough soldiers billeted on inhabited houses they will open closed ones and use them, and then everything will be ruined. So I am staying on though still feeling very anxious, as we have no man to protect us.¹³⁷

Turgenev and the Viardots were also staying put. ‘Baden is completely deserted,’ Turgenev wrote to his brother Nikolai on 27 July, ‘but I am staying here and will stay even if the French break through – what can they do to me?’ Life went on in an atmosphere of unreality. Turgenev was determined to take part in a chess tournament scheduled to be held in Baden in the first week of August. He played the game at a high level, was a member of the Baden club, and had been appointed the vice-president of the tournament committee. The competition went ahead in the Salle de Conversation to the distant sound of the French and Prussian guns. ‘It was strange and sad to see in this peaceful and beautiful plain, under the gentle glow of a half-covered sun, the shameful smoke of war,’ Turgenev wrote.¹³⁸

When the war began, Turgenev and the Viardots were hoping for a Prussian victory. Their friends in France, and most in Russia, were on the side of France. But they saw the conflict as a fight for liberty against Napoleon’s imperialism, and, as residents in Germany who counted Bismarck and the Prussian king and queen among their friends, they felt a certain loyalty towards Prussia. Their main thought was that a defeat for France would bring about the end of Napoleon III’s regime. ‘I don’t need to tell you,’ Turgenev wrote to Ludwig Friedländer, ‘that I am wholeheartedly on the German side. This is truly a war of civilization against barbarism – but not in the sense that the French think. Bonapartism must be defeated, whatever the cost, if public morality, liberty and independence are to have a future in Europe.’ France had to be taught a lesson ‘as we were taught a lesson at Sevastopol [in the Crimean War],’ Turgenev wrote in his fictional ‘Letters from the Franco-Prussian War’, which were published in Russia.¹³⁹

In the early stages of the war, Turgenev and the Viardots feared an invasion by the French, who had amassed their troops in Strasbourg to advance east to Baden, hoping that they would be joined by Austria–Hungary in occupying the south German states. Pauline and her daughters knitted garments and blankets for the Prussian soldiers in Baden, and sang in concerts to keep them entertained. The French breakthrough never came. Instead the Prussians quickly advanced towards Metz, an important fortress town deep in France where Napoleon III assumed command of the newly titled Army of the Rhine, which was soon forced to retreat by the more effective Prussian troops. The Prussians laid siege to Strasbourg, using trains to bring 200 heavy guns that began a month-long bombardment of the town on 23 August. From the heights of the Old Castle in Baden, Clara Schumann and her children could see the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral and hear the cannonades, which ‘made our cottage tremble’, recalled Eugenie.¹⁴⁰ By 2 September, the French had been defeated at Sedan, resulting in the capture of Napoleon III and his army, the formation of a Government of National Defence and a Third Republic in Paris. Bizet, Fauré and Saint-Saëns signed up for the National Guard, which carried on the fight against the Prussian troops attacking the capital.

Turgenev was delighted by the Prussian victory. ‘The whole Viardot family is healthy and happy,’ he wrote to Pietsch on 9 September.

We are organizing concerts and readings for the benefit of the wounded – and that is how we pass our days. The downfall of the Empire was a source of great satisfaction for poor Viardot, whose heart bleeds nonetheless – although he realises that all this was the punishment deserved by France. As for me, I ought to be a German completely, because a French victory would have been a defeat for Liberty – but you really did not need to destroy Strasbourg. That was clumsy and inexpedient. What will now happen in Paris?

For four months, beginning on 19 September, the Prussians laid siege to Paris. They attacked the French at Orléans, Le Mans and Amiens, and took Rouen (Flaubert’s house at Croisset was occupied by ten invading troops, forcing the writer to move with his elderly mother into lodgings in Rouen). The prolongation of the war turned Turgenev and the Viardots against the Prussians. ‘The fall of the empire brought great joy,’ Turgenev wrote to a Russian friend on 18 September, ‘but the aggressive greed for conquest that has overtaken Germany is not a consoling sight.’ Four weeks later he wrote to his German friend, the writer and translator Paul Heyse: ‘Are you satisfied with Alsace or do you also have your hearts set on Lorraine? I am beginning not to understand nor to recognize the Germans I once loved.’¹⁴¹ It seemed to him that the Germans had become the military aggressors, and were intending to destroy the new republic in which Turgenev and the Viardots had invested all their hopes.

Meanwhile, in Baden, they began to feel the full force of German nationalism as victory gave way to triumphalism among the local populace. ‘We no longer hear the cannon from Strasbourg,’ Turgenev wrote to William Ralston on 9 October, ‘but we do see Germans in their hundreds of thousands travelling there in pilgrimage to see their new conquest.’ German flags began to appear on buildings in Baden. Clara Schumann put one out and prayed for German unity. Brahms was overjoyed by the Prussian victory. A German patriot who idolized Bismarck, he composed a thunderous Triumphlied for orchestra and chorus to celebrate the victory. Nationalist parades were held in Baden. Extremists made life difficult for the French inhabitants in an attempt to force them out. Every night a crowd would gather by the entrance to the Villa Viardot and make Katzenmusik, a threatening din with drums and horns.¹⁴²

The war had given rise to strong nationalist feelings on both sides of the Rhine. The loss of Alsace to the Germans was bitterly resented by the French. Germans were expelled from France, and the French from Germany. The Prussian victory was a turning point in European history. Politically it reinforced the growing nationalist currents that worked against the cultural cosmopolitanism developing across the Continent – eventually leading in the longer term to the disintegration of this European culture in the First World War. More immediately, the foundation of the German Empire was a catastrophe for the cosmopolitan culture of Franco-German spa towns like Baden, which joined the empire in 1871. No longer favoured by the French, who turned instead to their own spa resorts, they lost their international atmosphere, and with it much of their cultural excitement and significance.

It was also a disaster for those artists who had thrived in their cosmopolitan culture. None suffered more than Offenbach, who was attacked by nationalists on both sides. In Germany he was accused of treason for writing anti-German songs, while in France he was denounced for siding with the country of his birth. Neither charge was justified. Although born in Germany, Offenbach had chosen France. He was a French citizen. He did not recognize the German claim of blood and soil on his nationality. To clarify his position and protect his kin from possible attack in Germany he wrote an open letter to Villemessant for publication in Le Figaro:

Certain German journalists have spread the calumny that I have composed many songs against Germany. The most terrible insults have accompanied these assertions. I have family and friends in Germany I still hold dear – and it is for them that I beg you to print this: From the age of fourteen I have lived in France; I have received letters of naturalization; I have been made a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur; I owe everything to France and believe that I merit the title of a Frenchman, which I have earned by my work and honour, but I plead guilty to a weakness for my first country.¹⁴³

In September, Offenbach and his family fled from France to San Sebastian, the royal seaside town in northern Spain.

In France, meanwhile, anti-German feeling was at boiling point. ‘They want us to hate the Germans, whom we love,’ George Sand wrote to Louis on 8 September. ‘What a test for European civilization!’¹⁴⁴ The nationalist mood made life impossible for the Viardots. They were attacked by the French press for choosing to live in Baden, for being friends of the Prussian king and queen, and for not returning to France on the outbreak of the war. They received letters accusing them of treachery. One addressed to Louis from Adolphe Crémieux, the republican Minister of Justice, made Pauline so angry that she felt obliged to defend her husband, as he had more than once defended her against unjustified attacks. Following the rules of social etiquette, she wrote not to the minister, but to his wife, Madame Crémieux:

Is it because of my friendship with the Queen of Prussia for almost thirty years that the patriotism of my husband has fallen under suspicion? A man who sacrificed his whole career to help mine as an artist? A man who out of love for France, because of his hatred for the Imperial government, lived with me in exile in the Duchy of Baden, on the frontier of our beloved country? And for that you think what? That we chose to be Germans? Oh, that is a bad joke [oh la mauvaise plaisanterie]!¹⁴⁵

The war was a disaster for Pauline financially. Concert life in Baden had come to an end, and she had lost her pupils, who returned to their families. On 18 October, with Paris under siege, she left with her children for Ostend, from where they sailed to England. As it was for many others, London became a refuge for the Viardots. Manuel had been living there since 1848, and had many influential contacts in the music world. Pauline could count on students, concerts and engagements in the capital.

Louis stayed behind in Baden, having fallen ill in the last week, so Turgenev accompanied Pauline and the children to Ostend. They travelled by coach to Mannheim and by steamship down the Rhine as far as Cologne – the railways being in the hands of the Prussian military, which blocked civilian passengers – and then went by train to Antwerp and Ostend. From there the Viardots sailed to Dover, where they were met by Manuel, who took them to their temporary lodgings in Seymour Street near Portman Square. The next day Pauline went to the Union Bank, where she had left £100 in an account, and deposited the money she had salvaged from Baden: 970 francs (£38). It was enough to live on for a few months.¹⁴⁶

From Ostend, Turgenev returned at once by the same route to Baden to look after Louis and oversee the packing up of their houses. Three weeks later, the Villa Viardot was boarded up. Turgenev’s house was also closed – as far as that was possible, for a chimney blown down by a storm had ‘crashed right through the roof and practically destroyed the whole building’, as Turgenev wrote to Annenkov on 28 October. ‘When I had it built I had told my architect, a French scoundrel, that with the winds we get here such tall chimneys could be dangerous: “Monsieur” – he replied – “these chimneys are as solid as France.”’ By early November, Turgenev was ready to depart from Baden with Louis. ‘I am leaving in a few days’ time and plan to stay in London until the New Year,’ he wrote to Annenkov. ‘From London I will send you my address. The rest of the Viardot family is already in London: the war has ruined them and Madame Viardot must try to earn a living in England, the only country where that commodity can still be found.’¹⁴⁷

* Turgenev was proud of his ‘river’ (it was really just a stream) and took offence if visitors did not remark on it (Ostrovskaia, Vospominaniia o Turgeneve, p. 9).

* Compare with the estimated earnings of Gautier, of whom the Goncourts wrote in 1868: ‘Our good Gautier is one of the richest of those modern starvelings of literature, with his librarian’s post, say 6,000 francs, his pension from the Emperor’s privy purse, say 3,000, and almost 20,000 a year from the Moniteur and the royalties on his books. Who among writers is as rich as that today?’ (GJ, vol. 2, p. 187).

* There are several entries in her diaries expressing fear and longing for him when he travelled abroad, especially to Russia, where he went in 1864 and 1868. See e.g. HL, MUS 264 (365), Pauline Viardot Journal, 13 Jan. 1864, 23 June 1868.

* Turgenev was the life and soul of these domestic parties, when he was not suffering from gout, keeping everybody entertained with his funny stories, silly dances and animal impersonations (his favourite party trick to entertain the children at the dinner table was to eat his soup like a chicken).

* The strict French laws of theatre licensing allowed Hervé to stage only one-act operas with no more than two characters. He found various ingenious ways around these restrictions. In one work, for example, he has a singing corpse for a character.

* Her authorship was revealed only in 1842, when Queen Victoria received Felix Mendelssohn at Buckingham Palace and expressed her desire to sing for him her favourite of his songs, ‘Italien’, which he confessed was by Fanny.

* ‘Don’t you think,’ Flaubert once wrote to a friend, ‘that life would be more tolerable if the idea of Happiness did not exist? We expect things that life can’t give’ (Flaubert, Correspondance, vol. 5, p. 419).

* A reference to Wagner’s self-promoting essay ‘The Music of the Future’ (‘La Musique de l’avenir’) published originally in a French translation in 1860 and in German (‘Zukunftsmusik’) in 1861.

* The great Wagnerian singer Marianne Brandt studied with Viardot in Baden-Baden during the 1860s. She shared the role of Kundry with Amalie Matema and Therese Malten at the Bayreuth premiere of Parsifal in 1882.