“The only love affair I have ever had was with music.”
Maurice Ravel
The history of classical music, however, is full of fabulously gifted individuals with slightly more earthy ambitions. Love stories of classical composers are frequently retold within a romanticized narrative of sugarcoated fairy tales. To be sure, happily-ever-after stories do on rare occasions take place, but it is much more likely that classical romances lead to some rather unhappy endings. Johannes Brahms had an overriding fear of commitment, Claude Debussy drove his wife into an attempt at suicide, Francis Poulenc severely struggled with his sexual identity, and Percy Grainger was heavily into whips and bondage. And that’s only the beginning! The love life of classical composers will sometimes make you weep, or alternately shout out with joy or anguish. You might even cringe with embarrassment as we try to go beyond the usual headlines and niceties to discover the psychological makeup and the societal and cultural pressures driving these relationships. Classical composer’s love stories are not for the faint hearted; they are heightened reflections of humanity at its best and worst. Accompanying these stories of love and lust with the compositions they inspired, we are able to see composers and their relationships in a completely new light.
7 pieces for Goethe’s Faust, Op. 5 No. 6. Gretchen am Spinnrade No. 7. Melodram It is at least conceivable that Leah David’s rejection fueled Richard Wagner’s gradually growing hatred for the Jewish race. It is without doubt, however, that
In his most renowned psychoanalytic conjecture — appropriately dubbed the “Oedipus complex” — Sigmund Freud suggested that a child’s unconscious mind projects the desire to sexually possess the mother, and kill the father. Freud derived his theory from ancient Greek
In festo transfigurationis Domini nostri Jesu Christi, S188/R74 It was relatively easy to start this series on Franz Liszt and his romantic conquests. However, it is somewhat more difficult to conclude it. Since Liszt was a fairly discreet lover, there
Orpheus, S98/R415 For 12 years, the Villa Altenberg in Weimar became the holy shrine celebrating the religious and personal cults of Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein and Franz Liszt. Working together in a church like atmosphere of religious solitude, they wrote essays,
The differences between Marie Duplessis and Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein could not have been more pronounced. Marie experienced a wretched and squalid upbringing with Daddy selling her into prostitution by age 12. Carolyne Ivanovska, on the other hand, was the only
Liszt Liebestraum After Franz Liszt had successfully escaped the ravenous attention of Lola Montez in early autumn 1845, he hastily made his way to Paris. Performing in a variety of public and salon concerts, he apparently liked to spend his
King Ludwig I of Bavaria had the somewhat conceited habit of having his lovers, real and imagined, portrait by the royal painter Joseph Karl Stieler. When the Bavarian Revolution forced his abdication in 1848, he possessed a proud collection of
Liszt Was Liebe sei?, S288/1/R575a Was Liebe sei?, S288/2/R575b Was Liebe sei?, S288/3/R575c After a highly successful tour of Russia, Franz Liszt arrived in Berlin and played his first recital at the Berlin Singakademie on 27 December 1841. His performance
