Just the two of us
A wife as nothing more than helpmate, comfort, cushioner: how long ago did that go out of fashion? Probably more recently in the world at large than it did in the sphere of the arts – composers, artists, writers generally moved in more liberated, more Bohemian circles than their contemporaries in the standard professions. Schumann’s Clara was a pianist of astonishing skill and sensitivity, all reports attest, a muse not only to Robert but also, extending after his death, to their friend-in-common Johannes Brahms. Carl Nielsen’s Anne Marie enjoyed as high a reputation in the field of sculpture as he did in music, at least during their lifetimes. Yet there were still limits we wouldn’t think acceptable today: ‘There isn’t room for two artists in this relationship’; ‘My career comes first’. No doubt it happens, but the woman will often think twice at such an ultimatum, or else make a decision to make the greater of the pair her life project to support and follow of her own free will (the same is true of gay marriages and relationships). A recipe for unhappiness in the first case was true for Alma Mahler; by all accounts, Pauline Strauss herself made the decision to give up a strong career as a fine soprano.
Yet even Pauline still suffers from the male perspective, as Garsington Opera’s 2015 production of Strauss’s autobiographical marriage-opera Intermezzo set me thinking. By coincidence, there were two other circumstances around the same couple of weeks last June which prompted the current train of thinking – the first involving an ideal but very human helpmate (Constanze Mozart), the second that aforementioned Danish sculptor.
In David McVicar’s tense and perceptive
production of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus
dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio)
at Glyndebourne, an offstage wind band
played part of the ineffable Adagio from the B
flat major Serenade, K361. A quick checking
of dates after the performance confirmed
that the Serenade was composed only slightly
earlier than Entführung, the masterpiece
of 1782. The previous December, Mozart
announced to his father that he wanted to
marry one of the three ‘Weber women’ – not
the eldest, Josepha, who had driven him to
distraction, but ‘the Martyr of the family’,
Konstanze (the name of the opera’s heroine).
The letter of 15 December 1781 is typically
perceptive and sensitive, one of many
contradicting the image of the scatological
numpty projected in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.
Wolfgang tells Leopold that while he has
the same sexual drive as any young man, he
has been too religious and decent ‘to seduce
an innocent girl’ and too concerned for his health ‘to play around with whores’: ‘as my
personal disposition is more inclined to a quiet
and domesticlife than towards noise and
excitement… In my eyes, an unmarried man
lives only half a life’. Konstanze is ‘the most
kindhearted, the most skilled’ of the sisters,
he goes on, with ‘no great wit but enough
common sense to fulfil her duties as a wife
and mother’ and ‘two little black eyes and a
graceful figure’ which are ‘her whole beauty…
I love her and sheloves me with all her heart.’
As in most marital relationships of the 18th
and 19th centuries, we’d like to hear more
from the woman’s side, ofcourse. But there
is enough evidence to prove that Konstanze
was a resourceful and spirited individual, who
cared for her husband’s legacy long after his
death. The wedding took place on 4 August
1782 in Vienna’s Stefansdom. I’d always
wondered why the (semi) comic opera of that
year and the most sublime of all the wind
serenades were thefirst of Mozart’s works
to have that at-one-with-the-world aura we
know so well from the mature masterpieces, a
radiance only very fitfully to befound in the
riven genius of his first great opera Idomeneo.
Last year’s discovery reinforced a hunch:
Konstanze’s role as muse as well as wife had
a more profound effect on the music than we
can ever realise.
Wouldn’t a thwarted artistic temperament
be a much more plausible explanation for the
dissatisfaction, the artfully staged paddies, the
ineffectual attempts Christine makes to put
herself at the centre of everything? It’s typical
that the only other views we get on her, apart
from those of the maid who has to button her
lips, come from men. Even the one who’s on her side thinks she’s ‘just what he needs’. But
what about her needs? At least there’s half an
act in which we see Christine apart from her
husband, but only in a questionable friendship
with a younger man which will serve to put her
in the wrong. That raises another unanswered
question: did the relationship with the ‘Baron’
have its counterpart in real life, as we know the
telegram sent in error by a girl on the make to
Strauss certainly did? 
In the case of Pauline Strauss, née de
Ahna, a major-general’s daughter just like
Alice Elgar, we know exactly the effect on the music. Strauss crated a series of musical portraits, filtered through a satirical or mockepic
imagination. There’s the woman of
infinite variety portrayed in the most complex
and difficult violin solo ever written for an
orchestral leader in the symphonic poem Ein
Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life); Strauss himself
is the hero, but only in part and very much
with tongue in cheek. The Wife has a variety
of themes – among them ‘lively/wrathful’
and ‘feeling’ ones, – in the 24 hours of
Strauss family life so exuberantly portrayed
in the Symphonia Domestica. As a soprano
of formidable talent, strong enough to sing
Isolde and Freihild, the heroine of Strauss’s
first opera, under Strauss’s baton at Weimar,
and Elisabeth in Tannhäuser as well as a
Parsifal flower-maiden at Bayreuth, Pauline’s
amazing breath control was the reason why
songs like ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’
and ‘Freundliche Vision’ are especially taxing
to singers of shorter wind.
Even after Pauline’s apparently voluntary retirement from the operatic stage and the concert platform to bring up the Strausses’ only child, Franz, her legacy lived on in songs right through to the incredibly long phrases of the Four Last Songs of 1948-9. Eduard Hanslick, Wagner’s notorious opponent immortalised as Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg called Pauline the composer’s ‘better and more beautiful other half’. The phrase went straight into thelibretto Strauss concocted himself for Intermezzo, fleshing out at length an anecdote of a rather serious marital misunderstanding. Christine Storch, theleading role, is very decidedly Pauline Strauss in all her pettishness, fury, coquettishness and generosity of spirit (unfortunately in that order, though Strauss lavishes his finest music on the generosity in one of his greatest slow movements, the orchestral interlude as Christine dreams by thefireside). In forging an identity for multifarious Christine, Strauss throws in just about every detail concerning her follies and virtues except the most crucial: that she has been a performer of great distinction, and has given it all up for family life.
We have to take Strauss’s word for it that
he never forced his dissatisfied wife into
anything; whereas we know for certain that
the marriage between Alma Schindler and
Gustav Mahler, the colleague with whom
Strauss had a difficult but not unfruitful
professional friendship, got off to a bad start
by any standards. What we know of Alma’s
songs shows a more than modest talent.
There’s no question of her rising to the level
of her husband’s symphonies – who else
could, at that time? But to her liberal family
in 1890s Vienna almost as much as to us now,
the unbelievably egotistical ultimatum that
there couldn’t be room for two composers in a
marriage seemed intolerable. It’s encapsulated
in Mahler’s letter of 19 December 1901, of
which this is merely a sample:
‘Have you any idea how ridiculous, and
in time, how degrading for both of us such
a peculiarly competitive relationship would
inevitably become? What will happen if, just
when you’re “in the mood”, you’re obliged to
attend to the house or that something I might
happen to need, since, as you wrote, you ought
to relieve me of the menial details of life…
You… have only one profession from now on: to make me happy.’
An extreme statement, surely, of what
was sometimes taken as a given in marital
relations between creative artists and women
who served. Still, it could have been worse.
On their honeymoon, William Walton told
his vivacious Argentinian wife that there was
only room for one child in the relationship – a
pity the question hadn’t been raised earlier
– and when she did accidentally become
pregnant, essentially drove her to a back-steet
abortion. Was Susana’s insanely energetic
promotion of William as his widow overcompensation
for all that frustrated drive?
At any rate, Alma questioned the one who
was really being ridiculous, writing in her
diary for 22 December, ‘But must one of us
be subordinate? Isn’t it possible with the help
of love to merge two fundamentally opposing
points of view into one?’ But she went ahead,
and 11 years later, just before Mahler died,
it turned out not to be enough. Though
Alma did not leave her husband long for the
architect Walter Gropius, would her new
volte-face hold? At any rate, she married ‘the
other’ after Mahler’s death.
Let’s take an intermezzo of our own
now between the high-profile wives.
By comparison with Pauline and
Alma, Caroline Alice Roberts –
like Pauline a major-general’s
daughter who took music
lessons from a merely
promising composer –
remains a more shadowy
figure. She was also 40, nine
years older than Elgar, when
they married. Was this the
helpmate pure and simple, albeit one who took her domestic powers
seriously to impress upon her husband the
need of moving in higher society as well as to
make him work and to divert his thoughts of
suicide during bouts of depression?
Creatively, this good wife was shunted
sideways in Elgar’s most autobiographical
music, as Pauline never was in Strauss’s.
It probably says much for the Edwardian
supremacy of the male that ‘C.A.E.’ is the
first, delicate but melancholy portrait of
the Enigma Variations while its heart and
soul is AJ Jaeger, ‘Nimrod’, the tubercular
employee at Novello’s music publisher
to whom Elgar confided so many of his
innermost thoughts as well as his artistic ones.
Maybe that has more to do with the summer
night’s discussion between Jaeger and Elgar
discussing Beethoven’s slow movements,
and particularly the one at the centre of the
‘Pathétique’ Sonata which the ‘Nimrod’
variation so nobly emulates. But even in the
finale, ‘Nimrod’ plays a bigger role alongside
‘E.D.U.’ than the briefly returning ‘C.A.E’.
Mothering seems also to have played a large
part in the stressful married life of Sibelius’s
wife Aino. Like Alma, she camefrom a highly
cultured family, albeit also that of an army
man like Pauline’s and Alice’s. One brother, Arno Järnefelt, was a writer, another, Eero,
a painter. The 1890s and early 1900s were
hard years; it was left to Aino to deal with her
husband’s carousing and financial difficulties,
and she turned to the solace ofcreating a
garden in their humble home at Järvenpää,
not far from Helsinki. In 1907 Sibelius was
operated on for what turned out to be a malign
throat tumour, and touched no alcohol or
cigars for the next seven years – happy ones
for Aino. The threat of separation or divorce
loomed again when that time of abstinence
came to an end. Yet this was a 65-year-old
marriage, probably one of more happiness
than grief, and Aino lived on at Ainola until
her death in 1969. She wrote in later years that
though she had had to repress and control her
own wishes, ‘I bless my destiny and see it as a
gift from heaven. To me my husband’s music is
the word of God – its source is noble, and it is
wonderful to live close to such a source.’
In another marriage which took place in
1891, a year before Aino and Jean tied the
knot, the woman did not suppress her wishes
in a high-profile career and only tolerated
her husband’s infidelities up to a point. Anne
Marie Brodersen was an award-winning
sculptor in Paris when Carl Nielsen arrived
in that mecca for Scandinavian artists. A
whirlwind romance and a pack-it-in European
tour culminated in a Roman wedding. They
shared liberal values which meant there was
never any question but that Anne Marie
should continue her career as well as raising
three children (Aino, mother of six, could
never have balanced the two).
Just how fine this sculptor was – indeed
is – because her works have such an ongoing
life, quickly dawned on me in Odense’s Carl
Nielsen Museum which I visited on Nielsen’s
150th birthday in between the Entführung
and Intermezzo first nights. The collection
seems to be equally divided between Anne
Marie’s maquettes and sculptures, and Carl’s
manuscripts and other memorabilia. Her
sculpture of an imagined young Nielsen
playing on a home-made flute stands on the
road from Odense to the only survivor among
his childhood homes at Nørre Lyndelse. It’s
fine if conventional work, and Anne Marie
took on big projects – the bronze doors, a
colossal equestrian statue of Christian IX –
work and preliminary studies on which did
indeed make her husband feel neglected.
The real fault, though, was his. Regular
liaisons led to an illegitimate child and the
revelation that he’d been carrying on with his
children’s governess. A hushed-up separation
lasted from 1915 to 1922, when Anne Marie
returned to comfort the last years of the
composer’s life, constantly troubled by a
heart condition which led to his death at 66.
If the Nielsens’ was a rather more troubled
portrait of a marriage than the Strausses’
or the Mozarts’, it anticipates the modern
pattern of parallel careers and forgiveness of
infidelities in a world where constant travel
makes a fulfilled creative life for both partners
difficult but not impossible.
VOCABULARY
- astonishing - удивительный
- circumstances - обстоятельства
- wratheful - гневный
- retirement - выход на пенсию
- thwarted - сорван
- infidelities - неверность