by Tim Rayborn
Then things became truly gruesome. Lina Schmalhausen, a one-time pupil of Liszt, recorded the horrific events in a recently discovered diary. The day after his death, a local barber arrived to embalm the body (barbers often doubled as surgeons; more on them in Part II). However, the poor man had never embalmed a body, and didn’t know what to do. He ended up cutting it apart in his attempts, and by the time the damage was done, Liszt’s body was so bloated that it became unrecognizable. Consequently, no one was even allowed to view it. By the next day, bowls of chlorine had to be set nearby to mask the odor of the rapidly decaying corpse, and it was quickly removed.
Liszt died in Bayreuth, a town famous for its association with Wagner both then and now. He had never been enthusiastic about the association because he was treated there as something like a second-class citizen in the shadow of the Wagnerian colossus. It might also have something to do with the fact that one of Liszt’s illegitimate daughters had an adulterous affair with Wagner for some time before they were eventually married. Wagner’s musical fame would eclipse that of Liszt for decades afterward, due in no small part to the efforts of the town that wanted to promote Wagner at the expense of other composers. Liszt, aware of this bias, once remarked of Bayreuth, “if only I do not die here.” So much for last wishes.
Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813–1888)
Racking up fame
Alkan was a French pianist and composer, regarded as having some of the finest piano skills of any musician of his time. Even the great Liszt claimed that Alkan had the best technique he had seen. Despite his acclaim and a wide circle of friends, by his mid-thirties he was increasingly antisocial, and by 1850 he had withdrawn almost completely from public life, making only very occasional public appearances. He noted that he seemed to become more and more misanthropic as he got older, and though he continued to play and compose, nothing much gave him pleasure any longer. Nevertheless, he was deeply devoted to his Jewish faith and pursued an intensive study of the Talmud and the Bible.
His end came about in an odd way, as two different stories recount. One says that as he reached for a volume of the Talmud from a high shelf, the bookcase fell on him, killing him instantly. This story seems to have been popularized by pianist Élie-Miriam Delaborde (long assumed to be his illegitimate son). But this appears to be an apocryphal tale based on an urban legend wherein an eighteenth-century rabbi named Aryeh Leib ben Asher Gunzberg met a similar fate. In fact, his death seems to have been even stranger. Something fell on him, to be sure, but it was a heavy porte-parapluies, a kind of coat and umbrella rack, and he died while trapped underneath it.
Another legend circulated about him after his death that took a rather cruel shot at him for his reclusive nature. It was said that the magazine Le Ménestrel printed an obituary that read, “Alkan is dead. He had to die in order to prove his existence.” Actually, there was no such obituary printed in the magazine, and the source of the legend is unknown.
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
When a body meets a body
Bruckner was an odd fellow indeed. He had limited critical success as a composer until 1884, when he was nearly sixty and produced his seventh symphony to great acclaim in Leipzig. For the last fifteen years of his life he lived in Vienna, encountering hostility there owing to his allegiance to Wagner’s music and the presence of anti-Wagner factions in the city; it was sort of like showing up to a Red Sox game wearing a Yankees cap. His symphonies were denounced as unplayable and even sabotaged when the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performed them at all. For his third symphony, for example, he couldn’t find a conductor willing to take on the task, so he conducted it himself. This led the orchestra members to mock him by playing out of tune, adding odd extra notes, not repeating phrases where required, and even laughing at him. Despite this blatant rudeness and disrespect, Bruckner was highly regarded as an organist, though strangely he never wrote any major works for the instrument.
A simple and humble man, deeply Roman Catholic, he nevertheless had at least one nervous breakdown and may have suffered from other emotional problems. He never married, though he proposed to a number of young women over the years, all of whom rejected him. Some scholars suspect that the poor man died a virgin.
His piety was such that he was said to fall to his knees and pray whenever he heard church bells ringing. This happened even when he was giving lectures; it probably gave his students some time to catch up on their note taking. In later life, he kept a detailed record of his daily prayers. He was also afflicted with a condition known as numeromania, a compulsion to count everything. Some have asserted that this obsession with numbers can be heard in his musical repetitions and even the great lengths of his symphonies; his eighth symphony can run for an hour and a half or longer depending on the individual performance preferences and interpretations. This is far longer than most comparable symphonies from the later nineteenth century.
Bruckner also had an obsession with dead bodies; it may have been a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He left instructions that his own corpse be embalmed. It would be tempting to think that he had heard of the Liszt debacle, whose funeral he had attended, though it’s unlikely since that whole mess was kept quite secret. He also commissioned a photograph of his deceased mother on her death bed, which he kept in his teaching room.
A remarkable story that illustrates his obsession comes from a time when Beethoven’s body was exhumed from its resting place in Währing Cemetery to be reburied in the new Central Cemetery in 1888. Bruckner’s pupil, Carl Hruby, related later that both he and his teacher attended the event. Exhumers had decided to open the coffin in the cemetery (another account says that they moved the body to a nearby chapel) and Bruckner hastened to get a closer look. As officials were taking skeletal measurements, he managed to push himself forward to get a view of the bones. Bruckner became transfixed with the corpse, staring down at it, moved by the sight. In some accounts, he cradled the skull in his arms and kissed it before being pulled away.
On the journey home with Hruby, he noticed that one of the lenses of his pince-nez (nineteenth-century eyeglasses without earpieces) had fallen out, presumably into the coffin. He was overjoyed, knowing that the lens would be reburied with Beethoven and stay with his body forever.
Apparently he did the same thing when Schubert was exhumed for the same purpose, and after seizing the skull, refused to release it until he was allowed to place it back in the coffin himself. In both instances, he was forcibly ejected from the gathering.
These were not the only corpses Bruckner desired to see. When he heard that the body of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, whom he greatly admired, might be on display, he wrote to a friend, desperately trying to get a chance to see it and wanting to know when it might be viewable. He didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity. Given Bruckner’s deep Catholicism, some musicologists have suspected that his fixation on these various bones (always of people he admired) was some form of relic veneration. But it certainly cast him in a strange and even morbid light, so it’s no wonder he was continually rejected for marriage.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921)
The apes of wrath
The long-lived Saint-Saëns was a brilliant musician, seen today more as a solid representative of the French style of composition of his time than as an innovator with a new style. This would later be held against him by some of his younger contemporaries, and he would defend his own style while attacking theirs.
Saint-Saëns was an exceptionally gifted child prodigy. His father was a French government clerk who died when the son was only three months old. He showed great early musical promise and was studying piano by the age of three; most of us can barely even remember what we were doing then! He began the study of proper composition at seven; he must have seemed like a reincarnation of Mozart.
Indeed, he gave his first public recital at the tender age of ten at the Salle Pleyel, a concert hall in Paris; again, most of us were probably in a spelling bee
or a school play at that age. However, this was not some simple children’s concert. He performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Minor and Mozart’s Concerto in B-flat from memory. Yes, that means with no sheet music. To further astound the audience, he offered to play any number of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from memory as an encore. Word of this remarkable talent spread quickly, and he was well on his way to a successful career. As if all of this weren’t enough, he showed tremendous aptitude for Latin, Greek, and various scientific disciplines. Indeed, when he sold the publishing rights to some of his pieces in 1858, he used the money to buy a telescope.
Despite the many gifts and accolades that he would receive throughout his career—including being awarded the Grande Croix of the Légion d’Honneur—his personal life was marred by tragedy. In 1875, he married a woman half his age, Marie-Laure Truffot. His mother strongly disapproved, and the marriage was rocky. In 1878, their two sons died within six weeks of each other, one from an illness, the other by falling out of a fourth-floor window. This devastating loss would ultimately end the marriage, since he blamed his wife for being negligent. While they were on holiday in 1881 he simply abandoned her, and they soon separated, though they never divorced. Saint-Saëns’s mood had certainly darkened, but he was able to gain some refuge in his friendship with the composer Gabriel Fauré, to whose children he became a kind of loving uncle. However, his mother died in 1888, which sent him into a state of depression; at one point he almost became suicidal. He sought refuge in North Africa, primarily Algeria. He would return to Algiers several times and died there in 1921.
Throughout his life he made many friends and many enemies. His remarkable talent undoubtedly led some to resent him, but his compositional style was conservative and hardly ground-breaking, which caused others to criticize his lack of innovation, especially from 1890 onward. He disliked Debussy’s music, for example, saying that his L’après-midi d’un faune “cultivated the absence of style, logic, and common sense,” and calling another of his pieces an atrocity. The feeling was mutual. Debussy felt that Saint-Saëns’s music was far too traditional and sentimental, stating in the journal La revue blanche in 1901, through the voice of his fictional character Monsieur Croche, “Is there no one who likes Saint-Saëns enough to tell him that he’s written enough music and would be better employed in his lately acquired vocation of explorer?”
Saint-Saëns willingly admitted to some conservatism in his music, writing in 1890:
Mea culpa! I am accused of not being decadent.
My Muse dares not put the tooth in unripe fruits
Saint-Saëns and fellow composer César Franck were also famously at odds over differences in composition. And, on hearing Darius Milhaud’s experimental 1919 piece Protée, Saint-Saëns said, “fortunately, there are still lunatic asylums in France.”
He seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a political problem during the First World War, being forced to publicly declare that he rejected the music of Wagner since it was part of a German propaganda campaign. A New York Times article from March 4, 1917, reported on this in detail:
Goaded by accusations of looking with a too friendly eye on Richard Wagner, Camille Saint-Saëns, the famous French composer … insists that he is one of those who believe that Frenchmen must fight the German influence wherever they find it, even if it come beneath the disguise of art. In a book which he entitles “Germanophilie,” Saint-Saëns warns his fellow-countrymen that the Wagner music-dramas are among the most insidious and dangerous of the weapons used by Germany for the enslavement of France, and he calls upon the French to cease pretending that they like the Wagner operas and to lavish their admiration on the works of French composers instead.
He described three categories of Wagner fans: maniacs, those who are like opium addicts, and those who genuinely like art, but he warned that all must be prepared to give it up. Whether he truly believed this or was simply saving his own behind in a dangerous time is not clear. He took pains to point out that he had, as early as 1881, supported Wagner’s work, but not the idea of German nationalism and colonialism.
Saint-Saëns obviously had strong opinions about musical innovation. During the infamous première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on May 29, 1913, he was reported to have stormed out, appalled at the use of bassoons in a high register, allegedly saying, “If that is a bassoon, then I am a baboon!” His social skills were clearly not always his best feature.
Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881)
I’ll drink to that
The Russian composer Mussorgsky is known these days for works such as Night on Bald Mountain and Pictures at an Exhibition, the latter of which was originally written for piano, though most modern listeners are probably more familiar with the orchestral version made by French composer Maurice Ravel. Although Mussorgsky was born into a relatively wealthy family, his life was troubled and short, largely due to one of those great Romantic afflictions, alcoholism. Indeed, he was described as having a particularly bad case, historically known as dipsomania, an uncontrollable urge to drink alcohol. This may have been brought on by an early military career and the brutality that was endemic to it, and was made worse by the death of his mother in 1865.
In any case, he also showed promise in music, though his work was frequently interrupted due to a number of things, including a possible spiritual crisis and another of those great Romantic ills, money troubles. He could be quite unfocused; he started a good number of pieces and abandoned them, leaving them unfinished at his death, though several other composers, most notably his friend Rimsky-Korsakov, set themselves the task of finishing or editing his incomplete works.
One of his most haunting works is his Songs and Dances of Death, four pieces for bass voice and piano that set poems by Arseny Golenishchev-Kutuzov. Each song describes death in a familiar manner, rather than one that is mythic. They are moving and poignant:
• Lullaby: A mother holds her infant, who is dying of an illness. Death appears, offering to relieve the tired mother and rock the baby in its cradle while she sleeps. The mother protests, but Death rocks the child into eternal sleep.
• Serenade: Death appears as a suitor at the window of a young dying lady and offers to be her knight, the one that will take her away.
• Trepak: A drunken man stumbles into a forest during a blizzard, where Death offers to dance a Trepak, a traditional dance, with him. After this, she suggests that he lie down so that he may be “warmed” by a blanket of snow and drift off to eternal sleep, dreaming of summer.
• The Field Marshall: Death circles the battlefield after the battle, like a proud commander, and declares that she has truly won. Death will now see all of the soldiers march, count them, and see that their bones lie in the earth, from which they will never leave.
Trepak was in some ways an ominous foreshadowing of the composer’s own fate, while describing a much wider societal problem. Indeed, Mussorgsky’s drinking was not only a personal concern; it seems to have been part of a cultural and social idea that the artists of his time were expected to indulge in drink as a means of protesting the established order. Rock and roll really has nothing on earlier generations, who were flipping off the Man with just as much enthusiasm. These “worshippers of Bacchus” believed that it was essential to their creativity and way of life to be as drunk as possible, as often as possible. Mussorgsky spent his nights in a low-life tavern in Saint Petersburg, joined by other artists who praised their own inebriation.
Obviously, this self-destructive behavior couldn’t last too long. By February 1881 he was reduced to begging, despite the help of his few remaining friends. He suffered a seizure, followed the next day by three more. He was taken to a military hospital, where he showed some improvement for a while. There is even a famous painting of him from this time, his nose as red as Rudolph’s from the years of alcohol abuse. He seemed to recover a bit, but only temporarily. In March he finally died, at the young age of forty-two.
After his death, some view
ed him a radical (his opera Boris Godunov was rejected for a court performance by the tsar himself), while others saw him as an amateur and a dilettante with unrealized potential. More recent studies have shown that he was indeed very original, with a unique style and a life cut short like so many before and since.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
I’ll drink to that II
The debate surrounding Tchaikovsky’s mysterious death has been long, protracted, and (mostly) unresolved. Whole studies have been devoted to it, and even non-specialists have probably heard something about the controversy. It comes down to a few possibilities: Did he die accidentally of cholera by drinking contaminated water, or did he commit suicide by ingesting poison or deliberately drinking unboiled water? A third possibility suggests that he was murdered. Different theorists have produced convincing arguments for each of these stories, though the suicide hypothesis is fading from popularity.
The beloved composer who gave the world the incomparable ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker lived a sad and tortured life, forced to hide his homosexuality from a very disapproving society. Indeed, disclosure could have resulted in his deportation to Siberia.
