This is a very startling commendation, and we suddenly see her exactly as she saw herself, but through the eyes and ears of another. Gounod was without question a colossal flirt, but he was also a complete professional, beside whom Fred Clay was merely a Treasury clerk with an imperial beard and modest musical accomplishments. Gounod was the real article. Many people—Liszt was one of them—believed him to be the supreme composer of his generation. There is dispassion in his estimate of Georgina’s voice: about things like this, we would like to believe, artists do not lie. They may lie about money or love, but not this, not art. At the time he first heard her sing, he had no way of knowing who she was and to what use she had put these talents.
She met him, in fact, at a disastrous moment. After the humiliation of the Dudley House concert, she had undertaken a debut tour of Wales and Anglesey with Gwendolyn Jones—“Beauty and the Beast,” as she put it, casting herself in the role of Beauty. It had not been a success. The halls they booked were drafty and unwelcoming, audiences were sparse, and local agents were nowhere near as scrupulous in accounting for the box office as she would have liked. Not everybody in North Wales wanted to go out on a cold and blowy night to hear two unknowns sing. Contrariwise, at the end of the tour where there was at last a decent audience, Arthur Deacon, the accompanist, was so annoyed at the incessant chatter during the recital that he closed the piano lid and left the stage. He did much better than that even. Before the concert ended, he had left the hall and the town in which it was located.
Back in Denbighshire, Mrs. Jones had begun to revise her estimate of Mrs. Weldon’s plans. The tour had been an artistic and financial failure, and Tavistock House, the seat of the National Academy (for that was how it was being puffed now), was still no more than Georgina’s private residence and a rackety one at that. Gwen was ill. In fact, she was dying. Disgusted, Mrs. Jones withdrew her remaining daughters a year later.
The day after meeting Gounod for the second time, Georgina called on him and asked him for an engagement to sing at a charity concert being got up for the victims of the Siege. He asked her to stay for tea. Together they sat down and sang the entire score of Faust. According to Georgina, Anna Gounod and old Mrs. Zimmermann were entranced—“it was a perfect shower of tears and compliments”—and both ladies told her she was “born for Gounod.” He himself declared that she was the Pauline for which he had been searching in his efforts to complete his opera Polyeucte. The meeting was a small triumph. Nobody of comparable musical rank had endorsed her talent with such enthusiasm. A real musical oracle had spoken, and she had jumped from nothing to everything in the space of a single afternoon.
That night in Tavistock House there was an opportunity for a clearer, calmer appraisal. In purely personal terms his praise had been intoxicating, but if she was thinking as a businesswoman, a fellow professional—which is what she had after all chosen to be—it was not the most helpful outcome of the encounter. There was more to come. What she needed from Gounod was some endorsement of her plans in the here and now—her academy in the making. The slightest assistance in this area would be worth a ton of publicity in any other form. Perhaps anyone other than Georgina would have seized on this aspect of their meeting and tried to think up ways of exploiting it. There was not the slightest doubt that he found her physically desirable and that some of his warmer exclamations were founded on that. But he was a great composer, and a golden opportunity was staring her in the face. For the time that he was in London, Gounod could make a huge material difference to her plans. It was for her to make of it what she would.
George Moore remarked of Gounod that he was “a base soul who went about pouring a kind of bath water melody down the back of every woman he met.” This was exactly the attention Georgina wanted, and it replaced common sense. The academy was completely neglected as they began a flirtation which, while it still had a musical content, soon extended to looks and sighs, letters, and on his side prayers. The experience was not unlike living inside a Gounod song. In the beginning she may not have been able to control the course of events as well as she would have liked. He was hardworking, he was impetuous and temperamental as many artistically gifted men are, but he was also venal in a quite astonishing way. Georgina wanted a hero. As Mme Gounod could have told her from long experience, she was getting a little boy. The solution that occurred to Georgina was simple. She must reinvent him.
Gounod had already made settings to some well-known English poems and was mulling over a much larger work. It was to be an imposing allegorical commentary on the fate of his country, for which he himself would supply the text. His London publisher, Novello’s, arranged for the first performance to be heard in the newly completed Albert Hall on the occasion of the International Music Festival. It was an inspired piece of publicity. Immediately after the fall of Sedan, the Queen had heard with satisfaction a sermon preached to her, of which the text was from Isaiah: “Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower.” But the Siege and the agony of the Commune swung the public mood toward pity for the French. When Georgina saw that what Gounod had written was on the theme of a martyred France, it was another cause for grateful tears. She soon described him, with typical exaggeration, as “the Messiah of the Gospel of New Music.” This sounds foolish in hindsight, but when on May 1 Gounod made his contribution to the international festival with an oratorio he entitled Gallia, the composer, who also conducted the performance, was cheered to the roof. The reception accorded him quite overshadowed Sullivan, whose On Shore and Sea premiered on the same night.
Gounod had been in England only eight months. As he walked off the podium, he must have calculated that there were new triumphs he might accomplish here to enhance his somewhat faltering muse. No one outside France had ever completely come to grips with Faust, and his fame with English audiences rested more on Roméo et Juliette. But now he had the royal plaudit for a very different kind of work. Away from the concert platform he had an outlet for his more personal musings. Putting it bluntly, he had someone who had never heard his stories before and so did not wince when he told them. Sitting in the audience, Georgina saw through tearstained eyes a man she had begun to consider “a god,” though one whose human attributes she more than anyone else in London had secret knowledge of.
Gounod was a tentative and uncertain dramatist in some of his operas, but he knew how to make an effect. A fortnight after the triumph of Gallia he burst into Tavistock House in a distraught state. In an impassioned speech to both Weldons he bared his soul. They struggled to understand him as he marched up and down their drawing room, talking a torrent. But it was all quite predictable and when at last it came out, quite banal. He could not stand to live with his wife any longer. After twenty years of marriage he had no alternative but to separate from her. His artistic life was being ruined. Exclamation marks spattered the carpet.
Anna Gounod was one of four daughters born to Pierre Zimmermann. In appearance she was thin, with a small head on a high neck. Not many of Gounod’s intimates liked her. Bizet detested her. Georgina (once she got the new lie of the land) thought her ugly—“a Japanese crockery dog . . . a little old brown woman”—and commented blithely, “She was odious, I confess; but I pitied her. Why had God made me so amiable and her so disagreeable?”
Part of the reason for Anna’s disposition was Gounod’s habitual philandering. He tended to fall in love with his younger admirers (it was said the younger the better), and there was a history of such brief liaisons, for the moment unknown to Georgina. In character these interludes were all more sentimental tosh than anything else: Gounod liked to exact devotion, not desire, and repaid it with long, liquid looks, whispered secrets, sighs. The lover in Gounod was a perpetual adolescent, and Anna could not help but notice an old pattern reestablishing itself. Her husband and Mrs. Weldon were becoming a mild scandal in both London and Paris, and it was time to go home.
The house in St.-Cloud had not survived, and th
ough the last shot was not fired in Paris until May 25, the provisional government was in control, and a terrible vengeance was being wrought on the Communards. In the midst of all this, their old friend Auber, director of the Conservatoire, had died and the post was vacant. These were practical reasons not to dally in London, but there were also patriotic considerations. Were the Gounods to be counted cowards in the new Republic; or, worse still, traitors?
Gounod had opened his heart to the Weldons on May 16. Five days later Anna went back to France, taking her children with her. It says much for her courage and patriotism. A week or so later Mme Zimmermann followed. On June 19, on the first anniversary of Georgina’s arrival at Tavistock House, Gounod moved in, bringing with him all his possessions, several valises of music he had already written while in London, and the unfinished score to the opera Polyeucte.
3
Very quickly, Gounod discovered something brought home to Harry a long time before: he was involved with a skillful manipulator of men more than with a wanton sexual being. While Georgina flattered him relentlessly and fed his ego, she was not all that interested in sex. Possession might mean one thing to him, but to her it meant quite another. She had, so to speak, collected him: he was added to her list of worthwhile things in the world. It was pleasant—up to a point—to be addressed as “Divine Being,” but Gounod may have been looking for more earthly pleasures. These she could not give him—not out of any delicacy or consideration for Harry’s position, but because it was not in her to give herself, to make good the promise that her titillations excited, with Gounod or anyone else. She was a tease, and an accomplished one; but that was that. Georgina was not the seductive and compliant mistress of a Frenchman’s dreams. Her admiration for him had a disconcerting Anglo-Saxon pragmatism.
He began to realize he was a long way from Paris as far as other matters went, too. One of his complaints about Anna was that she had ruined his digestion, a very grave thing for a Frenchman to suffer. Georgina responded with energy. She ordered an immediate regime of cold baths. Nor did it help that when he wished instead for a doctor, she insisted he consult her own. There were two further shocks to Gounod’s system on meeting this man: Dr. McKern was a devout Plymouth Brethren and an even more ardent devotee of hydropathy than Georgina herself. When a man says his wife does not understand him and hurls himself onto the bosom of a younger woman, he does not always expect to be plunged into a cold bath for the wound in his heart.
Harry watched. His role is enigmatic. He had brought Annie Lowe to London and was secretly enjoying the sort of sex that Gounod may have had in mind for himself. He had the Garrick Club to amuse him, and much to his surprise he found the work of Rouge Dragon Pursuivant to his taste. The house in Tavistock Square was sufficiently chaotic to accommodate a neurasthenic French composer, and all the evidence is that Harry tolerated Gounod’s presence in his home with cheerful equanimity. Events were bringing out the frantic side of Georgina, but “the old man,” as Harry called him, posed no threat at all. It was true that people were starting to talk. But Harry seems never to have minded talk. What such scrubs as Sullivan thought about Gounod’s ambush was beneath his consideration. He may even have seen the funny side of things. Georgina had exasperated him for years with her fantasies of high society. Now she had exchanged these for the care and solacing of a faintly preposterous figure when he was in his slippers, a corpulent French genius driven mad by the barking of Georgina’s four dogs and given to taking snuff, smoking cigars in bed, and, like a good Parisian, an expert at spitting.
He was there by invitation, of course, but he also chose to be there. Many people in London would have been happy to have taken him in after his wife left for Paris. Maybe Blackheath was a little out of the way, but he knew Ernest Gye, for example, who owned the lease on Covent Garden and was general manager of the Royal Italian Opera, as it was then called. Most of those connected to the music world would have been happy to settle him. He could as easily have stayed where he was in Park Street. He entered Tavistock House too willingly, and the decision did not go unnoticed. To his surprise, Georgina was assuming a sort of proprietorial right over him more important than any sexual hold she may have had. A vivid example of this happened only a week or so after Anna left. The composer was canvassed by intermediaries of the Paris Conservatoire to be its new director. Gounod himself had entered the Conservatoire in 1836 when Cherubini was its director, and to be sounded out in this way now—at the beginning of a whole new epoch, the Third Republic—was a signal honor. A year or so earlier under Napoleon III he would have accepted the post without hesitation.
He discussed the offer with Georgina. To his dismay, she advised him to refuse. He pointed out the advantages to her of accepting. She could come to Paris and study under him. The professional career she was trying to make for herself would be so much more easily accomplished. She would soon have engagements everywhere in Europe. There were difficulties, of course—his wife, her husband—but they were surely outweighed by the benefits. This was the opportunism necessary in a famously fickle way of earning a living. The point is an important one. Picking a quarrel with his wife so that he could surrender himself to the suffocated mother in Georgina was certainly infantile. But about the music business and its politics, Gounod was vastly more experienced than she. He knew everyone in Paris. It was a city she had hardly ever visited. Her given objection to the offer from the Conservatoire was that once there he would write no more great music. About this and so many things to do with how other people’s minds worked she was wholly ignorant. It really came down to this: she did not want to lose control of him. Incredibly, Gounod gave way. He wrote to the Conservatoire and refused the offer.
In July he went to Paris to get the Opéra revival of Roméo et Juliette back on track and to talk to his publisher, Antoine de Choudens. It had been pointed out to him by Georgina, who was good at this kind of thing, that his English royalties far exceeded his French. For her Choudens was just a name: he must be brought to heel. Gounod thought so too. But arguing with his publisher did nothing to improve his standing among the music community in Paris: people were asking searching questions about what Gounod was up to in London. However—and it is an indication of his eminence among his contemporaries—his oratorio Gallia was chosen to reopen the Conservatoire and so signal the resumption of musical life in the capital. The piece had a particular significance, over and above any other candidate, because it was entirely free of association with the old regime. In many ways it was heaven sent as a work of semiofficial art—solemn and patriotic, written in a form not generally part of the French repertoire yet certainly earnest enough to satisfy the most carping of critics. As to Gounod himself, now that he was on French soil again, the composer was understood to be partially reconciled to his wife, enough to avoid an outright scandal.
There was just one small problem. Gounod stipulated that Georgina must sing the solo soprano part. This took away some of the patriotic value of the piece and renewed gossip that Gounod was being led by the nose. Was there no French soprano in the fledgling Third Republic adequate to sing this role? Nobody had ever heard of Georgina Weldon. Gounod insisted.
Georgina traveled alone to Paris, which she had last seen eleven years earlier, in the days following her elopement with Harry. On October 29, 1871, she gave the first French performance of the work at the Conservatoire, followed a week later by two evenings at the Opéra-Comique and a final rendering at the church of St.-Eustache, attended by seven thousand people. Gounod conducted all the performances himself.
He had given her a stage beyond her dreams. Her reception was polite rather than enthusiastic, and she was understandably wracked by nerves, but somehow or other she carried it off. Nobody and no occasion had ever asked more of her. On the face of it, conditions favored her. Gallia was scored for solo soprano, orchestra, chorus, and organ and was in a form she knew very well, the dominant English musical form of the period. It was true she found the Conservatoire “a pok
ey hole,” and she was highly conscious of the scrutiny she received from the master’s contemporaries. There were some nerve-wracking details to the piece she had not properly taken in at the Albert Hall, chief of which was that the soprano part carried the melody on its own for a full seventeen minutes. In the two performances of the work given at the Opéra-Comique, the management added some backdrops and stage furniture and required Georgina to wear a costume with an enormous train. She only just survived tripping on it, to the sniggers of the supernumeraries. At times the chorus drowned out her voice. In the finale of the piece she had to walk backward across her train and seat herself on a suitably scriptural rock. “The chorus behind me (which were lamentably out of tune) were supposed to be my brothers and did not support me at all. At the moment when at last, seated safe and sound on my stone, I had to look around and gaze sadly at the Gallic-Israelites as they passed at the back of the stage, I felt inclined to burst out laughing.”
Georgina had a surprise up her sleeve for the beloved master. At the end of the final performance a huge and somber wreath of laurels was handed up onstage with a ribbon inscribed “From Gallia to G. Weldon.” Gounod was horrified. “The meaning of it clearly is that Gallia is a fiasco, Charles Gounod is a fiasco and G. Weldon ditto! My poor child! What persecutions!”
Georgina explained. She herself had paid to have the wreath made up and presented. The funereal note was accidental: she had considered buying herself armfuls of flowers but settled on what she thought was a more appropriate tribute, in keeping with the solemnity of the occasion. About this there was no contradiction. Her “angelic old man” had made her a gift such as she could not have believed possible from anyone in the world. Only a year earlier she had toured North Wales playing to half-empty halls. Now she had done something for which all her life had been a preparation. She was a footnote in history.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 13
