Almost at once things started to go wrong. It seemed to Gounod only proper that since he had given his name and his energies to creating the society, the first concert should contain work almost exclusively by him. With some of Georgina’s insensitivity, he packed the program. Along with new music for the occasion, he also wrote new settings for “The Old Hundredth” and “God Save the Queen.” The management of the Albert Hall was understandably alarmed. Though Gounod was a valued client of theirs, the music publishers Novello’s were also very uneasy. Under the energetic direction of Henry Littleton, the firm had branched out to become a highly successful concert promoter. Littleton certainly had an interest in Gounod’s musical career, but he also bore in mind that Gounod might not be in London forever. The Barnby Choir, now in the belly of the whale that was sometimes called the Gounod Choir, had done very well for Novello’s in its own right.
There was a second sticking point. Gounod had the uncomfortable job of telling Georgina that neither the Albert Hall nor Novello’s wished to see her included in the program as soloist. Again, this was not solely an artistic judgment. The Queen had laid the foundation stone of the Albert Hall, and this opening concert was the first she would attend in a place so very precious to the memory of her husband. The whiff of scandal that hung over Tavistock House was more than either management dared ignore. When he heard of this new condition, Gounod bridled. At first, he tried to stand on the principle of artistic integrity. To suggest altering the program and attempting to dictate his choice of soloists was interference, pure and simple. The two managements stood firm, and he had the unenviable task of going home and explaining the situation to Georgina.
She was outraged. It is a sign of Gounod’s infatuation that he could not or would not accept what amounted to an ultimatum. At subsequent rehearsals he read out lengthy addresses to the embarrassed choir, as if they were judge and jury in the affair. These were inspired by and may even have been written by Georgina. It was, however, an argument the composer could not win, and in his heart he knew it. The Queen’s patronage of the first concert superseded all other considerations, and although Georgina may have wished to take on the two managements, Gounod capitulated. Georgina’s name was removed from the billing. In the event, the music press savaged him anyway.
Henry Lunn, in the Musical Times, which was owned and published by Novello’s, wrote, “If the first of a series of choral concerts given on the 8th ult. may be accepted as a specimen of those which are to follow, it becomes an important question whether the art which this grand aristocratic temple was intended to foster (as we were positively informed by its promoters) will not seriously suffer by its influence.” Lunn noted the preponderance of Gounod’s own compositions and praised him with some sarcasm for not reworking the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which had been included in the program. In September he returned to the attack, in a general review of the London musical season.
The Albert Hall, struggling against its acoustical effects and its amateur management has met the fate we from the first predicted. Had the aid of the highest professional talent in the country been sought to ensure the perfect presentation of massive musical compositions . . . success would have been ensured; but the performance of a choir without orchestral accompaniment (to say nothing of the feeble programmes which were provided for each concert) . . . were scarcely attractions to draw audiences from the West End concert rooms.
In a fit of sulks Gounod turned the whole Gounod Choir enterprise over to Barnby, who saw the project through to the creation of the Royal Choral Society and continued with it until his death in 1896. (His bust, subscribed for by the Royal Choral Society, can be found in the Albert Hall.)
Gounod acted in a very petulant way with the management of the Albert Hall and was convinced that his publisher and concert promoter, Littleton, had done him wrong. It was comforting to go back to Tavistock House and rant and rage in French with Georgina, but it might have been wiser to listen to others. Georgina was beginning to exhibit the first signs of a persecution mania. She suspected Sullivan of orchestrating a campaign against her. It had not gone unnoticed by either of them that Lunn had praised Sullivan’s Te Deum at the Crystal Palace in the same issue of the Musical Times that trounced the first Albert Hall concert.
In November Lunn wrote a long leader entitled “Paper Reputations” which heaped scorn on people who styled themselves “Professors of Singing” or advertised “Academies of Music” without having the slightest professional qualification. Georgina was not mentioned by name, but the article was a swipe at her end of the music business. The modest sort of enterprise noticed with approval by the Musical Times was this sort of thing: “A most successful Amateur Concert was given at the School Rooms of Holy Trinity, Upper Chelsea, on Weds 26th April, for the purpose of establishing a Society for the Promotion of Window Gardening among the poor of the parish. The programme included ‘When the quiet moon,’ ‘Twilight is darkening’ and ‘The Rose’ (specially composed for the occasion).”
Lunn—and of course his proprietor, Littleton—were by no means against the small and the amateur. That was their market. Their quarrel with Gounod and by inference Georgina was straightforward. The critic and his paper were reflecting a growing determination that the business should be a business, and one in which the standards should be as professionally exacting as anywhere else in Victorian England. It was all very well for Gounod to bluster to Tavistock House visitors: “At the present day, vampires are said to inhabit only certain villages of Illyria. Nevertheless it is by no means necessary to undertake such a long journey in order to engage in monsters of this kind. They come across us in all parts of civilized Europe under the form of Music Publishers and Theatrical Managers.”
In the autumn of 1872, and after an ill-advised series of more or less hysterical letters to Novello’s, culminating in one signed by Gounod and published in the Times, Littleton found he had endured enough. He issued a writ for libel.
6
Georgina was delighted with Henry Littleton’s action. To her he was no more than a “tradesman,” an expression she had already used against Choudens, his French counterpart. She dismissed him breezily as “that little sweep.” She and her dear old man would go to court and wipe the floor with him.
Harry sensed trouble, all the more so after learning from his friends at the Garrick Club that the proprietor of Novello’s had engaged Sergeant Ballantine to act for him. Georgina scoffed at such naïveté—everybody knew lawyers were nothing but “curs.” Harry was not reassured and roused himself to an unusually dramatic act. The night before the trial he packed an overnight bag and left the house. This should have put Georgina at least on the qui vive, for generally speaking Harry was afraid of nothing and no one. She derided him to Gounod as fleeing the scene “with death in his soul,” as though he lacked the stomach for a fight. Harry knew what he was doing. What had hastened his departure was the knowledge of how much havoc was likely when Georgina went on the stand as a character witness, which she fully intended to do.
The sixty-year-old William Ballantine was among the bar’s most skillful cross-examiners. He was a well-known and bonhomous Garrick Club figure who liked to count its writer and journalist members as his closest friends. Littleton could not have chosen counsel more wisely. By engaging such an eminent and popular silk he signaled his intentions to all his other clients. Like the trial itself, retaining Ballantine was a piece of shrewd publicity. Novello’s headquarters in Berners Street rejoiced under the imposing title of the Sacred Music Warehouse, words blazoned across the building in Gothic lettering picked out in gold. Sacred Music must be above reproach and only the best engaged to defend its citadel. Once the case was won, as Littleton was sure it would be, he could rely on Ballantine’s bluff and gossipy nature to send the story around artistic London. There was no particular personal animus against Gounod in all this, though the composer had behaved ungraciously and with much ill will in his dealings with his publisher. It was business.
Littleton was determined to stop Gounod dead in his tracks.
Though she came from a family background famous for threatening litigation, it was the first courtroom in which Georgina appeared. The case was heard before Mr. Justice Denman in the Court of Common Pleas. It was a jury trial, and from the first Gounod found proceedings hard to follow. He gave his evidence in halting English and seemed bemused by the unfamiliar legal process. After a few exchanges he asked for an interpreter, and one was agreed to between the parties. The facts of the case were painfully easy to establish—indeed at law the composer did not have a leg to stand on. Gounod mumbled and blustered like a stage Frenchman, sometimes employing his interpreter, sometimes striking out on little arias of his own. He made a very poor impression on the jury. At last Georgina was called to the stand. She describes her evidence before Ballantine at considerable length.
Ballantine wriggled like an eel, sniggered, pulled down his gown over one shoulder, put his leg on the bench, and said, “Now we are going to hear what this young lady has to say!”
I looked at him, the picture of serenity, and gently murmured: “I am not a young lady, Sergeant Ballantine.”
Ballantine looked at me—I do not think he had ever been so surprised in his life. Imagine a wild bull looking at a red rag for the first time! He then stooped over the desk and whispered to a solicitor sitting beneath us. The solicitor looked up. He nodded yes. I fancy Ballantine’s question was “Is that impudent hussy Mrs. Weldon?”
He gave a little sharp cough.
“You are Georgiana Weldon?”
I began to feel a certain pity and said, “Sergeant Ballantine, would you like to know my name?”
I said so in the same tone I would have used to a child crying for a toy. “My name is Georgina.”
The judge was beginning to smile, the jury to titter. I was so calm, so candid, so innocent . . .
There was more of this knockabout. Was her husband Captain Weldon? No, he was not. He was not? No, he was Mister Weldon. Ballantine showed her a copy of the Times and asked her if she recognized a newspaper article in it: she said she did not. The paper was returned to counsel and a section marked in blue pencil. She allowed that she did recognize the indicated passage as a letter.
I turned to the jury: “Gentlemen, they do not wish to hear what I have to say. Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous? Neither party know what they are talking about. Mr. Gounod has been most shamefully robbed by these publishers, by all the publishers . . .” I could have run on forever. I thought I was doing the usual, proper, sensible thing!
That was the problem. What the court would and would not allow under the rules of evidence was of no consequence to her. She had discovered her stage. In the end she was forced out of the witness box “amid a universal din.” Counsel on both sides were outraged—Ballantine, she says, shaking his fist at her as she left. According to her, Denman had tears of laughter running down his face. She, Mrs. Georgina Weldon, artist and lady, had ridden to the defense of the embattled French genius and musical messiah. It never crossed her mind that she had made a fool of herself. On the contrary, she had exposed the legal profession as incompetents.
There was only one small disappointment in such a day of triumph. Gounod lost the case, Denman awarding forty-shilling damages and £100 costs. The judgment was delicately nuanced: Gounod was guilty, justice had been done, and the size of the damages was a gentle indication to Littleton that honor had been satisfied. The publisher was quite content. There were ways and ways of getting satisfaction from the courts, and the learned judge had shown some shrewd calculation of the balance between guilt and ignominy. Gounod had been reproved at law, and that was an end to the matter.
Unfortunately, the parties who filed from the court reckoned without Georgina’s taste for moral indignation. She now hit on a brilliant idea: Gounod could refuse to pay costs and thus force Littleton to have him sent to prison. This was a way of perpetuating the quarrel and returning the moral victory to him. Without too much hesitation Gounod agreed, signing away what goods and assets he had to her as payment of a notional debt between them, so preventing them from being distrained by the court. They waited to see what would happen. The answer was not long in coming. Littleton was not so forgiving that he was prepared to make himself look ridiculous—he wanted his costs. Georgina was thrilled when the ruse worked. After a few weeks bailiffs did indeed visit the house and were turned away empty-handed. Newgate now beckoned—the old man would be made a martyr to the English law. Gounod assured her he was quite prepared to go through with it. Indeed, he claimed to be looking forward to imprisonment: “On the 28th of the month [July] I shall go into my convent. In prison I shall orchestrate the imprisonment of Polyeucte and my Mass of Guardian Angels.”
This absurd situation was unexpectedly resolved by a third party. At the last moment Hortense Zimmermann, Gounod’s mother-in-law, paid the money into court, probably as a consequence of anguished representations made by his more rational English friends.
Mrs. Brown was the woman who had harbored the Gounods in their first days of exile, and now she came down from Blackheath to roundly accuse Georgina to her face of bringing the composer’s name into disrepute. She had made a bad thing worse. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, it was never Littleton’s intention to see Gounod in jail, as the Lord Chief Justice himself had observed. Mrs. Brown remembered Gounod as a quiet and sometimes annoyingly pompous man, very jealous of his reputation. She was staggered to see what he had become, with his quasi-bohemian clothes and confected outrage. Nor did Mrs. Brown like the way Georgina spoke for him as his legal consultant and artistic helpmeet. When she looked around more closely at Tavistock House, Mrs. Brown was even further disturbed. Who on earth were all these noisy children, trashing the garden and running helter-skelter through the house? Gounod was sheepish about that but otherwise stubborn. He knew what he was doing. If he said so without completely wholehearted conviction, that was because every last word he spoke was monitored by the watchful and interfering Mrs. Weldon.
For her part, Georgina was mortified that the costs had been paid, doubly so that the money had come from what she saw as a tainted source—what she described as the Zimmermann clique. In a midnight conversation with a friend of Gounod’s named Franchesi, she revealed that she wanted to see the old man in jail. She explained why in very significant terms: “All the world would have known how Gounod was put in prison; all the world would have flocked to see him—the poor martyr! You think, perhaps, it is merit which attracts the public. Alas! I have learned quite differently; it is only absurdity and publicity which draw. Never mind what is advertised, people will speak of it everywhere, and they will be bamboozled into believing it necessary to existence.”
This was true for her, but not for Gounod. Though he was fractious and took offense easily, he had never done anything so nakedly stupid as this. Very late in life, he wrote an anodyne autobiography. One would be hard-pressed to get an idea of who he was from what he wrote—but the work does include this passage, about the need the public has for artistic heroes: “To be brief, our houses are not in the street any more; the street is in our houses. Our whole life is devoured by idlers, inquisitive folk, loungers who are bored with themselves, and even by reporters of all sorts, who force their way into our homes to inform the public not only as to our private conversation, but as to the colour of our dressing gown and the cut of our working jackets!”
Some of this is an embellishment of the old cliché that the artist stands above the fray. It also excuses Gounod from revealing anything about himself of even a modest nature. The words were written at a time when the composer had become a national monument. By now his musical interests had dwindled to undemanding and unimportant church music. It amused him to pause and correct the tempi of certain works played on street barrel organs, explaining to the operators in a gentle, saintly way that he was the author of the pieces they were cranking out. Often, in more august company, he woul
d express a sense of remorse at what had been in his life, tantalizing his auditors and leaving them to guess at what awful things he might be concealing. But there is nothing new here either, for Gounod had spoken like this since early manhood. It was part of his view of himself to half confess to dreadful deeds. In the autobiography there is no mention of Georgina or the rupture with his wife.
At the time of the trial, however, the critic Albert Wolff wrote a piece for the Paris paper Le Gaulois that expressed the French view of how he was perceived during his years in London:
Was there ever a more singular history than that of Gounod and the Englishwoman? Since the woman Delilah, who cut off Samson’s hair, never was seen anything so curious. Events of late years turned the composer into the London gutters. There he makes the acquaintance of an Englishwoman. At her feet, he forgets all—family and country! Passion had taken possession of the artist’s brain and driven from it the remembrance of all that was decent . . .
There is much more in the same vein. Wolff supposed it to be a case of sexual obsession, which we can say fairly certainly it was not. Had it been, Georgina would have gone with Gounod to Paris when he was offered the directorship of the Conservatoire. Moreover, the lovers—had they been lovers in the way Wolff imagined—would have had to do something about Harry. Not even the most complaisant Victorian husband could tolerate being cuckolded in his own home. The Rouge Dragon Pursuivant would have been forced to show his claws. If it had been a story of a sexually insatiable woman fastening on a man and dragging his talents and reputation to the bedroom, things would actually have been much easier to explain and resolve. But it was not like that at all. The strangest thing about the infamous Tavistock House ménage was how both men managed to be bewitched by her, without lust coming into it. What they were responding to was her manic energy. The whole time Gounod was preparing to martyr himself by going to jail, the first floor of the house was being noisily altered to make a second music room where Georgina herself might have a choir, the equal of the Gounod Choir. This was the real clue to her relationship with “the old man.” Hero worship went only so far to explain it. She was in some way his rival, as well as his acolyte.
The Disastrous Mrs. Weldon Page 15
